A New Poem by Andrew Haley

Lohengrin

Through the Nine Currencies
and seven flowers,
the modi operandi
and Mother of Supremes,
the cat-call of perogatives,
the third suture and seventh sibling,
the ward lost,
the tortoise,
the wind carrying the lofty aroma of garbage,
a fine flute
out of memory
trenched
there
in memory
heard from over the field
and alley in that
home
long time finds
still
lingering
in a sea of vast sorrows
and vaster joys

you played that flute to nobody
in the audience of none
rhubarb and hollow stalks of wheat
--an intrusion--
we must not mind
you played that flute for no
body
in the audience of none
rhubarb and hollow
stalks of wheat
you played that flute for nobody

darkness was in those times
a hallow sacrifice
to one's nimble
infantine
fear
a placation of dooms postponed
to an ultimate hour
and bears and
ivy and grass cold and wet and black
around your feet
musics shed themselves to sing
tenors and the night and
the blue wet green
if a blade of dark grass had sound

now enlivening

but to go back

light as if music were light
where the spring
breaking
bubbles the grass in the pool

a tenderness
overlooked
by those seeking hatred

the threat
is the vortex
of longing

the past must be
forgiven

we are one time in the making
as sound
fleshed in the full thrush
of its willing
descends in marked vibration
to the tapered point
of its lingering
final sound

out in the minds of my brothers and sisters
the five kinds of City shine
on five hills in seven Minds
we are never so kind

in my dreams
I am on a boat to nowhere
this last place
of the quiet mind

in brown water the green shines
stern'a'starboard the boat floating sideways
collides against rocks and tamarisk

in my dreams we are spinning
backwards in the current
these obvious wastes
blemishes
on a sound meant to be finer
--I Love the World--
is my poem
to mammon
and Stein
and the lord unmentionable Supreme
whose poem
says
what all our poems
try to say
Love & World
in finest sounds

Andrew Haley's Poem to Get Started appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Western Humanities Review. It was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2006 Utah Writer's Contest by Billy Collins. New poetry is forthcoming in Quarterly West. He is the author of three novels, most recently Transference, and lives in Buenos Aires.

Two New Poems By Peter Golub

ноги у меня

вареные
вареники по глазам бегают
сердце копчёное
кишечник набит презервативами
за то что я читал Shakespeare
в метро кто-то во сне мне
отрезал пальцы
и привинтил критиков
которые курят мелкие
сигареты, говорят о Хармсе
(когда всем же известно что его
нет), целуются с воронами
а у меня бабушка заболела
грибком.
она спасала Африку
и теперь даже не ругается
матом




And here is the haunted drain pipe in which I found these words:

O, laptop
O, drainpipe
O, medical equipment for blood purification
O, Siberian ticks that cause Lyme borreliosis
O, interview that never happens
O, cafe that used to play good music
Girl who used to read my stuff,
Cigarettes I could smoke w/ out guilt,
Waiter who brought me free coffee

You have frozen or rusted
Impossible,
Completely practical
Cramped torso
Squeaky brain
After 15
It
Hits!
Once you've acquiesced to this
Condition
Stopped
The feeling before an iceberg
The size of Chinese libertarians-
Once the morning toothbrush
Hysteria has stopped
You begin quietly bitching
When eating with your colleagues
Once you have
More colleagues than friends and most of the day is
Spent thinking
About flea bites
Not
The flea pit orchestra
When you come home to rearrange
Your refrigerator collection
And the bathrooms are no longer a place
Of refuge but something you build
And it feels like you're having sex with you mother
Waiting for a vacation
On the beach
Where you write batteries into existence
With anti-histamines
That taste like radiator fluid

Of course everything has changed
And here is the haunted drain pipe in which i found these words:
O, laptop
O, drainpipe
O, medical equipment for blood purification
O, Siberian ticks that cause Lyme borreliosis
O, interview that never happens
O, cafe that used to play good music
you that used to read my stuff, cigarettes i could smoke w/ out
guilt, watier who brought me free coffee with shots of whiskey
you have frozen or rusted
impossible,
completely practical
cramped torso
squeeky brain
after 15 it hits!
once you've aquiesced to this
consition -stopped
the feeling before
an iceberg the size of Chinese libertarians-
once the morning toothbrush
hysteria has stopped
you begin quietly bitching
when eating with your colleagues
once you have more colleagues
than friends and most of the day is spent thinking
about flea bites
not the flea pit orchestra
when you come home to rearrange
your refrigerator collection
and the bathrooms are no longer a place
of refuge but something you build
and it feels like your having sex with you mother
waiting for a vacation
on the beach
where you write batteries into existence
with anti-histamines
that taste like radiator fluid

Of course
But when you wisely tell your children that no one changes
despite the obvious girth of your swollen ontology

Look around you
You big phony!

They are designing bodies and video games in your name
They have put your last name
on all the
toasters,
underwear and pliers in the store,
Where are your children?
No, the talking ones
Yes, them
There they are
Sailing a garbage ship
Across the Atlantic
Look there they are
In Paris
Mocking the pigeons
They have designed new underwear
They have reconstructed Atlantis
Where do you think
It all went?
The past?
H@!
Look at your laptop
Take a few good whiffs of your lover's underwear
The past is the future
Made up of the past's grocery bags
The present a collection of lost opportunities
Dressed in grey business suits and fat ties
Your lover has long since gone
He has replaced himself with another animal
Where is she?
No, that's a gerbil

Run,
Run, run,
Run, run, run run
Run
Run run
Run run run run

Go
Go go
Go go go go
Go go go go go go go

Sew your underwear into a kite
Toss from your window your desktop computer
Donate your car to public radio
And buy a china-man with a rickshaw
Order a carafe and pour it into your purse
Take the homeless woman out on the town
Sleep with the waitress
Of course she won't sleep with you
Of course you should ask her to a play
And offer her the hamster's hand in marriage

Yes
Yes yes yes
Yes

You've got it
Now toss it
And grab that chair over there
We're gonna need it
Where we're going


Peter Golub was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States in the late 1980s. He is in Russia for the summer seeking out his Russian contemporaries who stayed behind. Audio recordings of their poems will accompany a forthcoming anthology of their work, in Russian, with Golub's translations into English. Peter Golub lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Пётр Голуб родился в Советском Союзе и эмигрировал в конце 1980-ах. Постоянное место жительства - Лас Вегас, штат Невада. В данный момент находится в Москве и составляет антологию молодых русских поэтов для перевода на английский язык.

A Translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Départ

Départ

Assez vu. La vision s'est rencontrée à tous les airs.
Assez eu. Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.
Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. — Ô Rumeurs et Visions!
Départ dans l'affection et le bruit neufs!


Departure

Seen enough. Vision met in every air.
Had enough. Murmurs of cities, evening, and in the sun, and always.
Learned enough. Life's stops. O Sound and Vision!
Depart in new affection and new noise.


Translated by Andrew Haley


Arthur Rimbaud est né à Charleville, le 20 octobre 1854, fils d'un soldat et d'une paysanne. Il a écrit ses premiers vers, en latin, à l'âge de treize ans. En 1870, il a fugué à Paris, où il a comencé sa tumultueuse carrière poétique que durait jusqu'à son départ vers l'Indoésie et finalement à l'Afrique, en 1876. Avant ce disparition mystérieuse, il avait écrit plusieurs poèmes qui restent jusqu'aujourd'hui comme des modèles exemplaires de l'innovation poétique, entre eux Le Bateau ivre et les livres Une Saison en Enfer et Illuminations dans lequel Départ est trouvé. Rimbaud est mort le 9 mai 1891.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, France, on October 20, 1854. The son of soldier and a peasant, he wrote his first poems, in Latin, at the age of thirteen. In 1870, he ran away to Paris, where he began a tumultuous literary career that lasted until 1876, when he left France for Indonesia and, eventually, Africa. Before this mysterious disapperance, Rimbaud wrote numerous poems that remain exemplary models of poetic innovation. Among them are The Drunken Boat and the books A Season in Hell and Illuminations, in which Départ appears. Rimbaud died May 9, 1891.