C. P. Cavafy: “Ithaka”

Video kudos: babyloniaman

Abraham Sutzkever: “שפּילצײג / Toys”

שפּילצײג (original Yiddish text)

TOYS

My daughter, you must care for your toys,
Poor things, they’re even smaller than you.
Every night, when the fire goes to sleep,
Cover them with the stars of the tree.

Let the golden pony graze
The cloudy sweetness of the field.
Lace up the little boy’s boots
When the sea-eagle blows cold.

Tie a straw hat on your doll
And put a bell in her hand.
For not one of them has a mother,
And so they cry out to God.

Love them, your little princesses—
I remember a cursed night
When there were dolls left in all seven streets
Of the city.  And not one child.

—Abraham Sutzkever

Translated from Yiddish by Chana Bloch

B. H. Fairchild: “Body and Soul”

BODY AND SOUL
Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins
to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story
about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.
These were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties
and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,
sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music
whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to
where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores
and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul
in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep
lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking
Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.
Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,
another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

tricycle form–”…it is all one can do to remember…”

It is all one can do to remember
the dark warmth that was immortality,
so much colder now.  Abandoned forever
 
for this coil of möbius memory
that turns and twists away from the plane 
and the sharp pull of flat reality,

turning and twisting to ever sustain
some urgent momentum to recover
delirious paths away from the pain 

of the broken gods underfoot, after
the fall, after the immortality
that is all one can do to remember.

M. Salomon

Photo–Wasteland by duesentrieb