Crocodile Tears

theparisreview:

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.
By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this
room. I am not asked to explain my presence
anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and
are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking
certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank—
you’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-
chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—

they think they are going to surprise me: I,
who do nothing but wait.

—Franz Wright, from “Entry in an Unknown Hand”
Photography Credit David Moore

theparisreview:

There is finitude in ice and icy finitude
in public realms. The of-a-pieceness of it. It
maddened me, I wanted life to shatter. Glitter
like jewely fragments so I might admire. Rude
governance was not for me. I loved rage.
                                  Its edges caught the light.

—Richard Lamb, from “Margaret Trudeau’s ‘Pied Beauty’”
Photography Credit Roy DeCarava

theparisreview:

Vague mountains
greening waves
newspapers already white,
hesitant melody
trying to spawn
conditions for hope
on this gray day, of a broken lament.
Nothing left to remind me
of the seamless asphalt.
Abandoned cellars
my body shivers
discarded confessions:
abruptly, the walk home.

—Carlos Drummond de Andrade, from “Morning Street” (translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie)
Photography Credit Thomas Bovington

theparisreview:

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street
   one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling
   the flower.

Let me walk up Broadway past Zaks, past the Melody
   Fruit Store,
past Stein’s Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.

Let me leave quietly by gate 29
and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.

Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am,
   let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light.

—Gerald Stern, “Let Me Please Look Into My Window”
Photography Credit Gottfried HeInwein

theparisreview:

It is
so snug—
the skin
of the living animal
stretched out
to a rug
shaped something
like the United States.
One meditates
upon a
Florida-like flap—
a forward leg
which ran
the Russian steppes
perhaps?

—Kay Ryan, “Poetry in Translation”
Art Credit Jonathan Dalton

theparisreview:

on the windowpanes
on the porcupine’s skin
on the curtains
on braids
on the plates in restaurants
and the hats, buttons, rings
I wrote this poem.

In the night, when the newspaper’s proofreader died
he died without reading the proof.

I wrote it in coal
on snow
and on new shoes
for the ink has become like mud
and the paper, how miserable the paper is!

—Muin Beseisu, “Fingernail Poem”
Photography Credit Hidehiko Sakashita

theparisreview:

if my children are lions
let me be the tall grass

if they are horses
better the shade tree
than a groom or rider

if they are fish
in the open sea
I will not be the net
that brings them home

—Edwin Kaye, “Not the Hunter”
Art Credit Bill Henson, Paris Opera Project 1990/91

sovietjewry:

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 21 
Birthday of Anna Margolin, Yiddish Poet

Margolin’s poetry deals with the alienation of women in society, with women’s sexuality, and with themes of anxiety and loneliness. Upon her request, her poem “Epitaph” (1932) is engraved on her tombstone. She is buried in Brooklyn, New York.

“Epitaph”

She squandered her life
on rubbish, on nothing.

Perhaps she wanted it so, perhaps she desired
this misery, these seven knives of anguish
to spill this holy living wine
on rubbish, on nothing.

Now she lies with shattered face.
Her ravaged spirit has abandoned its cage.
Passerby, have pity, be silent–
Say nothing.

(translation by Shirley Kumove)

(via Yiddishkayt)

more on Anna Margolin

(via lazersilberstein)