the cure for what ails 'ya

¿Quién menoscaba mis bienes?
¡Desdenes!
Y ¿quién aumenta mis duelos?
¡Los celos!
Y ¿quién prueba mi paciencia?
¡Ausencia!

De este modo en mi dolencia
ningún remedio se alcanza,
pues me matan la esperanza,
desdenes, celos y ausencia.

¿Quién me causa este dolor?
¡Amor!
Y ¿quién mi gloria repuna?
¡Fortuna!
Y ¿quién consiente mi duelo?
¡El cielo!

De este modo yo recelo
morir deste mal extraño,
pues se aúnan en mi daño
amor, fortuna y el cielo.

¿Quién mejorará mi suerte?
¡La muerte!
Y el bien de amor, ¿quién le alcanza?
¡Mudanza!
Y sus males, ¿quién los cura?
¡Locura!

Dese modo no es cordura
querer curar la pasión,
cuando los remedios son
muerte, mudanza y locura.




                          Miguel de Cervantes












......








Paul Archer translation:

What undermines all I attempt?
Contempt!
What heaps sorrow onto me?
Jealousy!
And what gnaws me through and through?
Missing you!

That’s why nothing will do
To make my distress less -
I’m killed by hopelessness,
Contempt, jealousy and missing you!

What is it that makes me feel so rough?
Love!
What makes my puffed-up pride deflate?
Fate!
And what’s allowed all this to happen?
Heaven!

That’s why I have no time for them,
These evil strangers that thwart me,
Ganging up together to hurt me -
Love, fate and heaven!

What will change my luck? What’s left?
Only death!
And as for love, in all its profusion?
Delusion!
For all its woes, what’s the only redress?
Madness!

See how we get into this crazy mess
When trying to heal love’s pains,
If, after all else, the final cure remains
Only death, delusion and madness!

....

from 5 Poems published in the Paris review

      










      a poem
           by




   .          Frederick Seidel






                             Autumn Leaves                                  

Plop the live lobster into boiling water and let it scream.
You both turn red.
Of course you have to eat it dead.
There can be unfertilized roe
That will turn red also, maliciously delicious, called coral.
The colder the ocean waters the lobster came from, the sweeter
The meat boiled in the brain of heat.
The lobster at the end is as incontinent as falling leaves and doesn’t know.
It’s agony to be turning into something else—
And when you certainly weren’t intending to.


This room must be the bedroom, but it smells.
A mouse still alive is standing on the trap, stuck in glue,
Like a man trapped standing on the roof of his submerged car,
Or a woman making love to herself seated in front of a mirror.
Little shrieks from you as you try to get unstuck from you
Becomes a raving hippopotamus that sings and sobs.


The fuel for this ravisher unicycle of a world,
Going faster and faster, ever more horsepower,
Is not the president of the United States anymore.
The man on the roof of the car waves his arms.
The butterfly in love lands on fresh tar, tacky goo.
I’m turning into something I wasn’t intending to be—
In agony after the awful metamorphosis
Into a suddenly human being.
It’s so fascinating to watch a woman masturbating.
It makes your eyes turn blue.
You watch her doing it for you.


She’s watching, too.
You realize it’s true.
She’s doing it for you.
The man’s cell phone is soaked.
He’s stuck on top his submerged SUV yelling into the vast.
The new Swatch wristwatch on my wrist
Handcuffs the suspect for having sexual intercourse
With someone much younger, twisting in the noose.
Let them dangle and twist.
It’s agony turning into something else.


Some sort of cockroach that smells slightly rotten
Walks around on hairs for legs and mutters something,
Then puts on a fine suit and goes outside.
Outside it’s fall. This is the weather that people like,
Perfect for people who hate the heat.
The sun shines down at a different angle
Through the atmosphere, producing that look, that light.
A first responder is coming with a boat
To rescue the man from the roof of his car, a helicopter lowers a ladder
To the boiling lobster. Let me explain to you something
I’ve never understood.


















.....

Once a Wild God

  








      




               FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE                                                         










They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and, from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnawing head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk's horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World's last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch

On the moose's horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibers from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton's internal fire the elk's
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the 'blind swallowing
Thing,' with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die
Out.






                                       James Dickey


















......

it's a darn good question

               

               

                        Was Poe Afraid?                                                        

On these same old brick streets of
Baltimore tonight--was Poe afraid?
Of all night rusting sign patent verse;
new neon juice from foggy tavern door. 

Afraid of the florescent eyes of dogs,
the raven's reflection, the rats scat
through sawdust in Hollins Market,
the smell of rot and burlap thick as fur. 

Afraid of roaches, disease, of poverty,
loud poverty boom-box crackle crack whip
poor ponies pulling carts full of greens
up Greene Street - overloaded with greed. 

Afraid of the thick fast sky over
Cross Street's cloud draped rummage day
crimson cloak, threaded from the hill
down to the curling dark water bay. 

Black statues swirling great pleated sheets
when street lights go dim, losing the stars,
Like partygoers streaming to their last car...
some on twilight's slightly twisted cane. 

Afraid of the beer, the drugs, the vault
of shoreline's fractal ragged fault
floating in a dream grave afraid to yell
disciples repeating smug versions of hell. 

The whirl of a wash, a tangled thread
sets and alarm that turns to dread
makes the vision flow instead to
creation and how such grace is fed.

                                 Charles Plymell






















.....

poetry from alberta

      Sounding the Name

In this poem my mother is not dead.
The phone does not ring that October
morning of my fourteenth year.


The anonymous voice on the phone
does not say, Call Arthur to the phone.


Our hired man, a neighbour’s son, quiet,
unpretentious, a man from the river hills
near our farm, does not turn from the phone,
he does not say, seeming to stress the time,
Your mother died at ten o’clock. My sister and I
do not look at each other, do not smile,
assuring each other (forever) that words are
pretenders.


In this poem my mother is not dead,
she is in the kitchen, finishing the October
canning. I am helping in the kitchen
I wash the cucumbers.


My mother asks me
to go pick some dill. The ducks are migrating.
I forget to close the garden gate.








                       Robert Kroetsch

two quick observation poems joined in cosmic conversation

rain                    
                            dust
 
    wind


leaves                         


                                    sun
                         


                                   sky

and he shall lift up his head

MORNING AT THE ELIZABETH ARCH

The winos rise as beautiful as deer.
Look how they stagger from their sleep
as if the morning were a river
against which they contend.

This is not a sentiment
filled with the disdain
of human pity.
They turn in the mind,
they turn
beyond the human order.

One scratches his head and yawns.
Another rakes a hand
through slick mats of thinning hair.
They blink and the street litter moves
its slow, liturgical way.
A third falls back
bracing himself on an arm.

At river’s edge, the deer stand poised.
One breaks the spell of his reflection with a hoof
and, struggling, begins to cross.






                                          Joe Weil
















.....

Spicer's city

when like palms with life lines crossed as if memory also didn't last

you along the street seen dripping with trees the mind bright

We talked so long it burned my back. We never talk. My throat is bare. The sun. Never there. Day or night. or white but not like this stone ball or like this record round The world in your town drenched as they say. Speaking about absence. There is a register. A blur. A child tearing though the street. Not like you either.

high afternoon haze your day to be home In your day

is language strangely. You ask yourself what it would take. That taken. In the same words. A boy feels along the walls as if he were blind. they take him they taste him angrily The street is torn apart. The old street hidden and changed and hidden again. The new material. We don't sing. Our steps thrown back. The pavement as white as the sky. Hell with the women these flyboys.

but you are no pilot we sit in Gino & Carlo's at midday

The livid tables green as the child I mean when I say "We are not alone here." The music is identical. The pipes moan. There is less water than before. There is no rain at all like real rain I have not forgotten we sound the same when we say the same things like people of a certain time. As if history were not over. This is about the neighborhood of objects we are in. Someone is here. Is not here. It can be written the same way. It can't be said. Black fish in paper bins. Water as clear as the sea. A boy playing hide and seek. A small boy. A large ceramic tree. He seems lost without you. He feels nothing.

yet as time pretending to be you or I

Frankly I have come here for you. Some things are brutal. There will continue to be works about gardens but this isn't one of them. This is the real world. Or is this the world? Do I have time for a quick one before whatever passes for night around here passes?

distant bit of roof pink and red pales wall of gold

Chinatown finds itself open. All this silk. The old patterns imagined again burning. Torn or thrown away. Acres of it. Children dancing crazily to bells. No one tells them.

moon of iron rock garden steps am tired boy

oak and palms tried Like criminals we know too much. A deserted watering hole in the deserted West. The Polk Gulch. The Mediterranean sun divides its victims. Each searches for the other one. And I can still feel the burn. The new set of words. Obvious in its disguises. I have pictures of the empty room.

unconscious quotation broken like bones they were yours

Gay bones. Jay De Feo eyes. On both sides of you naked. Your face. Capable of anything. The accident of putting two things together. Any two. Any time. It's territory day in the islands. Also your fault. gone all out prediction A man takes his breath in and I decide to get it back out again.

love of Oh! Poor girl!

The scale is the same. The space between house and ancient building choked with greenery. The moist air between us. The con men play with each other. A hero is trapped in a pinball machine.

Poor taste

is never enough. My fever shakes this picture of trees. Blooming. Not everything that doesn't exist is me. I have nothing to explain. That seems shallow but goes in. Contains blood. Is round. The steaming tar like lava makes the new town. the figure with strings strung A mannequin in a window manipulates a doll. Caught in the act of being motionless. Her head turned away. Inasmuch as it is a head. He seems to fly. His arms held out. They are arms. Our arms. It follows with the logic of a false similitude left from another age. We believed in that too. Christ what innocents. Whose will go first? Like firecrackers in the Broadway Tunnel. The continuous roar between things. He claims not to understand negative space. The soft skin. The mute discipline no one is ready for. We say nothing to each other. Day after day. The celebration is ruthless. There is a musical version of the past.

caught in the radio is constant danger Also I am

constant also caught. The indecipherable note pasted like a rose to the wall barely lit by the sun going down. Is clear to someone. Or like a castle under siege. Overgrown with Edenic trees. The worse for the wind raging above this solidity. Things made of stone subject only to the catastrophes we know don't change things. Or change completely but we remain unshaken. We are the objects. The people were destroyed. More than once.

we were just words like the pear is a fruit and is yours

and is filled with sun like the valley with the white roses pictured here. You can almost see the heat. The petals blurred as if unsure of themselves. The rain also pictured. rains naked from the waist smokes or steams Because the heat is relentless. It never rains when it's hot here. Petals for eyes. Something new pasted over the new thing. A child holds you to its lips. A highrise where the hotel. Also of granite. A burned out pit. Graffitied man alive at the bottom with what did you expect written in red paint. A tent made of paper. The moon is still empty. But it will never be like it was. Known not to exist. The new moon.

is midday

We lay down in the lightest possible sun. She sang while it was too hot to move. But now it's not. Kwannon ice white Chinese goddess of love. Old red flowers turning yellow. Things disappear in the fog. He referred to certain people as the neighborhood.

still here we are gone

This is the series of stone steps that don't go on. The animals squirming.                                                Laura Moriarty