Like a Flower in the Far Meadow
(After Catullus, C11)
My love, you who would travel with me
to India, to the end of the world,
where the eastern waves rush to the shore
with adeep murmur;
or set out for Persia, for the far east,
to Delian, Samarkand, all the way to China,
or where the seven-mouthed Nile
colours the waves
and, in an instant, climb the high Alps to look
at Europe’s mighty monuments, the wide-
flowing Rhine, the Spaniards, the far away islands
beyond the cold seas –
wherever the Heavens would have me –
To you, who are fond of journeying
but don’t give a damn about me, I say these
harsh words:
Go there with others, flourish in your adultery!
Take on a legion if five don’t suffice,
drain them out all at once or one after another,
breaking their loins again and again;
but do not look for my love,
cut down by your faults like a flower,
which in the farthest of meadows
was shorn by a plough.
* * * * *
Not in Noah’s Flood
They say, we write to remember and we read
to forget. Ignorant of either impulse, I wished I could
write to grow up, especially the letter Y.
I’d been practicing Y since I first saw it printed
on the covers of American picture books
arriving in U.N.R.A. parcels, safely tucked away
up in the attic. Y never failed to impress me,
looking both like girls’ legs pressed together
and the forked sprigs we broke off from the alder
trees to place our fishing rods onto when we were
going after the dace; and in my dizzier moments,
like the throats, slit open by broken bottlenecks,
of long coated dark men in cheery hats, who,
a few pages on, turned into corpses, floating in
booze or drowning in some other disastrous liquid,
but not, for all I could see, in Noah’s flood.
* * * * *
Where Are You?
I am sitting in the doorway
under the light; the grass is darkening,
the stream below the house
sounds clearer. I’ve been waiting
for I don’t know what, for you
to call me, for weeks. And now—
not in the house, here outside,
from over the hill, from the stream,
from the wind through the branches,
your voice sounds, soft and clear—
Where are you, what are you doing?
Moths are settling on my head.
They are drawn to what’s in there
and want to get to you.