Peter Yovu


Postcard to Lemos

Don’t be selfish or afraid
To come unglued. Travel.
But first, Lemos, put some cookies
On the table. I’m growing old.
                                                                                          Text: “La Mouche”,  Apollinaire 



Letter to Luka


Either a couple of swamps
I can’t pronounce
or a select subset of Hello,
either way, we will
have to look into Belize.

Look, Luka, mon frère, mon blah blah,
in Lebanon the additional Alma
has got you figured out,

so I hope you’ll like the bar stools
and long pillows filled with grass.

P.S.

Don’t let Monsieur de Jean
unpack his tambourine.
He’d have you believe
Marco has a sour basil-scented soul.
                                                                                          Text: “Parler seul”, Jean Follain



Note to Glen

Your company is deeply elective, Glen.
You, as later lights fires on borderlines of soon,
will cause deep gall and bandagement.
Who is more doctor now, anyway?

Amanda is done with songs and all your pissy
old address. You, once a laser to our Sunday French,
now bundle less than one square inch
of camisole. Glen, your company’s ragworn. 
                                                                                          Text: Wikipedia article on the meadow vole



Letter to Alec

Alec, I’m sorry you have dismissed your sky
and tried to fill its mostly blue milligrams 
with the solvent of fervent flight.
You populate a turtle’d orb.

There’s an aspect of the Avenue
the unplumb majority has never sown,
beyond the sugared hiss of bees
on bottle mouths and vaporous jank,

a deer-glance grace that hovers under leaves
multitudinously unfallen, wind-grown,
an emerald trance that whispers of Nebraska as
much as corrugations of the sea. 
                                                                                          Text: Wikipedia article on hummingbirds

Peter Yovu lives near Montpelier Vermont. He continues to agree with Valéry: Toute vue de choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse.

He writes: "The above poems come from French texts spoken into my Mac’s dictation feature, which it tried to make sense of as English. It needed my help."

 
 

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