Forecasts say prepare for rain, so you will—
will keep at the ready tarp and cord, tents
and candles. And you will drink to the gulls
circling and the May sun high above rocks
Expostulate up! up! Route 9, Will.
Ignore the totality of immortality.
Drink up this anti-pastoral.
Hail the Just-a-Buck and Minnow Motors.
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
A little man walks
Through the golden dust
It is a summer’s morning
A morning fresh and mild
As other mornings, other sorrows
He walks across roads
Where no one else walks
With a tiny wooden coffin
Tucked under his arm
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
On the unbolted gate to the garden of the dead I wrote
Voi che entrate and was pulled short swift and sharply
As the strain of writing in an unknown tongue rather than
All the small griefs, the petty slights, the imagined
worst things, he’s placed them each
Pin prick of pink in the solution to ensure you struck a vein,
before you push the plunger in. Brief burn then spreading
Came a homeless man, without a foot,
dressed up in a new canvas sack,
tied up with a belt in the usual style,
and an Alfalfa tower of hair (all in soot)
with lint in the vertical layers.
Pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves suggests that Neanderthals, too, buried flowers with their dead.
The pollen could be mere coincidence—
traces left by a prehistoric rat
that ate flowers near the grave—but we prefer
Never again will I feed the mustangs my mind,
Outstretched in the grey moon of morning.
Ours is a ritual of nevers, the lung’s nocturne
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 06 contributors Oliver de la Paz and L. S. Klatt read and discuss their poems “Labyrinth 76” and “Apple.”
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