Icy Night, and: Orpheus in the Harbor, and: The Cat

Abstract

Icy Night, and: Orpheus in the Harbor, and: The Cat Kuno Raeber (bio) Translated by Stuart Friebert (bio) Icy Night Because they're already beginning to set the chairson the table at ten o'clock,you drive along through the nightshot through with crackling ice and finda pub still open in the most ordinary neighborhood,where an old man in the corner'sneatly piling up coins.But now he's turning the radio louderso your hard-edged thoughts sink downinto the whipped cream of pop songs.And when you glide along drunkenlyin your latest escape and hit the ice,you keep going right on through Greenlandand Siberia with your cheeks cut by splintersfrom the windshield:your blood melts the North Pole,and your eyes spark behind it,hot pebbles in the sand.After fevering along from wine barto wine bar in the icy night,your cheek, shrinking from anygrazing glance, comes to reston Ostia's sea-cheek. [End Page 125] Orpheus in the Harbor There's nothing herethat you'd absolutely have to have seen:I don't like it here for the monuments:but because of the hourswhere you're deeper in Venicethan even on the Rialto: On the hostel's hill,your ear sharpened to the tune of starsringing over the harbor—even if too far off, so the cold criesof the blowtorches from the docks over the waterwouldn't sharpen and grow. Don't cling to my arm:don't be afraidwhen you see the huge face white between the ships,its mouth open,gone dumb and as if asleep.Don't be afraid, because a secretstream floated it toward you even in this remote harbor: you may ever flee cities and harbors,I think it'll always find you again.So look past it, and just climb the hill: from there it's simply only the moon,modestly with stars, if you only wish it,lying there among the ships in the basin:don't be afraid. [End Page 126] The Cat Running aroundin a circle, the cat,smooth as velvet,pushes pebbles aside.They gleam and dazzle, so thatthe cat stumbles over the deadmice, huffy nowbecause it's kept from runningsmooth as velvet in a circle. Kuno Raeber Kuno Raeber, the Swiss writer of poetry, prose, fiction, and criticism, was born in 1922 and died in 1992. Much acclaimed in Europe, he taught at Oberlin College in the 1960s. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Field, Sou'wester, American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Permission to print has been granted by Carl Hanser Verlag/Munich. Stuart Friebert Stuart Friebert, founder of Oberlin's Writing Program and cofounder of Field, the Field Translation Series, and Oberlin College Press, has published eight volumes of translations, most recently Sylva Fischerova's Selected Poems: The Swing in the Middle of Chaos, as well as a dozen books of his own poems, most recently Speak Mouth to Mouth. Copyright © 2012 University of Nebraska Press