Poetry
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Three Poems by Vladimir Gandelsman, Translated by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco
MOM, RESURRECTED
Wear your coat. Wear your hat.
You’ll get sick. Don’t do that.
Call your mom. Call your mom.
A storm is coming. A storm.Get some bread on the way home.
Get up. It’s five minutes till. Hello?
I got you a delicious treat.
We’ll be able to pay for heat.That’s for the holidays. Why did you open it.
What did you do this time. What did—
Just go away. Just beat it, all right?
Daddy and I waited all night. -
“The Author Dedicates These Lines to His Beloved Self” by Vladimir Mayakovsky (translated by Val Vinokur)
The Author Dedicates These Lines to His Beloved Self
Heavy.
Like six blows.
“Caesar’s unto Caesar––God’s unto God.”
But where is a guy
like me
supposed to go?
Where is my lair prepared?If I were
still little,
like the Great Ocean,
I’d get up on my wavy tiptoes,
caress the moon with the tide.
Where can I find a beloved,
someone just like me?
She wouldn’t fit into the tiny sky!O if only I were penniless!
Like a billionaire! -
“Crisis” by Gerardo Deniz (translated by Mónica de la Torre)
Evangelista Cicindelli had no dark side. In vain
they spoke to him about Teilhard de Chardin, about mysteries,
the mysteries of the sea,
of life,
unexplained by positivism. In vain
they tried to shake his stool enameled white,
they spat in the histological preparations while he was out having lunch.By the rocky edge,
the ruinous and unfinished mansion, without windowpanes
so you can face the threatening sea
and welcome the wind carrying saltpeter and saliva, excoriate
the water’s torso,
and welcome your name between the clamor of the wind, -
“The Diagnosis” by James Tate
……………Lincoln was sixty years old when the
doctor told him he only had forty more years
to live. He didn’t tell his wife, with whom
he confided everything, or any of his friends,
because this new revelation made him feel all
alone in a way he had never experienced before.
He and Rachel had been inseparable for as long
as he could remember and he thought that if she
knew the prognosis she would begin to feel alone,
too. But Rachel could see the change in him
and within a couple of days she figured out
what it meant. -
“Love Song” by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by David Shapiro)
How could I stop myself
from meeting you? Should I rise
up over you to some other things?
I could happily make a roof
with someone abandoned in the dark
in some dumb distant spot
that never shakes, as you are trembling now.
Yet everything that grazes you and me
ties us together like a violin bow
stroking two strings into one sound.
But on what instrument have we been bound?
And what musician has us in his hand?
Oh sweet song.*
Rainer Maria Rilke was a German-language poet and novelist,
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“Bicycle Poem” by Noelle Kocot
There were cathedrals falling out of your eyes
And your arms were the handlebars
I held in an abbreviated dream of crushed petals
Strewn across the limpid avenues.I said, “I have poems for you”
But my words were lost in the wind.
I said, “I love you”
And you drifted into sleep.And so I said nothing and rode you in and out of the rooms
Where we had stretched the boundaries of the soul
Like an endless sheet
And I felt you waking up between my legs.
