word

Thoughts

I gave my thoughts a golden peach,
A silver citron tree;
They clustered dumbly out of reach
And would not sing for me.

I built my thoughts a roof of rush,
A little byre beside;
They left my music to the thrush
And flew at eveningtide.

I went my way and would not care
If they should come and go;
A thousand birds seemed up in air,
My thoughts were singing so.

Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922)

…..

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand

…..

King Rides By

If time had a place,
And space for your past.

Like a little novel,
I wanted to read again and again,
Would I be in your novel,
Would I begin and end in it?

If I had a place,
And space for your little boy eyes,
Could you really believe,
I certainly dare you,
I do not want to scare you,
Anymore.

Oh what a fuss when the king rides by,
Oh what a fuss when the king rides,
Straight through my heart,
Straight through my life.

I need your love more than you’d ever know.

If I kissed and touched your hand,
A million things I will never understand,
Oh what a fuss when the king trades in,
Oh what a fuss when the king trades.

Oh love, my love, for someone else’s hand,
Needing love more than you’ll ever know.

You don’t miss your water,
You don’t miss your water,
‘Till your well is gone.

Chan Marshall (Cat Power)

…..

“The expression there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Samuel Beckett, in Calder 1967:15).

…..

3

What would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills into the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without the sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

4
I would like my love to die
and the rain to be falling on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning the first and the last to love me

Samuel Beckett
(Calder 1967:169-170)

***

Two English Poems

I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
corner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy
waves laden with all hues of deep spoil, laden
with things unlikely and desireable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and re-
fusals, of things half given away, half with-
held, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights
act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary
shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to
chat with, music for dreams, and the smok-
ing of bitter ashes. The things my hungry
heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so
lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked
and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted
street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I
find them; I tell them to the few stray dogs
and to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life…
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those
illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
hidden look, your real smile — that lonely,
mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

II
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the ragged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a wman who has
looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the
ghosts that living men have honoured in mar-
ble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers
in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grand-
father — just twentyfour — heading a charge
of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may
hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have
saved, somehow — the central heart that deals
not in words, traffics not in dreams and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories
about yourself, authentic and surprising news
of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Jorge Luis Borges
1934
(Di Giovanni 1972:75-77).

***

Gifts

Here. Between us I’ve placed a smooth stone,
green-veined, with finger-fissures, and a cracked
blue bowl with three yellow pears, and seven miles
of jagged coves, pebbled and bouldered, the jade sea
drooling and frothing them, one dwarfed tree,
a crooked surviving pine, on a tumbled cliff
lookout point. Hold the stone
in your palm, cold
from the morning draughts on the window-sill.
The touched side takes your warmth. The cool
side rubs your lips. Your mouth
is on my hand.

Marilyn Hacker
(Hacker 2003:149)

***

The First Elegy

Who, though I screamed, would hear me among the
ranks of the angels? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space
wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for,
the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart
with difficulty stands before. Is she less heavy for lovers?
Ah, they only hide their fate between themselves.
Do you not know yet? Throw the emptiness out of your arms
to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds
will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.

Yes, the Spring-times needed you deeply. Many a star
must have been there for you so you might feel it. A wave
lifted towards you out of the past, or, as you walked
past an open window, a violin
gave of itself. All this was their mission.
But could you handle it? Were you not always,
still, distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced,
like a Beloved, came near to you? (Where could you contain her,
with all the vast strange thoughts in you
going in and out, and often staying the night.)
But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long
their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough.
Those, you almost envied them, the forsaken, that you
found as loving as those who were satisfied. Begin,
always as new, the unattainable praising:
think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature
into herself, as if there were not the power
to make them again. Have you remembered
Gastara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl,
whose lover has gone, might feel from that
intenser example of love: ‘Could I only become like her?’
Should not these ancient sufferings be finally
fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that, loving,
we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured
as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight,
something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear then, my heart, as only
saints have heard: so that the mighty call
raised them from the earth: they, though, knelt on
impossibly and paid no attention:
such was their listening. Not that you could withstand
God’s voice: far from it. But listen to the breath,
the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence.
It rushes towards you now, from those youthfully dead.
Whenever you entered, didn’t their fate speak to you,
quietly, in churches in Naples or Rome?
Or else an inscription exaltedly impressed itself on you,
as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they will of me? That I should gently remove
the semblance of injustice, that slightly, at times,
hinders their spirits from a pure moving-on.

It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth,
to no longer practice customs barely acquired,
not to give a meaning of human futurity
to roses, and other expressly promising things:
no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands,
and to set aside even one’s own
proper name like a broken plaything.
Strange: not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange
to see all that was once in place, floating
so loosely in space. And it’s hard being dead,
and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels
a little eternity. Though the living
all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.
Angels (they say) would often not know whether
they moved among living or dead. The eternal current
sweeps all the ages, within it, through both the spheres,
forever, and resounds above them in both.

Finally they have no more need of us, the early-departed,
weaned gently from earthly things, as one outgrows
the mother’s mild breast. But we, needing
such great secrets, for whom sadness is often
the source of a blessed progress, could we exist without them?
Is it a meaningless story how once, in the grieving for Linos,
first music ventured to penetrate arid rigidity,
so that, in startled space, which an almost godlike youth
suddenly left forever, the emptiness first felt
the quivering that now enraptures us, and comforts, and helps.

Rainer Maria Rilke
1912-1922
(Crichton and Crichton, trans. 2003:11-19)