called you from your idle

dream-workshop with the subtle spanners,

half-speeches, after keeping

you up late as my youth last night, later

than the gods’ twilight, who witnessed your trials

at fixing kinks in my causal body, just before sleep.

(Though I guess now that gods do sleep, I don’t know where.)

I watched a star burn through your wall-length windows

—no sun of ours, we were long past

midnight—resplendent fire raging far more

distant, more dead. Pur ti miro, you showed me,

Pur ti stringo, pur ti godo. I felt closer than

ever to inspiration—each breath into passive lungs—

while your fingers pressed behind my neck.

Pur t’annodo: I enchain you, I tie you down.

You left me asleep on the couch, and I thought by

dawn I’d sneak in beside your soul. But

a blessed light came disrupting the blind-

fold and blinds, and instead I woke you with Wagner.

On the fringes of conversations
surging around me in a different language,
my tongue is frozen in English.
Silence funnels into my body
I reach for words I recognize—
‘kitap’ book, ‘café,’ brand names.

I nod and smile trying not to look demure,
use abhinaya, throw open the nine gates of emotion,
let wonder, worry, fear, ire, envy, disgust,
piety, surprise, and love cavort on my face,
my hands aiding me, a language refugee,
roaming bazaars and sun-weathered ruins.

“Thank you,” I say to the waiter, touching my heart
as he places aromatic coffee on the table.
Beyond the courtyard, the peach dome of a mosque.
I expect the muezzin to sing at noon,
remember Haji Ali dargah, a moon on the bay
on my bus rides home from college.

In Kolkata when I was 9, I’d played silently,
my ear tuned to my classmates chattering in Bengali,
drinking their words until they became mine.

^{Zion says, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” Can a 
woman forget her baby, or disown the child of her womb? Though she might 
forget, I never could forget you.—Isaiah 49:14–15} 

^{“What It’s Like to Lose Your Entire Memory.”—Cosmopolitan}

You don’t remember anything.
How I formed you in your mother’s womb;
nursed you; bathed you; taught you to talk;

led you to springs of water?
I sang your name before you were born.
I’m singing your name now.

You’re clueless as an infant.
When I tell you to shout for joy,
you hear a bicycle, or a cat.

Sometimes, memories of me come back
like children you forgot you had:
a garden; a bride; an image of  your mother,

a best friend, a brother, or a cop, or snow, or afternoon.
Whose are these? you wonder.
Then you forget, and feel forgotten,

like an infant who falls asleep
at the breast
and wakes up hungry again.

Your mother might forget you, child,
but I never forget.
Your name is engraved

on the palms of my hands.
I shower you with examples of my love—
bees and birds, librarians and life skills,

emotions, sunlight, compassion.
Nothing connects.
Every dawn, every generation,

I have to teach you again:
this is water; this is darkness;
this is a body

fitting your description;
that’s a crush;
this is an allergic reaction.

This is your anger.
This is mine.
This is me

reminding you to eat.
Turn off the stove.
Take your medication.

This is the realization
that I am yours and you are mine. This is you
forgetting.

At the end

of the story,

we exchanged

hair. Two tiny

Ziploc bags,

little plastic

windows.

I sheared off

the tip 

of my braid,

candlewick

twist-tight.

Please

use these

dead cells

to make

new words.

We never

baked

the blueberry

crumble:

let the

mashed bowl

of indigo

fruit

on the

counter

be your ink.

Dip me

whole

into the

sweet

blood &

try to

write

about

cutting

hair &

a scissor’s

song,

its sound

akin to

a memory

holding its

own

breath.

I wear

your black

cursive

on my chin,

& imagine

being the

teenaged boy

that you will

raise

with a lover

that looks

like me.

I wrap

you around

my wedding

finger, pull

& watch

you snap back

until you yawn.

I dress

you in the

foam of

apricot shampoo,

spin you in

my palm

to wash out

time.

At midnight,

you lay me

at the nape

of your neck,

guarding

your spine,

in the blue violet                                                                                                                 

of dream’s

intermissions.

We are

climbing

strands

to each other’s

roots,

searching

for homes

that we

have

already

passed.

Behind

your head

& in my hands,

we are closer

than secret.

my girlfriend drives us south. There’s a smear
of hot pink on the asphalt. From the passenger’s seat
I twist my head back. Did you see that? Only a flash,
until a few miles later. Again, then again, then a whole

velvet deer burst on the shoulder, and now everything is pink.
She stares ahead and holds my hand. She has asked
me not to notice these things, but I am a glutton
for how quickly the body becomes something different.

Before we met, I imagined a wedding like this. But— 
not this. She stood with the other bridesmaids in champagne.
I followed their husbands, snuck away for hot wings with them
between the ceremony and reception. It was so strange.

The bride was so beautiful. Her family, so kind. The chicken?
The most delicious I have ever eaten, and that made it all
worse, as I jostled with the husbands over the succulent drumsticks,
startled by the unexpected ease of flesh sundered from bone.

Now, there’s a light rain. She stares ahead. The grey, the pink,
her hand—will we always unknow each other in this way?
I want the whole carcass. I want to roam the caverns of her body,
loving her like an animal howling its own name.

It was summer when I found you 
In the meadow long ago, 
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.

Did we falter when love took us 
With a gust of great desire? 
Does the barley bid the wind wait
In his course?

The sun holds all the earth and all the sky 
From the gold throne of this midsummer day. 
In the soft air the shadow of a sigh
Breathes on the leaves and scarcely makes them sway. 
The wood lies silent in the shimmering heat, 
Save where the insects make a lazy drone, 
And ever and anon from some tree near, 
             A dove’s enamoured moan, 
Or distant rook’s faint cawing harsh and sweet, 
Comes dimly floating to my listening ear.

Right in the wood’s deep heart I lay me down, 
And look up at the sky between the leaves, 
Through delicate lace I see her deep blue gown. 
Across a fern a scarlet spider weaves 
From branch to branch a slender silver thread,
And hangs there shining in the white sunbeams, 
A ruby tremulous on a streak of light. 
            And high above my head 
One spray of honeysuckle sweats and dreams, 
With one wild honey-bee for acolyte.

My nest is all untrod and virginal, 
And virginal the path that led me here, 
For all along the grass grew straight and tall, 
And live things rustled in the thicket near:
And briar rose stretched out to sweet briar rose 
Wild slender arms, and barred the way to me 
With many a flowering arch, rose-pink or white,
            As bending carefully. 
Leaving unbroken all their blossoming bows, 
I passed along, a reverent neophyte.

The air is full of soft imaginings,
They float unseen beneath the hot sunbeams,
Like tired moths on heavy velvet wings.
They droop above my drowsy head like dreams.
The hum of bees, the murmuring of doves.
The soft faint whispering of unnumbered trees.
Mingle with unreal things, and low and deep
            From visionary groves, 
Imagined lutes make voiceless harmonies. 
And false flutes sigh before the gates of sleep.

O rare sweet hour! O cup of golden wine! 
The night of these my days is dull and dense, 
And stars are few, be this the anodyne!
Of many woes the perfect recompense.
I thought that I had lost for evermore
The sense of this ethereal drunkenness, 
This fierce desire to live, to breathe, to be;
            But even now, no less 
Than in the merry noon that danced before 
My tedious night, I taste its ecstasy.

Taste, and remember all the summer days 
That lie, like golden reflections in the lake 
Of vanished years, unreal but sweet always; 
Soft luminous shadows that I may not take 
Into my hands again, but still discern 
Drifting like gilded ghosts before my eyes. 
Beneath the waters of forgotten things.
            Sweet with faint memories,

And mellow with old loves that used to burn 
Dead summer days ago, like fierce red kings.
And this hour too must die, even now the sun
Droops to the sea, and with untroubled feet
The quiet evening comes: the day is done.
The air that throbbed beneath the passionate heat
Grows calm and cool and virginal again.
The colour fades and sinks to sombre tones.
As when in youthful cheeks a blush grows dim.
            Hushed are the monotones 
Of doves and bees, and the long flowery lane 
Rustles beneath the wind in playful whim.

Gone are the passion and the pulse that beat 
With fevered strokes, and gone the unseen things 
That clothed the hour with shining raiment meet 
To deck enchantments and imaginings. 
No joy is here but only neutral peace 
And loveless languor and indifference, 
And faint remembrance of lost ecstasy.
            The darkening shades increase. 
My dreams go out like tapers—I must hence. 
Far off I hear Night calling to the sea.

As one who, leaning on the wall, once drew 
Thick blossoms down, and hearkened to the hum 
Of heavy bees slow rounding the wet plum, 
And heard across the fields the patient coo
Of restless birds bewildered with the dew.

As one whose thoughts were mad in painful May,
With melancholy eyes turned toward her love,
And toward the troubled earth whereunder throve
The chilly rye and coming hawthorn spray—
With one lean, pacing hound, for company.

The day the deer died,
I was alive in my house. 
I was alive in a watery field
of glaciers. In the realm 
of birchwood in my throat.
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire. 
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region 
was my religion. It was 
a place before trees, prior 
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then 
the drought came. Cessation 
of sound. Flames as red as apples 
lodged inside my throat hissing.

^{for J.}

Afloat out on the starlit water
where ordinary life’s a dream
as to two figures in a frame,
I touch the moon, and watch it shatter.

But when I touch you, you remain,
my body weightless in your arms
while quietly your hand conforms
to the hard griefs along my spine.

Beneath the sky’s unseeing eyes
I let my head rest in your palm,
making a little world of calm
for luck and longing to revise 

scenes too early to recall—
the frightened mouth, the soured breast,
abandoned den or splintered nest
resurfaced in the Lovers’ Pool.

Where our bodies intersect
like children whose fingers cross
to make a promise promise less
and guard this moment from the next.

And now before you disappear,
I’ve brought us once again to soak
in sulfur, salt, and arsenic,
so that in here, we’re always there.

^{translated from the Russian by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi}

When the church-village slumbers
And the last songs are sung, 
When the grey mist arising, 
Is o’er the marshes hung, 
’Tis then the woods forsaking, 
Their way cross country taking. 
Nine howling wolves come hungering for food.

Behind the first,—the grey one,—
    Trot seven more of black. 
Close on their hoary leader;
    As rearguard of the pack 
The red wolf limps, all bloody, 
His paws with gore still ruddy 
As after his companions grim he pants.

When through the village lurking
    Nought gives them check or fright, 
No watch dog dares to bellow,
    The peasant ghastly white. 
His breath can scarce be taking. 
His limbs withhold from shaking— 
While prayers of terror freeze upon his lips!

About the church they circle 
    And softly slink away
To prowl about the priest’s farm,
    Then of a sudden they
Are round the drink shop turning, 
Fain some bad word be learning— 
From peasants drinking noisily within.

With fully thirteen bullets
    Thy weapon must be armed, 
And with a wad of goat’s hair;
    Then thou wilt fight unharmed. 
Fire calmly,—and before all 
Will the leader, the grey, fall, 
The rest will surely follow one by one.

When the cock wakes the village
    From out its morning dream. 
Thou wilt behold the corpses—
    Nine she-wolves by the stream! 
On the right lies the grey one, 
To left in frost the lame one— 
All bloody,—God pardon us sinners!

Волки

Когда в сeлах пустеет,
Смолкнут песни селян
И седой забелеет
Над болотом туман,
Из лесов тихомолком
По полям волк за волком
Отправляются все на добычу.

Семь волков идут смело.
Впереди их идeт
Волк осьмой, шерсти белой;
А таинственный ход
Заключает девятый.
С окровавленной пятой
Он за ними идёт и хромает.

Их ничто не пугает.
На село ли им путь,
Пёс на них и не лает;
А мужик и дохнуть,
Видя их, не посмеет:
Он от страху бледнеет
И читает тихонько молитву.

Волки церковь обходят
Осторожно кругом,
В двор поповский заходят
И шевелят хвостом,
Близ корчмы водят ухом
И внимают всем слухом,
Не ведутся ль там грешные речи?

Их глаза словно свечи,
Зубы шила острей.
Ты тринадцать картечей
Козьей шерстью забей
И стреляй по ним смело,
Прежде рухнет волк белый,
А за ним упадут и другие.

На селе ж, когда спящих
Всех разбудит петух,
Ты увидишь лежащих
Девять мeртвых старух.
Впереди их седая,
Позади их хромая,
Все в крови... с нами сила Господня!

That you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strong, or rich, or generous;
You must have also the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose. 
There is a melody born of melody, 
Which melts the world into a sea. 
Toil could never compass it, 
Art its height could never hit,
It came never out of wit,
But a music music-born
Well may Jove and Juno scorn.
Thy beauty, if it lack the fire
Which drives me mad with sweet desire, 
What boots it? what the soldier’s mail
Unless he conquer and prevail?
What all the goods thy pride which lift, 
If thou pine for another’s gift?
Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight;—
When thou lookest in his face,
Thy heart saith, Brother! go thy ways. 
None shall ask thee what thou doest, 
Or care a rush for what thou knowest. 
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden,—
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten.
Surely he carries a talisman
Under his tongue;
Broad are his shoulders, and strong, 
And his eye is scornful,
Threatening, and young.
I hold it of little matter,—
Whether your jewel be of pure water,
A rose diamond or a white,—
But whether it dazzle me with light.
I care not how you are drest,
In the coarsest, or in the best,
Nor whether your name is base or brave, 
Nor for the fashion of your behavior,— 
But whether you charm me,
Bid my bread feed, and my fire warm me,
And dress up nature in your favor.
One thing is forever good, 
That one thing is success,— 
Dear to the Eumenides,
And to all the heavenly brood. 
Who bides at home, nor looks abroad,
Carries the eagles, and masters the sword.

^{translated from the Chinese by Ezra Pound}

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers 
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, 
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. 
And we went on living in the village of Chokan: 
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful. 
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. 
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling, 
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours 
Forever and forever, and forever. 
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed, 
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies, 
And you have been gone five months. 
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. 
You dragged your feet when you went out. 
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, 
Too deep to clear them away! 
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. 
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August 
Over the grass in the West garden, 
They hurt me. 
I grow older,
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you, 
                              As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

When no one’s around, a man could go 
all day, in the woods, and down by the lake, 
and into the house and back out in the garden, 
without zipping his pants. The belt 
holds them up, around his hips, 
secure as any loin cloth 
or lava-lava, the man is free 
and unobserved, observing the land 
and its creatures, each aware of him, 
but not of his costume, 
or the partial uncostume of his liberty, 
but only of the actions of his homemaking art, 
his music of earth’s caretaking—   
forest trails blazed with ribbon, 
pitcher plants transplanted, wood 
sawn and split, stacked or scattered, 
and part of the pleasure is to be unfettered, 
a hem of a leg of the boxers sometimes 
showing through the open fly 
like a flag of home. And someone who loves him 
loves that flash of carefreeness, that 
hanky peeking out of an eden pocket, 
an eden with no God or Eve in it, 
but only the original Adam. But someone 
who loves him had better not sing it, it is no one’s 
business but his. If someone sings him— 
the way his labors are singing nature—it might  
seem as if the scenery spoke, 
or as if some Lilith, her work of words 
no less at home than his work of creation, 
sang him as he sings the earth,  
language escaping her lips as a corner of 
fabric escapes his jeans like the jousting  
favor of one who is in thrall to no one, 
only to freedom.

Four hooves rang out and now are still. 
In the dark wall the casements hold 
Essential day above each sill, 
Just light, and colored like thin gold. 
Behind those hooves a drowsy course
All night I rode where hearts were clear, 
And wishes blessed at the source, 
And for no shape of time stop here.

No more to raise that lively ghost
Which ran quicksilver to the bone:
By a whim’s turn the whole was lost
When all its marrow worth was known. 
Ghosts can cast shadows in the breast,
And what was present tears to weep, 
Not heart nor mind would bid from rest
As far as sorrow’s, ten years deep.

I travel, not for a ghost’s sake, 
One step from sleep, and not for one
Left sleeping at my side I wake. 
Before bricks rosy with the dawn,
The hooves will sound beyond the light:
There are dark roads enough to go 
To last us through the end of night, 
And I will make my waking slow,

It was for unconcerning light 
That has not fallen on earth, to stare
An instant only out of night 
And with night’s cloudy character,
Before the laden mind shall slip
Past dream and on to brightmost dream
And fetterless high morning dip
Her two cold sandals in the stream.

The morning came like primroses
And pressed in through the slats
To the dim corner where He made
A rosy pallor in the straw.

I loosed the linen from my breasts
That took the light like ivory,
And pushed the door a little way 
Open, and looked at him again.

The air was sweet as hay, new moon; 
There was not any wind; the day
That crowded in the narrow place
Grew still to see him there.

The old men darkened on our door 
One night . . . their eyes were icy-clear,
The light was frozen in their eyes
That were too bright for old men’s eyes

And sided as the jewelled stars 
They let in with them when they came.
It seemed as though each star did haste 
To leech upon my chilling breast—

When one had crushed a lily once
And bruised its head to give his palace
And left a heavy blowth that soon 
Did thrust my tender walls apart 
To give its petals room.

The old men drew their shadows close
About his bed; their richen dress 
Hung loose upon each thawny frame,
As spare as ribbèd lantern.
They were too tall for the small space; 
Each had to bow his head.

They carried frankincense and myrrh; 
They touched their foreheads to our floor
And laid their gifts beside the babe.
Their gold was bright among his hair,

As it had fallen from a star, 
A petal of the light, congealed, 
That glimmered on his face.

The old men said,
A fair strange star
Doth watch above the babe. 
I looked up at the sky 
That were of a deep purple, simmering
Like unto a brew of grapes, 
And beheld a great star 
By a smaller star attended.
The large star 
Wore an august look; the two 
Stood, mid the lesser stars 
That twinkled on their shining errands
In and out the blue,
Rigid and gleaming.

I turned to the babe— 
He there naked, without defense— 
Saw his eyes too
Gazing without a quiver,
And put between him and the piercing
Chastity of the light 
My larger breast;

I gathered unto my breast 
The vast beam and the fiery
Point of the drawn star,
I felt the rays, unbent,
Streaming over the blue miles,
Grapple in my heart . . . my heart 
Hath endured till now.

^{translated from the Croatian by James Meetze}

^{Cork, Ireland}

is like a church bell 
in some remote village 
tolling mutely in the evening
through the musty provincial air 
self-obliviously 
and quite self-sufficiently  
—one might add—
if it weren’t for the pair of those 
ragged sheep 
huddled before the rain 
on the empty lot 
in front of a stone barn 
bobbing their whitish little heads 
here and there 
just to let you know 
that regardless of medium 
the message will always 
arrive at the destination.

Poezija u malom jeziku

^{Cork, Irska}

poezija u malom jeziku
je kao zvono
u zabačenom selu
što tuče muklo s večeri
kroz memlu provincije
samozaboravno
i poprilično samodovoljno
—reklo bi se—
da nije tih par kuštravih ovaca
skutrenih pred pljusak
u oboru
ispred kamene pojate
što malo-malo
trznu bjelkastim glavama
da ti daju do znanja
da bez obzira na medij
poruka uvijek
stiže na odredište.

At that hour when all things have repose,
    O lonely watcher of the skies,
    Do you hear the night wind and the sighs
Of harps playing unto Love to unclose
    The pale gates of sunrise?

When all things repose, do you alone
    Awake to hear the sweet harps play
    To Love before him on his way,
And the night wind answering in antiphon
    Till night is overgone?

Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,
    Whose way in heaven is aglow
    At that hour when soft lights come and go,
Soft sweet music in the air above
    And in the earth below.