Eternity Comes Down on the Side of Love

We present this work in honor of Morocco’s Proclamation of Independence.

I don’t love myself although I am my closest neighbor.

The image of a man leaping on the Moon is no more extraordinary than the immobile stone.

This man is ill. His illness is social. His illness is called hate. He lives, but takes care of himself by hating others.

This comic copies someone who doesn’t exist.

It’s the barque shows the waves in the sea.

Peace is not for export, war is.

There are curtesies rendered for lack for nobleness.

She brings me a glass of thirst. She drinks it with me.

My hands complete, O wonder, the stone in her breasts!

Rock drawings await me at a young girl’s. I must copy them onto my life. Whether she knows it or not.

Steps, sparks on the journey.

Silence, a side effect of the infinite.

Funny: the raindrop fallen on a tree keeps clinging to the branch before dropping to the ground.

A certain poet withdraws into the world.

What I love in this Flemish painter: he paints the inaudible.

A stone: feet planted in silence, head in immobility.

Inert, the stone can face the absolute.

Inertness rises from the stone like the very first dream.

For the stone, immobility is work.

Translation by Rosmarie Waldrop

Nothing More

We present this work in honor of the 10th anniversary of the poet’s death.

With this money
I will buy
a bouquet of sky
and one meter of sea
a point of star,
a sun of truth,
a kilo of wind,
and nothing more.

I Have a Rendezvous with Life

We present this work in honor of the 75th anniversary of the poet’s death.

I have a rendezvous with Life,
In days I hope will come,
Ere youth has sped, and strength of mind,
Ere voices sweet grow dumb.
I have a rendezvous with Life,
When Spring’s first heralds hum.
Sure some would cry it’s better far
To crown their days with sleep
Than face the road, the wind and rain,
To heed the calling deep.
Though wet nor blow nor space I fear,
Yet fear I deeply, too,
Lest Death should meet and claim me ere
I keep Life’s rendezvous.

Against This Death

We present this work in honor of the 15th anniversary of the poet’s death.

I have seen respectable
death
served up like bread and wine
in stores and offices,
in club and hostel,
and from the streetcorner
church
that faces
two ways
I have seen death
served up
like ice.

Against this death,
slow, certain:
the body,
this burly sun,
the exhalations
of your breath,
your cheeks
rose and lovely,
and the secret
life
of the imagination
scheming freedom
from labour
and stone.

Love

We present this work in honor of the 10th anniversary of the poet’s death.

How terrible was the flame
In which together we once burned
In the end an ember remains
And the usual happens, even to us.
That’s not ash, that last trace of fire
Shows our daily work. And how precious
this tiny bit of warmth, I learned
in this worst year
of all my years.
Should another winter like this come
and another such snow fall upon me
Only this warmth can save me
from death. What else
should hold me? What remains of our Love:
We had each other. No grass
will grow over us, no stone
so long as this ember glows.

So long as there’s an ember
there might be fire…

Translation by Grace Andreacchi

At the Threshold of the Book

We present this work in honor of the 30th anniversary of the poet’s death.

“What is going on behind this door?”
“A book is shedding its leaves.”
“What is the story of the book?”
“Becoming aware of a scream.”
“I saw rabbis go in.”
“They are privileged readers. They come in small groups to give us their comments.”
“Have they read the book?”
“They are reading it.”
“Did they happen by for the fun of it?”
“They foresaw the book. They are prepared to encounter it.”
“Do they know the characters?”
“They know our martyrs.”
“Where is the book set?”
“In the book.”
“Who are you?”
“I am the keeper of the house.”
“Where do you come from?”
“I have wandered.”
“Is Yukel your friend?”
“I am like Yukel.”
“What is your lot?”
“To open the book.”
“Are you in the book?”
“My place is at the threshold.”
“What have you tried to learn?”
“I sometimes stop on the road to the sources and question the signs, the world of my ancestors.”
“You examine recaptured words.”
“The nights and mornings of the syllables which are mine, yes.”
“Your mind is wandering.”
“I have been wandering for two thousand years.”
“I have trouble following you.”
“I, too, have often tried to give up.”
“Do we have a tale here?”
“My story has been told so many times.”
“What is your story?”
“Ours, insofar as it is absent.”
“I do not understand.”
“Speaking tortures me.”
“Where are you?”
“In what I say.”
“What is your truth?”
“What lacerates me.”
“And your salvation?”
“Forgetting what I said.”
“May I come in? It is getting dark.”
“In each word there burns a wick.”
“May I come in? It is getting dark around my soul.”
“It is dark around me, too.”
“What can you do for me?”
“Your share of luck is in yourself.”
“Writing for the sake of writing does nothing but show contempt.”
“Man is a written bond and place.”
“I hate what is said in place I have left behind.”
“You trade in the future, which is immediately translated. What you have left is you without you.”
“You oppose me to myself. How could I ever win this fight?”
“Defeat is the price agreed on.”
“You are a Jew, and you talk like one.”
“The four letters JUIF which designate my origin are your four fingers. You can use your thumb to crush me.”
“You are a Jew, and you talk like one. But I am cold. It is dark. Let me come into the house.”
“There is a lamp on my table. And the house is in the book.”
“So I will live in the house after all.”
“You will follow the book, whose every page is an abyss where the wing shines with the name.”

Translation by Rosmarie Waldrop

A Song for the New Year

We present this work in honor of New Year’s Day.

The Year of the Sorrows went out with great wind:
Lift up, lift up, O broken hearts, your Lord is kind,
And He shall call His flock home where no storms be
Into a sheltered haven out of sound of the sea.

There shall be bright sands there and a milken hill,
They shall lie in the sun there and drink their fill,
They shall have dew and shade there and grass to the knee,
Safe in a sheltered haven out of sound of the sea.

He shall bind their wounds up and their tears shall cease:
They shall have sweetest pillows and a bed of ease.
Come up, come up and hither, O little flock, saith He,
Ye shall have sheltered havens out of sound of the sea.

The first day of New Year strewed the sea with dead.
Lift up, lift up, O broken heart and hanging head!
The Lord walks on the waters and a Shepherd is He
They shall have sheltered havens out of sound of the sea.

New Year’s Resolution

We present this work in honor of New Year’s Eve.

Well, I did it again, bringing in
that infant Purity across the land,
welcoming Innocence with gin
in New York, waiting up
to help Chicago,
Denver, L.A., Fairbanks, Honolulu–and now
the high school bands are alienating Dallas,
and girls in gold and tangerine
have lost all touch with Pasadena,
and young men with muscles and missing teeth
are dreaming of personal fouls,
and it’s all beginning again, just like
those other Januaries in
instant reply.

But I’ve had enough
of turning to look back, the old
post-morteming of defeat:
people I loved but didn’t touch,
friends I haven’t seen for years,
strangers who smiled but didn’t speak–failures,
failures. No,
I refuse to leave it at that, because
somewhere, off camera,
January is coming like Venus
up from the murk of December, re-virginized, as innocent
of loss as any dawn. Resolved: this year
I’m going to break my losing streak,
I’m going to stay alert, reach out,
speak when not spoken to,
read the minds of people in the streets.
I’m going to practice every day,
stay in training, and be moderate
in all things.
All things but love.

The Historian’s Complaint

We present this work in honor of the 25th anniversary of the poet’s death.

In the fourth book of the Annals Tacitus complains
About the duration of peacetime, seldom interrupted
By silly border wars with whose description he
Has to make do, filled with envy
Of the historians before him
Who had mammoth wars at their disposal
Conducted by emperors who thought Rome was not grand enough
Subjugated nations, captured kings
Uprisings and state crises: great stuff.
And Tacitus apologizes to his readers.
As for me two thousand years after him
I have no need to apologize and can not
Complain about the lack of great stuff.

Translation by Carl Weber