Short Poems

Forever nameless
Forever unknwon
Forever unconceived
Forever unrepresented
yet forever felt in the soul.

Om jeg før har elsket? — Sandt at sige,
Har jeg altid, troer jeg, giort deslige;
Mange paastaae selv, jeg vidt det drev.
Hvis jeg husker ret, jeg og har noget
Digtet, for at øve mig i Sproget ,
Før jeg Digtene til Nanna skrev.

She is so beguiling
That when she beckons
I can run a mile
In twenty seconds.

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.


Translated by Robert Hass

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Her beauty is the bourne thought cannot pass;
And the angel of the heart's intelligence,
Young Love, might deem that boundary infinite,
So he within the glamour of her eyes,
As in some ether too thin to be weighed,
Might breathe for ever.

A man saw the whole world as a grinning skull and cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat on his eardrums. Music washed something or other inside him. Music broke down and rebuilt something or other in his head and heart. He joined in five encores for the young Russian Jew with the fiddle. When he got outside his heels hit the sidewalk a new way.

speak, sir, and be wise.
Speak choosing your words, sir, like an old woman over a bushel of apples.

Band concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.

Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, gigglers daffy with life’s razzle dazzle.

OLTRE tomba
Qualche cosa?
E che ne dici?
Saremo felici?
Terra mai posa,
E mar rimbomba.