What We Gain in Translation

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Epigram from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot,
originally from Dante’s Inferno, canto xxvii

i)
forgiveness for the language:
scratches for the trouble of trying
to arrive at the same place by a different way
when the first way was also choked with thorns. Continue reading “What We Gain in Translation” →

September 17, 2011 0

The Dream of Quoting Wendell Berry at the Rotary Club Meeting

During her speech, the nutritionist had said
we can only begin with where we are
speaking of a gradual reduction of fried chicken in our diet

When question time came I rose and asked:
Were you consciously evoking Wendell Berry’s
line we can only begin with what has happened

As she nervously nodded I expressed relief:
because the whole time you’ve been talking
I’ve been thinking about those rural deaths, those
chest clutching spasms leading to a Country Funeral –
here I paused for recognition which didn’t come

Continue reading →

September 16, 2011 3

Where I Was When I Realized What Had Happened

In a stadium on the flight path to the airport
planes descending during the game
my home town high school championship game
turning down for final approach
their engines running up slightly
watching every single one until they headed away
it was 2004.

September 11, 2011 1

Jane Hathaway 1985

She smokes the last cigarette of the day,
puts down her Jane Austen.
Another sore-feet day at the credit union,
returning to the apartment complex at Melrose
she shares with a handful of randy kids.

Too late, she appreciates the quixotic honor
of men like Clampett. The headline read:
Bodine, Heir to Fortune, Takes All to Chase.
Drysdale Ruined in smaller print, and she with him.

Drysdale lies at Forest Lawn, not at the bank now,
last in a line of unremarkable graves:
Granny, old age; Jed, city living;
Ellie May, drowned in the cement pond;
Drysdale, by the .38 he kept in his desk.
She saw him dead that afternoon, went to lunch
and never returned.

written about 2000, revised recently

September 9, 2011 0

This is My Last Poem

because I’m sick of my own voice,
tired of selling you my life, nauseous
from listening to you (and me).
I’m exhausted from talking to God. Listen:

I just got off the phone. My friend’s latest
manic phase resulted in God talking back.
His mother said that “while this was delusional,
the religious experience was real.”
Excuse me, but I can’t tell the difference
any more. When my friend hung up I listened
to the dial tone for awhile.

first written around 2004. And no, it wasn’t.

September 7, 2011 0

The Walls Came Down

I used to wonder what happened behind all
the doorknobs I had no right to turn, the
anonymous walls of my neighbor’s ranch houses.
I don’t know why the Prudhommes’ house squatted low
beneath oppressive dark blue lights ringing the eaves
each Christmas, nor do I expect I could Google the answer,
although the name and the place yielded 5,781 results.
The facts decayed in their accustomed ways:
they don’t exist – were never blogged about or catalogued.

The walls came down.
A friend has friended a friend.
There was an accident. A child has died. Or
They danced at their wedding to a Russian tune.
The crystalline structure, all the compartments,
the doors that represented friendship fraught and won.
The walls came down.

September 3, 2011 0