Texts: an orgy of similes, strona 2

Kisses on the breast

like water from a pitcher

                                 - Pasternak

Kisses on the breast
Like a gift rising
Like a comedian
Attacked by the military
Like a brain bursting
With wild gifts
Like a book of
Unusual expressions
Like kisses on the back
Of your back
Like the end of specious similes
Like a test of much theory
Like the Book of Windows
Like receiving fresh
Paint in the mail
Like being fresh to herons
Like snowflakes on your eyes
Like old friends coming
Home alive
Like outlandish confidence
In a game
Like the poem each line
Better than the next
Like two surprises in each line
Endless that still
Must end
Changing your name and
Your religion, too
Like including everything
And yet being clear at once
Kisses on the breast
Like writing in a dream
And waking up in an envelope

Copyright ©: David Shapiro

(in: In Memory of an Angel, 2017, p. 27-28)

When the translation and original meet
The doubtful original and the strong translation
The original feels lost like a triple pun
And the translation cries, Without me you are lost
Then be my dream, thin as the definition
Of a trance in a garden
The ambiguous friend responds, Perhaps I do astonish you
Like a boy confused with a butterfly’s dream
But you are my dream now, after all
If I don’t think of you, you disappear
After which they both comically disappear
Like a slice through two trees for a thousand years
Return knowing coldly a need for guerdons, guardians
Letters written on clouds, snakes on curtains and naked devices
Frighten them no longer since they live only together
Father and son refracted through blue green black moss
They travel together to the margins of a cloud.

Copyright ©: David Shapiro

(in: After a Lost Original, 1994)