GUY DAVENPORT ~

GUY DAVENPORT

 PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

PETER COLE ~

The Prayer Book




For years I've wanted to write a prayer book.

Why? Because I've learned

that the solid hangs upon nothingness.

Because I've found that the sentence is a kind of petition.

And because I've found that in all that I've said

in all that I've said I've said only thank you.

So, little by little,

                       in fact I've written that book

and today it weighs some two hundred pounds

and soon it will celebrate its fiftieth birthday

and yesterday I bought it shoes.


Aharon Shabtai (translated by Peter Cole)







Kharja / Closure






 "Oh, I'll

love you alright;

         so

   long as you

manage to bend



   both of my

anklets

back to the

   thin silver

earrings you gave me."


(Anonymous, Mozarabic, 12th century
 translate by Peter Cole)








Palestine: A Sestina


Hackles are raised at the mere mention of Palestine,
let alone  The Question of — who owns the pain?
Often it seems the real victims here are the hills —
those pulsing ridges, whose folds are tender fuzz of green
kill with softness. On earth, it's true, we're only guests,
but people live in places, and stake out claims to land.

From Moab Moses saw, long ago — a land
far off, and once I stood there facing Palestine
with Hassan, whose family lives in Amman. (We were his guests
at the Wahdat refugee camp.) Wonder shot with pain
came into his eyes as he gazed across the green
valley between Nebo and Lydda beyond the hills.

Help would come, says the Psalmist, from one of those hills,
though scholars still don't know for certain whether the land
in question was Zion, or the high places of Baal. The green
olives ripened, and ripen, either way in Palestine,
and the memory of groves cut down rings on pain
for those whose people worked them, for themselves or guests.

"I have been made a stranger in my home by guests,"
says Job, in Hebrew that evolved along these hills,
though he himself was foreign to them. His famous pain
is also that of those who call the Promised Land
home in  another tongue. Could what was pledged be Palestine?
Is Scripture's fence intended to guard this mountain's green?

Many have roamed its slopes and fields, dressed in green
fatigues, unable to fathom what they mean, as guests.
And armies patrol still, throughout Palestine,
as ministers mandate women and men to carve up its hills
to keep them from ever again becoming enemy land.
The search, meanwhile, goes on—for a balm to end the pain,

though it seems only to widen the rippling circles of pain,
as though the land itself became the ripples, and its green
a kind of sigh. So spring comes round again to the land,
as echoes cry: "It's mine!" —and the planes will bring in guests,
so long as water and longing run through these hills,
which some (and coins) call Israel, and others Palestine.

The pundits' talk of Palestine doesn't account for the pain—
or the bone-white hills, breaking the heart as they go green
before the souls of guests-on-earth who've known this land.



————————————
Peter Cole
Hymns & Qualms
new & selected poems & translations
Farrar, 2017

LARRY EIGNER ~

R E A D      M O R E

The University of Alabama Press 

2017

———————————————

NICOLAS GUILLEN ~

Nicolas Guillén, Cuban Poet

 (1902-1989)

R E A D !

SOLO EL CAMINO (ONLY THE ROAD) ~

O N L Y     T H E     R O A D

S O L O     E L      C A M I N O

edited and translated by Margaret Randall

Duke University 2016

. . .WHO IS IN LOVE WITH ME ~

Wood For Water

How come this night

You wash in a pan

A shallow draw of stream water

Spilled down from wild apples

Of the mountain, where deer

Browse, make trail

Leave droppings

Hand over hand, you may

Think of it this way, or

Water that simply flows

Spreading into a sound of peepers

Where I’ve entered

Truck low geared

Flushing every redwing

From trees we were to clear

Blackberries grew then

Tickling stone walls

While working in the heat, high boots

Rolled pants

Many came apart wet in my hands —

Couldn’t save any, not even for you

That was a half year ago —

Now dead wood dropped, hauled, split

Chickadees perch closely, fluttering pine

There is firewood to stack dry

Someplace through winter

At night you bathe cold, cold water

Heated warm —

When you dress you forget underwear

And the thin white blouse —

Just a dress, sleeveless and red

Rope Of Bells

It is the

Rope of bells

You have put behind the door

That let me know

Whenever one of us goes

To the privy

The woodshed

The outdoors

Lovely

Passing

It is Spring

Already you relax in a cotton skirt

Passing through mountains is a strong feeling

Fields plowed, new wood split, the hawk floating

Puffs of softwood in the gray hills

A river runs with snow melting

A small bridge neatly built to get by

There is a pleasure in such places

An old woman and her huge straw hat

Raking the far corner of a hay field

These Of The Morning

There is the wondrous that begins here

So easily, the pail that you put out in the rain

That fills

Walk a meadow

Hold a hand with your two hands

Be with your closest

Sunlight is never far away

We’ve crossed the small water into our surroundings

Hiked and became tired and loved

And what we didn’t bring with us

We found

In the smell of each other, the little movings

————————————

BOB ARNOLD

I'm In Love With You

Who Is In Love With Me

Longhouse 2012

PORTRAITS ~

Yale University Press

M O R E !