Alex Cigale was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine.  His poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, McSweeney’s, The Cafe -, Colorado -, and Global City Review and are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Many Mountains Moving, North American Review, and Zoland Poetry. Four of his poems appear in the recently published anthology Stranger at Home; American Poetry with an Accent (Numina Press), and his new chapbook, Chronicle of Calamities (Pudding House) has just been released.  His translations of contemporary Russian poetry can be found in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry and in The Manhattan Review.

Toward the Poetry of the Impure

        after Pablo Neruda

           

Look closely at the world: objects at rest

Wheels that have crossed long dusty distances

Barrels and baskets, sacks from the coal bins

Handles and hafts from the carpenter’s closet

         

Hence flow the contacts of men with the earth

With used, worn surfaces that hands give things

Foot- and fingerprints, the human condition

Engulfing artifacts inside and out

Poetry impure as the clothing we wear

Spilled on our bodies, soup-stained and soiled

Steeped in sweat and smoke, smelling of urine

Spattered by the trades that we live by

Those who shun the bad taste of things fall flat

The sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Previously published in 66: The Journal of Sonnet Studies

The poet is indebted to Ben Belitt for his translation of Neruda's essay “Towards an Impure Poetry”.   Belitt, Ben, ed., "Toward An Impure Poetry" (1935), reprinted in Selected Poems, by Pablo Neruda, Grove Press, 1991.