Piotr Sommer

Street Songs

Translated from the Polish by Andrew Gorski

I had something to say

The doors were thrown wide open

In my sleep I laughed out loud and shouted

and all the words lapsed into dream.

I had something to take note of

that no one else could see

I walked out onto the street and looked

Stumbled and fell into an open dream.

I walked along holding a child’s hand

and not wanting to talk with him in verse

And waking I still remembered

how much I didn’t want to pull him into my dream.

Osiris 27, 1988

Françoise Hàn

Chocs obscurs

Le souvenir de nos paysages

ne sauvera pas la beauté du monde
quand le dernier soleil sera parti

demain
gare désertée
sous les caméras de surveillance

en suspens
attendant que la traversent
des voyageurs en route vers un ailleurs
inimaginable

ou couloir aux portes numérotées
pour des errants assignés à résidence

Osiris 72

Denisa Comănescu


Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin & Irma Giannetti

The Fire Tower

After the candles too forsake us
like a lantern built step by step
the earth will suddenly glow
unhoped-for diamond
souls will wander without shadows
they will seek one another without their
knees shaking.

Icons banished
the shape of memory burned away
a star will kindle brightly
darkness held at an impasse.

Osiris 72

Carmen Firan

Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin & Carmen Firan

CONSPIRACY

as soon as I turn my gaze
flowers bloom
nuns throw off their habits and cowls
and raise their eyes to the sky as if everything’s there
the river shrugs out of its channel
larvae dress in iridescent butterfly wings
so as to confound our expectations
neglected objects withdraw into themselves
and conspire against separation—
time-worn ropes tethered to a pair of fixed points:
the water we emerged from and the water we pass into
floating white petals blush
as soon as I turn my gaze

OSIRIS 68

Dag T. Straumsvåg

Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin & the author

RETIRED PRIVATE DETECTIVE

He could hear this sound deep inside himself, a munching sound, like someone gnawing on a leg bone. He suspects his ex-wife, then his neighbor. A few months later he begins to limp. Maybe the limp was planted there. He moves to another city, changes his name. He can still hear the munching. He grows older. He grows shorter. He suspects everyone. People die and leave him trinkets in their wills. Other parts of him go limp. He loses his hair. He investigates himself. Each morning he wakes to a silvery plane buzzing out of the sun, dropping breakfast in his mouth without spilling.

OSIRIS 64

Leonard Cirino

A BEAUTIFUL OVAL

My voice is quiet, with a single bird
as its companion, somewhere in the tree,
here in the wind, altogether lost
in the forest with the dreams of oaks
and beetles, bark and wounded cedars.

And here one sees the silence the moon
sinks into its caves and craters,
its gouged-out skin with a reptile’s surface
and its jagged edge of a file flaring
like flint, the stone that brings fire.

Then the voice takes off with the bird, ogling
the moon, a beautiful disc with painted eyes.

OSIRIS 64

Nathaniel Tarn

Winter Oasis

It is snowing violently behind my eyes

as I try to sleep,

out there the dancing prairie falcon

is pressed into the ground,

the bright hawk

flamboyant as a kite in the sun

turns raven against the clouds

and the solitaire, a grey ghost

peers through the French windows to see me pass

and does not, and is at his most alone.

It is snowing behind my eyes

with more determination

than the snow shows outside: a childhood toy

glass ball filled with a city drowned in flakes.

The mountains sleep fiercely behind clouds

we wait for their liberation with impatience.

Soon, I will go down into the arroyo

lined with tall piñons where the owl

threads his secret way when I wake him.

I will be more asleep than I ever am

enclosed in the moving walls of dream

before the moments fall again, one after one,

glinting in sunlight, each one like a knife.

Osiris 22, 1986