One Worthy Patron

from What Mr. Cogito Thinks About Hell
By Zbigniew Herbert

The lowest circle of hell. Contrary to prevailing opinion it is inhabited neither by despots nor matricides, nor even by those who go after the bodies of others. It is the refuge of artists, full of mirrors, musical instruments, and pictures. At first glance this is the most luxurious infernal department, without tar, fire, or physical tortures.

...Beelzebub supports the arts. He provides his artists with calm, good board, and absolute isolation from hellish life.


Translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter

One Inattentive River

Agon
By Branko Miljkovic

While the river banks are quarreling,
The waters flow quietly.


Translated by Charles Simic

One Burning City

The Bell Zygmunt
By Jane Hirshfield

For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,
or possibly kiss it.
The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent.

At ten kilometers, even those who have never heard it know what it is.

If you stand near during thunder, she said,
you will hear a reply.

Six weeks and six days from the phone's small ringing,
replying was over.

She who cooked lamb and loved wine and wild mushroom pastas.
She who when I saw her last was silent as the great Zygmunt mostly is,
a ventilator's clapper between her dry lips.

Because I could, I spoke. She laid her palm on my cheek to answer.
And soon again, to say it was time to leave.

I put my lips near the place a tube went into
the back of one hand.
The kiss - as if it knew what I did not yet - both full and formal.

As one would kiss the ring of a cardinal, or the rim
of that cold iron bell, whose speech can mean "Great joy,"
or - equally - "The city is burning. Come.”

Book

One Thirsty Deity

from psalm
By Alicia Ostriker

I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament

for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine...


Book

One Nonexistent Mentor

from Letters to a Young Poet
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody.

One Rich Etcetera

from Song in the Manner of Housman
By Ezra Pound

O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were dead already.

The bird sits on the hawthorn tree
But he dies also, presently.
Some lads get hung, and some get shot.
Woeful is this human lot.
Woe! woe, etcetera...

One Stable Marsh

It is the roots from all the trees that have died
out here, that's how you can walk
safely over the soft places.

--Olav Hauge, translated by Robert Bly

One Unsaleable Shroud

My Stars
By Abraham ibn Ezra

On the day I was born,
The unalterable stars altered.
If I decided to sell lamps,
It wouldn't get dark till the day I died.

Some stars. Whatever I do,
I'm a failure before I begin.
If I decided to sell shrouds,
People would suddenly stop dying.

~Translated by Robert Mezey

One Unmarriageable Nose

From Luristan to Thule
By Sarah Lindsay

Delirium was the last country she saw clearly.
Mounting its exotic, riven flanks
on the back of a patient fever,
she left with regret the land of her hosts--
divisions of snow, upended stone threaded with tracks
between the goatskin houses with goatskin beds--
then left too the regret.

For decades she'd taken pleasure in imposing
the first white profile (with its great spinster nose)
upon such places, barely named,
as lay a few days' journey beyond fable,
uplands that bore no showy gold or ziggurat,
only the shallow marks of laboring generations,
the central campfires repeated deep in their eyes.

Past rocks tipped early out of the cradle of myth,
she finally became separated from her pack
with its twenty pencils, the notorious hat,
coins and aspirin, equally useless,
and yielded to discovery of one state
that lacks the primary luxuries: return,
and the safely delivered story.

Book

One Monochrome Winter

the sound of the wind
withered by
winter-one-color world

--Basho, translated by Stephen Addiss

One Blameless Artist

...the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. ...Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you - the nominal artist - your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question - that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

--Charlotte Bronte

One Unsheathed Cortex

from Via Insomnia
By Adrienne Rich

...Is this how it is to be newly dead? unbelieving
the personal soul, electricity unsheathing
from the cortex, light-waves fleeing
into the black universe
to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering
Where, when will I sleep

One Pestered Angel

from my old Guardian Angel
By Tadeusz Rozewicz

the avalanche of angels
brought about
by inspired poets
artists priests
and American
movie directors
is infinitely more foolish
than the one brought about
by Romantic poets

the products
of the dream factory
--the "holy wood"--
are sugary white
like the cotton candy
young children
adore

my Guardian Angel who
is 83 years old
and remembers all
my misdeeds
flew to me in consternation
and told me he was
being pestered
by salesmen
pedophiles sodomites
from commercial public
and religious TV
to endorse "angel's milk" custard
dance hip-hop with seniors
and sell
sanitary napkins
with wings
and without...

Translated by Bill Johnston ~ Book

One Spilled Bucket

from Moon Eclipse Exorcism

come out come out come out
the moon has been killed

who kills the moon? crow
who often kills the moon? eagle
who usually kills the moon? chicken hawk
who also kills the moon? owl
in their numbers they assemble
for moonkilling

come out, throw sticks at your houses
come out, turn your buckets over
spill out all the water don't let it turn
bloody yellow
from the wounding and death
of the moon

o what will become of the world, the moon
never dies without cause
only when a rich man is about to be killed
is the moon murdered...

--Alsea, translated by Armand Schwerner and Leo J. Trachtenberg

One Late Laurel

Several Voices Out of a Cloud
By Louise Bogan

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit;
to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.
It is deathless
And it isn't for you.

One Vertical Glare

Grief
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death--
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

One Cold Algebraist

[The poet] is no longer the disheveled, delirious man, someone who writes an entire poem in a night of fever; now he's a cool savant, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer.

--Paul Valery

One Appropriated Harvest

A Black Man Talks of Reaping
By Arna Bontemps

I have sown beside all waters in my day.
I planted deep within my heart the fear
that wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land
in rows from Canada to Mexico,
but for my reaping only what the hand
can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root.
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

One Insulting Sun

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

--Herman Melville

One Blue-Smoking Torch

Bavarian Gentians
By D. H. Lawrence

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.