Poet's Choice

Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.

What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.

Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley,

waiting for letters slow to arrive,

not always being able to wear a new dress. But

she strolled in the garden, in the morning!

They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!

The title invites us to expect a poem about some artifact or picture out of antiquity. It also upsets another expectation, the idea that disaster must be evoked by extreme rhetoric, or images of horror Here, the dreadful is called up by quiet, by small anxieties and by understated observation. .

Another element in the emotion of this poem is the specific, repeated name. It is not just that "Clara" connotes light and clarity, but also that she is not anonymous. Her name -- like any name -- implies disparity between the human scale of any specific and the massive scale of technologies so lethal that they can make names irrelevant. The intimacy of the first name in a way contradicts the remoteness suggested by "ancient world" and in another way emphasizes the distance of "they" and "those days." Or to put it differently, a reader can feel very close to Clara and those quiet days, as well as very far from them.

Mark Strand's translation of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poem "Souvenir of the Ancient World" is from Strand's "Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Rafael Alberti and Songs from the Quechua." Knopf. Copyright 2002 by Mark Strand.