Laura Wittner
The Walk
Pure Summer
Changes of Light
A Walk
Trying to
recapture that floating feeling
that existed once
or twice at best
in each
relationship or activity,
the person leaves
his house, tests the air,
adjusts his
posture, and sets out
only to find
himself wandering
among scenes from
which he hopes for too much --
very green
overgrown ivy hanging
like rags from
concertina wire,
yellow lights,
disconcertingly bright,
whose formation
suggests
a so-called
planetarium,
silver-painted
graffiti, and a train
passing just now
overhead --
in other words,
all sorts of
suggestive things
that would have
had to yield something
if the cable of
this reasoning
had not at some
point been cut.
—Translated from the Spanish by Mark Dow
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Pure Summer
The heat brought
permanent buzzing:
a murmur of
electrified buildings
balances immense
stillness.
Window after
window
shows someone
stretched out reading
beside bedside
insectivore lamps.
A few scenes
illuminated
by television. Two that offer
freshly washed
body parts.
At midnight the
sky roars like an ocean.
Below, the wind
drags light objects
against hard
surfaces,
whisks forms
meters upward
that seconds later
land. Lawn chairs
on balconies
though folded
fall flat.
Someone crosses
the patio with a flashlight
wondering how to
stop the flooding.
Something
somewhere
flickers in the
memory
and currents of
thought
that flowed freely
at first afterward
fizzle. The skin
is moist
in a couple of
ways.
It becomes
impossible to tease out
what one remembers
from what one read
from what one
thinks one needs to think about.
It becomes clear
that there is nothing to understand.
—Translated from the
Spanish by Mark Dow
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Changes of Light
The clouds decide
what this half-light does to us, it
seems an entire
family of clouds is migrating
overnight which is
why they hurry one
behind another in
this vaporous line
crossing,
fortunately, in front of the moon
and it's the hurry
that takes them apart as they go, giving
up instantly on
any one form, putting ideas
in our heads, in
yours and in mine, so we mutter the word
for what we see
but by the second syllable stop
because it's not
that, it's being something else so
no definition can
take it.
—Translated from the
Spanish by Mark Dow
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Laura Wittner is the
author of four books of poems, most recently La tomadora de café (Buenos Aires: Ediciones VOX, 2005).
She has translated poets Charles Tomlinson, Charles Reznikoff, James
Schuyler, John Koethe, and Kenneth Rexroth, as well as novelists Anne Tyler,
Tom Clancy, Carla Jablonski, and Henry Green into Spanish. Her translations of Koethe, with a foreword by Dow, are at www.revistavox.org. She lives in Buenos Aires.
Mark Dow has been a finalist in the Yale Younger Poets and Colorado Prize competitions. His poems and such have appeared in Threepenny Review, Chicago Review, Boston
Review, Pequod, Salmagundi, Conjunctions, Word for Word, and Fascicle. He is also author of American
Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons (California 2004). He lives in
Brooklyn.
Copyright ©2006 by
Laura Wittner and Mark Dow
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