A Village Life

Louise Glück

The death and uncertainty that awaits me

as they await all men, the shadows evaluating me

because it can time to destroy a human being,

the element of suspense

needs to be preserved—

On Sundays I walk my neighbor's dog

so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother.

The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter

we walk the same road, early morning, at the base of the escarpment.

Sometimes the dog gets away from me—for a moment or two, 

I can't see him behind some trees. He's very proud of this, 

this trick he brings out occasionally, and gives up again 

as a favor to me—

Afterward, I go back to my house to gather firewood.

I keep in my mind images from each walk:

monad growing by the roadside;

in early spring, the dog chasing the little gray mice,

so for a while it seems possible

not to think of the hold of the body weakening, the ratio

of the body to the void shifting,

and the prayers becoming prayers for the dead.

Midday, the church bells finished. Light in excess:

still, fog blankets the meadow, so you can't see

the mountain in the distance, covered with snow and ice.

When it appears again, my neighbour thinks

her prayers are answered. So much light she can't control her happiness—

it has to burst out in language. Hello, she yells, as though

that is her best translation.

She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain,

though in one case the fog never lifts.

But each person stores his hope in a different place.

I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine.

I'm tense, like a child approaching adolescence.

Soon it will be decided for certain what you are,

one thing, a boy or girl. Not both any longer.

And the child thinks: I want to have a say in what happens.

But the child has no say whatsoever.

When I was a child, I did not foresee this.

Later, the sun sets, the shadows gather, 

rustling the low bushes like animals just awake for the night.

Inside, there's only firelight. It fades slowly;

now only the heaviest wood's still

flickering across the shelves of instruments.

I hear music coming from them sometimes,

even locked in their cases.

When I was a bird, I believed I would be a man.

That's the flute. And the horn answers,

when I was a man, I cried out to be a bird.

Then the music vanishes. And the secret it confides in me

vanishes also.

In the window, the moon moon is hanging over the earth,

meaningless but full of messages,

It's dead, it's always been dead,

but it pretends to be something else,

burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes

it could actually make something grow on earth.

If there's an image for the soul, it think that's what it is.

I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,

as though I were already a factor in it.

Tranquil and still, the day dawns.

On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

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The Wishing Tree

Kathleen Jamie

I stand neither in the wilderness

nor in fairyland

but in the fold 

of a green hill

the tilt from one parish

into another.

To look at me

through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron

in your own blood

because I hoard 

the common currency

of longing: each wish

each secret assignation.

My limbs lift, scabbed

with greenish coins

I draw into my slow wood

fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania.

Behind me, the land

reaches toward the Atlantic.

And though I'm poisoned

choking on the small change

of human hope,

daily beaten into me

look: I an still alive—

in fact, in bud.

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the tragedy of the leaves

Charles Bukowski

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,

the potted plants yellow as corn;

my woman was gone

and the empty bottles like bled corpses

surrounded me with their uselessness;

the sun was still good, though,

and my landlady's note cracked in fine and

undemanding yellowness; what was needed now

was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester

with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd

because it exists, nothing more;

I shaved carefully with an old razor

the man who had once been young and

said to have genius; but

that's the tragedy of the leaves,

the dead ferns, the dead plants;

and I walked into a dark hall

where the landlady stood

execrating and final,

sending me to hell,

waving her fat, sweaty arms

and screaming

screaming for rent

because the world had failed us

both.

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the birds

Charles Bukowski

the acute and terrible air hangs with murder

as summer birds mingle in the branches

and warbleio

and mystify the clamor of the mind;

an old parrot

who never talks,

sits thinking in a Chinese laundry,

disgruntled

forsaken

celibate;

there is red on his wing

where there should be green,

and between us

the recognition of 

an immense and wasted life.

...my second wife left me

because I set our birds free:

one yellow, with crippled wing

quickly going down and to the left,

cat-meat,

cackling like an organ;

and the other,

mean green,

of empty thimble head,

popping up like a rocket

high into the hollow sky,

disappearing like sour love

and yesterday's desire

and leaving me

forever.

and when my wife

returned that night

with her bags and plans,

her tricks and shining greeds,

she found me

glittering over a yellow feather

seeking out the music

which she,

oddly,

failed to 

hear.

____________________________________________________________________

Through the Struan Door

Robin Robertson

There is the story of a boy, fetched from the water.

He was set to work, feeding the cauldron of the she-witch —

a whole year, stirring the herbs that would magic

wisdom and future-sight to her two children,

before he made the mistake.

Licking some spilt juice from his hand, his mind turned;

he knew then what would happen next.

Raging that he'd swallowed the cream

of her enchantment, the glamourie,

the witch went after him.

            Gifted with knowledge now,

                            he changed to the ways of a mountain hare

so she made the form of a hunting hound,

                            he turned to a mackerel

            slipping under the waves,

so she swam into the shape of a sea-otter bitch,

                            he flew up with the wings of a starling

so she stopped from the sky as a hawk,

                            and then he knew it was almost done

            so he lost himself in a field, as an ear of corn,

and she made herself back to a huge brown rat and ate him down.

But he did not die. He just set seed, inside. The witch waited,

and nine months later she was ready with her knife.

Re-born, he was so beautiful she couldn't cut his throat —

so she tied him inside a leather-skin bag, dropped it

into a coracle, and sent him out to sea.

But he did not die, and was found alive

on another coast, after weeks on the ocean,

and he grew to become a bard, they say,

singing forever of her greed and cruelty.

How being strong is being many.

*

My doors swing open. In the looking-glass

the hair on the side of my head pricks up, 

coarsening, going from red to grey, each ear

twisting outwards into a cup; my chin

lengthens to beard, the forehead nubs

grow heavy, hardening to horn,

a new shape becoming visible;

then the eyes roll back into white

and starts to spin like a drum

through all the changes, settling with a soft click

into goat:

each fat, black, horizontal bar of pupil

a floating letter-box.

What have I ushered in now: already

streaming over this threshold?

A body in flux — a man or a beast or a god —

a kind of Christ, perhaps: busy at his endless resurrections.

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Struan: anglicisation of srùthán (Gaelic) meaning 'place of streams'

story of a boy: a version of the Welsh legend of Taliesin

 

Of Mùthadh/Mutability

Robin Robinson

            (a protection spell)            

This book is for the taken: for all those feart of the glamour,

the skaith of the evil eye — weird-set, ill-minted

or only wildering — their bodies in motion, flowing

or full-flown, rapt with heart-hunger.

*

Grass twists up through my hair now

and my mouth is full of stones.

Tell my mother and father I am coming, tell them

I have not grown old.

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mùthadh: (Gaelic) change, mutability, metamorphosis; pronounced 'moo-huh'

glamour: magic, enchantment (cf. glamourie, gramarye, grimoire)

skaith: hurt, harm, damage

weird-set: fated, destined, cursed

ill-minted: malformed

wildering: going astray, bewildered, lost

flowing: unstable, changeable

heart-hunger: a longing for affection

The Shadow on the Stone

Thomas Hardy

     I went by the Druid stone

   That stands in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

   That at some moments there are thrown

   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

   And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

   Threw there when she was gardening.

     I thought her behind my back,

   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: "I am sure you are standing behind me,

   Though how do you get into this old track?"

   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

   As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

   That there was nothing in my belief.

     Yet I wanted to look and see

   That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: "Nay, I'll not unvision

   A shape which, somehow, there may be."

   So I went on softly from the glade,

   And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition —

   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

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