A Winter Evening

Translated from the German of George Trakl

When the snow against the window falls,
Long the evening bell rings,
For many is the table prepared
And the house is well-stocked.

Many on their wanderings
Come to the gate on dark paths.
Golden blooms the tree of Grace
Out of the earth's cool sap.

The wanderer quietly steps inside;
The threshold was swollen with pain.
There, glazed in pure radiance
on the table, Bread and Wine.

Trust

Trust your vaulted hallucinations
Trust your most ridiculous
impossibilities
Trust the wild visions that arise
from moments of boredom

Do not trust the larcenous glares
that surround you
Do not believe the gravity
in the black holes of pupils

Trust the improbabilities
and they will become realities

You Matter Like Prayers

You matter like prayers.
You give God to heaven
that I may ask them for you.

Big Ten Schools

Those are classroom ideas. The dormroom ideas, the flip-flops
grimy in the shower, the barf-proof tiles, the linoleum mattress.
This is where the webisodes are coming from. This is where
the webisodes are going to. These are the things we know:
A great pyramid of beer pong cups, the rosemary tragedy
of a Sunday morning at the clinic, daydream incapabilities
flatlining in rows of desks, the windows shawled in brick.
After all this we will never get back to the four makeshift bases
of the old electric field. We are 27 years old now
and have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

That Missing Civilization

Shakespeare making man
into music

Tu Fu locked in a tree
like Ariel
on the other side of the world

I can do nothing
but hold them
the blossoms
and instead they just
go on in the breeze

The big bombs rock us
to sleep as

Hamlet's body
is carried out
by soldiers

A New Kind of Laziness

I've happened upon
a new kind of laziness,
the laziness of delight.
The laziness of a daisy
knocked over by the sun.

This Body

Who else has used this body of mine?
These hands and eyes and feet?
Which journeys did they take?

In what life was I a clown and in what life was I a King?
In what life did I drink blue drops hanging from a leaf?
In what life did the rose of the sun stain my wild legs?

Which year had me impervious to thought
listening to the frogs croak from the grave of night?
When did I lay in the orchards of the stars?

Or has this body always been used
just as it is now?
For purposes other than its own?