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The Girl Next Door
and Other Poems

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What Must be Done
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July - Dec. 2014
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Translation

Ralph Monday

Your words are lost in translation. When you speak
the syllables are mute scratchings on stone
where your blank eyes translate all the empty
moments, slammed doors, lost sighs, erased texts.
They may as well be an antique tin filled with
buttons collected over the years, locked away,
musty, the hands of the living that stitched them
to cloth long departed.

Your legs are lost in translation. They no longer
pump like bicycle pedals propelling you toward
me like some desert radical seeking salvation
through the sword. Your footprints are no more
manifest than dew in afternoon sun, for where
you tread, now only smeared ink blots ending
before a closed door, swish of skirt like snare drums
preluding the crescendo.

Your ears are lost in translation. Vanished apparatus
of a Shelly, Dickinson, Bradstreet that you liked
to listen to aloud. At the end when I spoke you did
not hear—Job’s tongue traced the inner sound, intonations
in your head providing truth that no judge, god or the
devil, could sustain. Calling your name was the same
as uttering a plea for the lost gods of Troy—no taking
of sides, no race around the walls.

Your eyes are lost in translation. They see no more
than stalks on a sea creature at the bottom of the
Marianas Trench. Oedipus eyes, wandering in
lost desert realms, when you gaze out upon
the world the world looks back. Shuttered orbs,
when they do see I am not in the field of vision.
My translation—your body one skin
covered hieroglyph—my memory the Rosetta.



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