A winter night by Tomas TRANSTROEMER

The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm's text.

The child's eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.

The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.

The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.

A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.

  (Text of the poem in the original Swedish)
Tomas Tranströmer
translated from the Swedish by Robin Robertson

The Deleted World
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The wereman by Margaret Atwood

My husband walks in the frosted field
an X, a concept
defined against a blank;
he swerves, enters the forest
and is blotted out.

Unheld by my sight
what does he change into
what other shape
blends with the under,
growth, wavers across the pools
is camouflaged from the listening
swamp animals

At noon he will
return; or it may be
only my idea of him
I will find returning
with him hiding behind it.

He may change me also
with the fox eye, the owl
eye, the eightfold
eye of the spider

I can't think
what he will see
when he opens the door


extrait de The Journals of Susanna MOODIE
by Margaret Atwood 
chez Bloomsbury Publishing 
isbn 0-7475 3721 6 

Globule by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

To be transparent, to contain the world,

To be jellyfish, lucent, mobile, membraned,

Boneless behold me, my mica bits

Expensive steel suspended in my substance,

Afloat in floodwater, swinging shoreward,

Ebbing oceanward, clockless among quick fishes

Striped, sported,

Speckled, stippled

Swishing between braincoral cobbles

Granulated brine, ever in motion.

II

From plate tinted a shell’s hard innerness,

Cerise bleeds, leads chilly dawn.

Sunlight struggles downward through wavelets

Near the sound’s warm surface, visible even

From the cliffs of cottages, it pushes relentlessly

Finding us, feeding us, diatoms, sea-lace,

Anemones, kelp. Breathing in our beds,

Bright sunlight sustains us, formidable father,

We who are oblivious, maybe immortal,

Then softens, slants, abruptly dips. There’s darkness.

Brutally cold, the boom of surf unheard,

Over pocked sand, purely indifference,

Rock ridges ready to razor tenderness

Seawater keeps moving forgetfully.

III

Now on the surface moonlight rests like ice

And the far sky blinks its pointed messages,

Pointless to me, about matter’s beginnings-

Membranous, shapeless, rocking undersea,

Both a thing contained and container of mystery,

Smoothness inside of smoothness, cold in cold,

Wishing only to be as I am, transparent,

Textured fleck afloat in a wet world. 

The Crack in Everything (1996) 
page 170-171

in The Little Space 

by Alicia Suskin OSTRIKER 

isbn 0-8229-5680-2