FOUR POEMS, FOUR POETS
ANDREJ HOČEVAR
The Sun Is Shining Above Europe
I’m still walking on damp sand
flat-footedly pressing upon the history
of the sea. Clouds are shedding from my body.
The day already fuller than usual
and the light lets its petals
fall all over your neck.
Previously I saw people carrying
thick bouquets of leeks, big as a meter.
Now the cold is spilling over the city
and outside on the doorknob
hangs a bag with two leeks,
upright and more ordinary in size,
while on the shellfish ever less visible
pearls are forming—toward the end of the year
everything returns to its usual routine.
Neglected thoughts are arching
through me, the city walking on me,
wrapped in a woman’s hair for a scarf.
I’d forgotten everything about this poem.
At times, the hand that softly holds us
suspended in air, shakes us like salt.
Of all the lives I don’t live, this one
is the best.
Translated from Slovenian by Laura Soloman and the author
MARIA HUMMEL
Carousel, Ten Days after His Third Transfusion
I watch the horse
my son is riding
glide into gallop. Forward,
around: the proud, cratered
nose, serrated mane,
coat like black water.
Up! Down! my son calls, giddy,
holding the stake
driven through its body.
JAMES McCORKLE
Verge of Summer
All I wanted to say was something
about you, the pears—or were they plums—left
out on the table—and reading this again
always recalls Cezanne, his world always
tilting toward landscape
each thing in it a visual event existing
at all times, there—the morning’s gray
lifting, and rising I would have seen you
asleep, your hair floating across pillows
and think of which flower—asphodel
is it, or tulips still closed against
the night’s coolness
under the cherry tree’s greening
fruit, and what was that music we heard
then, reminding me always of you, like the flowers
and fruit, asleep before
I step out, and down
stairs, to feed the cats, that swirl down
the stairs, the world still
verdant—there are words I still love
as we all must
perhaps, like verge of summer
coming new
as never before, each time
knowing there will be one less
JULIET PATTERSON
Extinction Event
To burst in your mind with costly grace.
To mass in your faceted syllables.
The arrested movement of time; hours
in clusters, overripe.
Hours, like broken offshoots,
flourishing as they can;
possibilities in sleeves of limitation.
Whorled taut, each brittle
node to a flushed
bud, last needles
embossed in clay.
That we break
from your tongue
and now tease ash,
stitches of a titian
butterfly.
*
all from Crazy Horse 78 (2010), Ed. Garrett Doherty
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