Willis Barnstone
(USA)
Slum Café Playing Mousorgsky, 1947
The streets were winter high and cold
in the slum barrios where I walked
la capital to find an old
café where I could read. I talked
to no one but I heard my book
which was a mirror of an age
glaring all night. At dawn I took
the bus back to the orphanage.
Nothing happened but solitude
and lovers at the tables smoking
and waiters leaving me alone.
The rain, the youth, the cold I brood
on now again at midnight, poking
back to glass-bright tables not gone.
French Cake at Apartment of la Française, 1947
The year I sleep up on the roof in a
room I climb to by outdoor ladder, sun
wakes the snow volcanoes Popo and his La-
dy Ixtaccihuatl, who gleam at dawn.
Our orphanage has bean soup but I starve
for sweets, and when Paco takes me to eat
at a French dame’s elegant digs I cave
in love for Françoise, her fat crêpes, her feet
in braces up to her knees. Smiling she urges
platters of cream cakes all afternoon on us
and plays Offenbach’s La Gaité Parisienne.
I fall for older women. Young blood surges
between my virgin legs. Home on the bus,
squashed, cold, I ache for her sweet oxygen.
Room on the Roof of the Spanish Refugee Children’s Orphanage, 1946
After my father’s suicide, young Marti,
my Mexican stepmother,
goes back to the iron bed with her mother
Rebeca, a Sefardí
from Constantinople, who normally
calls me mancebito,
young lord (in medieval Ladino),
but she is afraid I’ll get
her daughter as my father had.
They rent some rooms behind
the great cathedral, a small hovel
in the old district. I too
live this year in Mexico City,
near Marti, in an orphanage.
If I can’t make it back by ten
(I give evening classes
all over the city to earn some pesos)
I do an all nighter,
reading in a lowdown café, or better,
go to Marti’s and sleep
on a straw mat on the floor
between the tiny Indian maid
and her brother Sam, an army captain.
Often when I am broke
I sell my blood in a clinic, and on
one Saturday twice—but not
in the same place. The Aztec nurse
notices the fresh pricks
but she lets me through. Beautiful Marti
is only three years older than me
and before my father made his move
she was my first date.
I care for her and never know
that the mere sale
of my blood is for her a stigma
God will not forgive
but who could not forgive us for
necking in the backseat
of Dad’s Buick. In the morning
as my train pulls out,
she gives me a silk handkerchief.
Sewed on it a red guitar.
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BIO
Willis Barnstone, born in 1927 in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College, the Sorbonne, School of Oriental Studies of the University of London, Columbia and Yale (PhD), taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), was in Haiti in 1960 during the deadly rule of Papa Doc and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War (1975-1976). He was in China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972 invited by Chou Enlai. A Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). Former O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University (1973), he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University. He lives in Oakland, California
A Guggenheim fellow, he has received the NEA, NEH, ACLS, W.H. Auden Award of NY Council on the Arts, Midland Authors Award, four Book of the Month selections, four Pulitzer nominations, six awards from Poetry Society of America, including the Emily Dickinson Award. In 2015 he received the Fred Cody Life Achievement Award in 2015. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement. He has published 80 books with trade and university presses. His new volume is Poets of the Bible: from Solomon’s Song of Song to John’s Revelation, Norton, 550pp.
Some poetry books are A Day in the Country (Harper) Life Watch (BOA Mexico in My Heart : Moonbook & Sunbook (Tupelo Books), New and Selected Poems (Carcanet), Stickball on 88th Street (Red Hen Press), Café de l’Aube à Paris / Dawn Café in Paris (Sheep Meadow Press); translations include Poetics of Translation (Yale), ABC of Translation: Poems & Drawings (Black Widow), Ancient Greek Lyrics(Indiana), Restored New Testament (Norton), The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala), The Other Bible (Harper); memoir books are SundayMorning in Fascist Spain (Southern Illinois), We Jews and Blacks (with Yusef Komunyakaa), and With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois). Borges has written, “Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whale, the sonnets of Willis Barnstone’s Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes – the rough poetry of morning.” Harold Bloom describes his version of the New Testament as “a superb act of restoration.”