Poems of early January

I.

Dresses
Earrings
and absent hopes.
Another year perished,
another revolution averted or co-opted.

The acid lips of hairspray,
the cloying kiss of rum,
the taste of another wasted year.
-more poems destroyed
-more packages of pens
-more notebooks clothed in black leather
while we wait for oblivion
at the open bar.

People spend money they do not have
on vacations they do not desire.
Girls already beautiful prance like peahens
who have just discovered their
tails.

The general savagery of anisogamy,
the way valuable and lovely women
sell themselves for smiles.
They, who could have been queens,
standing with shadowed eyes and
heels estrappado.
Oh, such women make it
so very easy to not
fall in love.

II.

The palms are saddened by the world
and this carbonated air poisons us.

Cavitations in the ocean are going
to fuck with God’s titration curves.
A vicious spiral, but one of
finite cost:
we know history,
human nature,
and when persons are threatened
they turn murderous.
And while the birds are
burned alive
(planes too fast to flee)
they will not even have time
to wonder
why.

III.

We are pillaging the land
but this is nothing new.
The novelty is our perfection:
we have never been so good
at theft,
even when our fascination
was held by dark continents
and our own dark deeds.

and now our very beach towels
are the products of empire –
the poor of the world do not
even know how to dream
of what we have.

Soon it will be gone
all the lithium we can find
molybdenum.
titanium.
these are things we cannot replace
and we will want them
back.

but no solution will be found

We can travel everywhere.
We cannot change much.
A meal, a pair of shoes.
We’ve all got parasites,
worms twirling through our feet,
beliefs in god.
Oh well,
what can be done?
It seems impossible to know.
We underline our hopes and dreams
we give them permanence
it is unsure if this is a safe plan.

IV.

But everywhere there are strangers

Men with immaculate hair at four a.m.
although they’d just been sleeping.
Girls with micro-dresses,
like caricatures of nurses on Halloween,
blinding white but happily without the hat.

Even the sand betrays us,
with frigid spines fighting
our better natures,
the icy bite of Atlantic air
like a splinter from discarded hearts.

Icarus’s wings would not melt here,
no ambition could be considered.
Here he would have
boundaries
guilt
the bare heat of life denied him.

Madness is driven in absurd ways
on the wheels of a fictional chariot.
The faint greek rose of the sun
was painting itself on the tide.
The cruise ships like grand mountains
were bravely glossing over
the unmitigated death
of the previous days.
Then like snapping your fingers
they dropped over the horizon
and the salt was heavy in the air
so that no one could forget.

But soon they went back to sleep,
and I poured a bigger glass of rum
and walked down into the surf alone
and Aphrodite was smiling
and softly saying to me
“Yes, this is the way that I was born.”

Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments

Stung with Love is a new translation of Sappho's poems and fragments given us by Aaron Poochigian.

The case of Sappho is an interesting one, because so little of her work has survived. It is also interesting because various groups with vested current political interests in the perception of the past have throughout recent years attempted to appropriate Sappho's poetry. Entertainingly, the Victorians characterized her as the headmistress of a finishing school, presumably because they felt it'd help them understand her.

Because I don't speak Aeolic Greek, I can't really comment on how accurate the translation is, but I've always found Willis Barnstone's translations of Sappho to be my favorite.

For example, compare Barnstone's take on:

yet I
for one

would rather see her warm supple step
and the sparkle in her face than watch all
the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored
in glittering bronze.

with Poochigian's:

And I would rather watch her body
Sway, her glistening face flash dalliance
Than Lydian war cars at the ready
and armed battalions

There isn't too much for me to say about this, I've read all of these poems before. However, because so little of Sappho's work has survived, any encounter with her ouvre is sure not to be prohibitively time consuming, and there are far worse ways to spend one's time.

Nightingale,
All you sing
Is desire;
You are the crier
Of coming spring.

For Andrea, on Feb 22

I flicked the deadbolt
down and to the left
with my elbow.

My hands were full.

All three were cold and the dates on them read
DEC 23
JAN 17
FEB 4
and they were nearly full.

Their caps were light blue
because the fat had been removed.

And with three dull thuds
they landed in a metal grave.

I opened and closed the door
again.

There is a can of tomatoes
premium
Red Gold
crushed
100% natural
half-filled with ash
sitting on my desk.

After loss, people like to grasp on
to everything
more tightly.

Old men with mirth in their eyes
falcon
ancient
azure
and hair as white as snow.

A young woman, impossibly young
confident
beautiful
pushy
but still kind enough to get me through a bit of hell
and wise enough to know when to say nothing at all.

They tell us that plastic stays around virtually forever,
That emperors and pontiffs will be reduced to naught
while the world of things we’ve thrown away
outlives our children by ten thousand years.

She was going to be an accountant
and there were months where
we drank more vodka than Russians
screamed curses out of windows
and kicked at oak leaves
while she stood on the stairs smoking
her cigarettes.

In my refrigerator another half-gallon
of milk
sits;
FEB 20
knowing myself
as I do
I think that I shall keep it for a little while.