"Written in pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car: Dan Pagis

WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY-CAR

here in this carload

i am eve

with abel my son

if you see my other son

cain son of man

tell him that i

-- Dan Pagis

Rilke on writing poetry when one is no longer a young man

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

"Una corbata parra Nicanor" by Pablo Neruda, "Saranguaco" and "Cambios de Nombre" by Nicanor Parra

"Una Corbata para Nicanor" by Pablo Neruda, translation by Suzanna Geisel-Zamora

Download Una corbata parra Nicanor- Spanish:English

Saranguaco N. Parra Hodgepodge

Es de noche, no piensa ser de noche It’s night, it doesn’t think to be night
Es de día, no piensa ser de día. It’s day, it doesn’t think to be day.

Cómo va a ser de noche si es de día How is it going to be night if it is day
Cómo va a ser de día si es de noche How is it going to be day if it is night
¿Creen que están hablando con un loco? Do you believe you are talking with a crazy man?

Ojalá fuera realmente de día. Hopefully it is really daytime.

Hace frío pero yo tengo calor It’s cold but I am hot
Hace calor pero yo me muero de frío. It’s hot but I am freezing to death.

Dije que hacía frío pero miento                      I said it was cold but I am lying
Hace un calor que derrite las piedras              It is so hot the rocks are melting
Eso lo veo con mis propios ojos:                    I see this with my own eyes:

¡Falso! ¡No veo nada! Lie! I can’t see anything!
¡Tengo los ojos herméticamente cerrados! I have my eyes hermetically sealed!

Lo que sucede es que me siento mal               The thing is I feel bad
Ese dolor de estómago de siempre                  That constant stomach pain
La sensación de vértigo no cesa.                   The dizziness never stops.

Cómo que mal: ¡me siento perfectamente! What do you mean bad: I feel fine!

¡En mi vida me he sentido mejor! I’ve never felt better!
¡Ojalá me sintiera desdichado! If only I could feel unhappy!

Observen bien y verán Watch closely and you’ll see
Que estoy riéndome a carcajadas. That I am roaring with laughter.

Translation by Suzanna Geisel-Zamora

Cambios de Nombre Name Changes

A los amantes de las bellas letras To the lovers of belles-lettres
Hago llegar mis mejores deseos I extend my best wishes
Voy a cambiar de nombre a algunas cosas. I am going to change the names of a few things.
Mi posición es ésta: My position is this:
El poeta no cumple su palabra The poet does not fulfill his word
Si no cambia los nombres de las cosas. Unless he changes the names of things.
¿Con qué razón el sol For what reason has the sun
Ha de seguir llamándose sol? Always been called the sun?
¡Pido que se llame Micifuz I say call it Pussy Cat
El de las botas de cuarenta leguas! The one with forty league boots!

¿Mis zapatos parecen ataúdes? My shoes look like coffins?
Sepan que desde hoy en adelante From here on out
Los zapatos se llaman ataúdes. Shoes are going to be called coffins.
Comuníquese, anótese y publíquese Communicate it, note it down, and publish it
Que los zapatos han cambiado de nombre: That shoes have changed name:
Desde ahora se llaman ataúdes. From now on they will be called coffins.
Bueno, la noche es larga Well, the night is long
Todo poeta que se estime a sí mismo Every poet who considers himself such
Debe tener su propio diccionario Should have their own dictionary
Y antes que se me olvide And before I forget
Al propio dios hay que cambiarle nombre God himself has to change names
Que cada cual lo llame como quiera: That every individual names him what they want:
Ese es un problema personal. That is a personal problem.

Translation by Suzanna Geisel-Zamora

Rebecca Torrez: "Lacrima Borealis" with audio

Lacrima borealis

Lacrima Borealis

Blue, light blue like the top of the sky. Black real black not brown not green ink green black. Inside, in the circle but really on top but really on bottom. And they implore. Staring into the whirling milk of forgetful coffee; cataracts. A ladder, silver – the spiderweb chain of a tender necklace – perched at the edge of the deep coffee bowl. Green soldiers, yes the soldiers from the box the shoebox size 8 under the bed, clamber mechanically up and dive into the rich lagoon and they are followed by the pretty shorthaired girls -coquettes. She teeters on her toes grip the smooth edge of the bowl and asks me a question, sorry what was the question? A plane flies by, I lose my balance and am plunged into sleepy coffee. Fight the fatigue. Remember. The swirling current draws me to a storm to la tempete du jour ferie. Un coup de foudre directement au milieu d’une pluie sous sédation et la enfin je suis arrivée a ressentir. La dernière fois, c’était cette nuit équivoque and the cup ran overflowing with tears.

(Rebecca lives in Albuquerque, NM)

Yeats: Knowledge of Reality and the Coming of Wisdom with Time

The knowledge of reality is always in some measure a secret knowledge. It is a kind of death.

-- Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 482

                    Though leaves are many, the root is one;
                    Through all the lying days of my youth
                    I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
                    Now I may wither into the truth.

Uncommon Wisdom 1 & 2

If you want to praise acceptably, be very precise. Inattentive praise is almost an insult.

-- Eva Brann, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul, p. 423

I hope whatever you’re doing,

you’re stopping now and then

and

not doing it at all.

--- James Fadiman, quoted in Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind, p. 282

The description of wind in Ondaatje's "The English Patients": excerpts

  There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened are/or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days —burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.
   There is also the ———, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.
   And the nafliat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen —a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.
Other, private winds.
Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reportedin Portugal and Spain in 1901.
There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.”
   Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.” (4)

*. * * *. *. *. * * . *

Still night. He can hear nighthawks, their faint cries, the muted thud of wings as they turn. The cypress trees rise over his tent, still on this windless night. He lies back and stares into the dark corner of the tent. When he closes his eyes he sees fire, people leaping into rivers into reservoirs to avoid flame or heat that within seconds burns everything, whatever they hold, their own skin and hair, even the water they leap into. The brilliant bomb carried over the sea in a plane, passing the moon in the east, towards the green archipelago. And released.
He has not eaten food or drunk water, is unable to swallow anything. Before light failed he stripped the tent of all military objects, all bomb disposal equipment, stripped all insignia off his uniform. Before lying down he undid the turban and combed his hair out and then tied it up into a topknot and lay back, saw the light on the skin of the tent slowly disperse, his eyes holding onto the last blue of light, hearing the drop of wind into windlessness and then hearing the swerve of the hawks as their wings thudded. And all the delicate noises of the air.
He feels all the winds of the world have been sucked into Asia. He steps away from the many small bombs of his career towards a bomb the size, it seems, of a city, so vast it lets the living witness the death of the population around them. He knows nothing about the weapon. Whether it was a sudden assault of metal and explosion or if boiling air scoured itself towards and through anything human. All he knows is, he feels he can no longer let anything approach him, cannot eat the food or even drink from a puddle on a stone bench on the terrace. He does not feel he can draw a mateh out of his bag and fire the lamp, for he believes the lamp will ignite everything. In the tent, before the light evaporated, he had brought out the photograph of hisfamily and gazed at it. His name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here.
He stands now under the trees in the August heat, untur-banned, wearing only a kurta. He carries nothing in his hands, justwalks alongside the outline,of hedges, his bare feet on the grass or on terrace stone or in the ash of an old bonfire. His body alive in its sleeplessness, standing on the edge of a great valley of Europe. (69)

Mr. Rabinovich from Peter Nash's "Parsimony": profound confusion

In his many years of living in Ithaca, he’d made a hobby of drafting simple sketches of its most distinguished buildings and trees—the Masonic Temple, State Theater, and Clinton Hall; the white oaks, striped maples, and shagbark hickories—and making crabbed black notes in a small black journal he’d kept for the purpose in his oilskin vest. With no regard for chronology, and with the occasional prompting from his journal itself, licking a finger to turn the wrinkled pages, he’d told me about the once-thriving Tutelo Indian village of Coreorgonel, destroyed by Washington’s troops in his war against the Iroquois, and about Ithaca’s largely unsung role in the Underground Railroad, even taking me into his house one day to show me the cupboard behind which a half a dozen runaway slaves had once been ingeniously, luxuriously, concealed.
Such was the illusion of Ithaca, he’d insisted to me, on more than one occasion, the town I knew, the town I saw with my eyes each day, but a fraction of some larger, more numinous whole. “Take the lake down there,” he’d remarked to me one day, directing my attention to the wintry sliver of gray through the trees. Did I know that there were caverns deep beneath it, a dazzling netherworld of tunnels and chambers more than 18,000 acres in size? Of course I’d had no idea, had never even heard of the Lansing salt mine in which he’d served as foreman for nearly twenty years, though I remember the delight I’d expressed at the thought of that ghastly, Stygian realm. It was a reaction, however innocent, that had only angered the man, furrowing his normally placid brow.
“No, no!” he’d exclaimed, swatting the air with impatience, only to cock his head at me, as if appraising me anew. “It’s nothing like that, no, nothing dreadful at all.” And there he’d faltered, so that for a moment his lips had quivered mutely where he’d stood. “It’s like…it’s like nothing you could know,” he’d stammered at last. “The darkness, the light… the deep thrumming silence down there—so ancient, so lonely, it sits upon your chest like a billion tons of rock. And then there’s the air,” he’d whispered, amazed, snuffling abruptly through his thick, bullish nostrils, “like a baby just born—that greedy, gobbling breath…”
In our frequent encounters he’d often talked that way, circling round some mysterious core, which he’d never seemed willing or able to name.
Parsimony, 24-25

Comment: Mr. Rabinovich arrives at that profound confusion (amazement!) out of which all true poetic utterance arises. Thus, when he tries to tell David about the air in the caverns, he expresses it in poetic analogy,“like a baby just born—that greedy, gobbling breath . . .” It is from such 'profound confusion' that all true poetic utterance arises, the rest being but decorative verse.

Borges: Le regret d'Héraclite / Matilde Urbach

Yo, que tantos hombres he sido, no he sido nunca
aquel en cuyo abrazo desfallecía Matilde Urbach.

GASPAR CAMERARIUS, en Deliciae Poetarum Borussiae, VII, 16.

The Regret of Heraclitus

I, who have been so many men, have never been
The one in whose embrace Matilde Urbach swooned.

There is misinformation roundabout that Matilde Urbach is a character in William Joyce Cowen's Man With Four Lives. There is no such character in that novel. Fool that I am, I bought and read the book.

"old children of god" by Catharine Stewart Roache

The author, Catharine Roache, has chosen not to capitalize any of the words in the title of her short book of poems and photographs of the very old folks she writes about. This choice may express her sense of helplessness. The poems are simple and without any of the usual verbal play that is characteristic of poetry. They come unadorned, straight from the heart and the anguish of her experience. Here is one of the poems:

as children hurt

eyes
old tired eyes cover me and speak more
than words in any tongue can say
of what it is to hurt

hurt
as a child hurts
over little things
but what is little when you are old?

when you spend your days
lying, sitting, thinking, waiting
is it a little thing for someone to speak
without a hint of care?

when friends are far
and sick and moving and you fear they will forget
is it a little thing for one to die
and leave you more alone?

when night comes
and dark will give you peace and rest and quiet
is it a little thing to hear someone weeping
far down some hallow hollow hall?

when you lie in hate
and despair of life, remembering good times, bad times
is it a little thing for your mouth to dry
into a yellow crust?

the world
tells me war is big
and profits and space and the price of gold
and I think about these things

but today
the cup of water seemed the world
and all those little things became
the only big.

old children of god was published by 'hermosa publishers' in 1973 and revised in 1978.

hhimwich is the author of all poems and other writing unless indicated otherwise.

Search

Favorite Links

David Chalmers: Fragments of consciousness

The New York Review of Books

Poetry 180

Counter

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;