Learning

1.
She went to a blog,
read a poem
he'd written

about a girl
he saw, whom he'd thought to
jump over the bar top for.

(She read this
a hundred years
after her departure,
a thousand years
before her return.)

Yet she sank into herself,
warm with the glory of his words,
chilled by the distance

of his world
and hers.
The growing
parting seas
between them.
A single ship that
never made its return.

2.
Today, she is separating laundry.
Today, she notices the burn scars
on the ironing board.
Today, she accepts the irony
of casual casualties between lovers.

Yesterday, she threw the whites
in with the colors.

3.
She will trace his body as memory with her
chalk-white fingertips
against the blue-grey asphalt
trying to recall

the difference between
murder
and
suicide.

Do Not Accept

Do not accept these rains that come too late.
Better to linger. Make your pain
An image of the desert. Say it's said
And do not look to the west. Refuse

To surrender. Try this year too
To live alone in the long summer,
Eat your drying bread, refrain
From tears. And do not learn from

Experience. Take as an example my youth,
My return late at night, what has been written
In the rain of yesteryear. It makes no difference

Now. See your events as my events.
Everything will be as before: Abraham will again
Be Abram. Sarah will be Sarah.

Yehuda Amichai
Translated by Benjamin & Barbara Harshav

A Precise Woman

A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
the wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.

A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)


Translated by Chana Bloch

Yehuda Amichai

사막의 사랑

사랑을 하는 일도
사랑을 받는 일만큼 힘이 듭니다.
간밤에는 바람이 불고 후드득 빗소리가 들리더니
이 새벽길은 나무며 지불들이
모두가 촉촉이 젖어 있습니다.
마음이란 깃털보다 가벼워서
당신의 숨소리 하나에도
이렇게 연기처럼 흔들립니다.
오늘은 당신의 목소리조차 볼 수가 없으므로
나는 사막으로 밀려가야 합니다.
모래의 오르막을 오르고
모래의 내리막을 내리고
모래의 끝없는 벌판을 지나 나는 갑니다.
우리 일용할 빵 하나의 모양으로 떠 있는 태양 아래
내 몸이 소금처럼 하얗게 바래질 때
그때,
멀리 떠오르는 당신.
그 신기루처럼 투명한 그리움.

홍영철

지하 인간

내 이름은 스물두 살
한 이십 년쯤 부질 없이 보냈네.

무덤이 둥근 것은
성실한 자들의 자랑스런 면류관 때문인데
이대로 땅밑에 발목 꽂히면
나는 그곳에서 얼마나 부끄러우랴?
후회의 뼈들이 바위틈 열고 나와
가로등 아래 불안스런 그림자들 서성이고
알만한 새들이 자꾸 날아와 소문과 멸시로 얼룩진
잡풀 속 내 비석을 뜯어먹으리

씁쓸하여도 오늘은 죽지 말자
앞으로 살아야 할 많은 날들은
지금껏 살았던 날에 대한
말없는 찬사이므로.



-장정일

Sharing

The wave is pulling toward the rock's edge.
The crash is heard
miles away.

The children playing in the sand feel the sudden chill;
they gather their shovels and pails
and begin to dig a grave.

Privilege of Being

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shutter pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

Robert Hass (b. 1941)