Leo Yankevich

(after the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)

We have no knowledge of his ancient brow
where pippins ripen. Yet his torso gleams,
...

You hear the sound of carols from afar.
Bright bulbs and tinsel, cinnamon and cloves.
Beyond a hill of snow you see a star.
...

Without the moon or stars to guide his sight,
without a glint from shanties down below,
he rested on the foggy hill that night,
and begged the heavens for a tiny glow.
...

...

Yes, pretty soon now they’ll be at your door.
They’ve orders and a warrant after all.
It doesn’t matter. You’ll be on the floor,
your wife and children having watched you fall.
...

Here is a river with a little boat
moored beside its bank. The boat's the colour
of oranges in the south of Greece, all bloody
and ripe with sweetness, while the bank's the colour
...

Milk curdles in her jar,
mould forms on her black bread.
She’s come so very far,
but her blue Polish eyes
...

Intensities of pain—
of those once persecuted
and those once executed.
...

(after the German of Georg Trakl)

The brown village. A darkness often treads
Along the walls that stand in autumn. Mock-
...

I rise at the break of dawn,
still dreaming, half awake,
wondering whether I’m gone;
but, the sun on the lake,
...

The father looks up to the sky or ceiling
(beyond the grey scale of the photograph)
with his son wrapped inside his cradling arms.
An orderly obscures the boy’s midsection,
...

A sudden brightness. Call it day.
Rooks above the cathedral, and clouds
...

Though many years have passed, and loves, I swear
I can still smell the soaps this one would use.
I can still see the mole on her left thigh,
black eden lace against her northern skin.
...

When we entered the burning city
charred corpses greeted us.
A child’s hand dangled from a scorched tree
and the twisted wreckage of a bus
...

Perhaps there’s mercy in the skies,
although the Spaniards have seen none.
The tears of horror in their eyes
reflect the fury of the sun
...

After a long night of interrogation,
followed by a thirty-minute trial,
there was no doubt about it: I was guilty.
...

Malachite of tower and dome,
clatter of sabots, creaks of wheels,
neighs of horses headed home
from a market where smoked eels
...

They come, come faithfully to behold him,
three kings and their harems after three nights
of fasting, coated in an afterlife
of sweet confection. But the star is dim
...

I felt it in her body loves ago.
Call it what you will: her psyche, soul,
essence, the ghost I never got to know
that haunts me down my later years. A fool,
...

At midnight, just beneath the sunken moon,
there is a glade, where leaf on fallen leaf
lie underneath her long and bony arms.
There, naked, she awaits her time to come.
...