on horses naked astride

The Sisters                                                   












After hot loveless nights, when cold winds stream
Sprinkling the frost and dew, before the light,
Bored with the foolish things that girls must dream
Because their beds are empty of delight,


Two sisters rise and strip. Out from the night
Their horses run to their low-whistled pleas—
Vast phantom shapes with eyeballs rolling white,
That sneeze a fiery stream about their knees:


Through the crisp manes their stealthy prowling hands,
Stronger than curbs, in slow caresses rove,
They gallop down across the milk-white sands
And wade far out into the sleeping cove:


The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death:
Their lips, whereon delicious tremours hiss
Fume with the ghostly pollen of their breath.


Far out on the grey silence of the flood
They watch the dawn in smouldering gyres expand
Beyond them: and the day burns through their blood
Like a white candle through a shuttered hand.






                                               Roy Campbell


















....

Why don't I have...

Why don't I have
You? Why
don't I see the trace of Your hand
in the inhumanly rational construction
of a blade of grass. The blackbirds'
song for me is only
ownerless, I can't hear Your
hearing. I don't hear the voice
piercing the day's clamor. And at night,
drowned in its enormous
breath, I feel how everything
takes place from me: between
me and the blind star runs
a frosty road of terror, my measure
of infinity, which ends
with me. I can't see
further. I can't see, since
I believe too little that I see? Or perhaps this
is simply the thirst
to see and there's nothing
beyond this thirst to pierce
suddenly into the day's clamor, the cathedral
of the grass, beneath a star's
dead eye.


                            


                                      Bronislaw Maj
 
                                             tr. Clare Cavanagh
















...

so entwined are we when loved

Unable are the Loved...                   

 Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity—

Unable they that love—to die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.

                          Emily Dickinson

....

on hearing in the mind a distant tune

The Green River                                                        

I know a green grass path that leaves the field,

And like a running river, winds along

Into a leafy wood where is no throng

Of birds at noon-day, and no soft throats yield

Their music to the moon. The place is sealed,

An unclaimed sovereignty of voiceless song,

And all the unravished silences belong

To some sweet singer lost or unrevealed.

So is my soul become a silent place.

Oh, may I wake from this uneasy night

To find a voice of music manifold.

Let it be shape of sorrow with wan face,

Or Love that swoons on sleep, or else delight

That is as wide-eyed as a marigold.

                                  Lord Alfred Douglas














...

to find a way

              Mapping                                                                                                 

There are stories to be let loose with comb and water:

Mikushi, my grandmother, who stood among the warriors as the bones on her breastplate jingled and she was proud.

The young niece who drives hastily into ditches and thinks of forgiveness

as the car turns over and over.

A son who will tighten copper bells to thin ankles and then fancy dance

among fluorescent feathers.

The cousin who chose not to cry out when the walls of her Chevy burst

around her in flame.

One nephew who returns from living in the city, only to realize how much

can change, and how little.

We gather these up again on shoulders and around waists where they endure.

This begins and does not end with a secret: we know only this route home.






                                                                Mandy Smoker Broaddus
























.

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.





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