James Davis May
The donkey my daughter loves
cannot reach the flowers that grow
in the film of soil the ocean breeze
has lifted to the roof of the barn.

We don't know what they're called
and speak too little of the language
to ask the farmhand their name,
though we can tell they're delicious

by the way the donkey cocks its head
to two o'clock toward the roof
and strains its prehensile lips
to almost reach them, an effort

that looks like remembering
a word you can almost remember
how it nearly touches the voice—
"It's on the tip of my tongue," we say.

And I don't know what to say
to myself, or the man I become,
inside those days and nights of hurt
I cannot argue my way out of.

I know it won't be enough to say,
"Remember the orchard over there,
its plums and cherries, and apples
just forming from the blooms."

Not enough to remember the tides
we hear beyond the meadow, how
they leave the beach cracked
like ancient porcelain. Not enough

to repeat the Auden lines I muttered
to myself last night at the restaurant
when I felt the depression coming on,
eerie as a suspicion of being watched.

"The lights must never go out,"
I said, "the music must always play."
And it almost worked: the intoxication
of asking for and receiving the tray

of oysters gleaming like an ornate dock,
then the bouquet of mussels,
and the baked sea bream symmetrical
as a well-wrapped Christmas gift.

But I've learned that you can love
pleasure and still want to die
while absolutely not wanting to die,
a situation that requires, if nothing else,

some patience, the precise gentleness
the donkey grants my daughter's hand
as she offers the wanted flowers
to the mouth that destroys and loves them.
from the journal SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
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After recovering from a year-long depressive episode, I experienced a relapse while visiting Brittany, France. One of the scariest things about depression is how adept it is at finding you even in the best circumstances. You can be surrounded by love, beauty, pleasure, and even peace, but it will find you. This poem acknowledges that fact while recognizing that there are ways of pushing back, difficult though they may be.

James Davis May on "Depression in Saint-Méloir-des-Ondes"
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Join Poetry Daily Editorial Co-Director Sally Keith in Fairfax today, October 13 at 6:00 pm, for a conversation with poets Tom Sleighand Allison Adelle HedgeCoke. 
 
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Feminists Fight to Repaint Pablo Neruda's Legacy 

"Often compared to Walt Whitman, Neruda became only the second Chilean to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. But more recently, he's come in for a grilling from Chile's #MeToo movement against sexual abuse that has organized huge street protests."

via NPR
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What Sparks Poetry:
Moira Egan on Franco Buffoni's "The Acne Eruptions of Eleanor of Aquitaine"

"Handling, embracing, paying extremely close attention: these are, I think, ways to describe the kind of close reading that is necessary to translation. To me, translation is an act of affectionate close reading in the original language, and then, 'close writing,' to the best of my ability, in the target language. As translators, we know that reproducing a poem in another language is a sheer impossibility."
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