[New-Poetry] Poetic image: two tears

[JforJames at aol.com]

Leavetaking
 
One the morning they left
we said goodbye
filled with sadness
for  the absence of come
 
Inside the palanquins
on the camels’ backs
I saw their faces  beautiful as moons
behind veils of gold cloth.
 
Beneath the veils
tears crept like scorpions
over the fragrant  roses
of their cheeks.
 
Ibn  Khafāja (1058-1138)
 
Poems of Arab Adalusia, City Lights, 1989,
translated by Cola  Franzen

--

In the Lake District
 
In those days, in a place where dentists thrive
(their daughters order  fancy clothes from London;
their painted forceps hold aloft on  signboards
a common and abstracted Wisdom Tooth),
there I—whose mouth held  ruins more abject
than any Parthenon—a spy, a spearhead 
from some fifth  column of a rotting culture
(my cover was a lit. professorship),
was  living at a college near the most
renowned of the fresh-water lakes; the  function
to which I’d been appointed was to wear out
the patience of the  ingenuous local youth.
 
Whatever I wrote then was incomplete:
my lines expired in strings of  dots. Collapsing,
I dropped, still fully dressed, upon my bed.
At night I  stared up at the darkened ceiling
until I saw a shooting star, which  then,
conforming to the laws of self-combustion,
would flash—before I'd  even made a wish—
across my cheek and down onto my pillow.
 
--Joseph Brodsky, "In the Lake District," 
(translated by Geo. L.  Kline),
A Part of Speech, FSG, 1980

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