Citizen tax collector,
honestly, the poet
spends a fortune on words…
Suppose
only half a dozen
unheard-of rhymes were left,
in, say, Venezuela.
And so
I’m drawn
to North and South.
I rush around
entangled in advances and loans.

Citizen!
Consider my traveling expenses:
Poetry –
all of it –
is a journey to the unknown.


(Trans. from Russian by Max Hayward, George Reavey)


Big Book Of Poetry

“I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.” – C.P. Cavafy, “In the Same Space”

"The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning.” – Gautama Buddha, Fire Sermon

“Wanderer tritt still herein;
Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle.
Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein” - Georg Trakl, “Ein Winterabend”*



So much unfinished business that the mind
Keeps, running over and over to lick old bones

Seasons roll like lovers over the unnoticing body
Rain changes to mist, mist to sun and wind,

All in a winter morning’s hours. Yet we see
Very little of these presences, this time

A friend writes, “The taxi on way home, Wendell
Berry on the radio, and me bursting into tears”

What we forget to remember always, I suppose,
Is this feeling of radiance, which sometimes comes

Unexpectedly in silence, with bread, wine, words,
Beyond the great fires, beyond pain’s threshold.



January 2, Dhamma Siri, Kaufman Texas

*a translation here


My Poems

"Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns" ~ Ingeborg Bachmann

He is wearing a garland of roses
And also a crown of memories.

No Romans at his back, and now
The only cross he carries is composed

Of clocks' ticking hands. Tonight,
There is a hungry feast he is supposed

To be at, but he appears to have lost
The invitation. These footprints

In the snow - the shade of roses.
Did Orpheus climb out of earth,

Alone with his defeat somewhere here?
Dusklight through frost’s glaze rainbows,

And takes him to the cathedral that was
Her throat in the middle of a song.

The wolf will rend this memory to pieces,
And night will be lit by the thorns,

Wedded to his rose-hued palms.

December 2009, Washington DC


My Poems