September 2013
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founded in 1912 by harriet monroe September 2013 FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccii • number 5 CONTENTS September 2013 POEMS w.s. di piero 411 Nocturne Tombo nate klug 414 Milton’s God Squirrels Observer atsuro riley 418 Thicket george kalogeris 420 Rilke Rereading Hölderlin katharine coles 421 From the Middle maureen n. mclane 422 One Canoe Best Laid Every Day a Shiny Bright New Day meghan o’rourke 426 Sun In Days eliza griswold 434 Water Table Forecast Sample Lisbon Sirens Poetry Not WRITTEN FOR CHILDREN That CHILDREN MIGHT NEVertheLESS ENJoy lemony snicket 441 All Good Slides Are Slippery maram al-massri 444 “Knocks on the door” Translated by Khaled Mattawa carl sandburg Doors ava leavell haymon 446 The Witch Has Told You a Story katerina rudcenkova 447 “Yes, I live inside the piano” Translated by Alexandra Büchler ron padgett 447 Poem liz waldner 448 Trust stuart mills 449 In the Low Countries carrie fountain 450 Burn Lake henry parland 452 “My hat” Translated by Johannes Göransson richard brautigan 453 A Boat sherman alexie 454 From “Bestiary” zachary schomburg 455 The One About the Robbers franz wright 457 Auto-Lullaby dorothea lasky 458 Monsters lorine niedecker 459 “A monster owl” campbell mcgrath 460 Dawn graham foust And the Ghosts john ashbery 463 This Room eileen myles 464 Uppity COMMENT kay ryan 467 Specks michael hofmann 481 Sharp Biscuit — Some Thoughts on Translating frederick seidel 492 La Vita Nuova fanny howe 497 Second Childhood clive james 501 Interior Music letters to the editor 511 contributors 513 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Consulting Editor christina pugh Art Direction alex knowlton cover art by chris raschka “Little Bird,” 2013 POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG a publication of the POETRY FOUNDATION printed by cadmus professional communications, us Poetry • September 2013 • Volume 202 • Number 5 Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, po 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, po Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2013 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine’s online submission system. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at jstor.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the uk. POEMS w.s. di piero Nocturne Where are you now, my poems, my sleepwalkers? No mumbles tonight? Where are you, thirst, fever, humming tedium? The sodium streetlights burr outside my window, steadfast, unreachable, little astonishments lighting the way uphill. Where are you now, when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias. W.S. DI piero 411 Tombo In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor, pulled off his shoes, granted audience to us, his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet. He smiled, our brother, at the story he told of deliverance at the hand of Master Tombo, lord and creator, whose round energy lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk our butter our eggs: see Him there, in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case? In that elder by the yogurt shelves? I believed his happiness and coveted a tidy universe. He picked his feet while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s mango aura made the cold blown air touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body and felt my silly bones collapse again. I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save this faint believer and the indifferent world that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle lavender respired from the flower stall and Security spoke kind words to our prophet. Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash of speech and flowers and winds and the tides and crave plain rotund stories to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god, spilled blood made corn grow, the blood gods shed watered needy ground and became People who worshipped the corn. Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one inarticulate incoherent moment to the next. Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh. Orion turns, burning, unchanged again. Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees. My poor belief lives in the only and all of the slur of what these are, and what these are 412 POETRY streams toward loss in moments we live through. As children we were lost in our opaque acts but fresh and full in time. I remember how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy broke another’s face, how we all stood in hard gray summer rain so it would run down the tips of noses to our tongues. W.S. DI piero 413 nate klug Milton’s God Where i-95 meets the Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered; stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge, the onlooker couldn’t decide until the end, or even then, what was revealed and what had been hidden. 414 POETRY Squirrels Something blurred, warmed in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke becoming tears; but when you turned to look the stoop was still, the pumpkin and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk — just a rattle at the gutter and a sense of curtains, somewhere, pulled. Five of them later, scarfing the oak’s black bole, laying a dream of snakes. Needy and reticent at once, these squirrels in charred November recall, in Virgil, what it is to feel: moods, half-moods, swarming, then darting loose; obscure hunches that refuse to speak, but still expect in some flash of luck to be revealed. The less you try to notice them, the more they will know of you. nate KLUG 415 Observer Not seeing me, not even looking, K. on her silver cruiser charms her way through the last long moment of the changing light: snow boots and a Seychelles Warbler’s old blue tights, a rolled-up yoga mat in her basket wobbling like a wild tiller as she pedals. It feels illicit and somewhat right to stand across the intersection without shouting her name, or even waving. According to the internet tutorial, the fact that photons turn into tiny loyal billiard balls as soon as we start watching suggests no error of method or measurement, but rather, as far as anyone can tell, an invisibly unstable world, a shaking everywhere that seeing must pin down and fix. So, that morning I stumbled on you out, alone, bending through 416 POETRY the traffic at Orange and Edwards Streets: a someone else then whom I, alone, can never otherwise see — there has to be a kind of speech beyond naming, or even praise, a discipline that locates light and lets it go. nate KLUG 417 atsuro riley Thicket We come gnawed by need on hands and knees. As a creature (nosing) grubble-seeks a spring. As bendy-spined as bandy snakes through saltshrub yaupon needle-brake. For darkling green; for thorn-surround. This absorbing quaggy crample-ground. Of briar-canes (intervolved with kudzu-mesh) and mold. Of these convoluted vines we grasp to suck. To taste the pith — the lumen the cell-sap pulse. To try to know some (soursharp) something about something. 418 POETRY Lumen is as lumen does. ‘A little room for turmoil to grow lucid in.’ In here where Clary set her cart-tongue down (and dug, and brailled). In here where Tynan breathed. We grasp to suck to taste what light. Let loose the bale that bows us down. — Bow down. atsuro RILEY 419 george kalogeris Rilke Rereading Hölderlin Footnotes to the tower. For “He spends the summer There, in a state of violent agitation,” Read: “It’s there, in his agitation’s most violent State that Hölderlin suspends the summer” — Like a yellow pear above the untroubled water. For the lost, disheveled decades of derangement, Translate I was struck by Apollo as you Must change your life. For sonnets that sing their own Spontaneous, Orphic necessity to praise, Think naked as a lightning rod he waited. For necessity insert Anangke. But for Anangke, “Lord, just one more summer, please.” For summer, the lyre. Hölderlin in his tower. Until autumn, when the leaves start falling. Whoever Has nowhere to go will never get home now. 420 POETRY katharine coles From the Middle How much of everything is pure Getting ready. Dressing, pushing the button Asquint through its machined furl Only to unbutton, the eyes-open moment Revealed. Ask any animal: nudity isn’t The same as nakedness. Once you’ve seen A dangling, you can’t unsee it, and From that anything might ensue.