Continued. Piotr Sommer
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Название: Continued
Автор: Piotr Sommer
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Поэзия
Серия: Wesleyan Poetry Series
isbn: 9780819569752
isbn:
to enter them by hand into hard memory
since that might be the way to treat them
to a new time, another round —
not that we have more of it now,
but, older for a moment, we can almost see them
the way they wanted to be seen,
“With a New Preface by the Author,” in which
with us in mind, who else,
they still managed to correct this or that.
Short Version
I couldn’t be with you when you died.
Sorry, I was toiling day and night
on the title of a poem I didn’t have time to show you.
You really would have liked it.
Even if the poem itself
wasn’t the strongest, I was counting on the title
to prop it up from above,
to set it right even, and to sanction it
as sometimes happens, I don’t know
if the nurse ever had time
to give you the news
because when I called it was
already late, though finally
she took the whole message.
Tomorrow
Whoever lives on will tell us how it was; whoever survives the rest will tell it more precisely.
Shepherd’s Song
Read these few sentences as if I were
some stranger, some other
language, which I may still be
(though I speak with your words, make use
of your words);
which I was, speaking
your language,
standing behind you and listening
wordlessly,
singing
in your tongue
my tune.
Read as if you were to listen,
not to understand.
Sometimes, Yes
After reading certain young authors
I too would like to be an author
and turn out works.
Right now I’m thinking of J.G. —
his happy rhymes, cinematic sentences and
the heroes in his poems, the real ones
and those made up. Because of course
poems have their heroes as well,
some not even all that
likeable. Of the real ones
for instance, I recall
Ezra Pound, whose name
appears in one of the titles,
or that Mid-November Snow
which, before it melted, the author thinks
had blanketed all the evil.
Of the unreal ones Kirillov, a suicide
and yet a builder, or that
professor, what’s his name,
a scholar of seventy now.
And I, what would I write poems about?
I’d have to think,
because in fact I’m fed up with them.
I ask my wife but she just repeats
“What about?” as if she weren’t there.
And a moment later adds: “But if
I tell you what about, you’ll say
we both wrote it, all right?”
I must — she says — remind her
about it in the future, since a person
may sometimes really get hold of an idea,
but most of the time it flies off.
Indiscretions
Where are we? In ironies
that no one will grasp, short-lived
and unmarked, in trivial points
which reduce metaphysics to absurd
detail, in Tuesday that falls on
day two of May, in mnemonics of days.
You can give an example or take it
on faith, cat’s paw at the throat.
And one also likes certain words and those — pardon me — syntaxes that pretend that something links them together. Between these intermeanings the whole man is contained, squeezing in where he sees a little space.
Candle
Friends from long ago, loved unchangingly,
with whom you СКАЧАТЬ