On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
                        with them.

            Swarms—
                        in all their airborne
                    pointillism—
                                shifted on the breeze

for the last time. Of course,

the absence of bees
                                    left behind significant holes
in ecology. Less


                                    obvious
            were the indelible holes
in poems, which would come
                                                            later:

Our vast psychic habitat
shrunk. Nothing was

            like nectar
                                    for the gods

Nobody was warned by
a deep black dahlia, and nobody

grew like a weed.

Nobody felt spry as
                        a daisy, or blue
                        and princely
as a hyacinth; was lucid as
            a moon flower.            Nobody came home


                        and yelled   honey!   up the stairs,

And nothing in particular
by any other name would smell as sweet as—

Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.

The lexicon of wilds goes on nixing its descriptions.
Slimming its index of references
for what is

super as a rhubarb, and juicy
as a peach,
or sunken as a
comb and ancient as an alder tree, or
conifer, or beech, what is royal
as jelly, dark as a wintering

hive, toxic as the jessamine vine
who weeps the way a willow does,
silently as wax
burned in the land of milk and

all the strong words in poems,
they were once

smeared on the mandible of a bee.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

^{translated from the Catalan by AKaiser}

We will sink our feet into other sands,
in the new normal. We will grow plants
between our toes, in the new normal.
 
We will laugh at the distances
and it will be forbidden to not touch us,
in the new normal.
 
Our calendars will seem strange
and we won’t know what the rules are,
in the new normal.
 
There’ll be caves
and space for everyone.
There’ll be lichens
and hunger well-whetted.
 
We’ll embrace all the mysteries,
we’ll be lovers of the invisible
and death, death
will be quite bearable.
 
When winter comes
the mud will come and with the mud
creation unleashed
and we will draw the whole holy day,
in the new normal.
 
We’ll yank flowers from the rocks
and let pigment run
and we’ll paint our faces, also our thighs,
also our sexes and the hot thing, too.
 
We’ll look at the sky more than anything else,
in the new normal.
 
We will breathe very slowly,
in the new normal.
 
And who knows if the gods won’t find us
and we’ll have to create new altars with twigs
and make a roaring fire and roast fish
and dance barefoot until it hurts.
 
Pain not in the feet, but in our bellies,
from so much inconsumable joy.

La nova normalitat

Enfonsarem els peus en una altra sorra,
a la nova normalitat. Ens creixeran plantes
entre els dits, a la nova normalitat.
 
Ens riurem de les distàncies
i estarà prohibit no tocar-nos,
a la nova normalitat.
 
Se’ns faran estranys els calendaris
i no sabrem què són les restriccions,
a la nova normalitat.
 
Hi haurà coves
i espai per a totes.
Hi haurà líquens
i la fam ben oberta.
 
Abraçarem tots els misteris,
estarem amatents a l’invisible
i la mort, la mort
serà ben suportable.
 
Quan vingui l’hivern
vindrà el fang i amb el fang
la creació desfermada
i dibuixarem tot el sant dia,
a la nova normalitat.
 
Picarem les flors damunt les roques
perquè deixin anar el pigment
i ens pintarem les cares, també les cuixes,
també els sexes i allò calent.
 
Mirarem el cel més que cap altra cosa,
a la nova normalitat.
 
Respirarem molt lentament,
a la nova normalitat.
 
I qui sap si els déus no ens troben
i hem de crear nous altars amb branquillons
i fer un bon foc i torrar-hi peixos
i dansar descalços fins que ens faci mal.

Mal no als peus, sinó al ventre,
de tanta alegria que no sabrem com pair.

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.

And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis—
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.

What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.

—2013

Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.

I think about the field of grass I lay in once,
between Omaha and Lincoln. It was summer, I think.
The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,
a-sway, swayed over me. I lay on green sod
like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.

What does a girl think about alone
in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright
as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?

Maybe I have not shaken the grass.
All is vanity.

Maybe I never rose from that green field.
All is vanity.

Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths
and spill them out into story: all is vanity.

Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,
spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem
and green lashes: O my beloved! O my beloved!

I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow my body made is gone.