The Wind || A Dream (contrapuntal)

[Read first down each column, then again row by row across columns.]
The Wind		Translated from the English A Dream
The wind blew fierce last night.		I dreamed of you.
Tree branches banged on the roof.		You rapped with knuckles and fists on the door.
Rain sprayed heavy against the windows.		You frothed spittle in torrents on the glass.
I had merely built my house there.		I had only sought sanctuary.
This afternoon,		This evening,
the wind averts its eyes,		you flicker the candle,
waiting for shadows to lengthen		waiting for darkness to flood

John K. Kruschke

First published in Pangyrus, October 02, 2026.

Notes: Regarding the format: When reading a poetry journal that presented English translations beside originals in languages I don’t know, I realized that the translator could write anything, and I’d have no way of knowing whether it matched the source. I was also piqued by the heading that appeared above them: “Translated from the Chinese” (or whatever the language). So I imagined a genre of poems called “Translated from the English” in which the translation is a free-association based on the original, such that each enriches the other. I added one essential rule: the contrapuntal structure must read coherently and generate emergent meaning when scanned row by row across columns; otherwise they’d just be two parts of a single poem. Many of my poems in this form have one side dominated by nature, and the other side dominated by human psychology. In this poem, “The Wind || A Dream”, the storm and the dream become metaphors for each other, both emerging a bit more supernatural.

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