Daphne, After by Carol Muske-Dukes

Daphne, After

 

So Spring blossomed in spite of itself.

Uniform skirts up-rolled high by wild girls

curbside, smoking. Still, two of us, heads

 

together, translating. Our selves as Stoic

teens, thinking Marcus, Marcus A.!

So: month of rose pagodas, of lilacs

 

impetuous, blue. Twigs spill from

her dropped text, as she flees

translation class, the nun’s query.

 

He demanded her name first. Just

steps from the bus stop. Sunset:

shade before ancient dark. Blossoms

 

beneath her, beneath the shock-light of

staggered street lamps coming on. Leda’s

Zeus, his suit & tie, swan’s hiss in her ear.

 

She told me only. The great wings of

aloneness closed in us, we learned how

the passive voice was magnified: “The soul

 

is dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

Powerless to move, she became past

tense of strength once standing tall

 

at her father’s grave. His name in brass

florets. But Latin offhand—“to seize or

abduct.” Ovid’s shudder: Vos mos non

 

sit sponsa . . . Once we might have found it

funny: You will not be a bride, you will be

a tree. At each ring where her flesh became

 

bark, a path opened: root split. Some

believe that anger can take the place of

love. She found the verb for it. Having to

 

do with the forest & a young girl running fast,

calling out—then silence. Becoming as she

had, one of them, reaching skyward. Their

 

witness, bowing. Those wings hidden in

the tree, meaning she was not ready to be

cut down, not ready to be chopped into little

 

sticks & tossed into fire’s assumed supremacy—

all that smoke, her ashes refusing to fly.

 

Spring by Robert Hass

Spring

 

We bought great ornamental oranges,

Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.

Browsed the bookstores. You

asked mildly, “Bob, who is Ugo Betti?”

A bearded bird-like man

(he looked like a Russian priest

with imperial bearing

and a black ransacked raincoat)

turned to us, cleared

his cultural throat, and

told us both interminably

who Ugo Betti was. The slow

filtering of sun through windows

glazed to gold the silky hair

along your arms. Dusk was

a huge weird phosphorescent beast

dying slowly out across the bay.

Our house waited and our books,

the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.

After dinner I read one anyway.

You chanted, “Ugo Betti has no bones,”

and when I said, “The limits of my language

are the limits of my world,” you laughed.

We spoke all night in tongues,

in fingertips, in teeth.

Hunger by Ama Codjoe

Hunger

 

When I rose into the cradle

of my mother’s mind, she was but

a girl, fighting her sisters

over a flimsy doll. It’s easy

to forget how noiseless I could be

spying from behind my mother’s eyes

as her mother, bulging with a baby,

a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed

the doorway with a moon. We all

fell silent. My mother soothed the torn

rag against her chest and caressed

its stringy hair. Even before the divergence

of girl from woman, woman from mother,

I was there: quiet as a vein, quick

as hot, brimming tears. In the decades

before my birthday, years before

my mother’s first blood, I was already

prized. Hers was a hunger

that mattered, though sometimes

she forgot and I dreamed the dream

of orange trees then startled awake

days or hours later. I could’ve been

almost anyone. Before I was a daughter,

I was a son, honeycomb clenching

the O of my mouth. I was a mother—

my own—nursing a beginning.

 

The Boat Merchant’s Wife by Khaled Mattawa

The Boat Merchant’s Wife

      Sabratha

He started out making feluccas;

an Egyptian taught him how.

Then he opened a shop by the beach,

sold ice cream, parasols and chairs.

He asked for my hand when I was

in teacher college, first year.

Time passes like the Ghibli here.

I was 7 months with my third baby

when someone sought him

for a Zodiac. He traveled all the way

to Guangzhou, brought back a dozen,

has been selling them ever since.

One night I asked how strong

they were, how many they carry.

“It’s all in the booklet,” he said,

“no reason for what keeps happening

to them.” He sipped from a glass

of bokha and explained how

from this same jetty, long before

the Arabs and Vandals, even before

the Romans and their famous theater,

boats filled with people and goods

and sailed off. A day or a week later,

the sea sends back the drowned.

His long-lashed eyes closed when

he spoke, his face unchanged by the years.

His fingers moved so carefully

putting out his cigarette. He saw me

looking, nodded, then pulled me toward

his manhood to help him sleep.

Streets in Shanghai by Tomas Tranströmer

Streets in Shanghai

1

The white butterfly in the park is being read by many.

I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!

At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion.

Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all

       situations, to avoid making mistakes.

To each one, there's also the invisible face reflecting "something you don't talk about."

Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps              

       with its long scaly aftertaste.

The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an

   example for the faithful: always in motion.          

2

It's midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists

who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labrinths on each side!

I'm surrounded by written characters that I can't interpret, I'm illiterate through and

            through.

But I've paid what I owe and have receipts for everything.

I've accumulated so many illegible receipts.

I'm an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can't fall to the ground.

And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling.

3

At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion.

We're all aboard the street, and it's as crammed as the deck of a ferry.

Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky

       to have made it aboard this street!

It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.

Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us,

        pass us, unite with us.

Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and

        whisper "Guess who!"

We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't

        know about.