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Poet's Choice
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When we have led women to excess;
Since there is also a heaven in hell,
Permit me to propose a few things:
I wish to make a noise with my feet
I want my soul to find its proper body.
To call life "A bit of foam shining inside a glass" evokes both test tube and champagne flute. Those crude elements become us, he says, the way wood becomes chairs and tables. To "make a noise with my feet" is a tribal stomp of outrage; for the "soul to find its proper body" is to meld with the eternal.
[Parra's poems -- the first two are translated by W.S. Merwin and the third is translated by William Carlos Williams-- can be found in "Poems and Antipoems," published first by Editorial Nascimento and republished by New Directions, 1966. Copyright by Miller Williams (editor) and Nicanor Parra.]
Mary Karr is a poet and the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
