John Oliver Simon and Rebecca Foust
Monday, Nov. 18 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Rebecca Morrison
Free/Donations accepted
John Oliver Simon is one of the legendary poets of the Berkeley Sixties who has remained true to his calling. Published from Abraxas to Zyzzyva, he is also a distinguished translator of contemporary Latin American poetry who received an NEA fellowship for his work with the great Chilean surrealist Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). He is Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out, a program of the Center for the Art of Translation, and is the River of Words 2013 Teacher of the Year. Reading at 2013 Berkeley Poetry Festival [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT-zVNx-we8]
“Las Hermosas” by Gonzalo Rojas
translated by John Oliver Simon
Eléctricas, desnudas en el mármol ardiente que pasa de la piel a los vestidos,
turgentes, desafiantes, rápida la marea,
pisan el mundo, pisan la estrella de la suerte con sus finos tacones
y germinan, germinan como plantas silvestres en la calle,
y echan su aroma duro verdemente.
Cálidas impalpables del verano que zumba carnicero. Ni rosas ni arcángeles: muchachas del país, adivinas
del hombre, y algo más que el calor centelleante,
algo más, algo más que estas ramas flexibles
que saben lo que saben como sabe la tierra.
Tan livianas, tan hondas, tan certeras las suaves. Cacería
de ojos azules y otras llamaradas urgentes en el baile
de las calles veloces. Hembras, hembras
en el oleaje ronco donde echamos las redes de los cinco sentidos
para sacar apenas el beso de la espuma.
Lovelies
Electric and naked in burning marble out from the skin through dresses,
swelling, defiant on a quick tide,
they stomp the world, they stamp the lucky star with their spike heels,
and they sprout up like wild plants in the street
and put out their hard aroma greenly.
Warm ungraspables of buzzing butcher summer. Neither roses
nor archangels: homegirls, riddles
to man, and something more than sparkling heat,
something so much more than these bending branches
that know what they know as the earth knows.
So light, so deep, so accurate these smoothies. Hunting
blue eyes and other urgent flares in the dance
of the fast streets. Females, females
in the hoarse surf where we hurl the net of the five senses
to come up with barely a kiss of foam.
Rebecca Foust’s books include God, Seed (Foreword Book Award), All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving Book Prize), and a new manuscript shortlisted for the Dorset and Kathryn A. Morton prizes. Her poems are in the current issues of Hudson Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Sewanee Review, Zyzzyva, and others.
Listen
to the slow, savage seep
of earthly beauty, cricket
cadence swelling soft dusk,
rain-stick stutter of seeds
incanting a monsoon memory,
its long, slow surge.
Wade waist-deep into a lake
in equal parts wet and white
moonlight. Meaning: the light
comes from neither water
nor moon, but reflects
a reflection. Unbolted satin
shimmers pale furlongs,
less sui generis than the idea
of itself; homage to homage,
song to mirage, to mist recalling
its past as water brimming
a great, ancient ocean,
the mystery of Fibonacci’s
crystalline series, of diatoms
fletched and fluted
like snowflakes, of one
pale, pink, whiskered fish.
