J. Kates

J. Kates, a poet, literary translator and the co-director of Zephyr Press, is the author of three chapbooks of his own poetry, the full length collection The Briar Patch: Selected Poems & Translations (Hobblebush Books, 2012), and a dozen books of translation from French and Russian. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he has also collaborated on four books of Latin American poetry.

Woman of the High Plains

The ground boils here, but slowly —

not like the water in my pot

stripping a cooked chicken to bone

and soup, separable

identities. It takes,

they say, nine years or more

for a man to render down

to broth, and then his skeleton

can be picked out and thrown away.

My husband, now,

would pinch the soil each spring

and taste it for the planting,

knowing what it needed

until it needed him.

                                    

Absalom

for Paul W. Kates

Father, I hang here

waiting for the sword you will not wield

to be turned again

against one of the two of us.

Before it comes, just this:

I too have a chamber over a gate

where I cry and cry your name

for my long exile and yours,

for the years together in the same city

never speaking to each other.

The first messenger will say

that you have won the field

but you will ask after me

and get no answer.

The second messenger will speak the truth.

May all your enemies and those who rise against you

be as I am:

loving you

and a witness to your love

even as I hang here

by my long hair.

The Faucet

I am not so easily turned off.

All night the hot syllable of my name

will tap at irregular intervals

onto the cold and ringing porcelain

of your most private room.

Twist until the clean metal

burns bruises into your sleepless hand.

I have found a way

to keep the water running

one tear at a time.

Orientation

I know a scoter from a coot,

a common eider from a king.

I know what song the mute swan sings

(I'll bet you know it isn't mute).

I know a harrier on the wing

and followed one one afternoon

in mid-October through the mud

and bitter milkweed of the moor

until I lost it in the air

and lost myself on lower ground

while rainclouds gathered overhead

around an early rising moon.

I knew I wasn't far from home.

I knew I wasn't really lost.

Less than a mile from the coast

(I didn't know it at the time)

the county road is paved and posted

and when the wind is blowing west

the rain will hold off for a while.

Somewhere to the east you waited —

you didn't know I would be late.

I climbed up on a little hill

to try to get my bearings straight,

then started off the way I guessed.

I would have liked you at my side.

You know how to interpret clues

and find the things I always lose

or unintentionally hide.

You know the lore I could have used

if looking did me any good.

Three kinds of heather, two of pine,

a dogfish and a basking shark,

a fritillary and a monarch

catch all the light the sun can shine

but fade to darkness in the dark.

I stumbled home. I knew I could.

New Jersey

From an island I have descended

(no other word for it)

by way of Boston to New Jersey,

the roads so numerous and interlaced

a map can't hold them all

and everywhere I go, I'm lost.

You got me into this.

When I look up into the sky

I am used to saying Aldebaran,

Via Galactica, Mars,

Draco, Cassiopeia,

while you look up and say "stars,"

but you know your way around.

"That's where my uncle fell to his death.

"That's where my ex-husband lives.

"That's where I was born,

you say to me. Elizabeth,

 Edison, The Ironbound.

                  Domestic Archaeology

                  Wide, garish roses promised nothing,

                  but where they peeled, revealing

                  classical blue ruins underneath,

                  I made a start, stripping out urns

                  and pilasters, shadowy temples highlighted in white.

                  Here and there I'd scraped through

                  to another level, a less

                  sophisticated culture — glimmers of bronze

                  dulled now to indifferent brown

                  but still suggestive — and so continued

                  until I'd laid all bare,

                  a dry antique skin somebody once loved

                  and somebody else buried. Oh, I confess,

                  I lifted that layer carefully, imagining

                  a young couple in their new house

                  making a start, beginning a civilization

                  with nothing to build on or scrape off,

                  nothing but lathed ribbing and horsehair,

                  the clean, dusty plaster of these walls

                  and a tin bucket of home-made paste.

                                

 The Music Box     

 Another one of those hard-cases flicks.

 The moral ambiguity of ex-Nazis

 and their ignorant children. At the exit

 a thickish woman with a silver cane

 blocked my way, asked me to explain

 the final scene her imperfect English

 couldn't keep up with. I was born

 in Munich, 1914, brought up after the War.

 She held my arm, encouraged by courtesy,

 and continued, with the glittering eye

 of an old sailor. And all these things are true,

 true — and worse.  All of it I saw.

 I come to this country fifteen years ago

 when my daughter married an American.

 She wore a gold medallion at her throat,

 a thick coat. I shivered in the cold.

 A delicate lid lifted of itself,

 the same small figures dancing round and round

 (And all these things are true, true — and worse)

 while tiny hammers pinged out tinny notes

 turning me mechanical to the refrain

 of my inhuman brain:Well, and you? And you?

 But two months earlier, on the Moscow train,

 I sat beside a soldier my own age,

 clearly Vietnamese, who smiled brightly

 and recognized in me the foreigner

 I know I am, and asked where I was from.

 America, I said. He buried his head

 deep inside the hollows of his hands

 and did not look at me, or speak again.

                                     

The Ax-Murderer's Daughter

The ax-murderer’s daughter

got a brand-new yellow tutu

and satin slippers

for her eighth birthday.

And today is Every-Other-Saturday:

time to visit with her mother

where he lives ever since the accident

she was too young to remember

almost.

How she hates the long drive,

the iron doors and corridors,

the dirty little room where three bored men

watch her mother talking to him,

two girls fidgeting.

What is she supposed to think

about the stranger she's supposed to love

for her mother's sake and Jesus'?

She will stop visiting when she goes away to college

but write faithfully every month.

He will learn about her own two children, her divorce,

her move out of state, her new home.

She will give instructions to the chief of police

(there is always talk of budget-cutting,

of letting the safe ones out)

if ever he shows up in town:

Shoot on sight.

But today she will dance for him

in the dirty metal room to canned music

borrowed from her teacher.

She will wear her yellow tutu and satin slippers,

her mother, sister watching

and three bored guards.

And he will watch her, too, saying afterwards,

my little girl.

                  That's my little girl.

           The Uses of Poetry

           for Larry Joseph

           Don't tell me poetry makes nothing happen.

           I had your verse in front of me, was reading,

           to be precise, about a black boy bleeding

           in Detroit, the poem "I Think About Thigpen

           Again," my country window thrown wide open

           to the October wind because I needed

           air and daylight, when like a double-beaded

           black bullet a single hornet flew right in.

           Out here, people pack their handguns, too,

           but, given the odds, I'm far more apt to die

           by being stung than being shot. What do I do,

           who love all innocent creatures? The hornet shook

           its iridescent wings and settled down. I

           whopped it dead with your compassionate book.