Adventures in Translation

From a student paper on Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants":

"The man tells the girl about a drink called Anis del Toro (meaning butt of the bull)."

No wonder I could never stand the taste of anise.

Line(s) of the Week

"Her voice was a force of nature, her conversation a fast-moving rapid full of deadly churning eddies. She was like Hitler without the anti-Semitism, MLK without the compassion or noble cause."

—Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

The Holy Order of Fish Handlers

There are those who claim

they can catch the sleek

trout in their bare hands.

My first response to this

was disbelief, but when

I try to imagine it—

I who can barely catch

that lovely and elusive

fish with hook and line

and who have seen them

flash upstream when I

merely scratched an itch—

I imagine something

like a sacred meditation,

a dance of stillness

demanding the non-

attachment of a monk.

To teach oneself to

stand in a cold river

without disrupting it,

to cast no shadow:

is it any different from

learning to levitate, or

mastering that bullfrog-

like chanting that resounds

even underneath the temple?

They talk of calming the fish

by gently stroking

its belly, and I admit,

like a hungry trout

gulled by glint and feather,

I may have been seduced

by a beautiful idea,

but I want to believe

in this, the holy order

of fish handlers, who, to

briefly catch their prey, must

first forget themselves.

—Dallas Crow

"The Holy Order of Fish Handlers" originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008 (Vol. 103, #3/4) issue of Poet Lore.

The Aesthetics of Gravity

Think of the pleasure boys take in falling,

the hours they devote to it: ko'd, shot

in the back, machine-gunned in the

gut; tackled, clotheslined, checked,

body-blocked, tripped; in slow motion

whenever possible; preferably

for an audience of friends or family;

dramatically, comically; into

pillows, hay, leaves, mud, snow—

any pile promising padding or a mess;

water, too: flips, splits, bellyflops,

can openers and cannonballs.

Some may argue that phylogeny

recapitulates ontogeny, that

they are reliving that initial fall

from grace themselves; others may

insist they somehow sense their

own mortality, and are preparing for

their future decline; but I am convinced—

watching my sons catapult and pirouette

through the invisible air, then replay

those all too brief moments of flight

again and again for friends—they are

enchanted by the aesthetics of gravity.

Icarus is their hero, not for his

Pyrrhic success or greedy heedlessness,

but for his most delightful failure.

—Dallas Crow

"The Aesthetics of Gravity" originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008 (Vol. 103, #3/4) issue of Poet Lore.