英语诗歌

英语诗歌

A Rose Tree

Fleur Adcock

When we went to live at Top Lodge

my mother gave me a rose tree.

She didn't have to pay for it—

it was growing there already,

tall and old, by the gravel（碎石） drive

where we used to ride our scooters（踏板车） .

No one else was allowed to pick

the huge pale blooms that smelt like jam.

It was mine all through that summer.

In October we moved again.

But even never seeing it

couldn't stop it from being mine:

one of those eternal presents.

At the new house I had a duck. Again

Norman Dubie

I’d left Paris for the beaches

in Spain. I’d sold

my dead father’s farm

and, in shame,

bought it back again

at a great loss . . . then

a plough（犁） found

a shelf of bismuth（铋）

and I sold just the north pasture（牧草）

for big serial profits

and I am ashamed again:

the huge white bones of my father’s

favorite cow exposed

one late September morning!

It’s always been potatoes and bread

or millions of francs（法郎） on speculation.

I am not stupid. I’m not dead.

But the bones of an old cow assemble

repeatedly now in a dream where my naked lame（跛足的） father

sits in a tub of boiling milk

and screams at me

first my name and then his name

which is the same

name. The crimes of the verb to be

pushing a hard rain in general

across the city and its suburbs. . . .

What the Mapmaker Knows

Mary Jo Bang

O is the ocean and t the consequence

of time at the edge

of a landscape of dots plotted into the plane

with a constant scale.

Any place can be located and later divided

by cultural and social data and sketched

on a napkin（餐纸，尿布） —disregarding distance

and leaving only the little one knows.

Description is reductive: a shirt on the back,

buttons on the front, a mind that is willing to enact its own explosive end. What idiocy（白痴）

the world is made of:

fierce justifications, landmines and such,

a plaid shirt（个子花呢上衣） , a rifle upright.

Day and night, an empire

of uncommon horror: the murderer singing,

"Every moment all that matters is me."

Tick-tick in the drifting dark.

Blue Window

James Meetze

You are an arc of light in sycamore（美国梧桐） leaves,

churned-up dust, the sun's disturbance,

beside workers and workday traffic.

Bronze light in every space we inhabit.

This big sky we are under,

a portal without law.

Even poetry can't sample it. It goes round rosy, always in motion,

like weather's coliseum（竞技场） lights.

*

One cloud changes the whole feel/field of things.

Afternoon indoor fluorescence（荧光） , that silky

envelope,

just a corner of blue window to see.

Pillars of smoke in our toxic and inefficient world,

smaller than it seems to be.

Outside, sounds approach like a shudder

without fantasy, a signal that we must go on

in fuzzy cubicles（小卧室，小隔间） , a fraction of private

space.

Light's decoy registers, safe in anybody's arms.

* The brightness doesn't end here.

The filters don't stop it from coming through.

Particles invisible. Blue or gray day.

It is the way shrinking/rising things

can't be made dire enough.

I like your smile, I'd like to see it live on forever.

A line of cars and cars from here to vanishing-point's

brown.

We cannot say sun, or sunlight, terminus,

stop where you see a sign.

Kessler's Coffin Factory

Ogden Avenue, Jersey City

Hot days the workers

threw open the shop doors

and the neighborhood buzzed（发出嗡嗡声）

with the rip of their saws

through the seasoned planks

of walnut（胡桃） , birch（桦树） , and maple.

Pine shavings piled inches

deep on the floor oozed sap over the steel-toes of the aproned（围裙） man

who stood hours turning scrollwork

while near him another burnished

stacks of brass cornices and grips,

and the friendliest, saddled

with a sagging belt of hammers,

mouth bristling with nails,

tacked nameplates（铭牌） and sterling crucifixes

to each finished box,

some nearly as long as grandfather's rowboat,

others barely big enough

to hold sister's talking doll,

and after our fathers drove off

to the grind of the second shift

leaving their wives leaning out

windows to tend twisted lines of wash,

we kids on the sidewalk

slapped balls and double-dutched

through the vapor-stink of curing varnish（亮光漆）

while over our heads the empty sleeves

and pant legs flapped when our mothers

pulley-squealed them closer