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Santa Fe, Winter
In the cafe there were jars of honey on each table
and outside huge snowflakes floated without landing:
combined, the happiness created could be distilled
as into the globe of a paperweight, shaken and distinct.
During night the storm comes in
and I've had a cappuccino and can't
sleep. At midnight it'll turn
to St.Valentine's Day: heart like an empty
red heart-shaped bottle, vase
for a frail bud. My husband
so far away.
Tugging at Fragments
- for Ilpo
Drinking at the Andalusian Dog,
the two young writers speak to each other in asides
and don't know how to regard me;
they're like little puppies without learned manners.
I have come to realize that we struggle like little stars
for recognition. One hundred thousand short lengths of string
are burned as offering to the gods in Kathmandu temples:
it is the way I write, tying together bits of twine
in the hope they will ignite. A friend once said
she thought singing was the highest art;
it is momentary and leaves nothing tangible.
I heard that on the last night of the poetry festival
you danced on the tabletop, and so wish
I'd been there to hear the clicking of your heels
and to see the fleeting mask of a god. Ê
After Bangkok, In February
Shadows from the palm fronds stripe the coconuts
and the sun lays gilt on the sand, like the sequined
fig-leaf foundations the transvestites on Chaweng Beach
tried on in the bar: it could be a tiara, or worn
low over the breasts, or over the pelvic area.
They festooned themselves in rhinestones, perhaps
for the full moon festival, perhaps Chinese New year,
no one cared. Oh love me in this external
manner if you like, tinsel clinging close
only a short time. You asked if I liked gold and I answered,
I can not afford it, meaning I will not want
what I can not have. It is your mercurial nature
in any case that I love, which pours over everyone
in your presence and then passes on quickly, quickly.
Such bright explosions later that night:
firecrackers spitting off the shrines, the flame-breather
juggling five torches, the brilliant shine on glass.
Coming Home
Night falls green in the cisterns: outside Taiyuan
a flock of sheep is herded in for the night.
In the orchard earlier, I peeled and quartered apples
and popped the sections into your mouth, now
under the parasol trees the bus glides homeward
and in a surfeit of happiness you gild me like mercury
the way the silver of an anchovy sometimes comes off
on one's thumb. Your hair is soft as cotton-candy
next to my cheek, your eyes like the silver moon
when clouds pass over -- far, far. A glitter of stars
and on the streets red-shaded lamps above heaps of jujube dates
while in the distant darkness children search for sparrows
in the holes of a wall with small lights.
Dissociation
As a catkin separates from a tree
I fell away from you in spring: was severed
though I wished to cling like a bit of gold-leaf pressed to the Buddha,
quivering in the wind, that gives it that peculiarly malevolent expression.
At my window above the quadrangle of pale-branched trees,
white chocolate on the sill, I corrected papers
in which a student writes of pears: their leathers are golden,
dotted with brown spots. Perhaps that fruit
is as protected as you, who used to sleep fitting your hand
around the clasp of a knife. The lily
whose shadow falls across the tight flesh of the melon
cohabits this room: I cannot know your body
with the knife scars on it. It was just after
International Women's Day, and because you are good with knives
they asked you to cut the cake, and you gave each girl
a slice with a rose.
Incara Cedrins is a resident of Albuquerque, an American artist, writer and translator who went to China in 1998 to learn to paint on silk, and remained for five years to teach writing and lecture on art at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, as well as to the People's Liberation Army and students at the Central Academy of Fine Art. In 2003 she went to Nepal to study the technique of thangka painting. After the king's coup d'etat in 2005, she relocated to Riga, Latvia, started a literary agency called The Baltic Edge, and taught Creative Writing at the University of Latvia.
She has edited an issue of the online magazine Omega featuring Latvian poets (accessible at www.howlingdogpress.com/OMEGA05), and developed an anthology of Baltic poetry from that. From it, she will form a future issue of the online journal The Drunken Boat featuring Estonian poets. She is editing and translating the Latvian section of a Baltic anthology to be published by Wolsak & Wynn, Canada in 2008, and also contributing to The New European Poets, an anthology to be published by Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota in 2008. The Atlanta Review has asked her to be contributing editor for their 2008 Chinese issue.
A collection of poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published in 2006 by the Virtual Artists Collective. Her poems, stories and translations from the Latvian have appeared in The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, the Massachusetts Review, among others. (October 2007)
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