means nostalgia, I’m told, but also
nostalgia for what never was. Isn’t it
the same thing? At a café
in Rio flies wreathe my glass.
How you would have loved this: the waiter
sweating his knit shirt dark. Children
loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging
toys and towels to the beach. We talk,
or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view.
Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation:
my imagined you is all I have left of you.
Copyright © 2017 by John Freeman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
translated by Sarah Arvio
To find a kiss of yours
what would I give
A kiss that strayed from your lips
dead to love
My lips taste
the dirt of shadows
To gaze at your dark eyes
what would I give
Dawns of rainbow garnet
fanning open before God—
The stars blinded them
one morning in May
And to kiss your pure thighs
what would I give
Raw rose crystal
sediment of the sun
*
[Por encontrar un beso tuyo]
Por encontrar un beso tuyo,
¿qué daría yo?
¡Un beso errante de tu boca
muerta para el amor!
(Tierra de sombra
come mi boca.)
Por contemplar tus ojos negros,
¿qué daría yo?
¡Auroras de carbunclos irisados
abiertas frente a Dios!
(Las estrellas los cegaron
una mañana de mayo.)
Y por besar tus muslos castos,
¿qué daría yo?
(Cristal de rosa primitiva,
sedimento de sol.)
Translation copyright © 2017 by Sarah Arvio. Original text copyright © The Estate of Federico García Lorca. From Poet in Spain (Knopf, 2017). Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 25, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
It’s silly to think
fourteen years ago
I turned thirty.
How I made it that far
I’ll never know.
In this city of hills,
if there was a hill
I was over it. Then.
(In queer years,
years
are more than.)
Soon it will be fifteen
since the day I turned thirty.
It’s so remote.
I didn’t think I’d make it
to fourteen years ago.
Fear lives in the chest
like results.
You say my gray, it makes
me look extinguished;
you make me cringe.
I haven’t cracked
the spines of certain paperbacks,
or learned a sense of direction,
even with a slick device.
But the spleen doesn’t ask twice,
and soon it will be fifteen years
since I turned thirty.
Which may not sound like a lot.
Which sounds like the hinge
of a better life:
It is, and it is not.
Copyright © 2017 by Randall Mann. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 17, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
When did hordes of sentences start beginning with So?
As if everything were always pending,
leaning on what came before.
What can you expect?
Loneliness everywhere, entertained or kept in storage.
So you felt anxious to be alone.
Easier to hear, explore a city, room,
mound of hours, no one walking beside you.
Talking to self endlessly, but mostly listening.
This would not be strange.
It would be the tent you slept in.
Waking calmly inside whatever
you had to do would be freedom.
It would be your country.
The men in front of me had whole acres
in their eyes. I could feel them cross, recross each day.
Memory, stitched. History, soothed.
What we do or might prefer to do. Have done.
How we got here. Telling ourselves a story
till it’s compact enough to bear.
Passing the walls, wearing the sky,
the slight bow and rising of trees.
Everything ceaselessly holding us close.
So we are accompanied.
Never cast out without a line of language to reel us back.
That is what happened, how I got here.
So maybe. One way anyway.
A story was sewn, seed sown,
this was what patriotism meant to me—
to be at home inside my own head long enough
to accept its infinite freedom
and move forward anywhere, to mysteries coming.
Even at night in a desert, temperatures plummet,
billowing tent flaps murmur to one other.
Copyright © 2017 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2017 by Joan Naviyuk Kane. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I watched in horror as the man hung half a pig by a hook in the window. Nearby, the sea shone or something. Nearby, the wingspan of a hawk cast an elongated shadow. I listened with horror to the words I was missing. A wrongness was growing in the living moon. & nearby, the sea rolled endlessly. Nearby, the saw grass peered through the grit & preened. I've never been to Florida. Louisiana however is second skin of mind, a habit-habitat. & Texas on the way there, the red soil & black boars, the frankly haunted pines lone men in pickups fishing for nothing they intend to catch. & nearby, the sea froths over the edge. & nearby, the sea. Nearer & nearer the obliterating sea
Copyright © 2017 by Shanna Compton. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 8, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
They’d only done what all along they’d come
intending to do. So they lay untouched by regret,
after. The combined light and shadow of passing
cars stutter-shifted across the walls the way,
in summer,
the night moths used to, softly
sandbagging the river of dream against dream’s
return…Listen, it’s not like I don’t get it about
suffering being relative—I get it. Not so much
the traces of ice on the surface of four days’
worth of rainwater in a stone urn, for example,
but how, past the ice,
through the water beneath it,
you can see the leaves—sycamore—where they fell
unnoticed. Now they look suspended, like heroes
inside the myth heroes seem bent on making
from the myth of themselves; or like sunlight, in fog.
Copyright © 2017 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 4, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.