after Zagajewski’s “My Favorite Poets,” trans. Clare Cavanagh
They wouldn’t have understood
this world, probably, those firm
believers in the horizon. They caressed
potatoes like a father his sleeping
son’s hair. They knew lust
and how to speak it, didn’t petrify
their fears into a yoke and blunder
about the mill in circles, grunting
and calling it song. They counted
themselves alive when the spring
air loosened around the village.
What do I know. They swam
in clear rivers or didn’t; they held
their lovers too tight, ate mostly
with their hands when alone.
They paused under a shooting star
to wonder at its mockery
of orbit, then fell again quickly
to the furrows with unchanged vigor.
What they planted still grows
in the dark behind my eyes.
Their tongues were scraped
and honed with strange language.
They knew almost nothing
and may have been happy. But they
are visible in the sags and seams
of my face. They perch on my shoulders,
featherweight grotesques, and I
stoop. They are inside my hiding
from the blind heat of summer
and inside the ecstatic burst of tomato
in my mouth. They are here when
my son draws on scraps of cardboard.
These stick figures could be anyone,
his family. With their perfect circle
faces they look like anyone partial,
anyone floating alone in the white space.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 2.
Dan Rosenberg is the author of Bassinet (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022), cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012). He has also written two chapbooks, Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn, 2015) and A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press, 2010), and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome (Zephyr Press, 2016). He is the chair of the English department at Wells College, where he teaches literature, creative writing, and translation theory.
See all items about Dan Rosenberg