Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following poems and many others are available in Gods of Rapture: Poems in the Erotic Mood by Steve Kowit.
From “A Prefatory Note”:
Love is a perennial theme. No subject has been sung with such constancy by so many cultures. Among the greatest of such songs is the amatory poetry of India, a poetry composed in what Sanskrit prosodists call srngararasa, the erotic mood. With tenderness, passion and grace, those poets transmuted into song almost every aspect of human love, from the rapture of the first adolescent embrace to the grief of age and irrevocable loss.
From English-language translations of that material I have taken situations that charmed or moved me and shaped them to my own taste. Often an idea of a single line or a vivid image in one or another English-language translation would send me to my notebook or keyboard. So the poems in this collection, most of which bear little or no resemblance to the verses from which they emerged, are not translations—nor are they adaptations. . . . the poems in this volume are simply new poems based on ancient themes.
The moment that my name is mentioned
she is buried in her purse
or finds a hangnail that needs prompt attention
or a thread that’s suddenly come unraveled
in her sleeve.
If someone laughs
she colors—certain
that the worst has happened
& the game is up
& everyone knows.
after Sri Harsa-Deva
I’d rather be nipped by a rabid fox
than be stung by your eyes.
The antivenin for rabies
is painful indeed.
But for the heart driven mad
there is no cure whatsoever.
after Bhartrhari
Beloved, could they be whetstones
--those dark spots
on the moon—
to sharpen the arrows of passion
grown blunt
from the breaking of too many hearts?
after Ganapati
In the madness
of the white light
of the moon,
near high reeds
where croaking frogs,
beating like drums,
frightened
a small bird
from the field,
I trembled,
& he swore
he would not leave me.
after the Tamil
