For a nod to Kafka, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
from Ordinance on Arrival / by Naomi Lazard, b. 1936
These things have always been
in short supply; now
they are impossible to obtain.
Month: June 2015
DPF / Stafford
For dust of all kinds and train travel, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
from Vacation / by William Stafford (1914-1993)
One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:–
Three Indians in the scouring drouth
huddle at the grave scooped in the gravel,
lean to the wind as our train goes by.
Someone is gone.
DPF / Soseki
For mountains and parts of life that appear to be mountains, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
from Magnificent Peak / by Muso Soseki (1275-1351) translated by W.S. Merwin
From the four directions
you can look up and see it
green and steep and wild.
DPF / Haines
For intimate moments in the landscape’s immense spaces, a fitting metaphor for how a poem sits in the mind, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
from The Train Stops at Healy Fork / by John Haines (1924-2011)
We saw the scattered iron
and timber of the campsite,
the coal seam
in the river bluff,
the twilight green of the icefall.
DPF / Merton
For bells in monastery towers, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
from An Elegy for Ernest Hemingway / by Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
Now for the first time on the night of your death
your name is mentioned in convents
DPF / Maj
For fleeting moments, which are all of them, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
from A Leaf / by Bronislaw Maj, b. 1953, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass
no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among other leaves, no one saw
what I did.
DPF / Szymborska
For sisters and for mine who makes the world luminous, from a woman who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, and from A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz. A funny one in admiration and in awe of those not fully obsessed with the making of poems while equally in admiration of those who are.
from In Praise of My Sister / by Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire
Under my sister’s roof I feel safe
