John N. Miller

IN PASSING

Weathered and peeled, the aging woman's house
crowding a country road stands haunted
by its ghost of white paint.
One more year is passing.

Autumnal wind whips at its roof-tin. Waves
of high grass sweep across her fields.
Window glazing, gone gray,
crumbles from glass rattled in its frames.

A distant hound pitches its lament
against the mid-November dusk. As darkness
swells, the creek below her house
voices no more than a mud-slurred murmur

while within, maybe she can hear
an emptiness sighing along the floorboards
upstairs. By day, one might think
the house abandoned to its own slow sagging--

only near nightfall, sometimes, she appears,
her withering face pressed against a window
in a tangle of gray hair as headlights
pass by, probing their way home.

SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE
     --for Alexis Levitin, translator

After midnight, free
from the drive-time tyranny
of time and temperature, news and ads,
a voice on the radio
reaches listeners in cars and bars, isolated
in empty offices and darkened bedrooms.

Is this a faithful translation
from the Bulgarian--or, better,
"in empty bedrooms and my darkened office,"

Magdalena?

"Empty, I've lost you in my mother tongue"
sounds terrible. I need you, need your help.
Your accent haunts me now in cars and bars,
free from the drive-time tyranny of iambs
but distant, as in the hours before midnight
a voice on short-wave radio,
barely audible, fades out.

On paper in my darkened office
my life remains interesting, busy
as I work to translate your Bulgarian
love poems into print, a paper trail
back to your heartland in Slavic Europe

while in an empty bedroom, after midnight
in the dark night of the soul
for those in cars and bars, a voice
from the radio drums at my ear,
urgent, low, funereal
as for a dead parent.

Magdalena,

your Slavic script loves consonants.
Our tongues smoothed its rough edges,
inserting vowel-sounds where they seemed right,
softening the dark bedroom
speech I choke on, in translation,
between a man and a lost woman.

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