Nomad Exquisite

By Wallace Stevens

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, come flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda

Translated By Alfred Yankauer

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,

but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he’d keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean’s spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don’t now and never did lie to each other.

So now he’s gone and I buried him,

and that’s all there is to it.

Source: Poetry (February 1999).



Pablo Neruda  (1904–1973)



Emily Dickinson

By Dejan Stojanovic

A word into the silence thrown
Always finds its echo somewhere
Where silence opens hidden lexicons
And words fly back
Only into silence to arrive
At just about the right instant

Dejan Stojanovic, Paris, May 1990



I’m nobody! Who are you?

By Emily Dickinson

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson

Being Late by Dejan Stojanovic

From where do simplicity and ease
In the movement of heavenly bodies derive?
It is precision.
Sun is never late to rise upon the Earth
Moon is never late to cause the tides
Earth is never late to greet the Sun and the Moon
Thus accidents are not accidents
But precise arrivals at the wrong right time
Love is almost never simple
Too often, feelings arrive too soon
Waiting for thoughts that often come too late
I wanted too, to be simple and precise
Like the Sun
Like the Moon
Like the Earth
But the Earth was booked
Billions of years in advance.
Designed to meet all desires,
All arrivals, all sunrises, all sunsets,
All departures
So I will have to be a little bit late.



Dejan Stojanovic, Belgrade, 1981