Raquel Chaves

LIFE OF RELATION

.

I am in relation to the wind.

That which brings me your voice.

.

I have a friendship with the rose.

.

It's bloom, its thorns come

from you.

I already knew the bird

that in the mornings

visits my window.

It has not arrived with you.

.

I was left carrying on through the rain.

It has brought water

like my eyes, looking at you.

Czeslaw Milosz

FORGET

.

Forget the suffering

You caused others.

Forget the suffering

others caused you.

The waters run and run

Springs sparkle and are done.

You walk the earth you are forgetting.

.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain

What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?

A childlike sun grows warm.

A grandson and a great-grandson are born.

You are led by the hand once again.

.

The names of the rivers remain with you

How endless those rivers seem!

Your fields lie fallow.

The city towers are not as they were.

You stand at the threshold mute.

Guillermo Juan Parra

EVIL STANZAS

.

No spirit seek rest here

-Steven Spender

.

I

Breath defines length of line

As does notebook shape/size

.

Yesterday afternoon hearing

Archie Shepp play

.

full breathe, rich-toned

saxophone chords

I think language can do

this too/

.

to make feeling evident

sound with evil stanzas

.

As one sufferer said:

unto us blessings are denied

.

Making some characteristic failure

our tautness - a trance

.

II

after Juan Sanchez Pelaez

.

If snow falls now

on a street without course

nor sign,

myriad shades inquire,

from the foyer,

if our entry is fleeting;

will it last or not.

And they point toward

the actual path,

always being attentive

or dressed in night cloth.

.

Thus,

from what north or south,

from what east or west,

these prompt shadows arrive

or amble

through fields

.

in stables and cottages,

no one knows

save through a dusk's thin beam,

when we can glimpse the absent

when our big hands

talking alone

open toward the other cold.

Jose Gorostiza

THE EDGE OF THE SEA

.

Sea of no water nor sand.

.

Simple sound of water and foam

neither water nor sand making the sea.

.

The discreet things kind and simple;

coming together at the edges,

.

The same as the desiring of a kiss,

sea of no water or sand.

.

The things I look for, dead;

lonely, desolate like a desert.

.

Sometimes welling up in tears

for it exists as sorrow.

Sea of no water nor sand.

Tomas Transtromer

OUTSKIRTS

.

Men in overalls the same colour as earth rise from a ditch.

It's a transitional place, a stalemate, neither country nor city.

Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,

but the clocks are against it.

Concrete piping scattered about laps at the light with cold tongues.

Auto-body shops occupy old barns.

Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.

And these sites keep on getting bigger

like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for

burying strangers."

Raquel Chavez

NO ONE KNOWS

.

love-- I don't know

your word.

It could be

latitude outside-

space.

It gets to be

the lost hope.

Everything happens;

in my dream silence,

this worn out sphere,

and it brings us

to live fully.

Li Shang-yin

THE PATTERNED LUTE

.

Mere chance that the patterned lute has fifty strings.

String and fret, one by one, recall the blossoming years.

Chang-tzu dreams at sunrise that a butterfly lost its way.

Wang-ti bequeathed his spring passion to the night jar.

The moon is full on the vast sea, a tear on the pearl.

On Blue Mountain the sun warms, a smoke issues from the jade.

Did it wait, this mood, to mature with hind sight?

In a trance from the beginning, then as now.