The HyperTexts

Terese Coe



Terese Coe's poems, translations, and prose appear in over 100 Anglophone journals, inc. Able Muse, Agenda, Alabama Lit. Rv, Alaska Quarterly Rv, Apogee, Cincinnati Rv, The Classical Outlook, Crannog, Cyphers, Hopkins Rv, Measure, Metamorphoses, The Moth, New American Writing, New Writing Scotland, Orbis, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Rv, Stinging Fly, Threepenny Rv, the TLS, Warwick Rv, Xavier Rv, and in various anthologies. Giorno Poetry Systems awarded her poetry grants in 2001 and 2002, and her collection Shot Silk was listed for the 2017 Poets Prize. Agenda UK published a number of her Rilke and Borges translations and adaptations in their 2007 *A Special Consideration of Rilke* Issue. Her biographical comedy about Harry Smith, Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, based on her decades-long friendship with Mahagonny’s filmmaker-artist-wit, was read aloud by Equity Actors at Dixon Place, NYC, in 2019 to a full house and was taped both there and at another reading.

She won first prize in the 2008 Schaible Sonnet Award, and publishes several genres of poems, inc. metrical and free verse. Copies of her poem "More" were heli-dropped across London as part of the 2012 London Olympics' Poetry Parnassus. 

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terese_Coe. 

"It's clear to me that she knows what she's doing, she's doing what she wants to do, and she does it well."—Hayden Carruth

"She domesticates and humanizes the exotic without robbing it of its strangeness, just as she reveals the inherent strangeness in everything looked at closely, however much we persuade ourselves that we already know it intimately."—Rhina P. Espaillat

"Intensely curious, and even more intensely observant, Coe uses wry good humor and considerable formal dexterity to keep the reader turning the pages of her album."—R. S. Gwynn

"The most recent issue of our magazine, no. 25, opens with the poem 'Remorse' by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Terese Coe. The first stanza is: 'I have committed the vilest of any crime / a man can commit. I have not been happy. / Let the ruthless glaciers of forgetfulness / come wrench me out and lose me.' No king is shoved beneath the bed. But there's a backlit melodrama of light and shadow figures that's our idea of a good time in language."—Paul Hoover, editor of New American Writing



Way of the World

Translated from Heinrich Heine’s German

He who has will soon have more,
much more than he has today.
What he with only a little has,
that little is taken away.

But you who have nothing whatever,
go dig yourself a grave–
for the right to live, you wretches,
is only for those who have.

Terese Coe, translator

First Published in The Alabama Literary Review



The Bison

After Jorge Luis Borges' Spanish

Like the mountains, steaming, indecipherable,
red as the coal that glares before it dies,
he moves his slow and monumental size
across the solitude of indefatigable
Plains. He lifts his horns, his armored head.
In the sleeping fury of the ancient beast
I see Comanche, Sioux, the mounted red
man, all the men whom Altamira lost.

Then I think he is unaware of human time,
whose phantom mirror is the memory.
Neither time nor history can touch his journey,

so long and so unsettled, and so hollow.
Out of time, out of number, zero,
he is the last of the bison, and the primal.

Terese Coe, translator

First published in Evansville Review



Café Noir

He turned her bedroom into a garage,
just ripped a hole in the wall and gutted it.
He never could hold on to a parking space,
you said. That month we suffered a barrage
of demolition noise; Annette had split.
Then one day he pulled up in a beat-up Lexus
with inanition chiseled on his face.
He said Annette was somewhere in West Texas.

I dreamt I wrote this living in a canyon
outside Malibu. Pacific waves
sent salt in through the trees; a massive banyan
stood near a fresh-dug grave.
At breakfast we were drinking café noir.
You said we wouldn’t always need a car.

Terese Coe

First published in The Threepenny Review



Apollo and Daphne

She runs again, shouts to her father,
The hound is Apollo, he’ll take me!
Beauty is only a curse to me—
destroy me or unmake me!

Apollo leaps for her loosened hair
but her flesh becomes bark as she flies.
Her feet sink into the ground as roots—
the laurel he clutches has eyes.

Pounding the trunk, he hears the beat
of Daphne’s sealed-in heart.
In a fury, the god rips out her leaves
for his wreath to war and art.

Terese Coe

First published in The Alabama Literary Review



Consider the Egg

Translated from Pierre de Ronsard’s French

Consider the egg. The egg is like the sky,
enclosing in its arms the earth entire,
caprices of the sea, the air and fire,
never known, but knowing what and why.

Its case recalls the air; the white, when raw,
is ocean, making all things sprout and shoot;
the yolk, like fire, can quicken and transmute;
the shell I hold, like ample Earth, in awe.

Both sky and egg are coverings of white.
In giving you an egg, I give creation:
a promise in a wrapping blank and bright

though next to this divine configuration
your own perfection rises without peer,
as only gods are worthy to make clear.

Terese Coe

First published in Iambs & Trochees



Tooth and Claw

With stones and sharpened sticks, with tooth and claw,
with blade and bow and cities burnt to cinder,
with truncheon, boulder, catapult and bluster,
with visions of a father or a river,

With boiling oil, with poisoned food and water,
with jealous kings still licking ancient wounds,
with armies made of boys and bones and blunder,
in frenzies called religion and revenge,

For envy, power, greed, for shackled slaves,
for access to the sea and concubines,
for cattle herds and horses, beaver skins,
for fox and fur, for flesh and diamond mines,

For minerals and lies, for land and timber,
corpse and battle, battle, corpse, and plunder.

Terese Coe

First published in Stone Canoe



Manhattan Schist

October 2001

The list of Missing swells;
a flotilla of ash and mote
is one with the air we breathe.
There is no antidote.

Scrawled above the encampment
and vigil in Union Square
is Love, the most somber graffito,
alive and stark and spare.

Terese Coe

First published in Blue Unicorn



Notes from a Tenement Downtown
 
The more original it is, the more
enigmatic. That could be said
of this apartment, which is
133 years old. Alexander Cockburn
was here to talk about a mutual friend’s
suicide. Drag comedian Jackie Curtis
in his 70s heyday acting out his fantasy of
“Three Girls at a Bus Stop” on an audio
tape. Up the block Eddie Condon and Phyllis before
they gave over their Washington Square apartment
to their daughter Maggie, Eddie in his
chenille bathrobe, Phyllis finally understanding
when I said their younger daughter was
alienated. That put it into perspective for
Phyllis, a 1940s intellectual. Don Barthelme
climbed three flights of stairs to pick up
his daughter from a play date. I wasn't
reading fiction at the time and had the indifference or
the temerity to say so. He was inscrutable, bright-
eyed as we picked our way through wooden blocks
and railroad bridges to the toddlers with
Botticelli in their eyes. Ron Rosenbaum fell by
the night of the ’77 Blackout, more than
enough temptation for an all-night walk
downtown, the only light a cop car’s
spotlights swirling red on tunnels of brick
facades. We took those images in the mind.

Terese Coe

First published in Alaska Quarterly Review



On the Choice of his Burial Ground (De l’Election de son sepulchre)

Translated from Pierre de Ronsard’s Middle French

Caves, and you fountains
 in cliffs and mountains
 cascading in flights
  from shimmering heights

and you rivers and trees
 amid vagabond leas,
 and you woods and creeks:
  hear me speak.

When time and the sky
  decree I must die
  and they snatch me away
   from the light of day,

I forbid you to cut
 blocks of marble.
 What use is room
   in a grandiose tomb?

Instead make my shrine
 in the shade of a pine
 or an evergreen tree.
  Let the marble be.

Let my body give birth
 to ivy, let earth
 enfold and entwine
  my body in vines.

Let the vines abound
 and flourish around,
 casting blue shade
  where my body is laid.

And shepherds each year
  will gather here
  on the day of my feast
   with their flocks increased.

Let sacrifice be made
 in the deep of the shade.
 May they pause for a while
  and say to the isle:

How deep is the grace
 of this resting-place
 for a poet sung
  by the old and the young.
 
He never burned
 with envy nor yearned
 for honors and awards
  from barons and lords
 
nor would he use
 a magician’s ruse,
 nor the mysteries of
  old potions of love.
 
But he brought to our leas
 the Pierides,
 who danced along
  to the sounds of his songs
 
trampling the grass
 to circle and pass
 to the grace of his chords
   and praying words:
           
Let dew be my shawl,
 let sweet manna fall
 forever down,
  and May be my crown.
 
Let the green grass grow
 on leas high and low,
 and let rivers and rills
  run for aye in these hills
 
every day to proclaim
 the renown of his name
 in homage to the man
  and honor to Pan.

So the shepherds will say
 as they pause on that day,
 mingling blood of a lamb
  with the milk of a dam

to pour over me.
 Just then I will be
 in the home of the blest,
  my spirit at rest.
 
Neither snow nor hail
 is seen in that vale,
 and lightning’s glare
  does not strike there,

where the undulant sea
 of eternity
 is forever seen
   as spring’s new green.

The afflictions that cling
 to the mind of a king
 do not trouble those sprites
  without appetites.

Instead they pursue
 the trades they knew
 from their fathers and mothers.
  They live like brothers.

There, there will I hear
 Alcaeus’ clear
 lyre, the light strings
   when Sappho sings.

And the spirits who longed
 for her music and song
 will hear and rejoice
  at the sound of her voice,
   
their torment supplanted,
 the boulder enchanted,
 and even the thirst
  of Tantalus reversed.

The lyre alone
 has the sweetness of tone
 to unburden the mind
  and give ease to mankind.

Terese Coe, translator

This is a link to the original Middle French poem:  https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/the-oxford-book-of-french-verse/68-odes/



The Enigmas

After Jorge Luis Borges' Spanish

I who am the one who sings this song now
tomorrow will be the mysterious dead,
the inhabitant of a magical and deserted
world without before or after or when.
So the mystics say. I believe I am
myself unworthy of either hell or glory,
with nothing to predict. Our winding history
shifts and tilts like the shapes of Proteus.
What vagrant labyrinth, what blinding whiteness
will come to be my fate when I am delivered
into the final fragment of this adventure,
the curious experience of death?
I long to drink its clear oblivion,
always to be, but never to have been. 



Where to Now?

Translated from Heinrich Heine’s “Jetzt Wohin?”

Where to now? To Germany,
my dumb feet want to say—
but shaking no, my head says
Let’s go the other way:

They say the war is over now,
but martial law’s a fright;
they say your writing’s reckless,
and Germans shoot on sight.

Quite true, quite true, and firing squads
are dirty, smug and rank.
I couldn’t bear the guillotine,
not even for a prank.

I’d gladly cross to England
if it weren't for the damp—
and then the smells alone suffice
to make my stomach cramp—

Perhaps an ocean voyage
to America, where I’d
see daring freedom fighters
and their feats of homicide.

It’s just that countries frighten me
where cowboys take a chaw,
they bowl without a kingpin,
and spittoons are not the law.

Then there’s Russia, Czarist Russia!
Just the place to skip. 
It’s doubtful I’d survive
the year-long winter and the whip.

I look up to the heavens
where a billion stars are bright,
but where’s my constellation?
Obscured by too much light.

In the labyrinth of starlight
it’s mislaid itself, as I
have mislaid myself in tumult.
So on Earth as in the sky.



Rain

After Jorge Luis Borges' Spanish

Suddenly afternoon turns clear as rain,
already falling, falls, meticulous rain.
It is falling or it fell. Rain is a thing
that doubtless occurs in a time already gone.

Whoever hears it fall recovers an era
when circumstance and luck revealed a flower
someone named the rose, and a peculiar
blood-red color.

In lost suburban towns this rain that turns
the windows blind will plump the blue-black grapes
on a vine in a certain yard no longer there.

At night the drenching brings his voice inside,
the longed-for voice of my father
who has now come back again, and who never died.

First published in New American Writing



Imitation of Martial

Translated from the French of Pierre de Ronsard

You want me to perform as slave
in every service you require,
to clear the path of gnome and knave
when you parade in silk attire,
to grovel every time you twitch
and burst with pride if you should snort,
to bitch and backstab when you bitch—
enough! I do not care to court
your trifling whims, nor do I owe
a duty to your odd pursuits.
Your menials rushing to and fro
can't hope to match my attributes.



Chanson

Translated from the French of Pierre de Ronsard

Spring has not the flowers
nor autumn such a squall
nor summer heat the power
nor winter cold the pall—
nor Beauce the cornucopia,
nor all the seas the fish,
Bretagne no utopia,
Auvergne no springs like this—
nor has the night the torches,
nor have the woodlands trees,
as I, the scars and scorches
you've burned there by degrees.

First published by Leviathan Quarterly (UK)



And This Is What We Have

And this is what we have:
a rakish slated rooftop,
the aging tambourine,
a page of eggshell foolscap,
a flap of barkentine.

And this is what we lack:
a penny saved for madness,
a penny saved for pain,
a measure for our gladness,
a box to fill with rain.

And this is what we know:
a summer birth will flourish,
Orion's stars will shift,
the love of love will nourish,
the scent of death will drift.

And this is what we don't know:
the reason for our living,
the price we pay for chance,
the sacredness of giving,
the grace of our own dance.



Will O’ the Wisp

Translated from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke

We have an ancient dealing
with those lights out on the moors.
They seem to me great-aunts, revealing …
things I fathom more and more:

We share the kind of family quirk
no power can suppress—
a bounce, a bow, a swing, a jerk
the others don’t possess.

I too am there, where no roads go,
where clouds put men to rout;
and I have seen myself below
my eyelids, going out.

First published in Orbis (UK)



Reviews of Terese Coe's Work

The Cincinnati Review

Jacket Magazine

New Pages

The HyperTexts