a cosmic seasonal ditty

  Leonskaya                                      






               by


           Joseph Brodsky








The air—fierce frost and pine-boughs.
We’ll cram ourselves in thick clothes,
stumbling in drifts till we’re weary—
better a reindeer than a dromedary.


In the North if faith does not fail
God appears as the warden of a jail
where the kicks in our ribs were rough
but what you hear is “They didn’t get enough.”


In the South the white stuff’s a rare sight,
they love Christ who was also in flight,
desert-born, sand and straw his welcome,
he died, so they say, far from home.


So today, commemorate with wine and bread,
a life with just the sky’s roof overhead
because up there a man escapes
the arresting earth—plus there’s more space.






                        tr.  Derek Walcott






















//

o trials aplenty

              Censored                                                   














Donald Davidson
died in Nashville, Tennessee
on the 25^th April 1968,
aged 74.





/



a little north of south

Lament                                                                                                     


                                             By






                                   Debra Marquart


north dakota     i’m worried about you   
the companies you keep     all these new friends     north dakota   
          beyond the boom, beyond the precious resources
               do you really think they care what becomes of you  

north dakota     you used to be the shy one   
enchanted secret land loved by only a few     north dakota
when i traveled away and told people i belonged to you     north dakota
          your name rolled awkwardly from their tongues
               a mouth full of rocks, the name of a foreign country 
 
north dakota     you were the blushing wallflower
the natural beauty, nearly invisible, always on the periphery

 north dakota     the least visited state in the union   
now everyone knows your name     north dakota
the blogs and all the papers are talking about you     even 60 minutes
i’m collecting your clippings     north dakota   
the pictures of you from space
          the flares of natural gas in your northern corner
               like an exploding supernova
                    a massive city where no city exists
                          a giant red blight upon the land
and those puncture wounds  


  north dakota     take care of yourself  
the injection sites     I’ve see them on the maps   
eleven thousand active wells    one every two miles
all your indicators are up     north dakota   
          four hundred billion barrels, some estimates say
more oil than we have water to extract
          more oil than we have atmosphere to burn


north dakota     you could run the table right now     you could write your own ticket
          so, how can i tell you this?  


 north dakota, your politicians    
           are co-opted (or cowards or bought-out or honest and thwarted)
               they’re lowering the tax rate for oil companies
               they’re greasing the wheels that need no greasing
               they’re practically giving the water away


north dakota     dear sleeping beauty please, wake up
they have opened you up and said, come in     take everything
          what will become of your sacred places,
          what will become of the prairie dog, the wolf, the wild horses, the eagle,
          the meadowlark, the fox, the elk,
          the pronghorn antelope, the rare mountain lion,
          the roads, the air, the topsoil,
          your people, your people,
          what will become of the water?


north dakota     who will ever be able to live with you
once this is all over     i’m speaking to you now
as one wildcat girl     to another     be careful     north Dakota


























.....

blessed ubiquities

Our Lady of South Dakota

                              By

                  Adam Fitzgerald

Our Lady of Allen, South Dakota be with us.
Our Lady of turquoise towers and water pumps,
of barbiturate skies barreling o’er dry granaries,
bucolic at the continental pole of inaccessibility.

Our Lady of Brundage and Wounded Knee,
pray for us. Average family income: 2300 USD.
Our Lady of Tagg Flats, think of us sometime.
In Elmo, Montana, in McNary, Arizona, near

Parmelee and Dunseith, steer our grubby tykes
through the promises of Sunday Pay Per View.
Our Lady of Boys Town, weep for us in aisles
bleaker than Wal-Marts of Belden and Muniz.

Shampooers and fast food fryers, nanny aides,
and drivers work for greasy wads in zippered sheets
stained with love. Our Lady of Del Mar Heights,
what’s the dillio? Lady of Calio, Madonna of

Oglala, Virgin of Las Lomas, Mother of Whiterocks
and Winslow West, scrunchies and lip gloss flake
about your departing feet. Glam metal, nourish us.
Roseanne reruns, comfort us. Prairie casinos, protect us.

I saw Our Lady in Spring Creek and North Hartwell,
in La Rosita and Nageezi, by Lago and Lukachukai
looking bedraggled about the eyes. Her wrinkles tied
in crow’s-feet, bellied by refrigerated mac ‘n’ cheese,

hair-curler stiff, stinking of lye and Marlboro Reds,
cleaning ranch condominiums littered with coolers
of heavenly Coors Light. Our Lady of Sheep Springs
wrestling for Friendly’s blintzes. Our yellow-lipped,

chubby-wristed mother, flowing in tie-dye muumuu,
cucumber sundress, pebble-fisted, softly skirting along
kiddy pools on unmown lawns in babyshit peep-toe
platforms, by handle-bar streamers humping paydirt.

In Sawmill and La Puerta, bring Kool-Aid coupons
and save us our White Castle gallon-kind big slurps.
Give ever your grist to the grits of highway rest stops.
Our Lady of Wanblee, help rebuild the bleachers at

Butterfield Regional Middle School where the boys
grope at their camera phones in shadow, zit-stippled,
molested by high-voltage power wires arching across
aluminum meadows, steel ladies tacking clotheslines.

Our Lady of Gentle Snowfall, Mudslides and Indoor
Home Plumbing. Our Lady of BuzzFeed and Tyler Perry.
Our Lady of Pooper Scoopers and Ketchup Dispensaries.
Our Lady of Skechers and Old Navy, of Dental Dams

and Grease Trucks, of Single Mothers and Closet Cases,
Road Rage and Outlets, of Trailer Parks and Cereal,
Our Lady of Monday Night Football, Our Lady All About
Consumer Confidence, RVs and Veterans—be with us now.
























....

so that's what it's all about

by

c.s.  giscombe



PRAIRIE STYLE                                                                                                        






A sexual image about the prairie ought to be a good idea: it'd have no 
meaning in a larger context and its existence, furiously local, might make
outline itself a high level of vernacular--the image might be the sum of 
dire and hopeless songs, more of an after-image really. Love 
might be, in general, a revelation but sex could have a shape 
or a figure with which one could remember it; the speaker could recognize
it or could himself cause recognition to occur. Love might be a terror--the hesitation past town--but sex could be content and outline both, until the 
watcher (or the listener) turns away.

Male, female. Black men say trim. An outline's sameness is, finally, a 
reference. Towns, at a distance, are that--how they appear at first, a 
dim cluster, and then from five or six miles off; how they look when
you're only three miles away. Inbetween sightings is the prairie itself
to get across: trek, trace, the trick of landscape. Love suffers its wish-
fulness--it's an allegorical value and the speaker mimes allegory with 
descriptions of yearning, like the prairie's joke on us (among us). In-
land's a name, a factory, something to say; the thing upon which the image verges, the thing push articulates

the best poem ever

What if, says a small child to me this afternoon,
We made a poem without using any words at all?
Wouldn’t that be cool? You could use long twigs,
And feathers, or spider strands, and arrange them
So that people imagine what words could be there.
Wouldn’t that be cool? So there’s a different poem
For each reader. That would be the best poem ever.
The poem wouldn’t be on the page, right? It would
Be in the air, sort of. It would be between the twigs
And the person’s eyes, or behind the person’s eyes,
After the person saw whatever poem he or she saw.
Maybe there are a lot of poems that you can’t write
Down. Couldn’t that be? But they’re still there even
If no one can write them down, right? Poems in
Books are only a little bit of all the poems there are.
Those are only the poems someone found words for.








                                                 Brian Doyle   (  + May 2017  )






















...

ah but to see a certain bird prayer poem

I lost out as a Buddhist,  worse as a Christian.
Never mind: I ask, please, to see a harlequin duck.
It would best be quite soon.








                                             Helen Tanizaki     (+   6 August 1978  )
















..

a land and a time far hence

British India                                                              

        To

       Rudyard Kipling

       by

  

          Henry Jean-Marie Levet 

trans.  Kirby Olson

The offices close at four o’clock in Calcutta;
In the palace park the tennis court stirs;
In Eden Park grinds the spicy music of the sepoys;
The brilliant carriages salute each other on Red Road...

On his throne of gold, sparkling with rubies and emeralds,
His highness the Maharajah of Kapurthala
Longs for Liane de Pougy and Cléo de Mérode
Their autographed photos nearby...

— Benares, squatting, dreams along its stretch of the river;
The Brahmin, candid, tired of his trials, sits
In lively repose amidst the perfumed abstraction...

— At Lahore, 120 degrees Fahrenheit,
The doctors Grant and Perry play cricket, —
Railroads crawl through the sunlit jungle...
























....

cardio -adamant reset

J'ai dans mon coeur...                                            






                     Théophile Gautier 




 J'ai dans mon coeur, dont tout voile s'écarte,
Deux bancs d'ivoire, une table en cristal,
Où sont assis, tenant chacun leur carte,
Ton faux amour et mon amour loyal.

J'ai dans mon coeur, dans mon coeur diaphane,
Ton nom chéri qu'enferme un coffret d'or ;
Prends-en la clef, car nulle main profane
Ne doit l'ouvrir ni ne l'ouvrit encor.

Fouille mon coeur, ce coeur que tu dédaignes
Et qui pourtant n'est peuplé que de toi,
Et tu verras, mon amour, que tu règnes
Sur un pays dont nul homme n'est roi !






‘I have in my heart’                                                  

I have in my heart, which, all unveiled, I show,
Two benches of ivory, a crystal table too,
Whereon there sits, each with a card to throw,
Your false love and my true love for you.

I have in my heart, my heart transparent as glass,
The name I cherish hidden in a casket of gold ;
None have the key : profane hands shall not pass
To open it. The key is yours to hold.

Search my heart, the heart that you disdain,
And find within it no one dwells but you,
And, truly, love, within my heart you reign
Over a country without a king to view !
















....