Merry
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The Apples
by Yves Bonnefoy
And what are we to think
Of these yellow apples?
Yesterday they startled us, waiting naked
After the leaves had fallen.
Today they enchant us,
Their shoulders
Underlined so modestly
With a hem of snow.
At university Yves Bonnefoy (French, born 1923)...
For My Daughter
by Antonella Anedda
I love her fierceness when she fights me, shouting "Not fair!" Her eyes slitting
like shutters in cities by the sea.
Her life is rich with bonfires -- seen and unseen --
fires that burn through the turning years
bringing her to life again, and again...
After Mayakovsky
by Denis Johnson
It’s after one. You’re probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President,
my darling: I’m alarmed by the alarm
clock’s...
All Hallows
by Louise Gluck
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or...
Cows in Trouble
by Steve Martin
These were not the average "contented" cows. They were cows born for trouble. They were not cows who could stand by and let people call them "bossy." They were cows who could not stand around all day lowing. They were cows who could be just as happy chewing...
Pretty
by Jane Anne Phillips
It was my birthday. I was half child, sensing by their feel the scenes I would remember. My mother tore lettuce with her brown hands. My brothers, hurrying up to wash, ran through the kitchen smelling of sweat and crushed grass. Outside my father stood over the...
Bunch Grass # 37
by Robert Sund
The ranchers are selling their wheat early this year, not holding it over for a better price in the spring. Next year the government lifts restrictions on planting, and nobody is sure what will happen when wheat grows from "fencerow to fencerow." This morning...
Refuge Behind Refuge
for Peter Huchel
by Reiner Kunze
Here only the wind comes uninvited through the gateway
Here
only god calls
He has countless lines laid
from heaven to earth
From the roof of the empty cow-house
to the roof of the empty sheep-house
the jet of rain
shrills from...
On 9 June 1904
by W. G. Sebald
according to the Julian
calendar, 22 June
according to our own,
Anton Pavolich and
Olga Leonardovna reach
the spa at Badenweiler.
The tariff is sixteen maks
for board and lodging
at the Villa Friedericke
but the spelt porridge
and creamy cocoa
bring no...
Lost in the Hospital
by Rafael Campo
It's not that I don't like the hospital.
Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave.
The smell of antiseptic cleaners.
The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true.
My friend, the one who's dying, took me out
To where the patients go to smoke, IV's...
Asuncia
by Nin Andrews
Now that you are gone, I am so lonely, even the angels love my sorrow as if it were their own. Sometimes I imagine them, reclining at beach resorts or walking the streets of their glass cities or descending in silver jets to survey the miseries of the earth they...
The Best Gang
by Roberto Bolano
If I had to hold up the most heavily guarded bank in Europe and I could choose my partners in crime, I'd take a gang of five poets, no question about it. Five real poets, Apollonian or Dionysian, but always real, ready to live and die like poets. No one...
The Black Heralds
by Cesar Vallejo
You get knocks in life, so vicious. . . . It beats me!
Blows as if from God's hate; as if under their rain,
the backwash of everything you've suffered
stagnates in your soul. . . . It beats me!
Not many; but you get them. . . . They open up dark...
Romanesque Arches
by Tomas Transtromer
Tourists have crowded into the half-dark of the enormous Romanesque church.
Vault opening behind vault and no perspective.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel whose face I couldn't see embraced me
and his whisper went all through my body...
from Red
by Rafael Alberti
1.
I am morning's first color
day's last.
2.
I wrestle with green in fruit; I win.
3.
With my brothers, I submitted to the rigors
-- Giotto -- of geometric rigor.
7.
I congeal when my being
solidifies in black.
12.
Indistinct in...
Nine Senryu by Nine Japanese Women
Running down the giraffe's neck the orgasm
- Seino Chisato
Deeper deeper into the night OO atop the waves
- Ito Masajo
Savage love's what I want I say smokestacks
- Tokizane Shinko
Though hugging each other my back suddenly feels...
Snowman
by Gu Cheng
I built a snowman
at your front door
to stand at my stead, waiting there
in all its stupidity.
Then you buried your lollipop
deep inside its snowy heart,
saying that this little sweetness
would perk it up.
The snowman did not smile,
did not make a sound...
February
by Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. Its his
way of telling whether or not Im dead.
If Im not, he wants to be...
Infectious diseases physician and epidemiologist Jacques Pepin, in his The Origins of AIDS (Cambridge University Press, 2011), tells an illuminating and sobering story of the spread of HIV. This is a scholarly, detailed work written for a general audience..
Dr. Pepin, who has done research...
Sayings from the Northern Ice
by William Stafford
It is people at the edge
who say things at the edge: winter is toward knowing.
Sled runners before they meet have long talk apart.
There is a pup in every litter the wolves will have.
A knife that falls points at an enemy.
Rocks in...