MY TASK
I row, row my skiff in your valley of waters
to script virgins into lovers.
I ordain the past to scribe cowards into heroes
and rumor the future to make sinners prophets and preachers.
Contorted within this beggardom of rules, I try to pattern stammerers into orators,
and I torture my way to Heaven while swording into Hell.
ONCE AND THEN AND NOW
I lived my youth from tower to tower.
Imagined marble turned out to be clay.
Once my arbor was fulfilled by flowers.
Then my garden filled up with weeds and toads.
Today is tomorrow’s yesterday.
Circumstances change without endeavor;
conditions, with ease. Flux is forever,
and now my life is roads
and roads and
Roads.
A SENTRY IS NOT A PARTY
When enlisted by you
I was flagged to make war
on volumes of rebels
though naked as a syllable.
While I waited for you
to wideopen your door
and join in your revels
I squatted by your vestibule
until my body became blue.
Your promise a rumor,
“You’re next, Sir” a never,
I fasted at your festival.
CAMBRIDGE, GOODBYE AGAIN
I’ll leave in quietude,
as quietly as I came;
I wave silent far farewell
to clouds in the western sky.
Riverside’s gold willows
are young brides at twilight;
their reflections shimmer
but remain fixed in my heart.
The weeds that grow in sludge
sway sway just beneath the ripple
of the gentle waves of Cam.
O, if I could be one weed!
The pool in the elmtree shade
holds not water but a rainbow;
refracted in duckweed
is the dream sediment’s spectrum.
A dream? Just poling upstream
to where the grass is thicker;
boat full-loaded with starlight
and singing aloud with me.
But I cannot sing loudly,
a recessional must be muted.
My summer bugs stay silemt.
Cambridge is too quiet tonight!
I’ll leave in stillness,
as quietly as I came;
flapping my sleeves like flags
won’t drive my clouds away.
–after Xu Zhimo
NEWMAN
I saw him last week
in his baseball cap and dungarees,
sitting on his Jeep.
He had just come back from Hungary.
It was quite a bit
since we’d talked, and I was eager
to know if his trips
in Europe made him any bigger.
“Well, I learned,” he said,
“that some women call poison a gift,
regard pain as bread.
In some places to make love is ‘theft,’
‘kneading dough’ in Dutch,
in Greece, ‘like riding a horse,’ in Spain
cogere (to catch),
scopare (to sweep) — that’s Milan — Germans ‘roll around,’
the Russians ‘have contempt for someone,’
the old up-and-down,
the French ‘jump.’ Ah! Linguistics — such fun!”
…