The Love of an Orange, Dahlia Ravikovitch

(Translated By Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld)

An orange did love  
The man who ate it.  
A feast for the eyes  
Is a fine repast;  
Its heart held fast  
His greedy gaze.  

A citron did scold:  
I am wiser than thou.  
A cedar condoled:  
Indeed thou shalt die!  
And who can revive  
A withered bough?  

The citron did urge:  
O fool, be wise.  
The cedar did rage:  
Slander and sin!  
Repent of thy ways  
For a fool I despise.  

An orange did love  
With life and limb  
The man who ate it,  
The man who flayed it.  

An orange did love  
The man who ate it,  
To its flayer it brought  
Flesh for the teeth.  

An orange, consumed  
By the man who ate it,  
Invaded his skin  
To the flesh beneath.

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The Difficulty with a Tree, Russell Edson

A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman’s attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.
         Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.
         Look out, you’ll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.
         The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.
         The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I’ll kill you!

         Her husband seeing the commotion came running crying, what tree has lost patience?
         The ax the ax, damnfool, the ax, she screamed.
         Oh no, roared the tree dragging its long roots rhythmically limping like a sea lion towards her husband.
         But oughtn’t we to talk about this? cried her husband.
         But oughtn’t we to talk about this, mimicked his wife.
         But what is this all about? he cried.
         When you see me killing something you should reason that it will want to kill me back, she screamed.

         But before her husband could decide what next action to perform the tree had killed both the wife and her husband.
         Before the woman died she screamed, now do you see?
         He said, what…? And then he died.

Lorine Niedecker

My mother saw the green tree toad
on the window sill
her first one
since she was young.
We saw it breathe

and swell up round.
My youth is no sure sign
I’ll find this kind of thing
tho it does sing.
Let’s take it in

I said so grandmother can see
but she could not
it changed to brown
and town
changed us, too.

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April, Alicia Ostriker

The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing their e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting their pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in their brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals’ piss at their feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singing along in all the wastebaskets

Sad Wine (II), Cesare Pavese

Translated By Geoffrey Brock

The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed.
Everything else will come easy. Three sips
and the impulse returns to sit thinking alone.
Against the buzzing backdrop of noise
everything fades, and it’s suddenly a miracle
to be born and to stare at the glass. And work
(a man who’s alone can’t not think of work)
becomes again the old fate that suffering’s good
for focusing thought. And soon the eyes fix
on nothing particular, grieved, as if blind.

If this man gets up and goes home to sleep,
he’ll look like a blind man that’s lost. Anyone
could jump out of nowhere to brutally beat him.
A woman—beautiful, young—might appear,
and lie under a man in the street, and moan,
the way a woman once moaned under him.
But this man doesn’t see. He heads home to sleep
and life becomes nothing but the buzzing of silence.

Undressing this man you’d find a body that’s wasted
and, here and there, patches of fur. Who’d think,
to look at this man, that life once burned
in his lukewarm veins? No one would guess
that there was a woman, once, who gently touched
that body, who kissed that body, which shakes,
and wet it with tears, now that the man,
having come home to sleep, can’t sleep, only moan.