truthfront

Tag: poem

  • Whims of Water, by Lucio Mariani

    Neither a star nor a demon or shrike

    asked me to exist. And yet this whim

    of water speaks to you and smiles still, one

    of countless thousands, a chance of form,

    a crag cut by the course of time,

    blood-soaked, that you probe and caress.

    *

    Neither a star nor demon will ask

    when I’ll want to die. But the hour presses,

    its shadow looming over my shoulder,

    with devastating precision its fractions

    and multiples press as well while I

    dismiss the unknown of kin

    whose ill gaze eyes me from the mirror.

    *

    There’s no star asking me to write my life,

    to clasp with my fingers at the dream and memory.

    But

    this pen is what balances my wound.

    Mariani, Lucio, Traces of Time: New and Collected Poems, trans. by Anthony Molino. Open Letter Books, NY, 2012: 33. 

  • behind you in the city

    You know my name

    i don’t know yours

    wandering town

    choking heat vapor

    ___

    I know your face but you don’t know mine

    glass shop windows, sunlit refraction

    smell the melting city

    living Dalí, dead world

    ___

    I follow you 

    black jean jacket

    sidewalks loaded

    fifty dollars for a cake

    feral panhandlers

    muse drifting

    pay the mortgage

    chase your dreams

    ___

    Aggressive music

    molded grapes in a bag

    house for rent

    chrome forty-five

    fuck the president

    you look rebellious

    today

    ___

    Ice cream

    a summer shell

    a voice: love me 

    you’re looking for something

    credit card swipe

    crooked bacchus

    ___

    suddenly Stan Getz

    in a raincoat

    no bus fare

    Colfax meanderer

    i’ve met you before,

    he says

    ____

    sculptures of horses

    destroying each other

    temporarily i lose you

    forget your voice

    family burdens, debts

    hang on walls

    ___

    joyous are we

    behind sunglasses

      behind you in the city

        who’s behind me?

  • The Horse and Rider, Louise Glück

    Once there was a horse, and on the horse there was a rider. How handsome they looked in the autumn sunlight, approaching a strange city! People thronged the streets or called from the high windows. Old women sat among flowerpots. But when you looked about for another horse or another rider, you looked in vain. My friend, said the animal, why not abandon me? Alone, you can find your way here. But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?

     Glück, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2014: 59.

  • Ransick’s Dream in Salida, Colorado

    Sunrise crests the southern peaks,

    strikes the white hut high on the hill,

    casts shadows along a railroad spur.

    Winter rode in on a boxcar last night, 

    spent the new moon’s savings in a

    ghostly brothel. All night, wind ran

    cold hands up the valley’s things,

    bristling with newly naked aspen and

    pines that know not the beetle hordes.

    An old man with smoldering beard and

    eyes of grey glass cries outside the Victoria

    tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

    but he’s more Lear than Scottish thane, 

    banished as he is to a mountain moor

    far from daughters loyal or treacherous.

    A brewpub inhabits the old mortuary,

    customers soaking up suds instead of

    embalming fluid. Every alley you skirt

    harbors defrocked Klansmen who

    scurry into dilapidated shacks or dive

    into dumpsters, mumbling of nooses, 

    shotgun blasts and crucifix ash.

    The Arkansas flows wild silver between

    hot yellow cottonwoods, a river anticipating

    canyon curves but regretting, like all

    pure water, flowing closer to the Springs.

    Look west toward Monarch Pass and see

    in the flats green fumes rising from a

    herd of porcine developers who dream of

    bedrock, valleyview, alpineglow over

    identical subdivisions, followed by the usual

    quick getaway. You wish to be a trout

    swimming upstream and even as you

    whisper those words you wake

    in clear shallows, current strong

    through your gills, jeweled beams

    lighting your flanks. Autumn is over

    and you know in your fine bones you must

    swim and swim and never stop.

    Ransick, Chris: Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams, Ghost Road Press, Denver, 2010: 81.