Destination
i. There are only metaphors for becoming. Only the sibuyas un-peeling its layers calachuci spreading their petals paruparo emerging from cocoons events of blossoming, acts of uncovering, of nakedness. There are no great […]
Time
Yestermorrow
Hallelujah, it’s nobody’s birthday! Nobody’s wedding and nobody’s wake! For once the glib calendar’s dumb. These brave hours have sloughed off their date. No unions are striking, no voters are polled, though if anything dawn has come early. While the coffee is yet to be ground, our displeasures dissolve prematurely. We’re a people […]
Temporarily Eternal
No more books or music for tonight, and nothing new on cable, nothing to clean or cook or suffer through. Just sighs between the minutes as this white typhoon of moonlight tries to shake the room and all that’s right within it. The clock face wears a sheen of […]
Letter to the Man Who Said I Stayed on His Brain Like a Hit of Acid That Wouldn’t Kick In
I thought of you this morning, our six years of letters, and the time you kissed me in the Saturday schoolyard. How we swung from side to side. Together, away. It was October then, like it is every year, like it is now, and that kiss tastes like green apples and leaves flaming in the […]
“So it came together”
So it came together, coincided: weakness after illness, the calm of gentle weather after a week of rain, after symptoms of autumn, after wind and roving liquid tons of dark-grey moisture overhead. With tenderness I note how the golden light of sun sifts through the heavens’ thinning greyness, and with the change of tone […]
“Вот и сошлось, совпало” (in Russian)
Вот и сошлось, совпало: слабость после болезни, нежность тихой погоды после недели дождей, прочих осенних симптомов, ветра и темно-серой движимой мокрой тонны влаги над головой. С нежностью отмечаю, как просевает солнце через поистончавшую серость на небесах золото света, и первым изменением тона луч проникает в царство успокоенных крон. Как бы ступить плотнее, Как бы […]
Fish (for everybody)
A cliché is not to be despised: its automatic comfort is the happy exteriority of a shared language which knows itself perfectly well to be a contentless but sociable turning outward toward the world. […]
Kamienie (in Polish)
Były tu zanim się pojawiłem. Przetrwają katastrofę. Nie mają duszy, ale są nieśmiertelne. To w sumie najważniejsze. Grzegorz Wróblewski “Kamienie” is from Kosmonauci (Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2015). You can read and listen to the poem in English translation here.