ratsonjulia

GIRL IN A NIGHTGOWN

Lights out. Shades up.
A look at the weather.
There has been a booming all the spring.
A refrain from the end of the boulevards.

This is the silence of night.
This is what could not be shaken,
Full of stars & the images of stars--
& that booming wintry & dull,

Like a tottering, a falling & an end,
Again & again, always there,
Massive drums & leaden trumpets,
Percieved by feeling instead of sense,

A revolution of things colliding.
Phrases! But of fear & of fate.
The night should be warm & fluters' fortune
Should play in the trees when morning comes.

Once it was, the repose of night,
Was a place, strong place, in which to sleep.
It is shaken now. It will burst into flames,
Either now or tomorrow or the day after that.

--Wallace Stevens

SUSANA SOCA

With gradual love she watched the evening
Colors disperse. How much she enjoyed
Dissolving in the intricate tune
Or in the curious life of verses!
No primal red, but grey upon gray
Embroidered her fastidious fate,
One inured to choosing & practiced
In vacillation, melange, nuance.
Not daring to enter this doubtful
Labyrinth, she observed (from outside)
The forms, the factions, & the fray,
Like that other lady of the morror.
the gods who live past all imploring
Abandoned her to that tiger, Fate.

--Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Richard Howard & Cesar Rennert