New Poetry From Peter Golub

Interpretation of Yeats


When Jack Bauer goes to Puerto Rico

He isn’t really on vacation

And he isn’t afraid to venture past the walls of Old San Juan into the cemetery

He brings a pack of Lucky Strikes, but forgets to smoke them

When he makes it to Isla Mona he’s too drunk to notice how drunk the iguana’s are

On the fancy boat that takes him around the island

Several times before he finally gets off

And stumbles into the black forest where he falls asleep

In an over priced hotel and writes

The following poem after singing Motherless Child

In all the languages the Government

Taught him

Several girls gather beneath his window while he sings

Weeping not knowing

How to continue on with their lives

The world must be saved endlessly

Just as it must die without end

As this terrible country

A sand dollar inside a hockey’s mans stomach

The koala bear in the backyard

Howling from its plastic tree

If I see the man with the tattoo

Wielding a stapler –it is a threat to national security

Preventions

I have met them at the close of day

From the counter of the rainbow I saw this morning

I passed with a nod of the head

While I lingered around a mangrove watching a bird

This other man I had dreamed

A vainglorious lout

I number him

He has resigned

A terrible beauty is born

Minute by minute the change

While I save the nation

While trout fall from the sky

In perfect sequence

On time

Each with his plans

Chatting on black phones

Minute by minute they live

Too long a sacrifice

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven’s part

To murmur name upon name

And for an hour I have walked, that is, in my mind the future years had come

Out of the murderous innocence

May she be granted beauty and yet not

That chooses right

That is no country

Caught in that sensual neglect consume my heart away sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is and gathers me

Into the artifice of eternity what is past, or to come

The America whose plant is packed into the bowels

Of young-four-stomached-girls

They graze the lawns

Inside my mind

Full of grace

Amid the rustle

High in the hills

Dizzy high

A mechanical

Shape

Jet

As if some empty shell

I should hand in my resignation

Those non regulated factories in China

Where there is no congressional oversight

O my god what is this world coming to?

Wine wine wine

Wine relieves my sigh

The men are on their way

They have my wife

They have my doctor’s medication

Public opinion ripening for so long

And a great army but a showy thing

Delicate matters are not unsolvable by anger

Unless a little powder

A drunken soldier

Murder at her door

In her own blood

As before we pieced out thoughts together

With satellite surveillance

I read the signs

I am a call-sign

Oh, master work of intellect or hand

That country round

None dared admit

If such a thought were mine

Chinese

A shining web

Or hurried them

No moralist

An image of its state

A man in his own secret

Is lost amid the labyrinth he’s made

In politics or art

Delicate matters are not unsolvable by anger

Where we trade our work

The half written resignation

We, who seven years ago

Talked of honor and of truth

Shriek with pleasure if we show

The weasel’s shriek and weasel’s tooth

We traffic

Upon the roads of violence

In monetary wonder stare upon

And thinking of that fit of grief of rage

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And who must sleep, shriek, and struggle to escape

As recollection of the drug decide

Maria

Maria full of grace



Peter Golub was born in Moscow. After receiving a BA in Russian and Philosophy from the University of Utah he moved to Nevada to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His translations can be found in Absinthe: New European Writing, Caketrain, Cimarron Review, Zone, and St. Petersburg Review. He also has a cat named Sparrow, a squemu named Brenna, and harbors serious plans for international fame and domination.