Craft
For Zsazsa Karl
The messenger paints solid brushstrokes
then cleans the tools with her saliva.
We like to watch her sketch landscapes
similar to her own,
lights submerged in shallows
of medicines and distant songs.
Inside it rains in a different language.
She sketches the translation in her notebook
then returns to work.
The messenger walks on tiptoe
from reef to reef, lest
she wake her frightful creatures.
Afterward she returns to her paint,
two or three whales under her arm.
And smiles at me.
Phanopoeia
If in my chest flutters
a thrush perched on a wire
it will automatically waken
the morose cicada
of the poem.
To trap a few ideas
in an attempt at describing
a sound memory. To slow it down
until my hand holds,
very carefully,
the bird of silence
and frees it of language
and substance.
Lists
You feed the ghost,
pray without knowing a line,
spit light to see how our waists
open to the design of another sea
and affection lies wounded,
agonizing on a beach.
Other voices
say more precisely
what we wish we had—
the moment so sensitive,
pivotal and spectral.
It was just a question of learning
to listen to them—don’t you see them?
The voices are there, they’re coming.
Maybe it doesn’t matter much,
your face fades on its own,
and affection is still agonizing
on the beach.
Fish
You moved underwater
among the diamonds and crowns
of buried bottles.
I want to say that I tried to call you,
or at least find you, who knows where,
in the street, by chance,
like trying to fish in the river
with two grams of bait and a kilo
of one-eyed jasmines stuffed in my mouth.
It wants to bite. Churns up water. Tugs on the line.
But the rod goes still again.
The water flows, it flows and undoes
these little dramas, this inclination
of dogs towards the river,
lest one of them remain, eternally
waiting, with horizontal
persistence and the illusion
of a straight line.
Translated by Sarah Moses
