Four Poems by Nancy Naomi Carlson
Variations on a René Char Riff
How to end this long, diluvial night
in a landscape scaled in grays?
Waves of grief can teach you to float.
You’ve lost a mother, a tidal
wave of friends to the death parade.
No end to this long, diluvial night.
You feel your self disrupted,
moored to prolonged despair.
Waves of grief can teach you to float
in their gaps, gifting you time,
breath and strength
to end this long, diluvial night.
Struggling against the dark, the tide,
your fingers navigate the way.
Waves can teach you to float
grief like a whale catching a current
of air, or a full moon’s watery face.
Drift to the end of this long, diluvial night.
Waves of grief can teach you to float.
Pastoral
Thomas Gray’s tomb lies under yew tree shade.
Resurrected from churchyard sun,
light is particle and wave.
Branches dating back to the ice age
have survived their trunks,
re-rooting for more yew tree shade.
Carved into English longbows and shaped
into Renaissance lutes despite toxic dust,
yews are chastened and chaste.
Legend has it that three seeds were placed
in Adam’s mouth before he was laid underground.
The yew branch planted to mark his grave
became a tree at Golgatha, the place
of the skull, where Jesus succumbed.
Love kills and saves,
like adjuvant taxol extracted from sacred
yew needles and bark—too much and your pump-
heart slackens, like ewes dreaming in shade.
Dosed, you’re celestial—ash and ray.
Lucid Dreamer
Maybe you’re the one falling,
the one helpless to stop what’s
set in motion or stilled
into pirouettes, and the villain
smirking behind the juniper tree,
or maybe you’re the bluff itself,
the complicit clouds,
the air parting like a sea of reeds,
the descent transformed
into bottomless thought—
our collective unconsciousness
churning out similar dreams of chased
and chasing, gawking
naked in crowded streets,
or riding that tunneled dream
of repressed desire—
and if Aristotle was right
that dreamers sometimes know
they’re dreaming, brains stalled
between REM sleep and waking,
then can’t we rewrite the stories
we tell ourselves, maybe foil our own
most desperate plots to know finally
the dreamer from the dream?
Skipping the Leap
If it takes the Earth more time than we can spare
to complete its orbit around the Sun—
almost six extra hours, if rounding off—
and we never accounted for gains,
the seasons would shift, and in 700 years
there’d be snow in June in the Smokies,
though with wild fires and floods
there may not be a planet left to drift.
Where do those hours go before we get them
back each leap year—almost one full minute per day—
not enough for a power nap or the hour
we lose and gain from saving daylight,
pesky as a pound we try to shed for good.
Would those seconds lost each day
be enough to secure good habits for life,
like flossing teeth or touching toes,
doing squats to strengthen quads,
or massaging scalps to coax hair to grow?
Could those seconds have delayed
the truck that T-boned my cousin’s car,
reaching the crossroad too soon,
or have been enough to restart my ex’s heart
after skipping too many beats,
unlike when leaps are skipped every 400 years,
like rubato measures when tempo rights itself—
a little like robbing time.
*
Nancy Naomi Carlson won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Author of sixteen titles (eleven translated), her poetry and translation books have been reviewed in The New York Times. A recipient of two NEA translation grants, she’s the Translations Editor for On the Seawall. Piano in the Dark (Seagull Books, 2023), a “Must-Read Editor’s Choice” from Poetry Daily, is her third full-length collection. Her translation of Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi’s When We Only Have the Earth (University of Nebraska Press: African Poetry Book Series) arrives March, 2025.
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