Speaking for Themselves

The weak poet

has not gone grey

but his sacrificed similes

lead nowhere.

And his I is like any other word

in the newspaper and he is cut up

like fashion.

MEANWHILE TAKE MY HANDBy Kirmen Uribe. Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin Greywolf. 129 pp. Paperback, $14

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Don't Make It a Choice

---

Don't make me choose

Between the Sea and Dry Land.

I relish living on the edge of the sea cliff,

On this black ribbon the wind waves,

On this long hair fallen from an errant giant.

Of the Sea I love especially its heart,

As idiotic as a great child's.

Now headstrong, wayward, now drawing

Impossible landscapes.

Of Dry Land, however,

I most love those great hands.

Don't make me choose

Between the Sea and Dry Land.

I know my residence is a fine line of thread,

But I'd be lost with only the Sea,

Drown with Dry Land.

Don't make it a choice. I'm going to stay here.

Between the green waves and the blue mountains.

THE BROKEN STRINGBy Grace Schulman Houghton Mifflin. 84 pp. $22

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From The New World

---

Orange alert has glared over this city

since terror acquired colors. Orange,

not yellow, not even yellow elevated.

Before Dvorak's Ninth, at Lincoln Center,

guards worry my handbag, stuffed with war news.

Oak leaves stick to pavement, yellow-to-orange

and high orange, brightest before they wither.

This year they sadden us. Talk was of endings,

not leaves but unrecurrent lives, and yet

with others now, we sink into a hush

like sanderlings that fly on a soundless cue.

Once the composer said his symphony

was Czech, as he was, that he added

"From the New World" in the final draft,

an offering for three years in America,

but in an oboe's long, plaintive vibrato,

I hear the phrases of Hasidic melodies,

African chants, come-thou's and kyries

I caught once on a street corner downtown,

four blocks merging like a napkin's points.

I raced a traffic light's orange-to-red

to find a synagogue confronting churches,

Baptist and Roman, eyeing one another.

High above street whines, music soared in quarrels,

moans, blues, calls-and-responses, hymns that rose up

together from stone. It took a Czech patriot

to restore that day. Now the people cheer

so loud you'd think a New World is beginning,

the clamor telling us this world will do

as long as we can have some more of it.

Outside, the founatin shoots the stars.

We glance upward, smiling, even when

a leaf spins down to concrete, crisp, high orange.

HalflifeBy Meghan O'Rourke Norton. 87 pp. $23.95

---

My Life as a Teenager

---

I felt "remorse for civilization."

My nostalgia was buoyant,

fat as cartoon clouds.

I sang teenage French, sashaying down the street:

" Bonjour, Je t'aime, comment tu t'appelles?"

The apartment buildings leaned down at me.

I proclaimed my love for the past,

wore fitted clothes from the 40s.

I came out against pointlessness.

All night boys danced in the living room

mouthing the words to the Go-Gos,

shrugging into the night's advances,

then took their stolen kisses from girls

fat like Troy, ready for the sieging.

In the morning, the sun was a cutout in the smog.

Every window was a picture window;

the dawn grew into day, red, orange, blue,

in perfect disorder. The partygoers were outside,

building a monument out of a blowtorch

and something old and green.

From where I stood, the tree, de-leafed and nude,

appeared to bow to me,

and what had long been silent grew.

.