TOVE DITLEVSEN
"Divorce 1"

He would
in case of divorce
lay claim to half
of everything
he said.
Half a sofa,
half a TV,
half a summerhouse
half a pound of butter
half a child.

The apartment was his
he said
because it was in his name.
The thing was
he loved her.

She loved another
whose wife would
lay claim to half
of everything.

So the marriage act stated.
As clearly as
two and two makes four.

The solicitor
said so too.

She broke half of everything
and ripped the tax bill apart.
Then she left for
the women’s shelter on Jagtvej
with half a child.

The child was teased at school
because he only had
one ear.
Other than that,
this life too
was bearable
since things couldn’t be
any different.

-

Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

LI BAN
"Drinking Alone with the Moon"

A tankard of wine in the midst of some flowers
I drank alone, no one was with me
Raising my cup, asking the bright moon
Bring me my shadow let us be three.
Alas, the moon couldn’t drink,
And my shadow stared at my vacantly.
Still, for a while, I had these two friends,
To cheer me up as Spring was ending.
On the spot, I composed a poem, the moon encouraged me,
I got up and danced, my shadow stumbled along.
All along, we two bosom companions.
Finally drunk, it was then I lost him.
Eternally tied, lacking emotion, one wanders,
We two for a time watching the Starry River.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

"Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere"

A gather of apricots fruit pickers left

gleam like reasons for light going higher, higher;

I look half as hard as I can to tease

the fruit out of its green.

        (It is time to run lest pity overtake us,

        and calamity pit invents to accompany itself:

        to sigh is a stern act—we are judged by this air.)

Down the steady eye of the charging bear

a gun barrel swerves—intention, then flame;

and willows do tricks to find an exact place in the wind:

resolution steady, bent to be true.

        (While there’s time

        I call to you by all these dubious guides:

        “Forsake all ways except the way we came.”)

TED GREENWALD
"Staring Doesn’t Help"

Staring doesn’t help
Nor does running around
Music doesn’t help
Especially songs
Getting together doesn’t help
Nor does staying apart
Seeing someone else doesn’t
Nor does seeing you
Sleeping doesn’t help
Nor does waking
Dreaming doesn’t help
Nor do any facts
Running doesn’t help
Nor does sitting around

LIU ZONGYUAN
"River Snow"

A thousand mountains, not a bird in sight
Ten thousand paths, not a human track
Alone in a boat, wearing a straw cape and hat, an old man sits
Fishing alone, in the winter snow

HERMANN HESSE
"Trees"

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

TOMICA BAJSIĆ
"When You Hit Yourself with an Axe While Chopping Wood"

You don’t think about poetry then
or about great deeds
or about politics
you don’t defy God.
you are as small as a pea
as you wait for the pain
to go away.

When you’re riddled with shrapnel
from a mortar grenade
you don’t think about the effect
you have on women
or about the national anthem.
you crawl under a rock
as you wait for the pain
to go away.

When the prison door
bangs shut behind your back—
that’s when you think about freedom.

Translated from the Croatian by Nina Bajsić

MARY OLIVER

"Why I Wake Early"

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

and spread it over the fields 

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even,

the miserable and the crotchety—

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light— 

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

WILLIAM STAFFORD
"A Key to an Old Farmhouse"

One of the raindrops going by
might find that key we lost and wash
it away where it fell from the picnic table
or bounced when we ran. One of the birds
might carry that key to its nest, metal
in the sun, glittering from its deep light
and waiting there, slow. The family then -
swallowed by time - are gone, but that key we lost
shines on, a silver monument that nobody
knows, fumbled by rain, cherished
forever by birds wherever it goes.

MING HAORAN
"Memories of Early Winter"

The leaves are falling, the wild geese flying south
The water is cold here, the wind from the North.
I remember my home, where the Xiang River bends
Hidden by the clouds of Chu.

I weep for my village, ’til my tears are spent
I spy a lonely sail that stares at the sky
Indulge me, where is the delta ferry?
The lake is peaceful and boundless.

MAX JACOB
"Story Without a Moral"

Once there was a locomotive so good that it stopped to let pedestrians pass. One day an automobile bumped over its tracks. The engineer whispered into the ear of his steed: “Shouldn’t we take it to law?” “It is young,” said the locomotive, “it doesn’t know.” It contented itself with spitting a little disdainful steam on the out-of-breath “sportsman.”

-

Translated from the French by Elizabeth Bishop

LI BAI
"Quiet Night Thought"

At the foot of my bed, moonlight
Yes, I suppose there is frost on the ground.
Lifting my head I gaze at the bright moon
Bowing my head, thinking of home.

GARY SNYDER

"Hop, Skip, & Jump"

for Jim and Annie Hatch

     the curvd lines toe-drawn, round cornerd squares

bulge out doubles from its single pillar line, like,

Venus of the Stone Age.

she takes stone,

with a white quartz band for her lagger.

                                                            she

       takes a brown-stained salt sticky cigarette

                                               butt.

he takes a mussel shell. he takes a clamshell. she takes 

a stick.

he is tiny, with a flying run & leap

shaggy blond—misses all the markers,

                              tumbles from one foot.

                              they are dousing

a girl in a bikini down the beach

                      first with cold seawater

                        then with wine.

     double-leg single-leg stork stalk turn

on the end-square—hop, fork, hop, scoop the marker,

              we have all trippt and fallen.

              surf rough and full of kelp,

         all the ages—

draw a line on another stretch of sand—

                                               and—

                                           everybody try

to do the hop, skip, and jump.

                                                                    4. X. 1964 —Muir Beach

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Ghosts"

     There are ghosts in the room.

As I sit here alone, from the dark corners there

They come out of the gloom,

And they stand at my side and they lean on my chair

     There’s a ghost of a Hope

That lighted my days with a fanciful glow,

In her hand is the rope

That strangled her life out. Hope was slain long ago.

     But her ghost comes to-night

With its skeleton face and expressionless eyes,

And it stands in the light,

And mocks me, and jeers me with sobs and with sighs.

     There’s the ghost of a Joy,

A frail, fragile thing, and I prized it too much,

And the hands that destroy

Clasped its close, and it died at the withering touch.

     There’s the ghost of a Love,

Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,

But he towers above

All the others—this ghost; yet a ghost at the best,

     I am weary, and fain

Would forget all these dead: but the gibbering host

Make my struggle in vain—

In each shadowy corner there lurketh a ghost.

EMILY DICKINSON
"As if some little Arctic flower"

As if some little Arctic flower,
Upon the polar hem,
Went wandering down the latitudes,
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer,
To firmaments of sun,
To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
And birds of foreign tongue!
I say, as if this little flower
To Eden wandered in —
What then? Why, nothing, only,
Your inference therefrom!

LUCY GREALY
"Ward 10"

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids
anywhere, we were bad, always sneaking off
to buy chocolate in the lobby, over to Maternity
to make faces at babies, and one morning,
after a previous evening of hushed, excited planning
based on an overheard conversation,
we took the elevator all the way down to the lower basement
to wind our way through the deserted tunnels linking buildings,
nervous, fearless explorers among the bare floodlights
and echoes, looking for signs pointing
toward the animal labs. The night before
we’d lain in our beds unable to sleep with the image
of what we must have thought would be
some sort of petting zoo. We got giggly lost three times
before the stink of sheep’s pee found us,
and then we found them, bleating in their concrete
strawless pens, raw geometries shaved
in their sides. In the next room were cages
and cages of cats, most of them silent, some
with electrodes sewn in their heads.
We could hear monkeys nearby, but instead chose
to finally read the signs we’d laughed at minutes before:
we were unauthorized personnel, we weren’t
supposed to be there. We went back to the ward
to find the nurses laughing, scolding.
They thought we’d somehow found out
the hated technician who took blood
was coming that morning, and that we’d sneaked off
to buy Hershey bars in the gift sbop instead.
Always loving, they applauded our ingenuity:
“How did you know?” We hadn’t, but
played along anyway.
“Guess,” we told them.

*

Before I knew high school I knew words
like vincristine, cytotoxin, sarcoma, failing.
I understood the basic theory of radiation,
the vacuum principle of hypodermics,
that it would be a long time
before I would say out loud
the names of my friends again.

Listen, Michael, Tina: I’m the one who made it.
I don’t know the reason for this.

GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG
“Signs”

Threading the palm, a web of little lines
Spells out the lost money, the heart, the head,
The wagging tongues, the sudden deaths, in signs
We would smooth out, like imprints on a bed,

In signs that can’t be helped, geese heading south,
In signs read anxiously, like breath that clouds
A mirror held to a barely open mouth,
Like telegrams, the gathering of crowds—

The plane’s X in the sky, spelling disaster:
Before the whistle and hit, a tracer flare;
Before rubble, a hairline crack in plaster
And a housefly’s panicked scribbling on the air.

WILFRED OWEN
"I Saw His Round Mouth's Crimson"

I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell,
Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;
Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,
Clouding, half gleam, half glower,
And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
“November”

When the hangman’s bored he turns dangerous.
The burning sky rolls up.

Tapping sounds can be heard from cell to cell
and space streams up from the ground-frost.

A few stones shine like full moons.

IVOR GURNEY
"Ballad of the Three Spectres"

As I went up by Ovillers
   In mud and water cold to the knee,
There went three jeering, fleering spectres,
   That walked abreast and talked of me.

The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier
   That walks the dark unfearingly;
Soon he’ll come back on a fine stretcher,
   And laughing for a nice Blighty.’

The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade,
   No kind of lucky chance I see;
One day he’ll freeze in mud to the marrow,
   Then look his last on Picardie.’

Though bitter the word of these first twain
   Curses the third spat venomously;
‘He’ll stay untouched till the war’s last dawning
   Then live one hour of agony.’

Liars the first two were. Behold me
   At sloping arms by one – two – three;
Waiting the time I shall discover
   Whether the third spake verity.