And the rest is rust and stardust

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She didn't Come

She didn’t come. I said: And she won’t…so
let me rearrange the evening with what suits my failure
and her absence:
I put out the flame of her candles,
I turned on the electric lights,
drank her wine then broke the glass
and switched the music: from the swift violins
to Persian songs.
I said: She won’t come. So I loosened my elegant
necktie (to relax more) and put on
my blue pajama. I could walk barefoot
if I want. And sit cross-legged, sagging
on her sofa, to forget her
and forget all the things of absence.
Then I put back in the drawers what I had prepared
for our party. I opened the windows and pulled back the curtains.
I stood in front of the night, my body holding no secret
other than what I waited for and lost…
and I mocked my obsession with purifying the air for her
(I had sprayed rose and lemon water).
She won’t come…I will move the orchid
from the right to the left to punish her forgetfulness…
I will cover up the mirror with a coat, I don’t want to see
her radiant image…and add to my regret.
I said: Forget what you have chosen for her
of ancient love lines, she doesn’t even deserve
a plagiarized poem…
Then I forgot her, ate my quick meal standing,
and read a chapter in a school book
about our distant planets,
and wrote, to overlook her harm, a poem,
this poem.

Mahmoud Darwish, Tr. Fady Joudah

I’ll give you an abyss, she said

I’ll give you an abyss, she said,
but so subtly you will only notice it
after many years have passed
and you’re far from Mexico and from me.
You will discover it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
though not much.

Roberto Bolano

While Waiting

While waiting, I become obsessed with observing
the many possibilities: maybe she forgot her small
suitcase on the train, and my address got lost
and her mobile phone got lost, so she lost her appetite
and said: No share of the light drizzle for him/
Or maybe she got busy with an urgent matter or a journey
to the south to visit the sun, and called
but didn't find me in the morning, because
I had gone to buy some gardenia for our evening
and two bottles of wine/
Or maybe she was in dispute with her ex-husband
over matters of memory, and she swore not to see
another man who might threaten her with making memories/
Or maybe she crashed into a taxi on the way
to see me, which extinguished some planets in her galaxy.
And she is still being treated with tranquilizers and sleep/
Or maybe she looked in the mirror before going out
of herself, felt two large pears
making waves on her silk, then sighed and hesitated:
Does anyone else other than myself deserve my womanhood/
Or maybe she ran, by coincidence, into an old
love she hadn't healed from, and joined him for dinner/
Or maybe she died,
because death loves suddenly, like me,
and death, like me, doesn't love waiting

Mahmoud Darwish, Translated by Fady Joudah

your dream tramples through the woods

In the shape of a boar
your dream tramples through the woods on

on the edges of evening.

Glittering white
like the ice from which it erupted
are its razors.

It rakes up a bitter nut
from under the leaves
that its shadows tore from the trees,
a nut
black as the heart that your foot kicked along
when you walked here yourself.

It gores the nut
and fills the thicket with grunting fate,
then strikes off down towards the coast,
there where the sea
holds its darkest of feasts
on the crags:

perhaps
a fruit like its own
will delight the festive eye
that has wept such stones.

P. Celan, translated by J. Neugroschel

Things I didn't know I loved

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

from Nazim Hikmet's "Things I didn't know I Loved"

Brise marine

The flesh is sad......and I've read every book.
O to escape.......to get away. Birds look
as though they are drunk for unknown spray and skies.
No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea.....
not my lamp's desolate luminosity
nor the blank paper guarded by it's white
nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!
I'm off! You steamer with your swaying helm,
raise anchor for some more exotic realm!
Ennui, crushed down by cruel hopes, still relies
on handkerchief's definitive goodbyes!
Is this the kind of squall- inviting mast
the storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast
away......no mast, no islets flourishing?......
Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing!

Mallarme, Translated by E.H & A.M Blackmore

The Mirabeau Bridge

Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine
Flows and our love
Must I be reminded again
How joy came always after pain

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

Hands within hands we stand face to face
while underneath
The bridge of our arms passes
The loose wave of our gazing which is endless

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

Love slips away like this water flowing
love slips away
How slow life is in its going
And hope is so violent a thing

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

The days pass the weeks pass and are gone
Neither time that is gone
Nor love ever returns again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

Translated by W.S. Merwin, G. Apollinaire

Twilight in Barcelona

What can be said about the drowning Barcelona twilights.
Remember
The Rusinol painting Erik Satie en el seu estudi?
The magnetic Barcelona twilights are like that, like Satie's
eyes and
Long hair, like Satie's hands and like Rusinol's affection.
Twilights inhabited by supreme silhouettes, magnificence
Of the sun and the sea over these hanging or subterranean
abodes
Built for love. City of Sara Gilbert and Lola Paniagua,
City of Slipstreams and completely gratuitous secrets.
City of genuflections and cords.

Roberto Bolano, from The Romantic Dogs

Winter

It's falling Mother, snows in the Ukraine:
The saviour's crown a thousand grains of grief
Here all my tears reach out to you in vain
One proud mute glance is all of my relief....

We're dying now: why won't you sleep, you huts?
Even this wind slinks round in frightened rags.
Are these the ones, freezing in slag-choked ruts-
whose arms are candlesticks, whose hearts are flags?

I stayed the same in darkness forlorn:
Will days heal softly, will they cut too sharp?
Among my stars are drifting now the torn
Strings of a strident and discordant harp....

On it at times a Rose-filled hour is tuned.
Expiring:once.Just once,again....
What would come, Mother:wakening or wound-
if I too sank in snows of the Ukraine?

Paul Celan, 1938

On the Last Evening on This Earth

On the last evening on this earth, we cut off our days
From our shrubs, and we count the ribs that we will carry with us
And the ribs that we will leave behind, there.......on the last evening
We bid farewell to nothing, and we do not find the time for our end
Everything remains as it is, the place changes our dreams
And changes its visitors. Suddenly, we are no longer capable of irony
And the place is ready to host nothingness..........here on the last evening
We fill ourselves with mountains surrounded by the clouds: conquest
and reconquest
An ancient time grants to this new time the keys of our doors
Come on in, O conquerors, enter our homes, and drink the wine
Of our complacent muwassaha. For we are the night when it splits
in two,
No horse rider arriving from the last prayer call to deliver the dawn....
Our green hot tea....drink it! Our fresh pistachio nuts.....eat them!
These beds are green made of cedar wood.....surrender to drowsiness!
After this lengthy siege, sleep on the feathers of our dreams
The sheets are ready, the scents are at the door, and the mirrors are many
Enter them so that we can come out! Soon we will seek what
Has been our history around your history in the distant lands
And we will seek ourselves in the end: was al-Andalus
Here or there? On the earth......or in the poem?

Mahmoud Darwish, Translated by Gil Anidjar

For Myself I Would Like

Tears or willow on the ground
teeth of gold
teeth of pollen
like the mouth of a girl
from whose hair swells a river
in each drop a tiny fish
in each tiny fish a gold tooth
in each gold tooth a fifteen-year-old smile,
that dragonflies may reproduce

What can a maiden think about
when the wind discovers her thighs?

from An Unspeakable Betrayal, Luis Bunuel

In the reading room of Hell

In the reading room of Hell............ In the club
for science-fiction fans
On the frosted patios.................. In the bedrooms of passage
On the iced-over paths................. When everything finally seems clearer
and each instant is better and less important
With cigarette in mouth and with fear................ Sometimes
green eyes........... And 26 years................. Yours truly

from The Romantic Dogs, Roberto Bolano

As he draws away

The enemy who drinks tea in our shack has
a mare in smoke, a daughter with
thick eyebrows, brown eyes, long
hair like a night of songs over her shoulders. Her image
doesn't leave him when he comes over to ask for tea. But he
doesn't speak to us about her evening chores, or about
a mare abandoned by songs at the top of a hill...

...In our shack the enemy takes a rest from his gun,
leaving it on my grandfather's chair. He eats our bread
like a guest, dozes on
the wicker chair, caresses our cat's
fur. He always says to us:
Don't blame the victim!
Who is the victim? We ask him
He answers: Blood that the night will never dry...

...The buttons on his uniform sparkles as he draws away.
Good evening to you! Say hello to our well
and to our fig trees. Tread gently on
our shadow in the barley fields. Say hello, higher up, to
our pines. Don't forget to lock the gate
at night. Don't forget the horse's
fear of airplanes
And greet us, there, if time allows...

These words that we'd wished
to say at the door... he hears them,
hears them well, but hides them in a quick cough
and tosses them aside
So why does he visit the victim every evening?
And memorize our proverbs, like us?
And repeat our songs of
our own appointments in the holy place?
Were it not for the gun
the flute would pass into the flute...

...The war will last as long as the earth
in us revolves around itself!
Let's be good then. He used to ask us
to be good. He'd read the verses
of Yeat's Airman: Those that I fight
I do not hate, those that I guard
I do not love...
Then he'd leave our wooden shack
and walk eighty meters to
our stone house, there, at the edge of the plain...

Say hello to our house, stranger
Our coffee cups
are still as they were. Can you smell
our fingers on them? Will you tell your daughter with
her long hair and two thick eyebrows that she has
an absent friend
who would like to visit her? For nothing...
but to enter her mirror and see his secret:
How she follows, after him, the course of his life
in his place? Say hello to her
if time allows...

These words that we'd wished
to say, he hears them,
hears them well
but hides them in a quick cough
and tosses them aside. The buttons
of his uniform sparkle as he draws away...

Mahmoud Darwish

The mountain was mourning

The mountain was mourning, (and mountains do mourn)
their clay is bitter, in the hours of parting).
The mountain mourned: for the tenderness
(like doves) of our undiscovered mornings.

The mountain mourned: for our friendliness, for
the unbreakable kinship of the lips.
The mountain declared that everyone will
receive in proportion to his tears.

The mountain grieved because life is a gypsy camp
and we go marketing all our life from heart to heart.
And this was Hagar's grief. To be
sent far away. Even with her child.

Also the mountain said that all things were a trick
of some demon, no sense to the game.
The mountain sorrowed. And we were silent.
leaving the mountain to judge the case.

Marina Tsvetayeva

Under cover of Night

To slip into your shadow under cover of night.
To follow your footsteps, your shadow at the window.
That shadow at the window is you and no one else;
it's you.
Do not open that window behind whose curtains you're moving.
Shut your eyes.
I'd like to shut them with my lips.
But the window opens and the breeze, the breeze
which strangely balances flame and flag surrounds my escape
with its cloak.
The window opens:
it's not you.
I knew it all along.

Robert Desnos

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten little girls
a shoulder for death to cry on
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself, of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's dark garret,
in our bed that was once the moon's bed,
and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the echoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints the little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.
Aye, ay, ay, ay!Take this waltz that dies in my arms

Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead.
Ay, ay, ay ay!
Take this "I will always love you" waltz.

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Poem to the Mysterious Woman

I have dreamt of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamt of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest
as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamt of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamt of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom,
that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Robert Desnos

I waited for you since yesterday's morning

I waited for you since yesterday's morning,
that you won't come they probably guessed.
Remember what beautiful weather it was?
A holiday weather!
And I walked coatless.
Today you are here, and they have arranged
an utterly gloomy and cloudy day.
It rains, and it's getting unusually late.
The rain drops are running down the cold terrain,
unsoothable by word, unwipable by hand.

Arseny Tarkovsky ( Translator Irma Raush)

First Meetings

We celebrated every moment
Of our meetings as epiphanies,
Just we two in all the world.
Bolder, lighter than a bird's wing,
You hurtled like vertigo
Down the stairs, leading
Through moist lilac to your realm
Beyond the mirror.

When night fell, grace was given me,
The sanctuary gates were opened,
Shining in the darkness
Nakedness bowed slowly;
Waking up, I said:
'God bless you!', knowing it
To be daring: you slept,
The lilac leaned towards you from the table
To touch your eyelids with its universal blue,
Those eyelids brushed with blue
Were peaceful, and your hand was warm.

And in the crystal I saw pulsing rivers,
Smoke-wreathed hills, and glimmering seas;
Holding in your palm that crystal sphere,
You slumbered on the throne,
And - God be praised! - you belonged to me.
Awaking, you transformed
The humdrum dictionary of humans
Till speech was full and running over
With resounding strength, and the word you
Revealed its new meaning: it meant king.
Everything in the world was different,
Even the simplest things - the jug, the basin -
When stratified and solid water
Stood between us, like a guard.

We were led to who knows where.
Before us opened up, in mirage,
Towns constructed out of wonder,
Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet,
Birds travelled by the same route as ourselves
And in the river upstream,
And the sky unrolled itself before our eyes,
When fate was following in our tracks
Like a madman with a razor in his hand.

Arseny Tarkovsky