These poems are from Vasko Popa’s “Games” cycle of 13 poems, translated by Charles Simic, published in Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems. If you buy only 1 book of poetry your whole life, you couldn’t choose a better one. Popa is an all-too-little known maestro of the powerful poetic parable and Simic is [...]
There are no camels in this combo crèche, formed in Singapore, assembled in Malaysia. The pieces, each in its place, dominate the living room, diverting our path to where we cleanse and empty and keep my store-bought teeth, neither sneer nor smile in their snap-tight cup. The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated last season, [...]
THE SIRENS These are the seductive voices of the night: the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to say they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful. – Franz [...]
The soap opera organ announces what we can hardly bear to hear. A metal-aproned matron summons the skin ribbon she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500, circa 1969. Her tremolo is a casual torture. We mistake her voice for a choir of a thousand muffled mothers and wobble dutifully in to an Easter [...]
I save the spaces. No, I’m no bent surveyor with a three-legged stare bent on destiny, unsettled by innominate expanses, undone by an absence of fences, parsing the plenty. We know how that was manifest. I’ve never been enamoured of wrought geometries and plaid is a bad parody of place. I save only the spaces: [...]
Tagged poetryThere are four legends concerning Prometheus. According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was permanently renewed. According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, [...]
Tagged Kafka, parable, thought shardsBEFORE THE GAME Shut one eye then the other Peek into every corner of yourself See that there are no nails no thieves See that there are cuckoo’s eggs Shut then the other eye Squat and jump Jump jump high high On top of yourself Fall then with all your weight Fall for days on [...]
Tagged poetry, prose poetry, Vasko PopaBEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the [...]
Tagged Kafka, parable