two distinct truths of summer

inarguably
summer has a collar and a cuff

fern

the bloodcord snaps

"Poem For A Daughter" (and for a Son) by Anne Stevenson

"I think I'm going to have it,"
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
"Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it."
A judgement years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first, particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but a part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.
 

dear spectre of mist I know this is dreaming

from: Selected Poems, "Poems For Blok", by Marina Tsvetaeva
(translated by Elaine Feinstein)

from:  9

A weak shaft of light through the blackness of hell is
your voice under the rumble of exploding shells

in that thunder like a seraph he is announcing
in a toneless voice, from somewhere else, some

ancient misty morning he inhabits, how he
loved us, who are blind and nameless       who

share the blue cloak of       sinful treachery
and more tenderly than anyone loved the woman who

sank more daringly than any into the night       of evil,
and of his love for  you, Russia, which he cannot end.

from:  6

Thinking him      human      they
decided to kill him, and
now he's dead.  For ever.
-Weep.  For the dead angel.

At the day's setting, he
sang the evening beauty.

from :  10

Look there he is, weary from foreign parts,
a leader without body-guard

there - he is drinking a mountain stream from his hands
a prince without native land.

He has everything in his holy princedom there
Army, bread and mother.

Lovely is your inheritance.

untitled

From: Diario de Poeta y Mar,  "Rose of the Sea", by Juan Ramón Jiménez
(translated by James Wright)

The white moon takes the sea away from the sea
and gives it back to the sea.  Beautiful,
conquering by means of the pure and tranquil,
the moon compels the truth to delude itself
that it is truth become whole, eternal, solitary,
though it is not so.

                            Yes,

                                   Divine plainness,
you pierce the familiar certainty, you place
a new soul into whatever is real.
Unpredictable rose! you took the rose away
from the rose, and you could give back
the rose to the rose.