A J OU RNAL OF WRIT ING & A RT
I SSUE ONE ✣ Winter 2011
A JOURNAL OF WRITING & ART Winter 2011
Tongue is a journal of new writing & art publishing original poetry, essays and images that aspire to challenge comfortable gestures and distinctions. 3ese are translations, polyphonic exchanges across all conceivable borders— those of imagination, of language, and our inherited and enacted worlds of joy, repression, solitude, and violence. As an autonomous project of the PIROGUE COLLECTIVE —the arts and culture expression of the Goree Institute—Tongue celebrates an expansive, poetic dialogue among communities of thought.
✣ Editors
A D A M WIE DE WIT SC H C OL IN C H E N E Y R .A . V I LLA N UE V A
TONGUE
editors@tongueoftheworld.org
✣ COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY ISLAND POSITION ALL R IG HT S R ESER VED
No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever (beyond copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the United States Copyright Law) without permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
GOREE INSTITUTE
Contents
Prelude to What Comes Next GEOFFREY NUTTER
Coprolite : Tornado :: Turkey Vultures : DARREN MORRIS
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10
3e Wolf’s Dream / Intaglio ALFONSO D’AQUINO TRANSLATION FROM THE SPANISH BY FORREST GANDER
20
Palustrine CECILY PARKS
26
Situation 8 (from Provenance) CLAUDIA RANKINE
29
Aubade with Panopticon SALLY WEN MAO
42
(Nightly We Are Taken) KIWAO NOMURA TRANSLATION FROM THE JAPANESE BY FORREST GANDER AND KYOKO YOSHIDA Recent Findings IDRA NOVEY Shanxi Portfolio ZHANG XIAO
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30
30
3ree poems ADAM SMALL TRANSLATION FROM THE KAAPS BY MIKE DICKMAN
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Four poems VÉNÚS KHOURY-GHATA TRANSLATION FROM THE FRENCH BY MARILYN HACKER
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Recurrence RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS Maniac Mansion BRIAN OLIU
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68
(from Context) BIRGITTA TROTZIG TRANSLATION FROM THE SWEDISH BY RIKA LESSER
70
Mexican Prayers EWA CHRUSCIEL
74
3ree poems NATHALIE HANDAL
71
Photography by RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS 5
RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books/2010) and !e Requited Distance
(*e Sheep Meadow Press/2011). Her next full-length collection, Mule & Pear, (New Issues Poetry & Prose), was published this fall.
!ey Have Tiny Eyes !at Remember Everything, Rachel Eliza GriďŹƒths. Photograph based on Aubade with Panopticon by Sally Wen Mao, 2011.
Prelude to What Comes Next GEOFFREY NUTTER
Knives may be sharpened on ivy roots, willow, and holly. SeaIray does not injure sycamore or tamarisk. Grass will grow beneath the alder, ash, plane, and sycamore but not the aIen, beech, cheJnut, and fir. CheJnut and olive never warp. 3e unmoving cloud that seems to billow on the cyclorama, the dream, the waking day, the rain-wet leaves. Condensation builds up on the windows. Bankrupt and in the exchequer’s black books, you’ve inscribed the Ramayana on a tetrahedron about the size of a dreidel. It’s okay. 3rough the sky fall fire-threaded hats for reKors, plums with Jreaks of green and violet, beetles with green markings. You came to her firJ as a child, then as a lover, then as a litigant. Is this the prelude to what comes next (low as it may be on the scale of verities)? As a ptarmigan lays aside its winter plumage, lay your burden down beneath the trees, in the cool shadow of the moss: your life will be there Jill when you awaken, like a grape-colored ribbon laid across the tinted page of a book that you have closed. 3en when you return, touchJone, opal of the pale, a child fully human in your wakefulness, full in your adulthood as absinthe for the weary, as fortitude for tedium, the lesser agons: we could be drinking ice wine right now, made from the grapes we left to freeze
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on the silver branches at dusk. We could be new, beautiful, appeased, immortal. Or watching the Orange River thaw as it flows through Mönchengladbach at dawn.
GEOFFREY NUTTER is the author of Christopher Sunset (Wave Books, 2010), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize) and A Summer Evening, winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize (Center for Literary Publishing, 2001). Geoffrey currently teaches in New York City, where he lives with his wife, daughter and son.
P R E LU D E TO W H AT C O M E S N E XT
✣ 9
Coprolite
:
Tornado
DARREN MORRIS
What am I the voice says. Where am I the body replies. Let’s begin with something known. Archeologists found a cache of coprolite nested neat as a clutch of eggs in a layer of North American peat. 3e petrified excrement ranged from tiny pellets to cannonball size, resolute among the exculpated memory of our bones, proving that we walked our continent long before we guessed. One way to view science is as a series of questions that necessitate other questions. 3is is the same with poems. We are asking: Isn’t this how we feel, process, live? Isn’t this us? From our prehistoric waste we now can guess at how we might have been, how large we might have grown, how hungry. On the night it was created we might guess how full of flora and fauna heretofore undiscovered and assess how pregnant or how sick or wounded.
10
: :
Turkey Vultures :
We can better approximate age of individual, intestinal strength, and even the amount of anxiety, and fearlessness—all from the distance at which we squatted from the fire. 3e world is what we know is constantly disappearing. And this is why we sing to ourselves and move our shoulders when we weep. Beauty is what runs into machine-gun glow. What wants its good arm back, what doesn’t want to die today, but to go on, lunging forward in the dark, until it vanishes. During World War One coprolite held no more value than its usefulness to gunpowder, so rich was it in phosphorous. In Ipswitch, a mining operation staked its claims, but now there is only its namesake street. It must have been cobbled then. Sheep would have stumbled where they crossed. Old neighbors must have greeted there each to each and worried that the Germans would sweep them under. So they lingered wordlessly and smoked or talked about the river and the birds that nested on its banks, the ones who seemed to know. 3e world would soon be passing them. 3ere is some comfort thinking of the nothing we become that allows us to be all things known or considered. All things thought or whispered past even the most regular field, the last day falling
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
: âœŁ 11
over the country of our sleep. 3e past made into coprolite, chunks of memory, perforated light, a burst before some soldier’s death. What am I the voice says. Where am I the body replies. 3e Virginia Historical Society has been working to preserve a house. Identical to the many homes built just after the Civil War, this one was built before. Finally, they had secured enough funding to begin the careful renovation. 3e first order of business was the destruction of two blood-hooded turkey vultures who had wandered deep into its gutted cellar. Old lovers, they had come again to nest within the ruins. Fish and Wildlife sent an agent who by shotgun rounds, a rasher apiece, killed them where they hissed, and lurched, and spat, raking their knives across the floor. Where they lay, nearly bodiless, a single, spotted final egg rolled unharmed between its makers. As a final indignation, the raptors were hauled out, hoisted by their talons, and strung as warning to others who might think to take up residence there. When I hear how they hung, wings fanning out like vanquished saints, a joy rises in my shoulders, because I have kept them for years alive in the Kansas sky drifting over an endless field where I am ten years old.
12 âœŁ
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
:
Typically, the vulture hunts silently, alone, just over the earth, sniffing the zones of grasses for the delicate gases of decay. I’ve seen them roadside like dogs shaking the heart from a cat, almost like a mercy, like mourners paid to weep when a body has no other, like the women who washed the bodies of the dead saying: Your hands are as rods of gold set with beryl; your body is as polished ivory overlaid with sapphires. Although vultures are absent the song box of the birds, their wings whisper “corpses.” Once some death is recognized they find a thermal to climb and glide. 3ere, they are joined by hungry others loafing through the final hours. I watched them circling eights and traced their shadows against the crop, level as a field of snow. 3ey must have been attending an animal running wild in its starvation. It was some comfort to consider it. 3e vultures turned the spindle works inside the sky’s great clock. I was only some filthy boy or animal. I’d been sent there like a secret, secreted let’s say, because death is abstract. It is my infant brother’s death, my mother’s boundless grief, and the unspeakable acts of living on. Even now, when the world goes quiet, the past is a tomb for archeologists, a pit of coprolite. It is those vultures I saw,
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
: ✣ 13
above me, while I squatted on my blue blanket on the dirt under the lone tree. Prevented the house, left alone with only thought, I rose one day and defecated on the whole of summer and Kansas and the old woman watching from her window. Something for the flies. Defiance became a mode of being. My mother abandoned me for the dead child, who was nothing even then, like memory. And the nothing was palpable, the only plasma that drove the chaos through itself. In the shapes birds make of sky, I saw on the horizon line that the field was bearded with an infestation. At a distance it seemed the business end of some mythical thresh, mowing the wheat, moving over it like a fog. It was some orchestrated cloud of insect, a black erasure, a tidal stretch across the soft blond land. Each head of grain leaned down upon and kissed benevolently home. Some among that nation pooled behind in char, devouring, the marrow of each stalk to dust. Others cleared trenches and leapt into the next possible light mouthful of heaven. 3ey churned and rose in waves that bit down again ahead. 3ey were instructed by no god but the many which they contained: the one called Maul, Slaughter, Nail-driver, Butcher, Scabbard, the god who drinks in time of drought, 3e Lamb,
14 âœŁ
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
:
the one called Void, the Brute. He is all encompassing Disdain. He is Vigilance. Truth-bearer. Slayer. Indifference. Tar. Barbarian. Beast. One is Crumble. Another Supine. 3orn-finch one. Another Monkfish. Bottom dwellers and those from cloud. Another called Insignificance-Obsolete. Wretch, how they are cursed, but many are the names burned upon the lips. Lot-counter, Fact-checker, Judge. 3e one who made these forty million mouths. 3e one called Do Not Repeat, who brings us loss, who makes it to consume, and endure. Where am I the body replies. Here. 3is near to the maw that pushes the great wheel tumbling through all our forgetful days. 3e more they eat, the more unquenched. Yet for this moment, stripped of all, they coil their amazing legs and squat down into their midst. 3eir short glider wings sprout from each brilliant empennage. And now the rear guard of the grasshopper horde jettison together and soar. 3e whole of the world that year ravaged by an appetite that I felt was all my doing. All of it. Even as the vulture’s shadow begins to disappear within a darker force, the insect wreckage widens by degree. I asked my questions: Is this the body and this the thought, is this who I am
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
: ✣ 15
or my believing in it? And there, like an answer , thickening in the cumulus at the apex of the earth, at the mouth of the sky, maybe two counties away, the gentle bell and downward swirl, the exclamation of tornado. It is small from here, and yet I can see it is lowering its spiral staircase. It drops one toe. 3en, twinned, it plants one leg into the soil and now another. Now it walks a titan upon the earth. Now the vultures have flown, and now the insect nation is pulled from its feast and thrown into oblivion. Now one runs from the house and drags me o. Now I am pulled to the cellar where we wait as all the unseen things begin to die beneath the canopy of the wheat, and now I weep, for no one will be there to pick us clean. I must place vultures snuggly into the history of the self. 3ese birds whose bone-white beaks are finished with a ripping hook, sharp as any question mark. 3ese who eat only the dead, who roost in empty subterranean haunts, thick stands of trees, caves, or that walk-in Virginia cellar in the rubble of disrepair. 3e mates are loyal and communal, flying back to perch at dusk among their elders and kin, often one hundred to a colony. And this is what I see after the storm. I walk into the altered landscape of my life, consumed and shat back out. I find shingles from the house strewn about the yard. 3e fields
16 âœŁ
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
:
are mulched, the wheat, supplicant, a new trench dug for working, the great tree shed of leaves. Yet as I walk beneath it, the light dies. For up in the many arms and echelons I realize I have come beneath some silent adjudication. It is the whole of the vulture wake. 3eir eyes at once so plaintive and surprised, so sorrowed I was still alive.
DARREN MORRIS ’s poems have appeared in journals including !e American Poetry Review, !e Southern
Review, Hotel Amerika, 32 Poems, and Raritan. His short fiction was awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Commission for the Arts and his short story “*e Weight of the World” recently won the Just Desserts Prize at Passages North.
COPROLITE
:
TORNADO
: :
T U R K E Y V U LT U R E S
: ✣ 17
Ancestors, Rachel Eliza GriďŹƒths. Photograph based on Aubade with Panopticon by Sally Wen Mao, 2011.
*e Wolf’s Dream / intaglio (from Star Lip)
ALFONSO D ’ AQUINO TRANSLATION FROM THE SPANISH BY
FORREST GANDER
El sueño del lobo / intaglio (from Astro Labio)
Conciliábulo de grajos en torno a un trozo de carne Soñaba el lobo / que unos pájaros negros desgarraban su piel a picotazos / —y era cierto Uno iba en círculo / le rozaba los belfos luego volaba a un árbol / y cantaba en silencio Otro se afana en vano / con las patas abiertas en arrancar del suelo / los restos de la presa Grajo verdinegro / por mirar el cielo parado en un tronco / tornasola el cuello Mientras el lobo duerme / y aquel grajo regresa la blancura se tiñe / el pájaro se atreve Levanta con el pico / un ojo abierto y negro y sacude las alas / y lo esconde en el suelo Su sueño huele a sangre / los párpados entierra si tan sólo lo inquieta / el canto de unas aves Grajo verdinegro / cabeza de cuervo un pájaro en otro / tornasola el viento
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*e Wolf’s Dream / intaglio (from Star Lip)
Cabal of grackles swarming a piece of meat 3e wolf dreamed / some black birds pierced its skin with their beaks /—and it was true One circled / grazing the wolf’s jowls and landed in a tree / to caw in silence Another plugs away / with splayed legs at what remains of a carcass/ in the dirt Green black grackle / eyeing the sky standing on a stump / its neck iridescing 3e grackle returns / while the wolf sleeps its white fur ruddied / and the bird getting bolder It plucks up with its bill / an open black eye and shaking its wings / plants the eye in the ground 3e wolf’s dream reeks of blood / buried eyelids and it’s bothered / by all the bird calls Green black grackle / raven’s head one bird in another / iridescing the wind
ALFONSO D ’ AQUINO , born in Mexico City in 1959, is the author of many books, including Vibora breve (Small
Viper) and Piedra no piedra (Rock No Rock). At the age of 22, he was awarded the prestigious Carlos Pellicer Poetry Prize.
FORREST GANDER ‘s most recent book is Core Samples from the World. Recent translations include Spectacle &
Pigsty: Poems of Kiwao Nomura and Watchword by Pura López Colomé.
THE WOLF’S DREAM
/
I N TA G L I O
✣ 21
(nightly we are taken) KIWAO NOMURA
TR A NSLATIO N FRO M T HE JA PANES E BY
FORREST GANDER
(夜ごと私たちは連れていかれる） 夜ごと 私たちは連れていかれる 誰もいない場所に 誰も生じえない場所に 愛する者にお別れをいうまもなく とりどりの子供たちの鬼面が 迎えに来るのだ 途中 さびれた街なかを抜け いくつかの橋を渡るが 下を川が流れているようには思えない むしろ草 夜の低みのみだらな草 ああ私たちは そこに欲望を解消することもできたのに また途中 子供たちのひとりが 鬼面を脱ぎ 向こうには雪が欠けている 時の湯垢のように降る雪が と忠告するけれど その顔も 街の灯のように遠ざかる 愛する大地 愛する大地 それから不意に 私たちは中空にせり出してゆく かのよう 眼は取り払われて 眼は取り払われて どこをどう経めぐったのか 気がつくと みえないが 誰もいない場所だ 誰も生じえない場所だ 私たちは淋しいし 耳からひるひる分身を躍り出させて 互いが互いの影を撫でるように たたずむ そのとき そこにいるのは誰だ そこにいるのは誰だ と二度 厳しく問われてしまう その声のほうへ 私たちはしかし 昏れてゆくことができない 夜ごと だから私たちは戻ってくるのだ いくつかの橋を渡り 濡れて大きな 泣きはらしたような眼を 嵌められて
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AND
KYOKO YOSHIDA
(nightly we are taken)
nightly we are taken to the place no one goes the place no one arrives without farewell to those we love the myriad devil masks of children come for us on our way through a desolate town we cross serial bridges and beneath them flow rivers only of weeds wanton weeds, night’s low-lying land
ah we might have drained our desires there and when we’re on our way again one of the children peels off his devil mask to warn us that the snow here drifting down like time’s limescale thins out to nothing on the other side
and then even his face fades like city light my sweet old earth my sweet old earth with no warning we are upthrust into midair or so it seems our eyes plucked out
our eyes plucked out where and how it comes about we can’t presume but now we are here in the place - no one goes the place - no one arrives
we are so desolate our fluttering doubles leap from our ear as if to caress each other’s shadow we stand stock still and right then who’s there? who’s there? twice the question is barked but because we cannot gloam back at the voice
nightly therefore we return recrossing serial bridges enchased with big wet eyes swollen with weeping KIWAO NOMURA is revered in Japan where he has been awarded major literary honors including the Rekitei
Prize for Young Poets and the prestigious Takami Jun Prize. His inspired work as a writer, editor, performer, organizer, and critic has altered the landscape of contemporary Japanese literature. Spectacle & Pigsty, Nomura’s first book in English, has just been published by Omnidawn.
KYOKO YOSHIDA was born and raised in Fukuoka, Japan. She was a participant of the 2005 International
Writing Program at University of Iowa. Her stories have been published in !e Massachusetts Review, Chelsea, !e Cream City Review and !e Beloit Fiction Journal, among other places.
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Nightly We Are Taken, Rachel Eliza GriďŹƒths. Photograph based on (nightly we are taken) by Kiwao Nomura, 2011.
Palu1rine
CECILY PARKS
IN THE planking of the pine woods tilts a moon low enough to snag as it flings itself through the brambling night. Against the alder tilts a lean-to thatched with branches—a pile of pieces of tree laid over the sleeping bag patterned with bees. 3ough sleep is a form of hunting, it does not feed. Half of my heart forages. Half of my heart fumbles for the zipper pull between the wings. Cartridged in small-caliber vines are the grave berries that I should not eat. I already ate them, did I say that? Recklessly is how I kiss my compass. Commuting through the present version of directionless excursion, I thank untrustworthy fruits & low-slung moons for slinking around this wild-willed bivouac in a toxic vineyard. Shelters have their own weather. Before mystery tilts into fear, the marsh unloads its sweetling mist for another place to bear.
CECILY PARKS is the author of the poetry collection Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Her
poems, reviews, and essays on art appear in American Letters and Commentary, Boston Review, Orion, and elsewhere. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she wrote a dissertation on American women writers and swamps.
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Recent Findings IDRA NOVEY
after the cells of Louise Bourgeois
I 3e difference between feet and hands, studies say, is in what occurs just before them: legs or arms. As the difference between a room and an enclosure can be known by the presence of curtains and if a person can tell the weather from what’s trickled down the walls.
II 3e tiny spiral staircase in this corner appears to be moving. Some experts say it is not. 3ey say as well that the nature of enclosure is like this.
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III It’s rare but possible, doctors say, that a man in an enclosure can bite into a mirror and turn it to stone.
IV As for this enclosure, larger and sprawling like never before, polls note a stalling for the right language of lament and then . . .
V Too many enclosures make people cold, new data shows, and when it’s cold it’s going to be cold. As for the spider, he’s feeling for an open seam between the walls.
IDRA NOVEY is the author of Exit, Civilian, a 2011 National Poetry Series Selection, forthcoming in April 2012,
and !e Next Country. Her recent translations include Clarice Lispecter’s novel !e Passion According to G.H. and a collection of poems by Manuel de Barros, Birds for a Demolition. She’s taught in the Bard College Prison Initiative and in Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
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RECENT FINDINGS
Situation 8 (from Provenance)
CLAUDIA RANKINE
Every man walking in the landscape is the landscape’s memory of the man walking. Despite those around him, despite his openness, no one comes close. For him the streets are alive because he exists, because somewhere he walks. He closes time with each step. He walks in order to be absorbed by the moment. Sometimes his lips move and I want to believe he is reciting some lines I once saw: Some stones to hold. Some stones to throw. Some stones to stand on. Every stone he finds on the street during one of his walks he picks up and touches to his mouth. Can he taste his own death, his own erosion, his exhausted time? 3e landscape absorbs his beauty. He is made sad by a nagging sense that all his sadness loses its meaning, that he is without expression. In his rush toward life, whatever it looked like, he lost his place in the evolution of time. I like watching him walk. It soothes me. I like his exposure, his insistence, his unstoppable patience. When he has found too many stones, when they become heavy, when his hands cannot hold any more, when his fingers start to ache, he drops the whole lot of them. Just like that. Everyday in some man somewhere I see him and everyday he drops them and the stones form a tombstone at his feet. I see him, even when I am not watching—I see him drop them. Some stones to hold. Some stones to throw. Some stones to stand on.
CLAUDIA RANKINE is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College. She is the author of
four collections of poetry, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004); PLOT (2001); !e End of the Alphabet (1998); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.
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Shanxi Portfolio
ZHANG XIAO
THESE PHOTOGRAPHS were taken in Shanxi Province in northwest China. *ey document ancient customs that have their origins in pagan religious beliefs including voodoo totem worship. To me, these customs create a kind of theatrical drama. In order to represent the identities of each dierent god, people dress in stunning costumes and have their faces painted exquisitely. Today a number of these customs have survived to remain one of the most important cultural practices in the Lunar New Year throughout most of Shanxi Province in northwest China.
ZHANG XIAO was born in Yantai, Shandong Province. He graduated from Yantai University, and worked as a
photographer for Chongqing Morning Post from 2005 to 2009. He now works as a freelance photographer, and lives in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China.
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SHANXI
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SHANXI
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SHANXI
SHANXI
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SHANXI
SHANXI
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SHANXI
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SHANXI
SHANXI
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Aubade with Panopticon December 12, 2010
SALLY WEN MAO
Some homes are meant to make its inhabitants feel homeless 3is same siege precludes the morning alarms My head on the pillow, my heart debarking hundreds of airships Again I am uptown, where you are sleeping me away again We are in your ex-lover’s apartment where the light steals all your features In moments like this I understand the sad rapture of spies My head is an empty museum with a storehouse of stolen paintings In my comatose dream my mother was singing “Midnight in Moscow” 3e waters were trembling, everything had died except the vermin Do not be afraid, I told the mouse, and it bit the poisoned bait from my hands I am stranded, not brave, in this roofless shelter On the fire escape I kiss an outlaw for unpardoned mistakes Sometimes I can’t believe the power of my own lies It is fanatical to lie with you now when the rotten apples pile inside me It is insufferable to caress the hand that once buried my limbs in autumn snow What can you do with all this dangerous, disastrous might You are silly as daybreak when the crows are fighting You wake now, and this waking is the color of dried mantises Underneath my eyelids, mudslides shudder into wrecked rivers And somehow with a single eyelash you can flush the breath out of this imbroglio Do you know the white worms that are my brains in my hands 3ey have tiny eyes that remember everything Do you remember when we first met, you immediately told me your body’s secret You were missing the center of your sternum If I pushed two fingers inside I could potentially kill you I was once an oval sepal in the center of your gravity In ecstasy your mouth is a carillon’s faraway din Even in these throes I remember the shame you taught me, every thrust of it A corolla upon which I break in lambent halves What if in this moment I am a machine that buries all warnings
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And I can rip through the morning with something flammable and inappropriate Shaking like an endangered cockpit What poison, what lust, what battle, what future When you crush me, ask a difficult question and I will reply My ancestors died stabbed and torched, how did yours
SALLY WEN MAO is an 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar and a Kundiman fellow. Her work can be found
published or forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, and West Branch, among others.
A U B A D E W I T H PA N O P T I C O N
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Sad Rapture, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Photograph based on Aubade with Panopticon by Sally Wen Mao, 2011.
*ree Poems ADAM SMALL
TRANSLATION FROM THE KAAPS BY
MIKE DICKMAN
Eksegese I
II Konings, 2 : 1–12
Elisa, bly tog hier in Gilgal die Here roep my alleen na Bet-al sê Elia, die man met die ligte vel maar Elisa sê : sowaar die Here leef sowaar as daar asem in my liggaam beef ek verlaat jou nie toe sê Elia : bly hier, die Here Bo —en jy en ek moet Hom albei glo— wil hê ek moet alleen na Jerigo maar Elisa sê : sowaar die Here leef sowaar as daar asem in my liggaam beef ek verlaat jou nie toe sê Elia : nou moet ons uitmekaar uit gaan die Here wil hê ons moet mekaar laat staan die Here roep my alleen na die Jordaan maar Elisa sê : sowaar die Here Leef sowaar as daar asem in my liggaam beef ek verlaat jou nie toe was Elia radeloos Elisa wou nie weg nie, Elisa wou nie skei Elisa het soos 'n skadu op sy spoor gebly... maar toe word die Here self vir Elisa boos — want die Here is met sy eie, bars of breek die Here laat Sy eie nooit in die steek — 46
en die Here het uit die storm gestuur die wa met die perde en die vuur
✣ Elisa het na sy donker vel gekyk en verleë deur die donker weggestryk
THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
✣ 47
Exegisis I
II Kings, 2: 1-12
Elisha, remain here in Gilgal it is me alone the Lord calls to Bethel said Elijah, the light–skinned man but Elisha said: as sure as the Lord lives as sure as the breath in my body moves never will I abandon you then Elijah said: stay here, the lord Above —and you and I both must believe him— wishes that I alone go to Jericho but Elisha said: as sure as the Lord lives as sure as the breath in my body moves never will I abandon you then Elijah said: now must we go forth each alone the Lord wishes us to leave off what is between us the Lord calls me to the Jordan alone but Elisha said: as sure as the Lord lives as sure as the breath in my body moves never will I abandon you so Elijah was at his wits end Elisha would not leave, Elisha would not part Elisha dogged him like a shadow . . . but then the Lord Himself became angry with Elisha —for the Lord is with his own, come what may the Lord left His own need in the lurch—
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THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
and out of the storm the Lord sent forth the chariot and the horses and the fire
✣ Elisha looked at his own dark skin and walked off embarrassed through dark
THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
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Lydingsweg Ons het lankal in plekke soes Windermere al ons verlangens afgalaar o Here djy kan maar lyster na ons lied sonner worry, ons is lankal verby vadriet altyd as ek na die oeg toe gaan dan dink ek aan die brylof by Kana maar ons het lankal in plekke soes Windermere al ons verlangens afgalaar en as tussen die shanties hier die wet my soek vlug ek altyd deur Nasaret maar Here djy kan maar lyster na ons lied sonner worry, ons is lankal verby vadriet so moenie worry nie Here ek is opgafix ek is my eie Here en dan’s is ons twie kiets prik ’n anner gêng se manne my eendag vol snye
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THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
gaat ek sterwe aan my eie krys vi’ myne o al lankal in plekke soes Windermere het ons al ons verlangens afgalaar all lankal in plekke soes Windermere al ons verlangens afgalaar
THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
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Path of Suff’ring Longtime already in places like Windermere we dumped all our yearnings o Lord you can jus lissen t’ our song wit no worries, we‘s long pass grief ev’ry time I go to da bar I t’ink of da wedding in Cana but already longtime in places like Windermere we dumped all our yearnings and when da law hunts me here among de shanties I’m always on da run through Naz’reth but Lord you can jus lissen t’ our song wit no worries, we’s long pass grief so you mussen worry Lord I’m all fix up I’m my own Lord so then we quits stir up some other gang’s men my someday full of cuts
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THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
I’m gunna die alone scream out f’ mine o longtime already in places like Windermere we dumped all our yearnings longtime already in places like Windermere all our yearnings dumped
ADAM SMALL (b. 1936), novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and translator, is a controversial South African
literary figure, known for his poetry in Afrikaans, English, and Kaaps, the Creole expression of Afrikaans which he himself defined in the preface to the 1973 volume of Kitaar my kruis. A new version of My Guitar My Cross, translated by Mike Dickman, is forthcoming from Island Position in 2012.
MIK E DIC KMAN moved to France, where he has lived ever since, working first as an English teacher and, latterly, as a translator of arcane texts from Tibetan and Old French and poetry from French and Afrikaans while at the same time maintaining activities in both music and t'ai chi.
THREE POEMS BY ADAM SMALL
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My someday full of cuts, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Photograph based on Path of Suff’ring by Adam Small.
Four Poems
VÉNÚS KHOURY - GHATA TRANSLATION FROM THE FRENCH BY
MARILYN HACKER
*e mother’s red hair stained our sheets
and the maple tree she pursued with her attentions sympathizing with the fall of leaves into our books bandaging the wounded veins 3e mother hurled broken crockery and imprecations at autumn let a single lash fall from our eyes and her curses would be realized We were otherwise many in one like pictures that last a long time and the rain when it becomes voluble 3e mother wanted us long-armed like St John’s streams smooth to move easily into her sleep And if the chestnut trees kept on battling in the hearth’s cinders it wasn’t their crackling that would wake us
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She closed her arms and her shutters to keep the odor of thyme in her casserole and the odor of bees in our hair
We were occupants and visitors at once the traveler and the one who watches the boat sail away 3e rosary of peppers on the windowsill protected us from gossip 3ose outside said we were soluble in darkness because a pomegranate tree had stolen our share of sunlight talked about us right to the end of the ravine 3e rustling of their words caused the flood that carried us away
FO U R P O E M S B Y V É N Ú S K H O U RY - G H ATA
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Reading wastes words and makes concentration boil over like milk on the stove
the mother would repeat and she sharpened the cypress like a pencil
For lack of books we read her intentions sure that she would leave us at the juncture of sleep as soon as it gave her some children that were hers alone would leave us as soon as she had swept our fears under the table gathered up the crumbs of her huge fatigue and our shoes lined up in order of size like good schoolchildren would leave us without going away sewn into her sheet her children become pebbles in her womb
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FO U R P O E M S B Y V É N Ú S K H O U RY - G H ATA
At night all words were black
3e moon bleached them like chicken bones 3ose legible in darkness disappeared with the moths We kept the roundest ones to make holes in the stream followed them to the river mouth where earth splits like the belly of a woman giving birth entrusted them to the sea wrapped in myrtle that prevents forgetfulness then went back with slow steps toward the aging pages
Lebanese poet and novelist, long-time Paris resident VÉNUS KHOURY - GHATA is the author of seventeen novels, including Une Maison aux bord des larmes, La Maestra, and La fille qui marchait dans le désert. and fifteen collections of poems, most recently Quelle est la nuit parmi les nuits (Mercure de France, 2006). *e poems in this issue are from a new collection, Où vont les arbres, to be published next year. MARILYN HACKER ’ S twelve books of poems include Names (Norton, 2009), and Essays on Departure (Carcanet Press, 2006)). Among her translations from the French are Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen and Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Alphabets of Sand (Carcanet Press, 2008) and Nettles (Graywolf Press, 2008). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
FO U R P O E M S B Y V É N Ú S K H O U RY - G H ATA
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Recurrence
RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS
Next to the throne where we are waiting for you to judge I sit you in a hardback chair. I don’t tie you to its broken arms. I don’t offer you torture, confession. Freedom. You could only give me what you gave the scholars. A chamber of vapors you named history. I give you water. You do not see my blood in it. I give you bread the rest of us cannot eat because we gave our bellies to red crows. I swivel a tambourine like a knife through air. We nod in time to airless music, I wish it was blue. I watch the scale of love tilt. I touch your hips and you like that. You like my bones to want you. In a solo you know the hymn and sing it with your lips cold. 3ose are your lips? Below we watch cities unfurl their flags and you don’t blink when the children fall out like mice, smothered thin. I polish you with tar. I shine you. I give you fruit after checking each seed for poison. Here is a book about war I say and you smile, taking it from my bloody hands. In the government of dreams you are behind on your paperwork. So you are like democracy. You offer me the throne. We are waiting for the servants to rinse the place where you soiled it from your last visit. I have been standing here for two hundred years by your side. Even when you left me for another woman.
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3e smell of my singed skin is in the sky and the rows of the harvest. I wait for your orders. Mushroom, nimbus, tornado. Fire. I hold a sterling tray of faces waiting for you to make up your mind.
RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books/2010) and !e Requited Distance
(*e Sheep Meadow Press/2011). Her next full-length collection, Mule & Pear, (New Issues Poetry & Prose), was published this fall.
RECURRENCE
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Recurrence, Rachel Eliza GriďŹƒths. Photograph based on Aubade with Panopticon by Sally Wen Mao, 2011.
Maniac Mansion BRIAN OLIU
WE ARE all here, and we are all here together with our backs to the moon. Here is a house. Go to it. Go to door. Open door. 3e door is locked and you should’ve known. 3ere is a key underneath the doormat, and you should’ve known. When I was young there were plants that lined our walkway. One day I saw a snake move from one plant to another and disappear like a light being turned off, a coil of green being spit from leaves. At school, I told the children that it was poisonous, that I reached my hand into the leaves to get the key that we kept hidden in the mulch so I could open the door and run upstairs without saying hello to my mother because she is not home. I can run up those stairs faster than anyone; hands over feet. 3is is the house I grew up in. 3ere were fourteen stairs that I counted every time I ran down them. In my sleep I crawled up bookcases; feet touching pages documenting how to make a rocket, lessons on giving, lessons on not giving. Go to sleep. Open sleep. 3ere is a photograph of me standing in front of the door on my way to school. I cannot remember how our kitchen looked. I cannot remember how our bathroom looked. I used to live in a hallway. My bed was a boat and I would draw on the windows in crayon mornings before church, before I was lifted up from under my arms and brought down to the ground. Pick up child. I was in love with insulation but it would make me itch. 3ere are sheets for my bed. 3ere is a cast for my arm. I would sit in the darkness of the attic to learn what darkness is. We cannot use the word kill. It must be changed. 3ere are neighbors here. 3e man next door is named red. 3ey have a white dog and I have given it a new name. 3ere is a girl who says the devil lives in her room but her mother got rid of it. 3ere is a farm and sometimes the quails escape. Everyone within a five-mile radius is going to die if I press the button. 3is is where the magic happens. 3is is where the heart is. Ring the doorbell. 3e door is locked and you should’ve known. My mother is not a person—she is my mother. 3ey are a building a house nearby. My father is not a person—he is my father. I threw rocks in the air and I hurt someone. 3ey are not people—they should be home and they are not. 3ere is no key hidden here; this is not a home. I would come here, amongst the gray siding and garbage dumpsters, the wooden stairs, the white walls and collect candy. 3ere are so many families and so little space; we could never get to them all. 3ey gave out razorblades the kids said. 3ey gave out apples with razorblades the kids said. Our street was named after a bird that I had never heard of, a kingbird, a tyrant. A hockey game swirls on cinderblocks and we are sad. 3ere was no basement here, no attic. Go to loose brick. You 68
learn quickly that you can operate at one speed here; there is no button to hold down that causes legs to move any faster, the background to scroll in reverse at any greater speed. 3ere is no outrunning the nurse at the refrigerator. 3ere is no getting to the door. 3ere is a strategy here that involves the hero getting caught and pressing the brick and trying to run for the door. Go to door. 3e door is locked and you should’ve known. 3ere are three of us. Press the brick and let the other out. I remember nothing about the house where I lived before I lived there. 3ere is a photograph I have seen of me holding my body up by pressing my hand into a wall. It is dark; there is a light. 3is is where I lived, at the end of this hallway. My first memory was not this. Stand by the brick and press the brick. I am not scared of the dark. 3ere is no gas for the chainsaw. In this house that is not a house is a grandfather clock that moves like a terror. 3e boy with the blue skin has the same name as my father. 3e boy with the blue skin has the same name as a town that I know. I know the color blue. 3ere is no way to document this. 3ere are numbers that need to be written down—I have memorized my phone number and it has not changed despite changes in ceilings. I want you to come to my house. Please come to my house. I am proud of you, house. 3ere is a cheerleader in my house. 3ere is a bully in my house. We will learn about the beatitudes and they will eat my dessert, they will watch my television. My mother has cleaned the basement. 3ere is a new coat of paint on the walls. 3is house is growing smaller with every new color. 3e deck is peeling. 3ere is a hole where the horse went through. I was the only one home when it happened. 3ere were no dogs. 3is house looks smaller without walls. My room exists without walls. My father and I stuff wires into electrical boxes and eat soup cooked on a fire. We press tiles onto the floor while watching television. 3e sawdust sticks to our shirts. We see the dogs. A horse walked up to our door. Go to door, horse. 3e horse’s leg snapped—I heard it crack like a tree, like peppermint. I was home. Walk to. What is.
BRIAN OLIU is originally from New Jersey and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. New work appears in
Fairy Tale Review, Hotel Amerika, and Drunken Boat. His book of Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connections, So You Know It’s Me, was released in June 2011 by Tiny Hardcore Press.
MANIAC MANSION
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(From Context) BIRGITTA TROTZIG TRANSLATION FROM THE SWEDISH BY
RIKA LESSER
THOSE WHO take the blame for me. 3e forest of illness is gray. Sometimes it emits a harrowing whisper. It can’t be called voice, impossible to make out any sort of message in it. It is silence actively kept, the body of muteness, gnawed by animals, abandoned. You pass between vacant collapsed stone houses, pavilions, yards, shaft after shaft, walls cold and ice-colder, half-wrecked administration buildings, culverts (caved in, filled with earth), windy empty corridors, old body of earth, earth eyes, memory’s inexhaustible blacked-out labyrinth. Under the veil of darkness no face, lips. At night they call to me. 3en they visit me in a dream. In the dream they move with my movements, the mute voice then is the voice that exists What the world is like. 3ey take the blame for me. 3e madhouse is black. Inside the marvelous faces make their appearance and live. 3ey rise up from the general body of blame, from the murderous glutinous walls they emerge like growths composed of some entirely unknown, fresh and clear organic matter, out of blame they grow like the rose out of dark blood 3e wild dirty mild mass of faces 3e black sticky walls, the burst water pipes, the enamel buckets rusted through, smothered between high walls, the little garden’s three dead trees, hard gravel. Within their eyes in the black misty well of their gaze the mountain of the Transfiguration appears, out into the radiant mute unknown now they walk and walk
BIRGITTA TROTZIG (1929–2011), a beloved grande dame of Swedish letters, published some twenty books of
lyrical prose—among them novels, essays, short stories and poetry—and was inducted into the Swedish Academy in 1993. *e poem published here is from her 1996 collection Sammanhang (Context).
RIKA LESSER is a poet and translator who resides in Brooklyn, NY. She has translated a number of German and
many Swedish authors. Her translation of Göran Sonnevi’s Mozart’s !ird Brian (Yale) will appear in paperback in 2012. Her most recent books are Questions of Love: New and Selected Poems and Etruscan !ings, both from Sheep Meadow Press.
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*ree Poems
NATHALIE HANDAL
Dado He longs for the secret forms of god stretched along the back of his neck He longs for what whispers are listening to in deep midnight He asks what the vision of a lotus is against flesh if not a trick He longs for the hallucinations death has and the latitude of an echo against an echo He longs for what can’t die— the remains of evidence that we aren’t alone
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Ojalá He holds on to the force that stretches the narrow light and finds himself somewhere behind history. He thinks, All we have left is to invent God, to find an infinite number to hope in, to touch the grounds of La Manquita, say Insha’allah, and wait for the church bells to remind us of who we have become. He knows what it means to live in another sleep— time moving over faces. 3ere are different varieties of loss— his is contemplating water trapped in mouths, his is never entering La Malagueta, his is trying to understand what God willing means, or if that is what we say to erase the fog on our tongue.
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T H R E E P O E M S B Y N AT H A L I E H A N D A L
El País 3e hills move an inch— no sound by the tree no whisper, no hour to speak of, no dream but a misplaced light he should be aware of, the word fulano echoing inside of him. Music migrates too. He looks at the El País, wonders who is wise enough to understand when a country runs towards a man tells him, we leave behind our life for others to love, leave, what sound can’t destroy. And he thinks, will Machado return?
NATHALIE HANDAL is the author of numerous books including Love and Strange Horses. She writes the blog-
column, !e City and !e Writer, for Words without Borders magazine. Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía is forthcoming.
T H R E E P O E M S B Y N AT H A L I E H A N D A L
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Mexican Prayers EWA CHRUSCIEL
I 3is blood this begonia this barn owl Jaguar in your hand Your heart has child’s claws 3ere is no way we can fix the flowers Slings and macanas Sacred jaguar
III He asked her with jaracanda tree in his hand. If he says he loves her in this room, how many jackals and ostriches will wear fans of guacamaya feathers and serve chocolate from lacquered gourds. Will feed her with tortoise -shell spoons. In their arms. Grasshoppers off volcanic plates. 3e normality of the instance. 3e creative gesture of the vertigo.
V You are the city of black squirrels and vendors. You chant in my ears cinco pesos You hand me incas, hummingbirds, the ghosts of coyotes. Tongues of colors flame in the streets of my body. A woman combs man’s hair outside. A lizard threads through the tree. Magnolias and pine trees. Nopal and Avocado ice-creams. Frog altar. A Franciscan monk shambling and blessing. 3e goddess Coatlicue sweeps at the top of the hill, Coatepec. She picks up the ball of feathers, places it next to her womb. When she tries to find it, she is pregnant. 74
VII Here are monks of royalty, peacocks. 3ey strut into your soul. 3ey are saint dusters. Here mythical ceiba tree grows out of the mask of the earth. Touching the crowns of ash trees with your feet. Palms, sacrificed pineapples. Dusters, elevated mummified peacock trees. 3ey grow on streets into houses. Which stride high in the ceilings. 3e acrobats of the unreachable. We pass high wire streets. 3e tunes of hurdy-gurdy. Under our feet, sacrifice. Under our feet in glass-cases, the skulls of Aztecs. Only palms here are skyscrapers. San Vital for those who have difficult dreams and school exams. Pray for us. Divine metonymy. Vital Martyrs.
VIII 3e earth is a quadrangle floating on a great body of water. In the center rises a sacred mountain with a cave at the entrance of which grows a ceiba tree. Who is He who holds a jaguar head? Saints are fully in their jacaranda trees, in love with purples. On a tree a peackock sits. Yet another apparition of the Madonna. Rumors on photographic plates. Sunset, a splash of a red turtle. Frogs dressed in blue, sacrificed and roasted.
IX At the end of a 104-year span called huehuetilitli, Aztecs held the ritual of the New Fire during which women and children were kept in their houses for fear they would transform into wild animals
XI Triangular blossom on your tilma—is both a heart with its arteries and a flower and mountains that hold water inside For Zozocolco Indians truth is flowers and songs Why do we tear apart our hearts? What demons await this sacrifice? !is Lady says that, without tearing them out, we should place them in her hands so that she may then present them to the true God
MEXICAN PRAYERS
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XIII Morenita. Mother of mestizi, products of conquest and rape. Give us the four-petaled jasmine on your tunic which indigenous knew as Nabui Ollin, “always in the movement.” Virgin of the motion, we search for food among the animals’ stalls. Multiply four petals into eight Oh, planet Venus into tulip trees Oh, morning star into a sphere, a ring, a biding circumference Oh, birth in pregnancy Into breathing Nahuatl—our dear mother into inexhaustible apparition of ruffed grouse pounding its wings on the log until the whole forest hears until the logs spark into Lumens
EWA CHRUSCIEL ’ S poems have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Jubilat, Aufgabe, Spoon River
Review, Omnidawn blog, Process, Lana Turner, Mandorla, Rhino, American Letters and Commentary, Poetry Wales (GB), Aesthetica (GB). Her translations of poetry appeared in numerous journals and two anthologies of Polish poetry in English translations: Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird and Six Polish Poets. She is a Professor of Humanities at Colby-Sawyer College
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MEXICAN PRAYERS
GEOFFREY NUTTER DARREN MORRIS ALFONSO D’AQUINO KIWAO NOMURA CECILY PARKS IDRA NOVEY CLAUDIA RANKINE SALLY WEN MAO ADAM SMALL VÉNÚS KHOURY-GHATA RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS BRIAN OLIU BIRGITTA TROTZIG NATHALIE HANDAL EWA CHRUSCIEL Photography by
RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS ZHANG XIAO Translators
FORREST GANDER KYOKO YOSHIDA MIKE DICKMAN MARILYN HACKER RIKA LESSER
Winter 2011