Paul Auster / Shadow to shadow

Self portrait
by Triunfo Arciniegas

São Paulo / Cemitério da Consolação, 2013

SHADOW TO SHADOW

by Paul Auster

Against the facade of evening:

shadows, fire and silence.

not even silence, but its fire–

the shadow

cast by a breath.

To enter the silence of this wall,

I must leave myself behind.

Self portrait
by Triunfo Arciniegas

São Paulo / Cemitério da Consolação, 2013

Paul Auster

DE SOMBRA A SOMBRA

Contra la fachada del atardecer:

sombras, fuego y silencio.

Ni siquiera silencio, sino su fuego,

la sombra

que arroja un respirar.

Para entrar en el silencio de este muro

Debo dejarme atrás a mí mismo.

Michael Dickman / White Migraine

WHITE MIGRAINE

A NEW POEM

by Michael Dickman

Every color there ever was is white It peels the skin back from the roof of your mouth in metal petals that taste   like snow The roof of the world My fingernails floating in milk The moon flushed down a toilet Everything I ever wanted glows in the moonlight Ask him what he wants I want to be sick and white and cough up lilies of the valley * The Matterhorn in my shoulders ruptures in the toilet My mouth walks down a hallway in a hospital Clouds of bone and cum in the brainpan White caviar gets shipped from my brain overseas then scraped out from the backs of my    eyeballs with beautiful spoons I can’t throw up anymore I have to throw up The mother-of-pearl spoons are tuned razor sharp and sing It turns out white can make the world absolutely clean * On all fours the universal position of love is white Oyster shells turned over on a bed of ice Oyster shells turned over on a bed of lice The white tongues speaking to me now speak in white tongues    Are you loved? Are you loved? Are you loved? I sit beneath the avalanche and sing My master plan is happiness

Michael Dickman wrote The End of the West (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Flies(Copper Canyon Press, 2011). He also wrote, with Matthew Dickman, half of 50 American Plays, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012.

Believer, May 2012

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201205/?read=poem_dickman

Aurelio Arturo by Gilberto Arturo

Aurelio Arturo and his father

Aurelio Arturo

BIOGRAPHY

By Gilberto Arturo

Translated by Nicolás Suescún

The poetry of Aurelio Arturo is both a world and a frame of mind. It is a dazzling and intimate world revealed through the poet’s sympathy with nature. It is a self-contained, complete universe in which every object is a living being, defined by its relations with the other beings that inhabit the same world.

It is a world closed to signification but open to transcendence: in its identification with the natural world, where animals and plants are one and the same ‘vegetation’; in its identification with the senses – the tactile, the aromas “only for the ear”, the wild, rustic tastes; and with living, vital, interrelated beings, all of them charged with meaning and sentiment.

In Morada al sur (A home in the south) Aurelio Arturo selected what he considered to be his life’s work; the rest, consequently, is conjecture.

His poetry does not describe the interior world of the poet’s own feelings: love flows from the contemplation of the outside world and from the music of the verse. It travels through different frames of mind as it moves through the various landscapes and places of his environment, meeting their inhabitants . . . the birds . . . the leaves.

In the end, he goes so deeply into himself (and the reader) that what flows from inside is a profound sensation of plenitude and peace, of harmony with the world, with nature – a feeling of tranquil and serene joy, not subject to sudden frights or fears. The words of his poems transport us into a world of enchantment and fantasy.

The strength of this poetry does not inspire reverential awe; nor does it derive from playing with words. It is a quiet strength, like that of the grass in his poem “covering footsteps, cities, years”. His poetry is like a fog that imperceptibly and slowly surrounds and covers us. Words pass before our eyes, following each other; and before we realise it, we are immersed and profoundly moved, surrounded by poetry.

Arturo’s is a mysterious poetry; but the mystery is not about something we don’t quite understand and therefore fear, but about what surrounds us, something we feel but do not touch. “In the mestizo nights that rose from the grass/ young horses, shadows, brilliant curves . . .” and “the murmur of date trees in the wind.”

His poetry is concerned with the enjoyment of life and, although it does not deny the setbacks and sadnesses of real life, it takes them and involves them in the deep experience of the moment.

Dorianne Laux, “The Rising”

The pregnant mare at rest in the field
the moment we drove by decided
to stand up, rolled her massive body
sideways over the pasture grass,
gathered her latticed spine, curved ribs
between the hanging pots of flesh,
haunches straining, knee bones bent
on the bent grass cleaved
astride the earth she pushed against
to life the brindled breast, the architecture
of the neck, the anvil head, her burred mane
tossing flames as her forelegs unlatched in air
while her back legs, buried beneath her belly,
set each horny hoof in opposition
to the earth, a counterweight concentrated there,
and by a willful rump and switch of tail hauled up,
flank and fetlock, her beastly burden, seized
and rolled and wrenched and winched the wave
of her body, the grand totality of herself,
to stand upright in the depth of that field.
The heaviness of gravity upon her.
The strength of the mother.

The Book of Men, the fifth collection of Dorianne Laux’s poems, is the winner of the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize. The book is dedicated to Philip Levine; the poem “Mine Own Phil Levine” originally appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review. Orion published “Juneau” (as “Juneau Spring”) and “Roots.” Willow Springs published “Staff Sgt. Metz,” along with a short essay about its creation.

(In 2007, Beatrice featured Laux’s “Moon in the Window.”)

Paula Bohince, “Pinot Noir”

Drinking deeply on the globe, waiting for blackness
to overtake romance completely,

eyes roaming the faded amphitheater of woods, I breathe in
pine pitch, admire columns of pines everlasting

against the crumbling columns of the burned-down smokehouse,
its three steps leading up to nothingness

but where grass still holds the essence of pig fat
and summer’s adrenaline. Now it’s a stage

for the imagination: my father, seven, feeding his beagle
beer, laughter of the uncles resounding through air

as his pet topples over, lifting its leg to piss, exposing”
its pink and hairless stomach, the child,

at last, approved of, taken in their circle, laughter caught
in the ch-ch-ch-waah of locusts.

The Children is the second collection of Paula Bohince’s poems. “Milkweed” and “Lenox Aubade” appeared in Agni; “Mother’s Quail” was published inThe New Yorker. “Gypsy Moths, or Beloved” appeared in Orion, and “Entering the Ouse” in Poetry. You can hear her reading “Clothesline” atSlate.

In the PIttsburgh City Paper, which is where I found this conveniently already laid-out cover and headshot, Mike Schneider writes, “This is not… Billy Collins, or many other contemporary poets, who generally keep the tone on the light side and the situations familiar. With Bohince, we are drawn into an interior network that at its best sets off Plath-like, compressed-energy depth charges of imagery, but that also can produce the uncomfortable feeling that the poem is a puzzle to solve.”

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/category/poetry/page/2/

Stanley Plumly, “Lapsed Meadows”

Wild has its skills. the apple grew so close
to the ground it seemed the tree was thicket,
crab, and root, and by fall would look like brush
among the burdock and the hawkweed, as if at heart
it had been cut and piled for burning.
Along the edges, at the corners, like failed fence,
the hawthorns, by comparison, seemed planted.
Everywhere else there was broom grass, timothy,
and wood fern, and sometimes a sapling,
sometimes a run of hazel; sometimes, depending,
fruit still green or grounded and rotting underfoot.
I remember, in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature,
lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheat
and fireweed and broken sparrow nests,
especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun,
when you could lose yourself by simply lying down.
Who will find you, who will call you home now, at dusk,
with the dry tips of the goldenrod confused”
with a little wind, filling in for what’s left of the light?

Orphan Hours is the eleventh book of poems by Stanley Plumly; I took this photo of him in 2008, after he’d just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Old Heart. Other poems in this new collection include “Cancer(originally published in The New Yorker), “Afterward” (Kenyon Review), “Vesper Sparrow” (The New Republic), and “Verisimilitude” (The Atlantic). “Amidon Christmas Tree Farm Cardinal” was originally published in The Atlantic as “Cardinal.”

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/category/poetry/page/3/

Peter Gizzi / Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures

Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures by Peter Gizzi

Is this what you intended, Vincent     that we take our rest at the end of the grove     nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration     saying, who and how am I made better through struggle.     Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum     this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision     the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree.     O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that     or if you can indeed hear what I might say     heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty     of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection.    To not be naive and think of silly answers only     nor to imagine answers would be the only destination     nor is questioning color even useful now     now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.     That the sun can do this to us, every one of us     that the sun can do this to everything inside     the broken light refracted through leaves.     What the ancients called peace, no clearer example     what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.     Leaves shine in the body and in the head alike     the sun touches deeper than thought.     O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing     to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world.     There might be nothing greater than this     nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within     like in the middle of the flower I call your name.     To correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff     to toil and to reflect and to home and to paint     father, and further, the migration of things.     The homing action of geese and wood mice.     The ample evidence of the sun inside all life     inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too.     But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.     The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity     but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.     The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun     at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.     The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside     and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that     the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time     in the time of pictures and refracted light.     Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night     the animal proximity of another and of nigh.     To step into it as into a large surf in late August     to go out underneath it all above and sparkling.     To wonder and to dream and to look up at it     wondrous and strange companion to all our days     and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us.     The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light     the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers     to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing.     The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it     the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms     these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge.     Now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.     To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane     and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.     The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression     making so much more of itself here than where it signals     the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing.     Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing     though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it     that nothing at the center of something alive and burning     green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet     into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone.     But what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar     the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling     what of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line.     To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.     The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever     the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint     into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight.     That light was my enemy and one great source of agony     one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.     The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear     the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun.     The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun     the fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear     one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.     That light was my enemy and one great source of agony     into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight     the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint.     The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever.     To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.     What of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line     the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling     but what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar.     Into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone     green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet     that nothing at the center of something alive and burning     though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it.     Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing     the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing     making so much more of itself here than where it signals.     The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression     and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.     To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane     now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.     These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge     the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms     the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it.     To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing     the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers.     The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light     and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us     wondrous and strange companion to all our days.     To wonder and to dream and to look up at it     to go out underneath it all above and sparkling     to step into it as into a large surf in late August.     The animal proximity of another and of nigh.     Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night     in the time of pictures and refracted light     the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time     and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that.     The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside     at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.     The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun     but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.     The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity     but felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.     Inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too     the ample evidence of the sun inside all life     the homing action of geese and wood mice     father, and further, the migration of things.     To toil and to reflect and to home and to paint     to correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff     like in the middle of the flower I call your name.     Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within     there might be nothing greater than this     to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world.     O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing.     The sun touches deeper than thought     leaves shine in the body and in the head alike     what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.     What the ancients called peace, no clearer example     the broken light refracted through leaves.     That the sun can do this to everything inside     that the sun can do this to us, every one of us     now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.     Nor is questioning color even useful now     nor to imagine answers would be the only destination     to not be naive and think of silly answers only.     Of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection     heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty.     Or if you can indeed hear what I might say     O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that     the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree     this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision.     Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum     saying, who and how am I made better through struggle     nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration     that we take our rest at the end of the grove     is this what you intended, Vincent. CONJUNCTIONS:47, Fall 2007 http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm

Alice Walker / Women

Women

by Alice Walker

They were women then
My mama’s generation
Husky of voice—stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves.

Ann Lauterbach / Two Poems

Two Poems by Ann Lauterbach

CONJUNCTIONS:53, Fall 2009 A  C O N T I N U E, OR  E N T R Y 1. Where next? Oblique cost of the not yet. Strange flotation of the stampede, resembling play. The octagonal stop, characteristic, time is place. Intentional rupture of the flow. Play coming upon belief, instruments, kin. Kindred bricks or blocks, the hallucinating margin. Then: double vision, a skill contained by doing. A refusal to embed that into this, so that this perishes. A spread or insistence, as in a flood. A local extremity, a wall. Extent and its delimiting edge. Elaboration sprouting form, its voraciousness. 2. What next? Unique cruelty of the undone. Rook rhymes with book, crow with toe. Also hook. Also know. To countermand restlessness, settle on fact as it seeks to order a well-worn shoe, two shoes, a pair of old shoes. And yet the sun lays claim to natural dyes, rifts through the glow-torn phenomena where I see the metonymic rituals of spring expose a mournful goddess in her crypt. Hook rhymes with crook, know with foe. 3. Strange flotation of the stampede, resembling play. Rumble, blaspheme, crooked under the gun. Too much is previous. Even the game, about to start, will vanish with its partner, day. Reach out your spoon for another portion; arch your neck. Everything is in profile toward evening. If, on behalf of a last chance, you move Yours sincerely into the winning slot, then cherries, stars, and the quick weave of your hair into braids: all this shall be yours. These are lessons of chance. They are not plans. 4. The octagonal stop is my master. I was thinking of roaming out of range to where a sidelong pillar of light rides the river sky. Wow! If I turn away toward an unmarked grave (here find the stop where the real is done) will you believe if I say something gains on our aspiration, our embrace? Branches against cloud. Fence against road. Above the shade, the elastic flirtation of a web. Words in another room, if the radio were on. These are lessons in mobility. They are not fate. 5. Intentional rupture of the flow, blurry, as in a Vermeer. You, who may not have seen such reproductions of the same, missed the optical illusion which, as it happens, is rhetoric at its best. He saw how materials collapse a desire for reality’s articulated shield. The Dutch love the small, domestic stage. I love the huge impertinence of an unresembling fact. Look! A deep pink developing above, there, in the west! It cannot be saved. 6. Play touches belief, sorts out, finding kin. Could be time to count. Ten, five, three as if pointing toward severance, the throw of the dice. Looking back, there seems to have been a hive or bank in which things were kept, a hoard or list or will. In the philosopher’s tale, there are bitter claims at stake; in the great attic, increasing remorse. Dearest, I visited your room after you were gone and found the and the the and the the and the. 7. Kindred plays or blocks, the hallucinating margin above mementos of— a supplemental neuter deletes some revenant’s luck. Her. I dream the awkward dream. I disallow. On the rug, with paint and trowel, under stones and ash and the rude vocabulary of the frost, grammar disobeys its rules. The western crawl space. Air and earth aglitter, collide. Something adds, something subtracts. How near is the thing that counts, what is it called? THE TRANSLATOR’S DILEMMA As if to foretell an ordinary mission, with fewer words. With fewer, more ordinary, words. Words of one syllable, for example. For example: step, or sleeve. These are two favorites, among many. Many can be found if you look closely. But even if I look closely, surely a word is not Necessarily here, in the foreground. I see an edge of a paper, I see orange, I see ear. I see words and I see things. An old story, Nothing to foretell in the ordinary mission. I see “her winter,” and I see “I am merely A tourist here.” Are these issues of Translation, the barriers of translation? I see John and an open book, open to a day In August. I am feeling defeated Among these sights, as if I will never find Either sleeve or step. These ordinary And pleasurable words, attached to Ordinary and pleasurable things, as if To announce them I am Announcing certain criteria. The step, the sleeve, How they invite hovering over and within Our necessities: a coat, a stair. But I am merely a tourist here, deaf to light. What is this wreath? What is this thing? Nothing to foretell the ordinary, its leap across http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm

photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Mark Strand, “With Only the Stars to Guide Us”

Whenever the giants turned in for the night, taking their huge toys with them, we were left nothing to play with, and slept under sofas and chairs. The gift of bigness would never be ours. This was a truth against which we had tried again and again to turn our tiny backs, and each time had failed. Undone by sorrow, some of us found solace in prayer, and others, like ourselves, chose to follow wild dogs through the dark, moose-crowded woods of the northland, nursing our hurt until we dropped.

Almost Invisible is a collection of short prose poems by former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand published at the beginning of 2012. It collects works from, among other publications, Slate (“The Engima of the Infinitesimal” and “Every So Many Hundred Years Hence“), Little Star (“The Students of the Ineffable” and “The Triumph of the Infinite”), and Poetry (“Futility in Key West,” “Mystery and Solitude in Topeka,” “No Words Can Describe It,” “The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish,” and “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter“).

Oh, and five poems in Boston Review, where Nicholas Christopher praises Strand for his “clean lines, taut narratives, and carefully framed mise-en-scènes.” I’d add only that they have for me the surreal specificity of dream images—sharp, distinct tableaux of things that shouldn’t quite fit together yet somehow do, and in doing so impress themselves upon your memory.

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/category/poetry/page/3/

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF MARK STRAND
Mark Strand / With Only the Stars to Guide Us
Mark Strand at John Cabot University
Mark Strand / The Art of Poetry
Mark Strand / The Everyday Enchantment of Music
Mark Strand / The Coming of Light
Mark Strand / Eating Poetry
Mark Strand / From the Long Sad Party
Mark Strand / My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Mark Strand / Always