1

When the last of the sunlight goes,
and shadows stretching from the shade
of trees and bushes, long hedgerows,
join up together to invade
wild grasses and the flat pasture,
turning from shadows into night,
then the bees, scattered far and near,
take notice, and start on their flight
back to those walls and roofs they know,
beehives where their small bodies rest
between dark and dawn; they go
over the threshold, noisy, fast,
massing in hundreds at the doors,
and pour past into their close cells,
cramming chambers and corridors
while the last of the daylight fails:
sleep silences the working hive
and leaves it quiet as the grave.

2

For bees put no trust in the sky
when storms come up with an east wind,
and seldom venture far away
from their stations when downpours impend:
instead, they draw the water off
and stick close to their city walls
where any flights they take are brief;
as the wind blows and the rain falls
they steady themselves through turbulence
by taking with them little stones
(as frail boats, faced with violence
of gales and tides, take ballast on),
and hold their given course along
the clouds, balanced, and balancing.

3

A wonder, how they reproduce:
without courtship, or lovemaking,
without letting their hearts unloose
nerves and sinews like so much string,
without the agony of birth,
they gather offspring from the leaves
and softer hearts, draw with each breath
pollen and children for the hives,
providing themselves with a fresh
ruler, and tiny citizens,
to take the place of some who crash
against the earth, onto hard stones,
brought level by their single love
for flowers and honey-vintages
(the glorious legacy they leave
behind them, in trust for the ages),
although the time that waits for them
is short enough, and not beyond
a seventh summer; yet the same
nation and race will soldier on,
deathless in spite of time’s attacks,
in cells and palaces of wax.

4

All of these things have given pause
to the bees’ watchers and guardians
whenever they ascribe the cause
to some influx, some influence
over and above the natural,
an exhalation from beyond
or an element more ethereal
than air itself – maybe the mind
of God, that strengthens as it runs
in earth and sky, or turns in deep
acres of churning oceans,
in herds of cattle, flocks of sheep,
the wild beasts and the harmless beasts,
in life that feels along a thread
from its first movement to the last,
finishing where it all started,
and never reaching a true end:
this keeps the bees away from death
when, at the last, they all ascend
into the skies they lived beneath,
to fly between undarkened spheres
in heaven, and the many stars.

(Virgil, from the Georgics, book IV. Translated from the Latin by Peter McDonald. Published in the 26 January 2007 Times Literary Supplement.)

     I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations — one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

     II

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

     III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

(Wallace Stevens)

The shoulder of a man is shaped like a baby pig.
It terrifies and it bores the observer, the shoulder.
The Greeks, who had slaves, were able to hitch back and rig
The shoulder, so the eye is flattered and feels bolder.

But that’s not the case in New York, where a roomer
Stands around day and night stupefied with his clothes on
The shoulder, hung from his neck (half orchid, half tumor)
Hangs publicly with a metabolism of its own.

After it has been observed a million times or more
A man hunches it against a pole, a jamb, a bench,
Parasite he takes no responsibility for.
He becomes used to it, like to the exhaust stench.

It takes the corrupt, ectoplasmic shape of a prayer
Or money, that connects with a government somewhere.

(Edwin Denby, from In Public, In Private, 1948.)

There was the famous photographer, Walker Evans,
who started by photographing old signs and ended
by filling his bathtub with them and washing
himself in the kitchen sink. There was the Harlem
man whose pet tiger cub grew so big that first
his family and finally he himself fled
the 12th-floor, three-bedroom apartment in the housing
project, returning every day to fling raw chickens
through a crack in the front door. Love displaces

everything. All over the city the signs peer
from beneath modern facades, fade in the sun and rain
high up on sides of buildings: BEST QUALITY TWINE. Ghosts
on brick, cockeyed atop demolition dumpsters, tin
worn delicate as paper, pale lettered – mint,
red, black: ELEVATOR APARTMENTS AVAILABLE:
INQUIRE ON PREMISES. If you stare at them words
are faces; everyone who ever spelled them out,
ever debated whether to buy twine or rent
an apartment fades up into view wearing shadowy
Homburgs, black veils, parcels in their arms, the winter
air freshening for snow. Or imagine the face
of a tiger waiting behind a thin metal door,
your furniture demolished, your family living
on friends’ floors, your neighbors smelling urine and fur
and losing their tolerance, a policeman
rappelling outside your windows with a dart gun.

Imagine a hunger for the invisible world
so deep it must have existed before you were born.

(Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City.)

Silver is the ruby’s faded glare
Awkward silence taking it out to sea
And you away. The morning
Is its own highway, interleaded
With ears at the important points,
Each the size of a key of typewriter type.
To hornets we are all electroencephalographically
Neutral. Everyone is speaking jargon, especially
The ducks which look orange in this light;—
Sunny as a fruit tree, or as a lime drawn
From the tops of the fruit trees to the telephone wire
Dividing the ocean, whose neck is the horizon.
Some words (“like ‘fuck’”) require objects some of the time; others
Are content to be themselves, suspended like a chair,
Covered in green ink. Everyone’s comet
Strikes the earth, in a way.
The birds stay where they are, stretching to get the birdseed
Until they resemble the clothesline, white
With a dark shimmer. Half-cocked, except for a hay
Riding the air, the sky pushed branches against a screen
Where some T-shirts have caught, drying in powder
That will make them stiff and fragrant. As sound is released
By the head in front, the back of the neck
In back, and out and beyond the honking.
Everyone sleeps at least part of the time, the pilot
In the plane, the oceanographer in the bathysphere,
The judge on the bench, everyone else between eating and
Going to the bathroom, the window pouring
It through like the boat.
Some of the harvest words are
Also used for hunting, making them doubly unresonant,
Like an agglutinative language
Condensed to a single word, unspoken; or
The moon with no breath on it, touching your forehead in a complete
Absence of what meteorologists call weather
In a country on the verge of capitulating
To its smallest city. One would steer
Carefully to the south towards the lighthouse.
Slowly the lawn quiets down.
Each berry is a species of robin, all inflect night
Like the ocean’s rush over a bumpy road. As the radio
Spars with air, random to the space it occupies
To the inclusion of skin. Not the argument
From design since there are no stars to push, but thin
Points of maroon beside some gold
Letters which thud, far
Out of their cosmological depth.
Then the berries leave the trees;
The birds chase them, delivered to a prior spot where ech,
Like the ocean, is inflated and simplified,
Marooned no more than late afternoon mist dispensed
From an apple tree claiming to be the air outside the room,
Supporting everything in it. In the turtle’s mouth.
The turtle looks up. Trees and grass, chairs and clouds,
Sit in the middle of the lawn, the snowy lawn of the air.
With a breeze the ocean stutters, in the middle of
Mumbling. But the ship is already a blur,
Each point created for the benefit of others
Which react to it as if it were poison ivy, catching the same spray.
A chorus steps out of the spray. Two, in fact;
Astonished at not having made themselves known before,
With brandied snows, burning eyelashes.
You are the hotel, but you are also
The vandal, as well as the house detective.
Every spray accelerates, stops, so you can watch it;
Banging like grain like the door against ice air.

(Charles North. Reprinted in The New York Poets II, pp. 148–149. Originally from Six Buildings, Swollen Magpie Press, 1977.)

Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? 

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.

     Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death

     Are become insubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
     What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

     Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet 
Under sleep, where all the waters meet. 

     Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

     What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.

(T. S. Eliot, 1930)

Disorder, mental, strikes me; I
Slip from my pocket Dante to
Chance hit a word, a friend’s reply
In this bar; bare, dark avenue
The lunge of headlights, then bare dark
Cross on red, two blocks home, old Sixth
The alive, the dead, answer, ask
Miracle consciousness I’m with
At home cat chirps, Norwegian sweater
Slumped in the bar, I mind Dante
As dawn enters the sunk city
Answer a one can understand
Actual events are obscure
Though the observers appear clear

(Edwin Denby, from “Later Sonnets” in The Complete Poems.)

(photo by Jerome Robbins)

VISÉE

À Madame René Berthier

AIM

To Madame René Berthier

(The New Directions edition of Apollinaire, translated by Roger Shattuck, is a facing page edition, but while the French version is laid out as Apollinaire published the poem, there’s been no attempt to lay out the English version. Thus this. These have both been put together in Adobe Illustrator; they’re not accurate to the original &ndasd; presuming that New Directions accurately copied the layout themselves! – because I eyeballed the layout; the type isn’t the same, and the alignment isn’t perfect. Will fix this later.)