The ten o’clock train to New York, coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow. Steam wheezes between the couplings. Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you. Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife. Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood. It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering. Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys. It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you. I think about the subjugation of women and horses; brutal exposure; weather that forces, that strips. In our time we met in ornate stations arching up with nineteenth-century optimism. I remember you running beside the train waving good-bye. I can produce a facsimile of you standing behind a column of polished oak to surprise me. Am I going toward you or away from you on this train? Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks: mounds of rusting wire, grotesque pop art of dead motors, senile warehouses. The train passes a station; fresh people standing on the platform, their faces expecting something. I feel their entire histories ravish me.
What I love about this poem is its projection of human psyche onto the world. It’s comprehension of singular self, as part of a collective involvement. It’s an honest look at memory and emotions. Faced with a 'drab misery' she craves memory for escape. But memory is tinged with the very same grotesquery of the world, conflicting emotions fumbling and mixing with it. Pleasure is ultimately experienced. Us with it.
"The lyrical breadth and depth of Yona Harvey’s second collection of poems, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, is stunning; the book’s poetic conversation across time and space deliciously resists easy categorization or summary. Grounded in female Black experience, the poems variously celebrate deep roots in tradition and chart possible futures, terrestrial and beyond."
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"Every translation is a collaboration among many, including all those who have come to this terrain before you. I am indebted even to those translations whose approach I reject because they gave me the benefit of having something to reject.
If nothing is to be lost, something must first be gained."
