I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
If I could live again my life,
in the next, I’ll try
to make more mistakes.
I won’t try to be so perfect.
I’ll be more relaxed.
I’ll be more full than I am now.
In fact, I’ll take fewer things seriously.
I’ll be less hygenic.
I’ll take more risks.
I’ll take more trips.
I’ll watch more sunsets.
I’ll climb more mountains.
I’ll swim more rivers.
I’ll go to more places I’ve never been.
I’ll eat more ice creams and less lima beans.
I’ll have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people who lead
prudent and prolific lives each minute their alive.
Of couse, I had moments of joy but,
if I could go back, I’ll try to have only good moments.
If you don’t know, thats what life is made of.
Don’t lose the now.
I was one of those who never goes anywhere without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle,
and without an umberella and without a parachute.
If I could live again, I will travel light.
If I could live again, I’ll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till
the end of autumn.
I’ll ride more carts.
I’ll watch more sunrises and play with more children.
If I have the life to live.
Throughout the course of their generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.
And to think that she wouldn’t exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord, you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away.
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.
can you see the green
can you see the sand
i can hardly see my path
100′s of ufo’s everywhere
lean to the left
lean to the right
a heavy 4 head
will take me home
home to a cyclone
a cyclone of bliss
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.
Oh well, I love you pretty baby
You’re the only love I’ve ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own
Well, I’m movin’ after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don’t know what I’d do without it
Without this love that we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ but the moon and stars
Down every street there’s a window
And every window’s made of glass
We’ll keep on lovin’ pretty baby
For as long as love will last
Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past
Well, my ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me, pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said
NE PLUS ULTRA – SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Sole Positive of Night!
Antipathist of Light!
Fate’s only essence! primal scorpion rod–
The one permitted opposite of God!–
Condensed blackness and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the Grasp enorm–
The Interceptor–
The Substance that still casts the shadow
Death!–
The Dragon foul and fell–
The unrevealable,
And hidden one, whose breath
Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell!–
Ah! sole despair
Of both the eternities in Heaven!
Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer,
The all-compassionate!
Save to the Lampads Seven
Reveal’d to none of all the Angelic State,
Save to the Lampads Seven,
That watch the throne of Heaven!
I feel foolish,
like those silly robins jumping
on the ditch boughs when I run
by them. Those robins do not have
the grand style of the red-tailed hawk,
no design, no dreams, just robins
acting stupid.
They’ve never smoked cigarettes, drank
whiskey, consumed drugs, as I have.
In their mindless fluttering about,
filled with nonsense, they tell
me how they love the Great Spirit,
scold me not to be self-pitying,
to open my life and make this day
a bough on a tree leaning
over infinity, where eternity flows
forward and with day the river runs
carrying all that falls in it.
Be happy, Jimmy, they chirp.
Jimmy, be silly, make this day
a tree leaning over the river eternity
and fuss about in its branches.
The stars wept red at the heart of your ears,
The infinite rolled white at the nape of your back;
The sea beaded rose at your russet breasts,
And Man bled black at your sovereign thighs.
In the winter, we will leave in a small pink railway carriage
With blue cushions.
We will be comfortable. A nest of mad kisses lies
In each soft corner.
You will close your eyes, in order not to see, through the glass,
The evening shadows making faces.
Those snarling monstrosities, a populace
Of black demons and black wolves.
Then you will feel your cheek scratched…
A little kiss, like a mad spider,
Will run around your neck…
And you will say to me: “Get it!” as you bend your neck
And we will take a long time to find that creature
Which travels a great deal.
Strange days have found us.
Strange days have tracked us down.
They’re going to destroy
our casual joys.
We shall go on playing
or find a new town.
Strange eyes fill strange rooms.
Voices will signal their tired end.
The hostess is grinning.
Her guests sleep from sinning.
Hear me talk of sin
and you know this is it.
Strange days have found us
and through their strange hours
we linger alone.
Bodies confused.
Memories misused.
As we run from the day
to a strange night of stone.
En la desnuda tierra del camino
la hora florida brota,
espino solitario,
del valle humilde en la revuelta umbrosa.
El salmo verdadero
de tenue voz hoy torna
al corazón, y al labio,
la palabra quebrada y temblorosa.
Mis viejos mares duermen; se apagaron
sus espumas sonoras
sobre la playa estéril. La tormenta
camina lejos en la nube torva.
Vuelve la paz al cielo;
la brisa tutelar esparce aromas
otra vez sobre el campo, y aparece,
en la bendita soledad, tu sombra.
Following the path of the naked land,
the time for flowers comes.
Lonely thorns
Scrambled shadows in the humble valley.
The true psalm.
Today, a tenuous voice returns
to the heart. And, to the lips,
a broken and trembling word.
The old sea is mine and she sleeps;
The sound of her foamy waves
were extinguished on the sterile beach.
The storm moves in the distance
with fierce clouds.
Peace returns to the sky;
The breeze takes me under
its wing again and scatters
pleasant smells all over the fields
and appearing in the blessed solitude,
is your shadow.
Para que yo me llame Ángel González,
para que mi ser pese sobre el suelo,
fue necesario un ancho espacio
y un largo tiempo:
hombres de todo el mar y toda tierra,
fértiles vientres de mujer, y cuerpos
y más cuerpos, fundiéndose incesantes
en otro cuerpo nuevo.
Solsticios y equinoccios alumbraron
con su cambiante luz, su vario cielo,
el viaje milenario de mi carne
trepando por los siglos y los huesos.
De su pasaje lento y doloroso
de su huida hasta el fin, sobreviviendo
naufragios, aferrándose
al último suspiro de los muertos,
yo no soy más que el resultado, el fruto,
lo que queda, podrido, entre los restos;
esto que veis aquí,
tan sólo esto:
un escombro tenaz, que se resiste
a su ruina, que lucha contra el viento,
que avanza por caminos que no llevan
a ningún sitio. El éxito
de todos los fracasos. La enloquecida
fuerza del desaliento…
Translation:
Before I Could Call Myself Ángel González
Before I could call myself Ángel González,
before the earth could support the weight of my body,
a long time
and a great space were necessary:
men from all the seas and all the lands,
fertile wombs of women, and bodies
and more bodies, incessantly fusing
into another new body.
Solstices and equinoxes illuminated
with their changing lights, and variegated skies,
the millenary trip of my flesh
as it climbed over centuries and bones.
Of its slow and painful journey,
of its escape to the end, surviving
shipwrecks, anchoring itself
to the last sigh of the dead,
I am only the result, the fruit,
what’s left, rotting, among the remains;
what you see here,
is just that:
tenacious trash resisting
its ruin, fighting against wind,
walking streets that go
nowhere. The success
of all failures. The insane
force of dismay…
Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change form day to day,
the high yellow turning to mustard and at last
to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches
of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these
therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I
saying all this to you anyway since you already
know it? But of course we always tell
each other what we already know. What else?
It’s the way love is in a late stage of the world.
By the second verse, dear friends
My head will burst, my life will end
So, I’d like to start this one off by saying
“Live and love”
I was young and at home in bed
And I was hanging on the words some poem said
I was thirty-one
I was impressionable
I was upsettable
I tried to make my breathing stop, my heart beat slow
So, when my mom and John came in, I would be cold
From a bridge on Washington Avenue, the year of 1972
Broke my bones and skull and it was memorable
It was half a second and I was halfway down
Do you think I wanted to turn back around and teach a class
Where you kiss the ass that I’ve exposed to you
And at the funeral, the University
Cried at three poems they’d present in place of a broken me
I was breaking in a case of suds
At the brass rail, a fall-down drunk with his tongue torn out and his balls removed
And I knew that my last lines were gone while stupidly I lingered on, other wise men know when it’s time to go
And so I should, too
And so I fly into the brightest winter sun
Of this frozen town, I’m stripped down to move on
My friends, I’m gone
Well, I hear my father fall
And I hear my mother call
And I hear the others all whisper, “Come home”
I’m sorry to go
I loved you all so
But this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on
So, hoist up the John B. sail
(Hoist up the John B. sail)
See how the main sail sets
(See how the main sail sets)
I’ve folded my heart in my head and I wanna go home
With a book in my hand
In the way I had planned
Well, this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on
Hoist up the John B. sail
(Hoist up the John B. sail)
See how the main sail sets
(See how the main sail sets)
I’ve folded my heart in my head and I wanna go home
With a book in each hand
(With a book in each hand)
In the way I had planned
(In the way I had planned)
I feel so broke up
I wanna go home
Dream Song 14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.
love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence towards the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons
and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season
of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school
or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
and your very flesh shall be
a great poem, and have the richest fluency,
not only in its words,
but in the silent lines of its lips and face,
and between the lashes of your eyes,
and in every motion and joint of your body.
The poet shall not spend his time
in unneeded work. He shall know
that the ground is always ready plowed
and manured: others may not know it,
but he shall.
Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold
Police at the station
And they don’t look friendly
Well they don’t look friendly
Well they don’t look friendly
Police at the station
And they don’t look friendly
They don’t look friendly well
They don’t
Blind or crippled
Sharp or dull
I’m reading the Bible
By a 40 watt bulb
What price freedom
Dirt is my rug
Well I sleep like a baby
With the snakes and the bugs
Well the stores are open
But I ain’t got no money
I ain’t got no money
Stores are open but I
Ain’t got no money
Ain’t got no money
Well I ain’t
Found an old dog
And he seems to like me
Seems to like me
Well he seems to like me
Found an old dog and he
Seems to like me
Seems to like me
Well he seems
Seen them fellows
with the card board signs
Scrapin’ up a little money
To buy a bottle of wine
Pregnant women and
The Vietnam vets I say
Beggin’ on the freeway
‘Bout as hard as it gets
Well I slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still
Cool and still
It was cool and still
Slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still
Cool and still and it
Was cool
Slept all night in the Cedar grove
I was born to ramble
Born to roam
Some men are searchin’ for the
Holy Grail
But there ain’t nothin’ sweeter
Than ridin’ the rails
I look 47 but I’m 24
Well they shooed me away
From here the time before
Turned their backs
And they locked their doors
I’m watching T.V. in
The window of a furniture store
Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let’s say you’re seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast …
Let’s say we’re at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space …
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived” …
Nazim Hikmet
February, 1948
Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk – 1993
You ask me why so much rage in my heart
and on a wan neck an unkempt head;
It’s that I’m from the race of Antaeus,
I deflect the darts of the conquering god.
Yes, I am of those the Avenger ignites,
He’s branded my brow with his tortured lips;
Under Abel’s pallor, alas! bloodstained
I blush sometimes Cain’s inexorable red!
Jaweh! The last to be drowned by your seed,
Who from the depths of hell cried “O Tyranny!”
It’s my father’s father Belus or my father Dagon.
They plunged me thrice in the waters of Cocytus,
and protecting my mother the Amelkite all alone
I resow at her feet the old Serpent’s teeth.
Je vis assis, tel qu’un ange aux mains d’un barbier,
Empoignant une chope à fortes cannelures,
L’hypogastre et le col cambrés, une Gambier
Aux dents, sous l’air gonflé d’impalpables voilures.
Tels que les excréments chauds d’un vieux colombier,
Mille rêves en moi font de douces brûlures :
Puis par instants mon coeur triste est comme un aubier
Qu’ensanglante l’or jeune et sombre des coulures.
Puis, quand j’ai ravalé mes rêves avec soin,
Je me détourne, ayant bu trente ou quarante chopes,
Et me recueille pour lâcher l’âcre besoin :
Doux comme le Seigneur du cèdre et des hysopes,
Je pisse vers les cieux bruns très haut et très loin,
Avec l’assentiment des grands héliotropes.
TRANSLATION:
I spend my life
seated in bars
like an angel in the hands
of a barber, clinging
to a beer mug. My belly
hangs over and my neck is bent,
a cheap pipe, between my teeth,
fills the air with fleeting sails
of smoke-cloud.
The thousand dreams still within me
sweetly scald my supple skin.
They are like hot piles of bird crap
left on the bottom of some old pigeon coop.
But, sometimes my sad heart
is like a piece of soft wood
that’s been cut off but still bleeds
gold where the branch was torn
and is still fruitful.
And after I’ve carefully drunk
down my dreams, after about thirty or forty
drinks, I get up to take a long piss,
an offering to the god
of hyssop and cedar.
I piss into the dark sky
a great golden stream
very high and very far
that blesses all the plants
that turn towards the sun.
