Last Saturday’s selections were from a volume of short poems translated from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth. Today three more Japanese translations, from a second volume called One Hundred More Poems From the Japanese, also translated by Rexroth:

On the Eastern horizon,
Dawn glows over
The fields, and when
I look back I see
The moon setting in the West.
       -Hitomaro
Everybody […]

Congratulations to Ronnie Brown, Cadillac Williams, Carlos Rogers, and Jason Campbell, all of whom were selected in the first round of today’s NFL draft. Two running backs in the top five, three picks in the top nine, and four first-round selections - no matter how you slice it, it was a big day for Auburn […]

The weekend Wendy and the girls went to Destin, I built this partition around the A/C units so they don’t look quite so ugly. This weekend our neighbor gave us a load of rainbow gravel (thanks Selena!) which we used to finish around the units. The partition still needs painting, which I’ll do after the […]

Night Picnic
Charles Simic
There was the sky, starless and vast–
Home of every one of our dark thoughts–
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand.
All things are imbued with God’s being–
She said in hushed tones
As if his ghost might overhear us–
The dark […]

To My Father’s Houses
W. S. Merwin
Each of you must have looked like hope to him
once at least however long it lasted
he who claimed he saw hope in every grim
eyeless gray farmhouse uninhabited
on a back road and hope surely was needed
every time they were shown into the bare
resonant rooms of the manse provided
by his next church […]

Via Can We Have Our Ball Back?:
From There To Here
Kerry O’Keefe
When he said that 14th century paintings of Christ
changed his heart, she was thinking of the way
his face changed her. How there was nothing but
to dismantle a life. Her husband left the house
in anger. Children thrashed in unspeakable grief.
For months, the beginnings […]

Einstein is dead…
 
…but he has been reincarnated as a lemur!

Via Can We Have Our Ball Back?:
Mad Ramblings
K.R. Copeland
like the irritating scrapestrum
of a bum-leg pacing pavement
facing back against filmed windows
with no panes
pangs of anger, hate and hunger
make their statements in a rush
of uproarious orations
spat from fangs of grim distrust
mustard smudged across the bun
a revelation
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to organize a […]

The Rider
Sarah Manguso
Some believe the end will come in the form of a mathematical equation.
Others believe it will descend as a shining horse.
I calculate the probabilities to be even at fifty percent:
Either a thing will happen or it won’t.
I open a window,
I unmake the bed,
Somehow, I am moving closer to the equation or to the […]

There Was Earth Inside Them
Paul Celan
There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.
They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no […]

Blogthings has a linguistic profile where you answer about 20 questions, and it tells you what kind of English you speak. Here’s my linguistic profile:
55% General American English
35% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern
0% Yankee
Upper Midwestern? Where did that come from? Oh yeah, I went to Milwaukee once.

Today’s selections come from a book entitled One Hundred Poems From the Japanese, a collection selected and translated by Kenneth Rexroth. It’s one of my favorite collections of poetry, because the poems are all so simple and short - and yet, they are alive with imagery and emotion. Here are three:
In the empty mountains
The leaves […]