Second Elegy
The assassins had all gone back to barracks their helmets remained, piled with the banners as on the eve of a battle. What are those shadows beneath the tree of life? Holy women, swooning, faces [...]
The Terrace
He watches the terrace through the window that interpreter he no longer has any claims on the life that bursts and flows beyond it down those lanes in view among palm trees, cork-oaks, mimosas [...]
The Black Streets
The soldiers on their way to lay siege to the mountain stopped here to let blue wine blot out steaming blood the devil spoke to them not the one who watches over the old synagogue or sets the [...]
The Lacemakers
the lacemakers are no longer in the Pelican but the Beguines haven’t budged from behind their windows the empress of Constantinople has forgotten them unlike the thrushes recalling autumn all [...]
uncertain land petrified mourning
fire iron blood barbed wire Djibouti meditates on Red Sea shore dhows rot in the cove of the port Rimbaud seated pensive at a school desk has no more ink for his pen no paper for a poem kilomètre [...]
birds of ill omen
above black Gorée basalt boulders encircling the island of slaves dark cells iron chains the door of no return the continent far off the port Dakar still farther beyond the sea and the desert is [...]
GHAZAL: kana bahrun m’a beini wa beiniki
Was there loyalty, envy, devotion between us? More like a dizzying pendulum’s motion between us. After the silence and the damp morning chill a new conversation would grate like corrosion between [...]
Paragraphs For Hayden
i.m. Hayden Carruth, 1921–2008 1. I’d want to talk to you about desire, Hayden, the letter I could have written on a subject you’d never tire of turning in a glass, smitten by a song, an [...]
Double the Fun:
An Interview in Paris with Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker’s 2008 translation of Marie Etienne’s poetry, King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) knocked me out. The long lines brought [...]
