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ARS POETICA

A man should not dream of the frilled skirts of the hooves of horses.

An apple should not be eaten with the burned shadow of a leaf in its flesh.

A woman should bury her man’s nail clippings under the dark moon.

There should be no trail to that place, no trail to the fragments of his hair, his spittle.

A mole’s tooth, a cat’s tail, the heart of a dog, the eye of a frog.

Bring none of these as gifts to the year’s first lamb.

A man should not be witness to his daughter’s birth or dress his mother’s corpse

(This last the teaching of the Greeks on Ios).

A man should burn the branches of the weeping willow. Should he,

Then his sons will have sons, his daughters ovens.

A mother says you should leave your footprint in the dust of her grave

So the wind will remember her. But that mother is dead now.

And the wind forgets and forgets without mercy her passing.

—After Czeslaw Milosz’s poem, “Should, Should Not”