Category Archives: Experiments

According to Steve Kowit in his wonderful book, In The Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, “a translitic is a poem ‘translated’ from a foreign language by paying attention not to the meaning of words but to their sounds.” It’s a way to shake loose when words feel dull or frozen.

Translitic based on Jorge Luis Borge’s El Guardian de Los Libros

Here the gardens, the temples, the temple
Of wrecked music and wrecked palaces
The sense of seven, four-sided walks,
The right to be summoned, amicable, in unison
Before the opening night sky and the crowds
That decorate the blue-water emperor
Cued to serenity, fueled by reflection of the world
And especially the compass, dabbling in the fruit,
Torrential respectability at the margins
And the unicorn herd, parting with their fins
All their regrets.
The secrets layer eternally,
The concerts orbit
And each house of memory stands free
in custody of its own world.

Every year,
the first glimpse
startles. Coming home from work long after dark
headlights catch the odd humped edges
sitting in the snow banks along my quiet street.
The glitter surprises in a place
that’s been tinsel-free since last January,
then the dark, unfamiliar bulk
repeats house by house as out of place
as if we’d all agreed to
put out our
elephants and told them
to nap by the
curb.

Christmas was a humbug,
to begin with.
Marley was dead.

The men who watched the light
had built a fire by
the rough table where they sat,
always in earnest.

In came a fiddler
making a great stir.
She was exceedingly pretty
when she laughed.

Every man among them
had a Christmas thought.
It seemed to shine.

He listened for an hour,
his poor, forgotten self
Forgotten.

It had been a very old song
Not an echo, not a sigh.
In possession of the world–
The world, so irresistibly contagious.

When the crazy years fall under the rumba
and the water’s so hot, it spirals into similes,
quelled. Arnie and Fannie rumba away
though three men try to part them.
The corridor rings with old Mel Torme songs
and passion underneath it all. The place
is filled with little pigs who drink martinis
and wine every night, and the grave man
who says “The trees!” over and over as if you didn’t notice.
Stay sober,sashay your clever nose to the Bossa Nova.
Like chimes, those little pigs live in our memories
Just recently, at Vecchi’s bakery, then later
like stars in the firmament,
Incessant.
It anchors me to purchase all I remember.
As my doctor will attest,
It’s natural. She’s crazy, he’ll decide.