Another Fan

By Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Peter Manson.

Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé

Dreamer, that I might plunge
into pure unguided delight,
learn, by a subtfle lie,
how to guard my wing in your hand.

A twilight coolness
comes your way with each beat
whose captive stroke delicately
pushes back the horizon.

Vertigo! see space
shivering like a great kiss
that, mad to have been born for no-one,
can neither break free nor calm down.

Do you feel the untamed paradise
slip like a buried laugh
from the corner of your mouth
to the base of the unanimous fold?

The sceptre of rose-coloured shores
stagnant on golden evenings, this is it,
this white closed flight you pose against
the fire of a bracelet.

Elsewhere: The Poems in Verse (2012), Peter Manson’s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Still farther: Lady Windermere’s Fan, ed. N. Scargill (Pride Press, 2012)

From “Notes for Fatty Cakes”

By Andrew Spragg.

III

Intros all made. First scene –
FC, a sea captain:

The Ballard of
Captain Cakes

So well met, she begun like this:
our love, dear Fatty Cakes
stood stern aboard her merry ship.
Our captain wails & quakes.

Consoled by map & chart alone
tales told: crude, stark & sad,
of Cakes at night lone wandering:
the deck, her feet would pad.

Cruel hinterland she longed to see,
ship stocked & anchor raised,
set sail, horizon in her sight,
for Cakes a start of days.

The crew, all told, on ration’s wage
idle, mean hearts belie
a bell, telling, rung late one night
& deserted Cakes & I.
& deserted Cakes & I.

From “Ode to TL61P 1″

By Keston Sutherland.

The code TL61P belongs to a Hotpoint dryer;
You’ll find out nothing if you look
it up through the sky in the screen, the vault
of exchangable passion, Vertigo at
the horizon prostrate as an outstretched
cheek; but in the mouth that grows
in capacity behind that overflow,
Nobody can take away the word for it:
love, the provisional end until death;
TL61P its unconditional perfected shadow
opposite; Now go back to the start.