Calder’s Menagerie
Duchamp called them mobiles— early crank-driven works of kinetic art, perhaps descended from prehistoric peepal leaves amusing an infant strapped to a bent-backed mother
gathering berries and grains, or the tintinnabulum of ancient Rome that belled wanton-eyed deities— not yet evolved into symphonies of parts balanced by fragile wires, charged by your touch or breath.
Lyrical inventions, Sartre said of his friend’s later creations— flowers that die when motion stops— like Paleolithic vines frozen and locked into their s-shapes in open- mouthed Ice Age caves
or this high wire act on homespun thread outside your window, suspended like Calder’s “Spider,” black disk and cantilevered legs playing dead until you tap tap on the pane, and it twitches once like a blink,
before turning back into sculpture the way tomorrow’s quarantine days morph into days already passed— reminding you to throw open the sash, let in the new autumn air, let it play your heart like an aeolian harp.
An Excess of Dreaming
It takes an effort to summon the sacred bird of invention— go slowly, with caution
as Montaigne warned against getting mired in the liminal space between visible and not,
citing two cases as proof: Gallus Vibius, gone mad from obsessing on madness
and the convict pardoned on the scaffold, struck dead by his own wild imaginings—
and some nights I’ve let that bird preen her feathers at my pillow’s edge, leaving several in her wake.
I’ve tried to wean myself from an excess of dreaming, but my good intentions equal
what Aquinas might have called sloth, bothered more by too much sleep than drink,
and Einstein might have praised, as things restrained return in force. Late to rise, I’m also late for bed,
maybe waylaid by a waxing moon or a word or phrase shooting past white space like a star.
By Any Other Name
Spanish approximates my rose with “rosa” and likewise in Portuguese, but she blooms
to “roos” in Dutch, “ruusu” in Finish, and in Hindi to “bulaab ka phool.”
“Rozi” in Amharic, “woz” in Creole, the French ones ripen to « rose » itself,
lazing in guillemets: sideways double chevrons favored by Josephine —
guillemets derived from « Guillaume » meaning « William », just as the Irish
strew Erse with « Liamóg » from « Liam ». Like geese, they work in pairs,
borrowing what’s said by someone else, faithful, for all we know, to dying words:
Dickinson’s “I must go in, the fog is rising.” Duncan’s “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire.”
They adorn translations, like the jewels Napoleon looted from Luxor.
Mismatched—one open, one closed— yet they make no sense without the other,
like long-married couples—of one mind for what gets walled out or in:
“We love the things we love for what they are.” Don’t rend them asunder
through malice, mistake or sleight of hand: they shall be unbound—“nevermore”!
Nancy Naomi Carlson, winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, twice an NEA translation grant recipient, and the Translations Editor for On the Seawall, has published twelve titles (four non-translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019), her second full-length poetry collection, was called “new & noteworthy” by The New York Times. Her co-translation with Esperanza Hope Snyder of Cuban Wendy Guerra is forthcoming from Seagull Books in April 2023.