After Love

Sarah Teasdale

There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea—
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.

Divergences

Gottfried Benn
translated from the German by Michael Hofmann


One says: please no inner life,
manners by all means, but nothing affective,
that's no compensation
for the insufferable
difficulties of outward-directed expression—
those cerebralized
city-Styxes

when my little prince
pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot
it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst,
and it's no different now

the contraries are not easy to reconcile
but when you survey the provinces
the inner life
has it by a neck.

The Poor

Roberto Sosa
translated from the Spanish by Spencer Reece

The poor are many
and so—
impossible to forget.

No doubt,
as day breaks,
they see the buildings
where they wish
they could live with their children.

They
can steady a coffin
of a constellation on their shoulders.
They can wreck
the air like furious birds,
blocking out the sun.

But not knowing these gifts,
they enter and exit through mirrors of blood,
walking and dying slowly.

And so,
one cannot forget them.

Strange Sea

Edith Södergran
translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy

Implausible fish bloom in the depths,
mercurial flowers light up the coast;
I know red and yellow, the other colors, —

but the sea, det granna granna havet, that's the most dangerous
to look at.
What name is there for the color that arouses
this thirst, which says,
the saga can happen, even to you—

In Daylight, I Turned On the Lights

Jane Hirshfield (2011)

In daylight, I turned on the lights,
in darkness, I pulled closed the curtains.
And the god of More,
whom nothing surprises, softly agreed—
each day, year after year,
the dead were dead one day more completely.
In the places where morels were found,
I looked for morels.
In the house where love was found,
I looked for love.
If she vanished, what then was different?
If he is alive, what now is changed?
The pot offers the metal closest to fire for burning.
The water leaves.

The Imagined

Stephen Dunn (2011)

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefullness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she's ever wanted,
would you want to know that she slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she's made for him, that he's present even when
you're eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,

once again, not to talk about it?

Epithalamium

Nick Laird (2011)

You're beeswax and I'm bird shit.
I'm mostly harmless. You're irrational.
If I'm iniquity then you're theft.
One of us is supercalifragilistic.

If I'm the most insane disgusting filth
you're hardly curiosa.
You're bubble wrap to my fingertips.
You're winter sleep and I'm the bee dance.

And I am menthol and you are eggshell.
When you're atrocious I am Spellcheck.
You're the yen. I'm the Nepalese pound.
If I'm homesteading you're radical chic.

I'm carpet shock and you're the rail.
I'm Memory Foam Day on Price-Drop TV
and you're the Lord of Misrule who shrieks
when I surface in goggles through duckweed,

and I am Trafalgar, and you're Waterloo,
and frequently it seems to me that I am you,
and you are me. If I'm the rising incantation
you're the charm, or I am, or you are.