Guest Lecture

It’s too late to back out, you are joined today by the ghosts of the great ancestral forest,

the thicket bogies, the ooze, the wordless cavalcade of pines, the owl eyes, the grimaces on tree

stumps, the mold blossoms on vole bones, blood-red winter raspberries for the pious son’s

insatiable mother, her undead cravings snagged on a goat’s horns, rumors of a lynx, the rage of

the sedge, the grudge held by mud, the imminent seism remembered by cicadas, the prophecies

dropped by flocks of graylags, the larva’s refusal to be taut, and when you finally say it’s such an

honor to be here you hear a belch of thunder.

Note

This is a translation

I am the translator’s note

I belong to a smoother generation

There is nothing language cannot do

I am the translator’s machine

That cannot stop doing its job

My job is the skin of my being

I make everything human

The word for “human”

Is “human” pronounced “human”

A World War has been won

Weather is no more

No need for morgues

How else may I help you

This is not a poem

I am the speaker

Wilderness

when no more water

is permitted to us

I will drink your weariness

you will shield my face

from doves bringing

instead of sprigs

their own snapped feathers

not even as prophecies

simply out of rage

I am not sure

what our wilderness will be

underwater perhaps

cloudless or gaseous perhaps

at least we will have fled

everything we will have built

no one will come to kill us

in our nook

I am not sure how big a nook

but some elliptical

enclosure will run from your chin

to your neck to my neck to my chin

if not an enclosure

some loose loop of heat and need

pairing us in wilderness

unless even wilderness

refuses to keep us

if it removes me

please be kind to the doves

you are sweet water

I am not sure

if this is my fear

if I am building

the very thing we will flee

will you flee with me

to a time where

no one can come to

save us