Marc Vincenz

Yet Another Reincarnation

I pay my soothsayer in hard-boiled eggs, chicken wings,
gristly claws, livers or gizzards—she believes in the due process
of tempests, visions of omniscient butterflies. An old woman
scrubbing floors portends violent crime or racketeering;
finch in the hand, fraud or incest; beetle on the mantelpiece,
ill health. She snatches invisible lassos from the air, spins dizzy
larks above my head, everywhere she sees living dead,
centuries of men on the low road to the county fair, millennia
of citizens ensnared in menial tasks, plowing, sewing, reaping,
daydreaming; mostly she knows where lightning will hit,
who will spontaneously combust, become president,
overnight millionaire. With my own eyes I saw her heal
a cancerous man, the single touch of her arthritic hands.
Twice she foretold my almost-demise, the possible grand curtain,
a lifetime of sighs, once a jet in the skies, once in a train wreck—
she hears the constant chatter behind, grandmothers and aunts and
ex-wives. The past is a series of dots you can trace through the sky.
It’s the future that’s harder to count, though in a finite universe
only so many spots can branch out—think of it as an astral crossword.
And the crowds that shuffle ahead and behind, dead or alive,
all animated beings begging for sound advice on love and career,
sex and disease, there’s little she hasn’t been forced to hear—
even in this lifetime—so she raises her soul-umbrella,
an unseen parasol, to ward off gnashing thunder of lost voices,
stinging hail of multiple choices; and in her abode of double-entendre,
a ghostly breeze blows, two degrees warmer than outside the door,
it snakes under your skin and coils there until you’re quite ready
to unravel. The wife thinks I’ve lost my head in the wild ranting
of this other woman, and she swears by Almighty God the fields
will remain parched and the harvest a washout if I keep this up—
one day she says the earth will buckle beneath my legs
and in my next life when I return as a moth, destined to bump
around lamps, perch still, motionless on bark in broad daylight
and three days later I shall lay my pearly eggs on the leaf
of an elm, shaded in the gables of a chicken coop, and over
and over, the clucking, the clucking, the clucking.



Marc Vincenz is British-Swiss, was born in Hong Kong, and has published eight collections of poetry: The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees; Gods of a Ransacked Century, Mao’s Mole, Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works (a verse novel), Additional Breathing Exercises (bilingual German- English), Beautiful Rush, This Wasted Land and its Chymical Illuminations (with Tom Bradley and forthcoming, Becoming the Sound of Bees (Ampersand Books). His chapbooks are Benny and the Scottish Blues, Genetic Fires, Upholding Half the Sky and Pull of the Gravitons. He has been published extensively in many journals and anthologies, including: The Manhattan Review, Washington Square Review, Guernica, The Bitter Oleander, Battersea Review, St. Petersburg Review, Fourteen Hills, Exquisite Corpse, Spillway and The Canary.

He is also the translator of numerous German-language poets, including: Erika Burkart, Ernst Halter, Klaus Merz, Andreas Neeser, Markus Bundi and Alexander Xaver Gwerder. His translation of Alexander Xaver Gwerder’s selected poems, Casting a Spell in Spring, is soon to be released by Coeur Publishing/Spuyten Duyvil. He has edited various anthologies and selected works of other poets, including Hugh Fox’s last and posthumous collection, Primate Fox. He has received grants from the Swiss Arts Council for his translations, and a fellowship and residency from the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB). His own work has been translated into German, Chinese, Russian, Romanian and French.

He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Alexander Xaver Gwerder

Amorous Morning

Another world—, morning of blooms

even before waking up—; morning

in the symbol of the bewitching zephyr.

The seagull procession

of fortunate arabesques in the clearest sky,

Dianas

waving from every balcony.

IN:

            Poplar crowns, the damp landscapes—

OUT:

            Luster of tiles and that trembling Venus—

BREATH:

            Stallions with jangling coins,

the fig market and the tiny violets in the milky

shade of the forest,

mosque—and no end—O hour,

the princess awaits

the opium goat!

*

The time has come: the leaves flicker

and above her hair

occasional hands dangle chestnuts.

The sound of splashing rises prettily around Ruhstatt;

horn, spear and booty surround us—, wine presses,

equipment for the harvest, grape-voices

extorted between flying hearts.

Skins too, pelts

hot from sun and corn. The circling and undulating

and whimpering of the eyelid

and lips: you—

Farewell

That waving of some kind of hurtling

machine, and then

the landscape dries up. The houses

crumble into the rubble of bubbling

chalk and the end

gnashes its poison tooth

between tracks.

“Never again that refuge under chattering

leaves; never again the ladybugs’ raining

heart; and certainly never

that mesh of rays

on the breast’s flower-pillows—never!”

O Ragusa! Become that smoggy sulfur city—

The south sea dosed in kerosene and everything

burning! Your cloudy seconds,

take them—, devour

the bright poison of these bites—after you

have mummified yourself

in the sarcophagus of forgetting …

translated from the German by Marc Vincenz

Alexander Xaver Gwerder was born in 1923 to a Swiss working-class family and began writing poems when he was sixteen years old. In 1949, a few of Alexander’s poems were published in the Zurich newspaper, Die Tat. His talents were recognized by a handful of Swiss editors.Gwerder committed suicide in Arles, France in 14. September 1952.

Most of Gwerder’s work was published posthumously. He was clearly influenced by Gottfried Benn and Rainer Maria Rilke. Gwerder’s poems are highly imagistic, written in a rhythmical language and infused with the Swiss dialect of his childhood. Gwerder was highly critical of the bourgeoisie and the conservative institutions of Swiss government and the military. During his lifetime he was a complete outsider to the Swiss literary establishment and little-acknowledged for his poignant and stirring visions. It was only 45 years after his tragic death that Gwerder’s collected and uncollected poems were released in German, and his extraordinary talent finally brought to critical attention.

Erika Burkart

Moon in March 


Two sickles are still missing. 
Oblong: an egg—you dazzle
dead stone, wake up fear, infect
with fevered light, confuse the brain, 
extract my hysterical cry—
to be a helpless human being
like you who doesn’t manage to evade 
its phases.

Mock-bloom, blood-young leaves
in the winter boughs: the devouring frost and the vague hope, 
when, with burning eyes
the ghost in the nightshirt
stares up to the light-blanked no-man’s-sky
of our contaminated sphere. 

Summer Solstice 

Waiting at the window and staring outside 
two mountains in the distant vapor 
become a twin volcano.
The sun stands quite still
before it sinks. 

Seeing what doesn’t see us. 
Constellations are of another nature. 
Lucid moments: human glances. 
They burn through water
before they extinguish. 





"Moon in March" and "Summer Solstice" were previously published in Late Recognition of the Signs, translated from the German by Marc Vincenz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014).

 

Erika Burkart was born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1922. Throughout her career she published over 24 collections of poetry, 8 prose works, and was awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Conrad- Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis (1961) and the Gottfried- Keller-Preis (1992). She was the only woman ever to have been awarded Switzerland’s highest literary prize, der Grosser Schillerpreis (2005). She passed away on April 14, 2010.

Marc Vincenz

Biohazard

Unequivocally yours, Molly—in her last note, she signs off.

It rings in-finite. Toxicity level 4:  What we fear but never conceive.

War you tolerate as an acquaintance turned, matter rings in your ears,

crumbled stuff. The virus claims the head, devours the soul,

mal de los rastrojos, breakbone fever, Ebola, hanta, Lassa, mutating variola.

Things are left standing. In the end we know all their God-fearing names

like very bad men from the Gestapo, the Stasi. Molly pins them on a fridge,

beneath magnetized pineapples and smiley faces, beneath Max’s crayoned skyline,

to-do lists, tax return form curling at the corners, takeout menu

from Wang’s Golden Wok. They secrete through taps, drizzle dams, slipstream—

like hurricanes we baptize them Alma and Boris, Katrina and Yolanda

to make them more innocuous for Max. Within a week,

the surgical masks on every street corner, blue and white, then

Gucci pink and Hermes polka-dot, splutters contained behind high fashion.

And the water we drink is Antarctic ice, eons old—once swilled by dinosaurs,

an inside joke. Carrier rats bear the brunt, followed by ticks, fleas, lice,

the effervescent tsetse, and we don’t swat and shoo—but never the monkeys,

our harmless swing-in-the-trees ancestors separated by a single strand of amino acid

who’ve learn to uphold themselves and eat bananas. I say it was the dogs,

the Labradors, Alsatians, those ratty Chihuahuas, cuddled, coddled and Tickle Tickle.

Still, none of it explains away the quakes, the freak storms and tsunamis,

none of it justifies the plummeting price of gold, the vanishing of the beggars

and the birds, the vacant beehives, none of it. In my mind Molly still nags

about that damn tax return. Isn’t it strange how you prioritize?

previously published in The Green Door

__

Weighing the Broken Heart

Blessed the wind. Cantankerous, asthmatic priest

in swollen robes & feathered headgear—

once oceanblue & redgold—now charcoaled

darkening to soot. Waterfed & corn-bred, sun-

worshipping, sun-cursed, a ruinous disseminating

soul, gilded & guilt-ridden, heavy-handed &

lightly-touched—exhales in exhausted prayer

through empty lanes & alleys, prods rooftops,

rattles broken panes, half-open doors, hinges

groaning upon buckling frames, fingers

familiar faces of dying trees, thumbs anemic

birds’ nests, rubs eggs to awaken life within,

kicks empty bottles & tins into blank squares,

crumpled things under porticos & steps, blows

ancient news into coppery osprey, kites, puffed up

eagles with giant wings, tears leatherbound

psalms from the palms of pews & aisles,

whispers names of long-forgotten gods, leftover

vowels as if in pidgin, as if in a burning

foreign tongue &, as he gathers himself

from his four corners, draws upon the strings,

he recalls what it was like to breathe

life into sun-filled stuff, how oxygen was

a litany & how every rain was an Amen,

he remembers cragged prayers, fragments

in leaves scattering within his own tree, roots

sinking to search for belief, limbs stretching out

over a flock—the tremulous keys of a Portuguese

accordion wheezing a simple song into his lungs,

the exhumation of a thousand jagged sins.

& now, on his last legs, he must remind himself

once & again, he is neither woman nor is he man,

he is nothing, nothing at all. Blessed the wind.

previously published in The Canary

___

On a Day Like This

Let me open

your mouth

with mine,

let me tell tale

of the drowned

whose hearts

stopped on a day

like this                a day

too early

for fruiting trees

You know    with each

of your touches

my flesh burns

with curious meaning.

So tell me

is it really breath

that glues

us together

and laughter

that makes the day

shorter than

it truly is?

            Or is there something

                        else you’re just not

telling me about?

(unpublished)

© Marc Vincenz



///

Three Poems (Marc Vincenz)

Democracy Wall

for Wei Jingsheng and Huang Xiang

Look what’s pasted here—

Poet on the wall says

we’re all dictators, despots

shouldering to get in first.

Old men

with inflated superegos.

Besides, what the fuck does he know?

He’s only a lad.

Enlightened poets carve their

words in stone—

these just whimper,

blow away like leaves

in a storm.

He might as well

scratch them

in the sky.

Atomkraft 1967

Zhong Guo means the middle country;

the middle way, the path to liberation.

Coal thieves on scooters

dig from the middle of the earth,

separate the temporal from the permanent,

burn fires that melt iron ore

and draw curtains over the skies.

The old man wished for the atom bomb,

but Stalin wouldn’t give it to him.

In 1967, he got it.

He dredged fish from lifeless rivers,

fed souls with limp clothes

and hungry eyes.

As we were told, in our Village Cooperatives

and People’s Communes,

real miracles could happen.

In 1970, he launched satellites

straight into heaven,

to give us an eye

on the world.

I’ve been told you can’t split the atom

any way but down the middle.

Monkey Brains

We ate monkey brains in secrecy

just to see what they tasted like,

as if they might remind us of you;

and although the ancient custom

was to strap the chosen primate

in a made-for-measure cabinet

with only the shaved cranium exposed,

crush the skull-bone with a golden hammer,

while she screamed and whimpered,

begging for the beginning of time;

an experience, I’ve been told, like no other,

we preferred them fried in garlic and onions

separated from the body,

dipped them in rice wine vinegar.

You got sick after that, struggled

for ten days and nights,

dampening the sheets with your toxins.

I knew you’d live.

You wanted to die.

I remember the morning your fever broke

was the morning the H5N1 virus

flamed across the country,

everyone was wearing a blue mask

and we no longer feared the secret police.

At its most basic level, Mao’s Mole is a cinematic journey through China’s last hundred-or-so years, offering snapshots, incidental reflections and moments of flux across a broad spectrum of the Middle Kingdom’s citizens and their foreign guests. On wider levels, the book poses deep questions of society, identity and culture; Mao’s Mole concerns itself with the development of icons, figureheads and modern mythology in today’s China; with the making of modern nations; with our dented twenty-first century mythologies.

-- Marc Vincenz

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Marc Vincenz

Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British and was born in Hong Kong. His recent books include Upholding Half the Sky (MiPOesias, 2010), The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (Argotist, 2011) and Pull of the Gravitons (forthcoming Right Hand Pointing, 2012). His translation of Swiss poet Erika Burkart’s Secret Letter is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Last year, his poetry was nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize.


The Mystical Art of Accounting

“When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast…”— Harry S. Truman

It’s all about volume,
capacity per square metre / foot
(whether metric or imperial floats your proverbial boat);
although, there are others
(a whole slew of choices, in fact):
the Tokyo Tsubo for instance; sounds like soy-infused Wasabi sauce;
the Seoul Pyeong: true measure of an average ninth century Korean male—
arms and legs fully splayed, face down prostrating, flailed by the brunt
of a Mongolian warlord’s cat ‘o nine tails, an ideal size for a room,
I am told; or perhaps face up, making perfect circles
under cherry blossoms in the snow, stargazing,
defining the rules of space and numbers.

Imperial Peking had,
and Social Democratic Communist Beijing
still has the Mu, which possibly derives it’s name
from the exhausted groan of the water buffalo—
a measure for judging the extent of rice paddies before harvest.
Everything is weighted, ruled, cubed, boxed, angled, triangled—
lucky we came up with these handy things, numbers.
Now we can finally count the stars in the sky—
6000 with the naked eye—and we know useful things
like the distance from the equator to the moon
represents sixty-nine times the girth of a full grown earth.

Funny that, the number 69—
normally I think of being twenty one again,
in the back of my Unbeatable Bonk Bug with Maria-Rosa,
Hispanic-American goddess, gently calculating
trigonometric angles, postulating X/Y positions.
Without numbers we wouldn’t know our up from down,
we wouldn’t even know there are more than two of anything at all—
just be walking on straight lines in flat spaces, like Pacman,
we wouldn’t know an arse from an elbow, really.
Yet, these are mostly distances—things men have conquered,
numbers have far reaching consequences:

Analysts know how much Namibia is worth on paper,
in Dollars, Euros, Rupees; its equivalent in derivatives;
and in conjunction with funded institutions of science,
how much bacteria and moss can contribute
to the global economic balance sheet—
it has all been tallied out, audited down
to the last decimal point, then stamped,
duly notarised and sealed in hot wax for posterity.
There is surely a secret book,
hidden in the darkest catacombs of the Vatican
where all calculations are indexed for future evidence;
or perhaps it is hermetically locked
in the sprawling prairies of Middle-America,
guarded by the Federal Agency in charge of numbers.
I mean, why else would they call it Area 51,
giving it not one, but two prime numbers?
And, by the way: 69 and 51 add up to 120,
which is a recurring number in the Mayan calendar,
and shall someday well fulfil an ancient prophesy
unlocking the last secrets of the Universe.

Yes, we have developed all sorts of uses for numbers;
we know how many atoms are required in an atom bomb,
but more importantly how much it costs,
(2 billion dollars for Harry Truman in 1945, 20 billion dollars today);
there must be reasons, of course, why God gave us five fingers on each hand—
he wanted us, it seems, to count on them. One by one by one.

Previously published in FRiGG


Monkeys & Flowers


Nobody stands for old Auntie
on the 6.45 to Purple Pagoda Park.

Most of us are gripping the overhead rails
like whooping monkeys.

In the streets of a city
flowers need a man’s attention.

There are no birds, no bees.
Dirt & dung are horse-carted

& the Buddha & the Chairman skip hand
in hand, all the way down to the waterfront.



[Earth-Shaving]


“I know you’re thinking
these are trees from the days
of wilderness and chaos,” he says
wielding his electric chain saw,
a crusader assessing his holy war,
“when butterflies were golden eagles
and spiders the size of cartwheels.”
“We,” says his companion
Manolo who looks like a gunslinger,
“are trimming our way to enlightenment.
There’d have been no Renaissance
without the heat and the paper-makers.
It’s stubble from a chin, and we’re
just giving her a close shave,” he says.
And Manolo points at my Canon
dangling from my neck like a marsupial.
“Take your shots of the extinct volcano,”
he says, “but these are coming down.
And I know you’re thinking about
the wild flowers, about the bees,
but listen—don’t you want to know
what the time is?”