blackbirds

through the wall of this wound

photograph by erin

Red Photograph Inside a Gladiolus Blossom

The woman makes this image.
This is the garden inside the garden
and then again inside.

Erosblood glows
unfurling
through the wall of this wound
that opens the air like a sex.

Her looking strokes
breathe
the petals to further opening and opening
and un-
fold
membrane contour texture
different wet reds
shine.

All this from dirt and sun and water
dust the flower has healed
sepal
ovule
anthers laden dark
nudge of a cell upward
any touch would soft to bursting
and scatter sperm
inside the four chambers of the stone.

a shard from which I drank

[ always to be among words ]

Always to be among words, whether one wants to or not,
always to be alive, full of words about life,
as if words were alive, as if life were a-word.

But it's otherwise, believe me.
Between a word and a thing
you only encounter yourself,
lying by each as if next to someone ill,
never able to get to either,
tasting a sound and a body,
tasting out both.

It tastes of death.

Yet death and life, whether both exist,
who knows,
since so many of the dead are distant, though in me
there are so many dead,
the dead having also taken me
along with them.

a friend, a girl who once knew me,
a shard from which I drank to you....


--Ingeborg Bachmann
(my revision of Peter Filkins's translation)

a bit of slack

[ untitled ]

even if the branches wave
rustle
the evening light drowns
everything
bathes swathes soft
tranquil

we have
calm
lowered the gates of memory
shut the books

wind sweeps the rest

for a moment
we seem to belong
to the wind to the light
standing
unmoving
empty

as if here time left
a bit of slack in the rope

as if brusque there were
not a clean breakaway
but less wall


--Antoine Emaz
(my translation)

the child startles at the mirror

[ Untitled ]

The child startles at the mirror
and passes on;
no one could have known
what her image has given her.

But near evening the memory
insists she return for proof,
and a lingering curiosity
stops her before herself.

One doesn't know if this is fear.
But she pauses now, her gaze
searches her own face,
and she breathes -- somehow -- elsewhere.

R. M. Rilke

(my translation)

sarah

(desire)

Salmon Run, Kagawong, September 2013

1.

Lovers who met in our forties, we decided not to have a child.

A year later, we hold hands along this teeming river, where the cold

is already prying a few flushed leaves from the maples.

I want my wife's breasts. She undoes a button and takes my hands

into the warmth under her clothes, against the living skin,

and I waver near regret, never knowing if the choice was wisdom

or cowardice, unwilling to risk chaos, unwilling to pay the time,

our melancholy, grown-up caution before the violence of desire ---

but, as if her body were knowledge, I touch

her beside this water and tell myself I know our child,

curled hank of vein and bone swimming through her

that would have knotted our temporary blood to all this falling and surge.

2.

I have never seen this before:

the traveled fish thrash uphill,

stubborn as hammered spikes,

hovering to fan their gills

in the lucid pools, then bursting out,

tails beating the ice-water

over ruffling shoals,

urgent toward reproduction

and death. When one loses

its grip on the water, the current

sweeps it far back, until it catches

somehow and climbs again,

each a thick, single-minded

sleeve of flesh pulsing

like a horse's thigh muscle.

The untiring, convulsive salmon

whip themselves over

the slick, algae-green stones,

against the also stubborn

invisible current, yellow-

black ripples of shimmer and

thrust --- or, each a fist

clenched on roe or milt,

they punch a tunnel through water

to quiet where they will gasp

and drop their milky heat

into the dangerous chill of this world.