Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)
*
Poem for a dawn I missed by rising late
Wren, when will
that cricket stop
its racket in
your throat?
Cricket, how could you
play second fiddle
all night to
the katydids?
And you lot, with
your gossip about
poor Kate, who did
both less & more
than you
can know –
be still now.
Turn into a leaf,
a sail, a rudder.
Sleep furiously
for every hour
without love.
I can’t seem to figure out what to do with my head. It is too small to carry the right sort of luggage and dangerously prone to spills and injuries. I was thinking I might rent it out for microidea transmission, but I’m not sure how well I’d like sitting on top of a metal tower during thunderstorms. Then there’s the whole issue of bird droppings. Perhaps I could put it in a breadbox to keep it fresh. But lately it has this alarming tendency to weep, which could promote spoilage.
It is a jealous head with only a vestigial sense of humor at best. But it has eyes only for me. I rap on it with the knuckles of my right hand, never my left. I take it on road trips as well as for short walks around the farm. It never went to obedience school, but in its middle age I find it has developed very regular habits. Loyalty is the only coin it trades in.
My head has led a tragic existence – kind of like the Ugly Duckling in reverse, I sometimes say. Imagine growing up expecting to turn into a swan, only to discover that – alas – you’re really just another puddle duck.
I do keep it fairly well groomed now. Just the other day, it occurred to me that some of the people I used to be friends with back when I let my head grow dreadlocks probably wouldn’t want to hang out with me now. Some people I hang out with now definitely wouldn’t want to be seen with me if my head still wore dreads. Then I started thinking: all my friends are really my head’s friends. Could that be where this loneliness comes from?
I never went to a shrink, because I figured s/he would try to convince me it’s all in my head. I refuse to stoop to that kind of sophistry: it’s not just wrong, it’s idolatrous. For the Freudians, especially, one wonders if a head can ever be anything more than a misdirected phallus, the body’s grotesque bolete.
Right now my head is tired and a little overwhelmed. I am feeding it a rare, late-morning beer as I write. It has been short on sleep in recent days and rather short-tempered as a result. I’m thinking that a little alcohol might short a few, over-sensitive circuits. And though my forehead remains an open book for those with the proper training, a slight flush always helps to hide the marks of abuse from that beast, my body.
This was prompted – I won’t say “inspired” – by the comments thread to yesterday’s post.
Two needles knitting and not an eye between them.
Click click, the path turns in upon itself,
a field of knots.
This is the sound an eyetooth makes
before it breaks.
Bodies aren’t as finished as we think.
A third eye can open anywhere.
Certain navels allure
with a permanent wink.
There’s hardly a part of the body
that can’t learn vision, clock stopped
at the center of a hurricane,
all-seeing shape that plays for keeps.
It shines.
It weeps.
This is a rough, first draft . . .
God knows how many times
I have stood frozen in the hot street
with rifles pointing at my crotch
& watched myself – small
& impossibly thin – in the oil-black
mirrors of their sunglasses.
They never take them off, not even
to enter a mosque. God knows
they are easy to hate.
But after the explosion when
I ran with the others to look, suddenly
I felt shame for all the things
I had thought. One howled, the other
bled in silence, eyes naked
to the sun. I bent down.
Above the smooth cheeks
such a clear, pale blue! I felt as if
I were looking down from heaven:
Here is our sky, soldier,
here is yours. Hold on.
Help will come.
I’ve never understood why summer is officially Dumb Movie Season. In fact, given that most of us do suffer a decline in creativity due to heat, humidity, beer drinking and babes (or guys) in form-revealing outfits, I should think that would make intellectually challenging movies all the more essential. The brain is like a muscle, folks; trite but true.
But then here comes this summer, with the unprecedented box-office success of a nonfiction film, Fahrenheit 9/11, and with others in the offing (I’m especially eager to see The Corporation). The Day After Tomorrow, silly as it seemed from the reviews, evidently got audiences thinking about serious issues (global climate change, corruption in the government). I gather even Spiderman II was unexpectedly engaging. Whatever happened to movies about alien invaders and giant meteors?
So anyway, since Friday is movie night for a lot of folks, and since I don’t have time this morning for an original post, I thought I’d reproduce a couple of old poems relating to the movies. The first describes three shots from an imaginary film noir. This is one of my oldest successful poems; the germ of it is at least twenty years old. Despite the reference to a corrido (Sonoran folk ballad), the piece I have in mind for the soundtrack is modern classical: a tone-poem called Song of Love and Death (Canto de Amor e de Mort) by the Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graca.
The second poem combines two real, public school experiences, so I guess it would fit in the category of “almost nonfiction.” Off-hand, I can’t think of any other movie poems I might’ve written. Does anyone else have any?
I apologize to anyone who has already read these poems (both are included in the manuscript Capturing the Hive, available in PDF form at my personal website). I promise some original content tomorrow, even if it’s just that doggerel I mentioned yesterday. Until then, TGIF y’all.
TRIPTYCH IN NOIR
her jailed lover’s image in the mirror
slowly loses color
like tea poured again & again
from the same leaves
or a cloud of cigarette smoke mixing with the air
*
beneath the mirror’s mercury lies
the captain lost at sea in some
interminable corrido
his waterproof watch still ticks inside his slicker
*
it’s past 3:00
light from the street lamp
filters through the slats of the blind
outshines the moon:
two sets of stripes that cross at
an oblique angle on the walls & the bed
where she lies staring into the one dark corner
__________
THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION
Twelve hundred kids packed the auditorium
for a high school assembly: a road show
on the history of animation, brought to us
by Pepsi. The punishment for skipping
such mandatory fun was an extra hour
of school. But some wise-ass
Spoiled It For Everybody with
a little
laughing box.
In the middle of the presenter’s
introductory talk, a sudden
outburst of demented giggles
followed by rapid-fire hos & haws,
squeals & peals, belly laughs
going off like depth charges.
The thing about
a laughing box is, once
you get one started, you can’t
shut it up. Propelled
by apprehensive kicks,
it ricocheted from row
to row beneath the seats,
its laugh track whipping around
like a sperm cell’s flagellum
in a Sex Ed film. As the shock
wore off we watched the three
or four minor führers on stage
shrinking into their scowls.
Finally it flew
out–a bright blue
plastic cube–struck the baseboard
with considerable force & died
in mid-guffaw.
A long moment of silence.
Then the clapping started, spreading
throughout the hall. Cheers,
whistles. The assistant principal
on his feet, waving his arms
as the applause went on & on.
*
i put a single stem
of beebalm – bright
red shaggy head – in
a green, wide-
bottomed wine
bottle & set
it outside to see if
the hummingbirds
would come
*
the first summer crickets
playing their rasps
pick right up where
they left off at
the intermission,
going on as if
this brief stage
were the whole of it
*
if you come for pizza
bring a bar of ayurvedic soap
a cut flower from your garden
& a jar of cold soup –
so thinks my friend L.
who gives & gives from
what little she has
& calls herself lucky
to be able to spare
so much
From time to time I like to go back in the vaults and dig up poems I have long since filed away and forgotten about because for one reason or another they just weren’t up to snuff. (Not being good enough for a “real” publication doesn’t necessarily disqualify a poem from inclusion in this blog, I think. Especially since poetry isn’t the central focus here, just an important source of data.)
Here’s one I wrote maybe eight years ago. I was musing on the fact that so many unrelated languages the world over contain a word for “mother” that begins with the m-sound, if not in fact the syllable “ma.” Mothers and infants speak a truly universal language, it seemed to me – something rarely acknowledged by male thinkers down through the millennia, for whom a universal language was to be sought in the distant past, future, or (for shamanistic peoples) in visionary trance or dream.
The result didn’t strike me as especially authentic, but I still feel it has a few good lines.
The Philosopher Considers Her Breasts
Even with the mind’s dark mirror wiped clean
The merest suggestion of a touch can prompt them to make their concise points, ah
They’re all the proof I need that self-consciousness precedes individuation
Just as a toddler can speak unhampered by syntax
Can extrapolate from breast – Ma – to smile
& simply double it to invent the world
Everything the male thinkers imagined they could exclude
Eliminate all supposed redundancies & take what’s left
Be it only a shadow in the depths of a cave
They’ll cover it with hand prints
Conjure a spirit game bristling with arrows
(Here come for instance the one-breasted Amazons)
But look how even the driest of abstractions tend to divide by a sort of mitosis
You can’t elevate the host without humbling the guest
Big I little i what begins with eye
What begins with lips & tongue & helpless cries
The thousand-mile journey of a kiss that still cannot encompass a single waist
Then let these roles retain their provisional status
Their essential shimmer
& see how entranced they become, my learned lovers
When I have them whisper into my nipples their own pet names
Here’s another odd one, dating from five or six years ago. It was sparked by a particularly vivid dream, and influenced by my study of Noh dance years before.
Monsieur Butterfly
Not the princess bride but the aging dragon’s nurse, ripe and firm as an Asian peach, she demands fealty from my dream-double, a type of Updike hero who’d let himself be slayed before he’d commit to any entangling plot, the threat of happily-ever-after dispelled by a painless death.
Her tears – a trick of shadows – failing to revive me, she lets the open fan fall like a useless wing, plucks a halberd from the wall, this spurned-yet-loyal caricature sprung from god knows what corner of my sleeping brain.
In plain view, no intervening curtain, she kneels for the costume change, girds her loins like a man and places the no-longer-fitting mask of a maiden at my side to keep my ghost – a hollow hungry thing – from worming free, pinned by the sightless epicanthic slits.
Traveler, my tale is yours. Be careful where you sleep.
And here at last is a poem based on a conscious experience. I had the misfortune some twelve years ago of attending the funeral of a sixteen-year-old girl. The immediate family wasn’t at all religious, but they had hired this fire-and-brimstone preacher, who hadn’t even known the deceased, to deliver the eulogy – I think to placate the grandparents, or something. It was hard not to imagine how the deceased, whom I had known fairly well, might have felt about such an imposition. This came out of that. I can’t remember now exactly why I excluded it from Capturing the Hive. (Actually, I can’t remember much of anything. I just had to go click on my own website to get the title of that manuscript, which I worked on for years. Christ Almighty!)
Memorial Service
Can you believe
how many songs have been committed to stone
& none to the water that wears it down?
How many lines get lifted from the surf–
& none from the living ocean?
I was the dead girl who lay in the coffin
with her corona of hair cut short.
I wasn’t listening to that stranger
whose hands held their fire,
whose teeth trapped dust.
But when the women one
by one stood up to testify
I heard the first rumor of rain.
It was as if I’d awakened precipitously
in the night, forehead filled
with mist & the dreams
still crowding close.
I push them back
& blink, remembering–
recalling my role. I was
the nice guy who never refused
to buy a six-pack for a teenage drunk
(even though that night it had been
someone else’s turn) & now
I’m sitting in the back with my feet
tucked under my chair, alert
to the slow dripping of grief & the ripped
tissue cradled by uncertain fingers.
A song can sag
on the page, consigned
to some abstract solar kingdom
more inviolable than a tomb.
A river can lie down behind levees,
drained and channeled to hold
the flood in check. Who then
will bear witness to the current,
the profligate flow?
She was always so full of spirit, says
the neighbor lady. It’s hard
to believe.
Dibujo uno
de Claudia Torres (Mariposa Amarilla / Yellow Butterfly, Ediciones Navegante, Austin, TX, 1996)
La tarde teje su silencio
en los pequeños bordes de las casas.
Esconde aristas abruptas
al son de la noche espesa.
Las vigas abrazan las soleras y sus tejas.
El amarillo de los rayos se encoge
hasta volverlas nada.
El ovillo azul intenso
se convierte en zumbido titilante,
suspira la luz de la mañana.
El ojo anhela;
apenas un reflejo en la profundidad interna
que batalla los sentidos.
El miedo salta victorioso.
Hace suyo el momento.
Tiembla, treme, tiembla.
El susurro es un largo grito sin ruido.
__________
Sketch #1
Evening weaves its silence
along the narrow borders of the houses.
It conceals sharp edges
with the advancing sound of dense night.
The rafters tighten their grip
on crossbeams, roof tiles.
The last yellow rays dwindle,
return to nothing.
Skein of vivid blue becomes
an arousing hum, the light
of morning on its breath.
The eye hungers:
scarcely a single glimmer
in the deep core
at war with the senses.
Fear leaps up,
overwhelms the moment.
Trembling, quaking, trembling.
A whisper is a long scream without a sound.
__________
Claudia Torres is a linguist and a native of Tegicigalpa, Honduras, born in 1951. In the above poem, I like the images of weaving, and the way its synaesthesia evokes a confusion of emotions perhaps best understood by someone who grew up under a dictatorship, where a midnight knock might mean two, almost opposite things.
Another poem by Torres, “Caballero de Noche / Gentleman of the Night,” includes the following explanatory note: “Gentleman of the Night and Love for a Day are the literal translations of flowers that are common in the author’s native country of Honduras.” This time I’ll put my translation first.
__________
Gentleman of the Night
Shy caresses
all over my skin,
scent of cinnamon,
of guava.
In my tangled hair
there dreams
the dry stroke
of a tender hand.
Gentleman of the night,
love for a day,
lemon tree in blossom,
unpollinated orchid.
You went away,
and it was killing me.
__________
Caballero de Noche
Sobre de la piel
caricias hurañas,
olor de canela,
guayaba.
En el pelo
enredado sueño
el sonido seco
de una mano tierna.
Caballero de noche,
amor de un día,
limonero abierto,
orquídea fallida.
Te fuiste,
y yo me moría.
I wrote the following last year, during the doggerel days of August, inspired by a nifty feature on the revamped home page of our local Audubon chapter.
Ode to a Line of Java Code
Holy smoke – upon the monitor, a flock
Of swirling numerals turned into a clock!
They chase the cursor, newly hatched ruffed grouse
Imprinting – as it were – upon the mouse,
But soon enough resume their circle dance,
Spin left or freeze, like children in a trance
Whose ring-around-a-rosie fell from grace –
Transformed by warp of time and cyberspace.
No rain of flowers marked my entry into the world.
I wasn’t born onto a shield or draped
in a robe of feathers. My own mother
sold me in secret & celebrated my funeral
with the substituted corpse of a slave.
I ended up serving the lords of Yucatán,
on the eastern shore.
Four years ago, when Hernán Cortez came back
from setting fire to his ships, slipping
like a thief into camp, I was waiting in
his tent. We understood each other
from the first, before I could speak
one phrase of Castillian. We had
the same hungers.
He is the blonde lightning, I am the thunderhead.
The eagle dives, the jaguar screams — or so
the lying poets like to say. I hear
only the cries of men sliding
in their own gore, moaning for
their mothers. A thousand times
the fate of empires rode on almost nothing
but my supple tongue.
When we fled Tenochtitlan the first time
& our portable bridge failed, the drowned bodies
of soldiers weighed down with plundered gold
filled that last, terrible gap in
the great causeway. Over such fords
have these legions of freed slaves wallowed,
swum, returned.
Freely I chose to serve the foreign occupiers
& their three-faced God Who is Father,
Mirror, Smoke. He bleeds Himself so
the rest of us might be spared, redeems
all captives. For the sake of faith
His double-edged words sever children
from parents, wives from husbands,
a people from their blood-soaked earth.
For love!
Here, Mother. Take the jewelry from around
my neck. All’s well that ends.
I am called Marina now: the fleet
burning in the harbor. That watchword.
That perilous crossing.