The year's doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.
I opened my eyes late.
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for time's uncertain return
through cracks in the horizon.
But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.
You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn't yet accepted
being invented by the day.
--Nor possibly my being invented, either.
You were in another day.
You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleeping women.
When you open your eyes
we'll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We'll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we'll open the day's doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.
Cambridge, Mass., 1 January 1975
- Octavio Paz, translated by Elizabeth Bishop
For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honours given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
- Jane Hirshfield
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honours given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
- Jane Hirshfield
This Was Once a Love Poem
This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.
It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.
Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.
Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.
It spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind its knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.
The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.
Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them - one, then another -
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.
- Jane Hirshfield
Henry James
"We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
On diaries
"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time."
- Virginia Woolf
(Taken from Even Cleveland)
- Virginia Woolf
(Taken from Even Cleveland)
Demas, In Love With This Present World
2 Timothy 4:9-10
What you've heard is true - I've gone to Thessilonika.
I've taken a room above the agora with a view
of the harbor and wake too early to merchants' voices,
bleatings of every sort, and carpets being beaten.
The innkeeper and his wife bring bread - they are kind,
and their daughter is pretty, though she has a withered hand.
At night I watch the fishing boats come in to shore,
hung with many lanterns. The men pull up their nets
and sort the catch in shifting light; they sometimes sing
a song about the moon seducing an old sailor
and drink a bit and fall asleep in their robes.
Later someone puts out the lights one by one.
In between, the days are slow, and I think of you often.
I know what some are saying, that I loved my father
and his estate more than truth and our way of life.
It wasn't the inheritance that called me back,
and I won't return to the assembly or his house.
Demetrius is here, asleep beside me as I write.
He has thrown one of his warm legs over me
in a dream, and two pears with a jar of wine wait
on the table for when he wakes. I wish you understood
how it feels to fear the truth while also loving him.
I still believe this present world is passing away,
but now it is impossible to rejoice with you.
Sometimes when I walk outside the city gates
and I look up into the mountains, toward Rome
where all of you are waiting, I want to come back -
but it doesn't last. I walk home through the colonnade,
listening to the temple priests and fortune tellers,
the eastern caravans selling cedar, pearls, and linen.
The innkeeper's daughter greets me at the door,
the weak hand cupped to her breast. She has been
praying to a small bright god in the corner
of her room, for health and peace, as she has been taught.
I will go upstairs and place my arms around the loved
and living body of one who owns no household gods,
who confesses no world but this. We will watch
the sky turn dark and wait for fishermen to light
their lamps and disappear across the invisible sea.
I pray to the God I remember, whom I love and fail
to love, knowing words are all I have to bind
us to each other, knowing they are passing too.
Grace be with you.
- Kristin Fogdall
What you've heard is true - I've gone to Thessilonika.
I've taken a room above the agora with a view
of the harbor and wake too early to merchants' voices,
bleatings of every sort, and carpets being beaten.
The innkeeper and his wife bring bread - they are kind,
and their daughter is pretty, though she has a withered hand.
At night I watch the fishing boats come in to shore,
hung with many lanterns. The men pull up their nets
and sort the catch in shifting light; they sometimes sing
a song about the moon seducing an old sailor
and drink a bit and fall asleep in their robes.
Later someone puts out the lights one by one.
In between, the days are slow, and I think of you often.
I know what some are saying, that I loved my father
and his estate more than truth and our way of life.
It wasn't the inheritance that called me back,
and I won't return to the assembly or his house.
Demetrius is here, asleep beside me as I write.
He has thrown one of his warm legs over me
in a dream, and two pears with a jar of wine wait
on the table for when he wakes. I wish you understood
how it feels to fear the truth while also loving him.
I still believe this present world is passing away,
but now it is impossible to rejoice with you.
Sometimes when I walk outside the city gates
and I look up into the mountains, toward Rome
where all of you are waiting, I want to come back -
but it doesn't last. I walk home through the colonnade,
listening to the temple priests and fortune tellers,
the eastern caravans selling cedar, pearls, and linen.
The innkeeper's daughter greets me at the door,
the weak hand cupped to her breast. She has been
praying to a small bright god in the corner
of her room, for health and peace, as she has been taught.
I will go upstairs and place my arms around the loved
and living body of one who owns no household gods,
who confesses no world but this. We will watch
the sky turn dark and wait for fishermen to light
their lamps and disappear across the invisible sea.
I pray to the God I remember, whom I love and fail
to love, knowing words are all I have to bind
us to each other, knowing they are passing too.
Grace be with you.
- Kristin Fogdall
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)