translated from the French by Justin Brumby I The guardsmen stood in two lines, halberds in hand,in baggy knee breeches, noses in the air,while the rabble and the street kids…
Poetry
Poetry: Rachel Blaustein
translated from the Hebrew by Mildred Faintly from Brought Low He came by night, the spectral emissary,he sat on the edge of my hospital bed:his bones jutting up, tenting the…
Jean Lorrain: Odile
I Stone saints, seated in symmetric seriesalong the pointed vault, graven angelsof the transept, and the sonorous golden soulof the bells imprisoned in the tall slender cageof the belfry tower—all…
Catullus: Ariadne
Ariadne, a poem by Catullus, translated from the Latin They say Mount Pelion’s topmost pinesonce swam the great sea’s fluent waveswhen the chosen, toughest young men of Greece,hoping they could…
from “Collected Poems”
Visiting When I first came on a visitto your limewashed house– a clean-kneed child from town –your two great fists impressed me, for theywere ponderous chunksof granite, notchedcarelessly for fingers…
Tentative Melodies
translations from Vivien’s 1901 book Études et Préludes Undine There’s a light in your laughter and a darkness in your touch.Your lips are cold. You smile at the distressyour kisses…
A Ballad from the Hills of Westphalia
He fell for a devil of a woman,and she was a devil of a woman for him to fall for,his own sister! She was affectionate, you have to grant her…
Poems from Flares and Fathoms
The review of Flares and Fathoms, from which the following poems are taken, appeared in the previous issue. Blizzard: Brooklyn View A man shovels in a parking lotfor a car…
Susan Gordon: Four Poems
The Regiment That morning they’d bent to don their black-soled bootsafter hours through which none of them had slept.Bending to tie them, not one thought to refusethe fate that dogged…
Poems from “Sappho Is Dead”
the birds praise Joan of Arc at Domrémy the pigeons singwith a do, and a re, and a mi— at Vaucouleurs all in a ringthe hens refuse to lay— the…