Jorge Guillén: The Horses

Shaggy and heavily natural, they stand

Immobile under their thick and cumbrous manes,

Pent in a barbed enclosure which contains,

By way of compensation, grazing-land.

Nothing disturbs them now. In slow increase

They fatten like the grass. Doomed to be idle,

To haul no cart or wagon, wear no bridle,

They grow into a vegetable peace.

Soul is the issue of so strict a fate.

They harbor visions in their waking eyes,

And with their quiet ears participate

In heaven’s pure serenity, which lies

So near all things—yet from the beasts concealed.

Serene now, superhuman, they crop their field.

Tr. Richard Wilbur. Guillén stressed a sense of good which might lead to simple joy, but also carried a parallel sense of imperfection and chaos. In other words, the most basic driver and contradiction of poetry. “The Horses” comes from the human envy of the anthropomophized animal, content to graze.

Andrew McNeillie: Birds of America

I woke again… inside a dream, startled,

On an internal flight… The navigator beside me

No sooner put his flight plan down than he

Began to show me pages out of Audubon:

The Birds of America, from Original Drawings

With 435 Plates Showing 1,065 Figures.

My first thought was that we would crash.

So many foreign objects flying. I put myself into

The brace position. But he laughed and turned

The pages: so many pages, so many birds. I could hear the air

Beat with their unnameable wings, as we descended

Into the frontier morning, where a Cardinal presided

Singing in the bushes to his heart’s content.

I seemed to know at once it was a Cardinal,

A scarlet, crested, black-faced finch,

With the most melodious of voices.

I could see the sense in that, a start I might welcome in

The new world when I woke and clambered from the wreckage.

But suppose it had been a Grackle or

A Brown Thrasher from the Catbird family,

Would it have left me looking awry?

Or a Bobolink or a Cowbird? Scratching my head

At those queer birds, stumbling in the dark wood

On the road less travelled, as poets should?

From Now, Then (2002). McNeillie is British (Welsh-Scots), so this is a foreigner’s encounter with the birds of America and with the displacement of being in parts foreign. It’s the displacement of dream: whether or not McNeillie has actually been to the United States isn’t relevant. I don’t understand why at the end he brings in echoes of Dante and Frost – it seems a clashing shift in registers of irony.

Christoph Meckel: Fragment

– blackbird call in twilight
suddenly, glorious, the shock
of pleasure, and
you can't get anywhere without it –

Another blackbird poem. Tr. Christopher Middleton. Meckel (b. 1935 in Germany, maybe not a difficult time for a child but a difficult time for its parents) has been a hugely prolific poet and graphic artist. The blackbird does its standard duty for the earthbound.