Meeting
by A. S. J. Tessimond
Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell,
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.
We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair; before the inept lips open.
Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely; skin unhappy …
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennae stretch … waver … and almost … touch.

A few random poems:
- Владимир Британишский – Фет в кирасирском полку
- Валерий Брюсов – Германия (отрывки)
- Arrival by William Carlos Williams
- Love Compared To A Game Of Tables by William Strode
- Николай Языков – Дева ночи
- Cotton and Corn by Thomas Moore
- Religious Obsession — translation from Dharmamoha by Rabindranath Tagore
- Олег Бундур – Вечером
- Distributive Trade II – The Wholesaler
- Владимир Корнилов – Эпоха
- Sometimes with One I Love. by Walt Whitman
- A City Remembered by Vernon Scannell
- Screw-Guns by Rudyard Kipling
- Алексей Плещеев – Молчание
- My Mind Keeps Movin’ by Shel Silverstein
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- The Great Palaces Of Versailles by Rita Dove
- Teach Us To Number Our Days by Rita Dove
- Primer by Rita Dove
- Persephone, Falling by Rita Dove
- Mushrooms by Rina Ferrarelli
- Ludwig Von Beethoven’s Return To Vienna by Rita Dove
- Lines Composed on the Body Politic by Rita Dove
- Lady Freedom Among Us by Rita Dove
- I hear the roar of a Harley… by River Urke
- Heart To Heart by Rita Dove
- Hades’ Pitch by Rita Dove
- Fifth Grade Autobiography by Rita Dove
- Exit by Rita Dove
- Dawn Revisited by Rita Dove
- Chocolate by Rita Dove
- Cavern in Paradise by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- Broccoli by Rina Ferrarelli
- Birth Of A Flower by Riss Ryker
- American Smooth by Rita Dove
- Amarene by Rina Ferrarelli
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works