To read only children's books, treasure
Only childish thoughts, throw
Grown-up things away
And rise from deep sorrows.

I'm tired to death of life,
I accept nothing it can give me,
But I love my poor earth
Because it's the only one I've seen.

In a far-off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing,
And I remember dark tall firs
In a hazy fever.

—Osip Mandelshtam
[trans. James Green]
(4) 1908

Poems by David Athey

• Paperback: 58 pages
• Publisher: Bellowing Ark Press, Shoreline, WA, 2000
• ISBN: 0944920373
• To order the book contact David directly at davidathey@hotmail.com

Hunting and Gathering Heaven is a thin little book. It is light. Light in weight, obviously, and light in tone. But more significantly, it is light in the sense of being luminous.

I've just recently (re)began reading the selection of Pablo Neruda's verse in translation titled Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. I find myself quite seduced by the mature yet childlike earthy-sensuality of these poems. Here's the first one in the book as translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Some Beasts

It was the twilight of the iguana.

From the rainbow-arched battlements
his tongue like a dart
plunged into the greenness
the monastic ant-swarm walked
through the jungle with melodious feet,
the guanaco, thin as oxygen
in the wide gray heights,
moved wearing boots of gold,
while the llama opened his guileless
eyes in the transparency
of a world filled with dew.
The monkeys braided a thread
endlessly erotic
along the shores of the dawn,
demolishing walls of pollen
and scaring off the violet flight
of the butterflies of Muzo.
It was the night of the alligators,
the night pure and pullulating
with snouts emerging from the slime,
and out of the sleepy marshes
an opaque noise of armor
returned to the earth it came from.

The jaguar touched the leaves
with his phosphorescent absence,
th puma runs on the branches
like a devouring fire
while inside him burn
the jungle's alcoholic eyes.

The badgers scratch the feet
of the river, sniff out the nest
whose throbbing delight
they'll attack with red teeth.

And in the depths of the all-powerful water,
like the circle of the earth,
lies the giant anaconda,
covered with ritual mud,
devouring and religious.

cranehaven

An owl descending
From above the nocturnal pond:
The waning moon,
Robed in silver mist,
Finds a sleeping fieldmouse.

Emergence

A Confession to a Friend in Trouble