Archilochos in Baghdad
Doug Anderson
Archilochos in Baghdad
There is less noise now except in your head.
The smirking rich have gone home with their take
and left you the rind and the flies.
The dead have gone home. The maimed
with their lolling tongues. All gone.
Children play in the empty husks of Hummers
and helicopters. Watch you through the dust.
When you have gone they will come out
to take what you have not used, have not eaten.
Cannot remember why you came to this place.
Now they tell you to pack.
Go back to a place you imagined as home.
That has moved on beyond you and changed the locks.
from Sleeping with Sappho
Stephen Vincent
from Sleeping with Sappho
36.
Andrew
The joker dropped
Melissa a dead letter
]
Out of Delphi — without a prayer
Indelicate Jane confuses seaweed with rope —
Burnt. Copper anklets and starched jeans
Without smell, varnished tools
Or white plates spare and smooth.
So she shut up. Soon after, her mother caved in.
No one hears anything, travel a naysayer.
Then, the daughters of Athena released the horses
Studs each gripped by the legs of Epidore’s finest
The young men with taut ribbed torsos
That they would climb mountains, traverse rivers, ravines [
]unlike to us
]not particular to the gods
To arrive Attica
What is bitter in the tambourine and snare
Ill-fitted to the false speech of outsiders
]
A chorus in which no one transforms the anguish:
Such sad, mean sounds
The streets filled with broken bricks
Folded down, broken statuary
Bitterroot and dry compost
The young on their horses in tears
The women in shredded pink silk
No one can call on anyone, absolutely
No one. The instruments fail. Every eye
And chin dropped: an ode for infinite loss,
Infinite forgiveness.
104.
Such large
Rain drops
So few
Fingers
XI.
Susan Sherman
XI.
There is no way to imagine her final hours what she saw
when she finally descended into that darkness she loved
so well Desire once a pawn of intellect became real
loss made it real As once she had drawn her own blood
marveled at its consistency her confession flowing onto
parchment the unanswerable exploding her soul questions
impossible to grasp the truth of limitation the outline
of our bodies as we confront ourselves Sor Juana
What was it like to believe in word as symbol music magic
hieroglyph Plato and Christ bound together ungraceful lovers
What is more ephemeral than words the pretence of
numbers Sor Juana Did you try one last time
to make that leap of faith to purify yourself to make of
yourself the gold without blemish reaching for the divine
inside yourself only to discover once again you were
only human or did you ultimately succeed forsaking your last
breath as you finally let go
Excerpted from The Light that Puts an End to Dreams, a suite of Poems for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
To Juan Gelman
Gioconda Belli
To Juan Gelman
I think, Juan
that we are
a man and a woman
wandering aimlessly through the world,
with a muted question
behind the looks
and open hands
searching for bluebirds
tranquilizers for the pain
eaves where we can be safe from tears
mirrors in which to look
and find who sees
so sweetly with the same sweetness
so tenderly, with a tenderness from within
who removes us from solitude
leaves us warm
with no more sun than the sun
and embraces the warmth for life that we carry
our dawns
as if we were from the same country;
who takes us out on a walk under the trees
like stubborn little creatures
sniffing out love.
I think, Juan, that there is a mirror
where we peek out
at the same time.
— tr. Mónica Bruno Galmozzi