MORNING CROWS IN A FRESH MOWN FIELD BEFORE RAIN
Three in a group then one coming from a distance
to make four dividing into two scavenging pairs.
They waddle like ducks, dibble like robins.
This close to the earth they have nothing to say.
And yet as they bobble in a hands-behind-back
colloquy of feints and nods they are the ankle boots
of an idea gone missing, their laces threaded
through eyelets but left untied, accountants
of random expenditures, connoisseurs
of the worm’s catacombs of waste, they limp eastward,
toward the mountains, covered in contractor bag
capes, one wiry boot then the other on the ground.
If they would stay just where they are all morning,
they’d be the monument to the history they’re looking for.
MICHAEL COLLIER’s The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming, August, 2021, University of Chicago Press. He is Director Emeritus of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and Professor of English at the University of Maryland.
Read more by Michael Collier:
Poem in B O D Y
Another poem in B O D Y
Sixteen Poems collected at Innesfree Poetry Journal
Poem in TriQuarterly
Poem at PBS.org
Another poem at PBS.org
Lots of poems at Poetry Foundation
I was the last place on the planet /
where astronauts slept /
my last customers were the planet’s /
last people
"The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem."
Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?
That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.
There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs /
and various birds anas crecca, /
there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks /
and the cracking of pinecones
Herewith a fresh selection of our favorite recent poetry, fiction, and biography in translation from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.
For a moment, she wondered where all dead birds go when they die, which probably happens every minute of every hour, so really, birds should be falling from the sky not just from time to time, but raining down constantly, over both deserted and inhabited areas...
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
His astonishing, indeed quite singular ability to touch the tip of his nose with his teeth was something he discovered almost inadvertently
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
