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and tripled by your tumultuous poses!

O fatty dishes of love!

 

Their skinny sisters woke up earlier,

before dawn broke and shone upon the painting.

And no one saw how they went single file

along the canvas's unpainted side.

 

Exiled by style. Only their ribs stood out.

With birdlike feet and palms, they strove

to take wing on their jutting shoulder blades.

 

The thirteenth century would have given them golden halos.

The twentieth, silver screens.

The seventeenth, alas, holds nothing for the unvoluptuous.

 

For even the sky bulges here

with pudgy angels and a chubby god—

thick-whiskered Phoebus, on a sweaty steed,

riding straight into the seething bedchamber.

 

 

Poised beneath a twig-wigged tree,

she spills her sparkling vocal powder:

slippery sound slivers, silvery

like spider's spittle, only louder.

 

Oh yes, she Cares (with a high C)

for Fellow Humans (you and me);

for us she'll twitter nothing bitter;

she'll knit her fitter, sweeter glitter;

her vocal cords mince words for us

and crumble croutons, with crisp crunch

(lunch for her little lambs to munch)

into a cream-filled demitasse.

 

But hark! It's dark! Oh doom too soon!

She's threatened by the black bassoon!

It's hoarse and coarse, it's grim and gruff,

it calls her dainty voice's bluff—

Basso Profundo, end this terror,

do-re-mi mene tekel et cetera!

 

You want to silence her, abduct her

to our chilly life behind the scenes?

To our Siberian steppes of stopped-up sinuses,

frogs in all throats, eternal hems and haws,

where we, poor souls, gape soundlessly

like fish? And this is what you wish?

 

Oh nay! Oh nay! Though doom be nigh,

she'll keep her chin and pitch up high!

Her fate is hanging by a hair

of voice so thin it sounds like
air,

but that's enough for her to take

a breath and soar, without a break,

chandelierward; and while she's there,

her vox humana crystal-clears

the whole world up. And we're all ears.

 

 

From scalp to sole, all muscles in slow motion.

The ocean of his torso drips with lotion.

The king of all is he who preens and wrestles

with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels.

 

Onstage, he grapples with a grizzly bear

the deadlier for not really being there.

Three unseen panthers are in turn laid low,

each with one smoothly choreographed blow.

 

He grunts while showing his poses and paces.

His back alone has twenty different faces.

The mammoth fist he raises as he wins

is tribute to the force of vitamins.

 

 

To be a boxer, or not to be there

at all. O Muse, where are
our
teeming crowds?

Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare—

it's time to start this cultural affair.

Half came inside because it started raining,

the rest are relatives. O Muse.

 

The women here would love to rant and rave,

but that's for boxing. Here they must behave.

Dante's Inferno is ringside nowadays.

Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

 

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet,

one sentenced to hard shelleying for life,

for lack of muscles forced to show the world

the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists

with luck. O Muse,

O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

 

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore:

he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more,

she's making him that tart she used to bake.

Aflame, but carefully—don't burn his cake!—

we start to read. O Muse.

 

 

Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses,

the authoress of verse. Eternal rest

was granted her by earth, although the corpse

had failed to join the avant-garde, of course.

The plain grave? There's poetic justice in it,

this ditty-dirge, the owl, the burdock. Passerby,

take out your compact Compu-Brain and try

to weigh Szymborska's fate for half a minute.

 

 

He made himself a glass violin so he could see what music looks like. He dragged his boat to the mountain's peak and waited for the sea to reach his level. At night, he got engrossed in railway schedules: the terminals moved him to tears. He grew rozes with a “z.” He wrote one poem to cure baldness, and another on the same subject. He broke the clock at City Hall to stop the leaves from falling once and for all. He planned to excavate a city in a pot of chives. He walked with the globe chained to his leg, very slowly, smiling, happy as two times two is two. When they said he didn't exist, he couldn't die of grief, so he had to be born. He's already out there living somewhere; he blinks his little eyes and grows. Just in time! The very nick of time! Our Most Gracious Lady, Our Wise and Sweet Lady Machine will soon have need of a fool like this for her fit amusement and innocent pleasure.

 

 

If the gods' favorites die young—

what to do with the rest of your life?

Old age is a precipice,

that is, if youth is a peak.

 

I won't budge.

I'll stay young if I have to do it on one leg.

I'll latch onto the air

with whiskers thin as a mouse's squeak.

In this posture I'll be born over and over.

It's the only art I know.

 

But these things will always be me:

the magic gloves,

the boutonniere left from my first masquerade,

the falsetto of youthful manifestos,

the face straight from a seamstress's dream about a croupier,

the eyes I loved to pluck out in my paintings

and scatter like peas from a pod,

because at that sight a twitch ran through the dead thighs

of the public frog.

 

 

 

 

Be amazed, you too.

Be amazed: for all of Diogenes' tubs,

I still beat him as conceptualist.

Pray

for your eternal test.

What I hold in my hands

are the spiders that I dip in Chinese ink

and fling against the canvas.

I enter the world once more.

A new navel blooms

on the artist's belly.

* * *

 

 

 

I am too close for him to dream of me.

I don't flutter over him, don't flee him

beneath the roots of trees. I am too close.

The caught fish doesn't sing with my voice.

The ring doesn't roll from my finger.

I am too close. The great house is on fire

without me calling for help. Too close

for one of my hairs to turn into the rope

of the alarm bell. Too close to enter

as the guest before whom walls retreat.

I'll never die again so lightly,

so far beyond my body, so unknowingly

as I did once in his dream. I am too close,

too close. I hear the word hiss

and see its glistening scales as I lie motionless

in his embrace. He's sleeping,

more accessible at this moment to an usherette

he saw once in a traveling circus with one lion

than to me, who lies at his side.

A valley now grows within him for her,

rusty-leaved, with a snowcapped mountain at one end

rising in the azure air. I am too close

to fall from that sky like a gift from heaven.

 

 

 

 

My cry could only waken him. And what

a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,

when I used to be a birch, a lizard

shedding times and satin skins

in many shimmering hues. And I possessed

the gift of vanishing before astonished eyes,

which is the richest of all. I am too close,