Wait by C. K. Williams Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there […]
Eating Poetry (XVII) – Metaphysical Darkness
1. Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst […]
Eating Poetry (XVI) – Two Poems to Mark a Moment
Yehuda Amichai (Ludwig Pfeuffer) was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, […]
Eating Poetry* (X)
Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-Mart on New Year’s Day by Campbell McGrath Beneath a ten-foot-tall apparition of Frosty the Snowman with his corncob pipe and jovial, over-eager, button-black eyes, holding, in my palm, the leathery, wine-colored purse of a pomegranate, I realize, yet again, that America is a country about which I understand everything and […]
Eating Poetry* (VII): for the New Year
Be Drunk Charles Baudelaire Translated by Louis Simpson You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or […]