seen from Türkiye
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SLATCH
That's the quiet patch between
heavy breakers, just outside
the mouth of a narrow inlet to
the sea. You'd better bide your
time, maneuver just beyond the
rough water, pick a slatch, gun
your boat right through or you'll
be washed to a place where
just a single candle's lit. Amen.
-- Stuart Friebert, from his new book from Lost Horse Press, Decanting: Selected and New Poems, 1967 - 2017.
Man Cursing the Sea
Someone just climbed to the top of the cliffs and began to curse the sea.
Dumb water, stupid pregnant water, slow, slimy copy of the sky, you peddler between sun and moon, pettifogging pawnbroker of shells, soluble, loud-mouthed bull, fertilizing the rocks with your blood, suicidal sword dashed to bits on the headland, hydra, hydrolyzing the night, breathing salty clouds of silence, spreading jelly wings in vain, in vain, gorgon, devouring its own body,
water, you absurd flat skull of water---
And so he cursed the sea for a spell, it licked his footprints in the sand like a wounded dog.
And then he came down and patted the tiny immense stormy mirror of the sea.
There you go, water, he said, and went his way.
Miroslav Holub, tr. from Czech by Stuart Friebert and Dana Hábová
«Field» – Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, No. 42, Edited by Stuart Friebert, David Young, Alberta Turner, and David Walker, Oberlin College Press, Oberlin, OH, Spring 1990. Cover: Stephen J. Farkas, Jr.
Kuno Raeber: So You Exist...
Kuno Raeber: So You Exist…
LAKE
If the wind, when the wall of clouds pushed this way, hadn’t suddenly stopped, the leaves wouldn’t be swimming so quietly now, the branches wouldn’t be hanging, rusty hooks, into the water.
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THE CHILD IN THE FISH
When it wasn’t in the leaf-bud that came swimming along at night, and when, late, astonished, they loosened it from the fish’s burst belly washed up on the sand, so that the women…
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Deborah Bogen: Introducing Kuno Raeber and BE QUIET
Deborah Bogen: Introducing Kuno Raeber and BE QUIET
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The Scholar, as Artist, Clears the Table
Take the plate from the table
carry it through the chambers.
Don’t be confused by the dust,
the spider webs, the sawdust.
Not by the old
poison, by the bacon,
which smells in the mousetrap.
Kuno Raeber, a Swiss citizen who wrote in German, was a student of philosophy and literature as well as a Ph.D in History. He was also a poet, a novelist and…
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Quarter-to-Nine
Close as you can get without touching lips. You keep blinking, shadows cross my face. We’re trying silence for a change, words of late trouble us. Oh, we’ve tried crying, shouting, laughing, and once you clapped your hands for an hour, while I tapped my heel on the floor. Got us a good night’s sleep, though we woke up exhausted, like nihilists who love beauty. Are we quits? you seemed to be saying with those eyes, while all I could dream of was the place they carry you to at the end of the field.
Tomorrow, we might try a few phrases again —When will all this stop? Dear God, why? But all this is as wished, and will be till we’re very ill, with nothing ahead but old blind faith. Come here, will you? you shout from the hall. I push up out of my La-Z-boy and pad out to find you. Look, the wind-up clock’s stopped at 3:15, just about the same thing, you say at last, and open your fist on the key I thought lost. Give it a wind!
-- stuart friebert
