Waiting for the Storm

Timothy Steele

Breeze sent a wrinkling darkness

Across the bay. I knelt

Beneath an upturned boat,

And moment by moment felt

The sand at my feet grow colder

The damp air chill and spread.

Then the first raindrops sounded

On the hull over my head.

It Could Happen To You

David Lehman (2019)

It's June 15, 2017, a Thursday,

fortieth anniversary of the infamous day

the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati

and they're still losing

I mean we are

7 to 1 to the Washington Nationals

a team that didn't exist in 1977

the summer of a little tour in France

with Henry James

in a yellow Renault douze

the light a lovely gray

the rain a violin

concerto (Prokofiev's No. 2 in D Major)

and I had books to read

Huxley Woolf Forster and their enemy F.R. Leavis

Empson a little dull for my taste

also Freud on errors, Norman Mailer on orgasms,

James Baldwin in Paris

Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground Part 1

and John Ashberry tells me he is reading The Possessed

translated as The Demons in the newfangled translation

while Ron and I stay faithful to Constance Garnett

I went upstairs stood on the terrace ate some cherries

admired the outline of trees in the dark

and Rosemary Clooney

sang "It Could Happen To You"

and I was a healthy human being, not a sick man

for the first summer in three years.

Silver Spoon Ode

Sharon Olds (2018)

I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth

and a silver knife, and a silver fork.

I would complain about it—the spoon was not greasy,

it tasted like braces, my shining access

to cosmetic enhancement. And I complained about

the taste of my fillings in my very expensive

mouth, as if only my family was paying 

where did I think the rich got

their money but from everyone else?

My mother beat me in 4/4 time,

and I often, now, rant to her beat—I wear

her rings as if I killed her for them, as my

people killed, and climbed up over

the dead. And I sound as if I am bragging

about it. I was born with a spoon instead of a

tongue in my mouth—dung spoon,

diamond spoon. And who would I be

to ask forgiveness? I would be a white girl.

And I hear Miss Lucille, as if on the mountain

where I'd stand beside her, and brush away the insects,

and sometimes pick one off her, sometimes

by the wings, and toss it away. And Lucille

is saying, to me, You have asked for enough,

and been given in excess. And that thing in your mouth,

open your mouth and let that thing go,

let if fly back into the mine where it was brought

up from the underworld at the price of

lives, beloved lives. And now,

enough, Shar, now a little decent silence.

Todas as minhas coisas são tuas

Leonardo Gandolfi

Quando fiz Do you know the way

to San Jose, preparei algumas variantes

que acabaram ficando de fora da versão final,

gravada em 1968 por Dionne Warwick.

A mais importante delas talvez tenha sido

uma pequena quebra de andamento

mais ou menos na metade da música,

indicada sobretudo por uma mudança de nota

nos três trompetes que, naquele instante,

preenchiam os espaços em branco.

Isso, apesar de rápido, sempre me remetia

a um tempo em que meu pai me levava

ao bar a meio quilômetro da nossa casa.

As cordas de um piano que eu nunca mais

ouviria. Anos depois, toda vez que toco

Do you know the way to San Jose, penso

no meu pai. A música que fiz com certeza

não fala disso, a suspeita a um só tempo

oportuna e desacreditada que nos separa

dos nossos. Frio antigo e úmido que,

como depois percebi, da ação até a demora

não leva nem mesmo alguns segundos

translated from Portuguese by Farnoosh Fathi

Everything I Have Is Yours

When I wrote Do you know the way

to San Jose, there were a few flourishes

in the arrangement that didn’t make the final cut

recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1968.

The most noteworthy of these was perhaps

a small break in the rhythm midway

through the song, further indicated by a

note change from three trumpets that were,

at that time, filling blank spaces.

Although quick, that break always reminded

me of when my father used to take me

to a bar half a mile from our house,

the chords of a piano I would never hear again.

Now, years later, when I play Do you

know the way to San Jose, I think

of my father. The song I wrote certainly

doesn’t tell of this, the suspicion both

fitting and unreasonable that keeps us apart

from our own. A damp old chill that,

as I was later to realize, from action to stall

lasts no more than a few seconds.

pouca coisa

Angélica Freitas

não calcula a perda ao comprar a caixa de alfinetes (da china)
e tampouco de onde vão despontar com suas cabeças (chatas)
e maldiz mao tsé quando sai uma gota de sangue (do dedo)
e quando vê um alfinete na rua não pega (nem morta)
mesmo se igual aos que pontuam as blusas (no armário)
e que rocem na pele produzindo vermelhos (tão raros)
e que alguém sonhe com alfinetes (na china)
na vida só valem às dúzias (é claro)



(translated from Portuguese by Farnoosh Fathi)

one more (tiny) thing

don’t calculate what you’ve lost in buying a box of pins (made in china)
and from where exactly they emerge with heads (flat)
and your cursing mao tse when a drop of blood appears (from the finger)
and when you find a pin in the street, leave it there (it’s not dead)
the same kind of pin pointing to the blouses (in your closet)
and brushing your skin it produces a red (so rare)
and someone is dreaming of pins (in china)
in this life only valued by a dozen (clearly)

Bored

Margaret Atwood (1995)

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces, and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.

The Imagined

Stephen Dunn (2012)

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness 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 he 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?