This stanza from Waldo Williams' poem, What is it to be human? spoke to me earlier today:
What is it to sing? To receive breath
From the genius of creation.
What's work but humming a song
From wood and wheat.
This translation from the Welsh by Menna Elfyn was in Poetry magazine in April 2008.
Here's are some little lovelies from The Sound of Water, translated by Sam Hamill.
Basho:
Heard, not seen,
the camellia poured rainwater
when it leaned
The morning glories
bloom, securing the gate
in the old fence
Come out to view
the truth of flowers blooming
in poverty
Buson:
Sweet springtime showers
and no words can express
how sad it all is
In seasonal rain
along a nameless river
fear too has no name
Pure white plum blossoms
slowly begin to turn
the color of dawn
Issa:
Before I arrived
Who were the people living here?
Only violets remain.
This world of dew
is only a world of dew—
and yet
Moritake:
Those falling blossoms
all return to the branch when
I watch butterflies
Kikaku:
A single yam leaf
contains the entire life
of a water drop
Ransetsu:
All by itself,
that beautiful melon,
entirely self-sufficient
Kakei:
At the break of dawn
the well-bucket reels in
a camellia bloom
Chiyo:
Since morning glories
hold my well-bucket hostage,
I beg for water
Fuhaku:
So very still, even
cherry blossoms are not stirred
by the temple bell
Socho:
The moon this evening
and in the whole wide sky
not a trace of cloud
Shiki:
The full moon ringed
by these innumerable stars,
and the sky deep green
Anonymous:
To learn how to die
watch cherry blossoms, observe
chrysanthemums
...by Jane Hirshfield, and in her collection, Given Sugar, Given Salt :
"Rarely are what is spoken and what is meant the same.
Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees
say another, the floor hears a third.
Yet within us,
objects and longings are not different.
They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes."
Today's mail brought my inaugural copy of A Public Space, the new lit rag edited by Brigid Hughes, deposed heir-apparent to Plimpton's Paris Review empire. I tried to read a few pieces with my new glasses which seem, $642 dollars later, to be somewhat bifocal-impaired. But French and stylin', did I forget to mention that? So, all is not lost or sacrificed yet.
There was something I wanted to talk about when I started this. Has it escaped my addled brain, already, now? Today, what has been today? Driving to/from Eugene on the glasses run. That included flights of birds, llamas that babysit sheep, and water, water, everywhere in Christmas tree plantations and fields. I read an essay in an Alaska literary magazine by Jane Hirshfield, my new poetry guru. Read a bit of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice but Jan Morris in the introduction is right, the prose is a tad dense.
I walked the trail, put recycling and urine-drenched kitty litter in the back of the pickup and hauled it to the garbage can at the top of the hill. Had one, two, maybe three mini-crying jags that are all tied up with mostly my failure as a mother of an adult son but as a writer, too. Like so much, with the waning light and the rain on the roof, their urgency has since faded.
It's sometimes hard to locate what's the mettle of a single, lived-long day. There's something in what Jane H. says, that a poet, a writer comes to the page with a sense of disturbance. A burr in the saddle. A discomfort. A sense that all is not right and, from that, words flow and beg to be explored.
I wish I could surrender to such insights day in and out, blindly and blithely. Life would be so much simpler. I wouldn't be considering Prozac.
Clipped out of a New Yorker issue a few years back. Now that I own all the back issues on CD I suppose I can find the actual publication date! Questions and maybe a few answers for all of us striving to work with words.
Words
by Venus Khoury-Ghata
Where do words come from?
from what rubbing of sounds are they born
on what flint do they light their wicks
what winds brought them into our mouths
Their past is the rustling of stifled silences
the trumpeting of molten elements
the grunting of stagnant waters
Sometimes
they grip each other with a cry
expand into lamentations
become mist on the windows of dead houses
crystallize into chips of grief on dead lips
attach themselves to a fallen star
dig their hole in nothingness
breathe out strayed souls
Words are rocky tears
the keys to the first doors
they grumble in caverns
lend their ruckus to storms
their silence to bread that's ovened alive
(Translated, from the French, by Marilyn Hacker)
Just finished a superb novel, The Gardens of Kyoto by Kate Walbert. It was such a satisfying, lyrically smart, rich, engaging, and compelling read. One of those novels you close with a sigh and hope you remember to find the time to read one day again.
This passage particularly spoke to me, seemed to offer up advice about finding audience for our writing, locating and focusing on your own particular someone, out there listening, no matter if imagined, living or dead:
"There was only one thing Randall insisted I remember about the art of dramatic presentation. It was the first rule of thumb, what I would have to understand if I were going to understand anything at all. You speak, he told me, to an audience of one—a solitary listener to whom you direct your presentation, to whom you project your voice in the telling; a person whom you picture as you confide."
A prose poem made out of bits of ordinary, daily life.
Poem: "Change" by Louis Jenkins from The Winter Road . © Holy Cow! Press.
Change
All those things that have gone from your life, moon boots, TV
trays, and the Soviet Union, that seem to have vanished, are
really only changed, dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth
but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers.
Everything around you changes. It seems at times (only for a
moment) that your wife, the woman you love, might actually be
your first wife in another form. It's a thought not to be pursued.
... Nothing is the same as it used to be. Except you, of course,
You haven't changed ... well, slowed down a bit, perhaps. It's
more difficult nowadays to deal with the speed of change, dis-
turbing to suddenly find yourself brushing your teeth with what
appears to be a flashlight. But essentially you are the same as
ever, constant in your instability.
Poems: "The Muse and I Are Alone" and "The Muse Lends a Hand," by Robert Long
The Muse and I Are Alone
On the usual corner, we're
Up and out earlier than usual.
No winos around: too cold. The Muse
Wears white pants and the usual heavy metal
Jacket. He's pouty, half-asleep,
Turns toward me, his back
To the screaming crosstown wind.
I'm leaning against a video store
Steel grate. Hollywood light bulbs
Race around the window perimeter.
If you looked from across the avenue
You'd see us: a guy with a briefcase
Full of paper and a kid
With a backpack stuffed with books,
Framed by blinking lights,
Like forgotten celebrities.
The Muse Lends a Hand
The wind picks up; my hat blows off my head.
I'm trying to light a cigarette.
The hat hits the Muse in the knees, drops
To the sidewalk. Facing me,
He wears a baseball cap backwards, and looks stern
This morning. He bends, picks up the hat,
Hands it to me. "Thank you," I say.
He says nothing but watches
As I replace the hat on my head.
He turns, searches the avenue for evidence
Of our bus. I feel undignified.
The Muse is always composed;
His role is to trigger creative impulses
In others. He adjusts his bookback,
Steps to the curb, stares
Into the relentless gray dream
Of 7:13 a.m. Philadelphia.
The Muse looks tired of living.
A woman in a dirty raincoat asks me
If the K bus has passed. "No," I say.
From his new collection, While We've Still Got Feet:
What It Takes
Enough
of a house
to keep
the bugs and rain
out
in the summer,
stay warm
in
in the winter.
Books,
a few
musical instruments,
a garden,
silence,
some mountains,
maybe a cat.
Lies
Who you are and who
you think you are
are almost never the same.
Wang Wei
the ex-government official
seeking in his
retirement the solitude and
silence of his
Buddhist faith referred to his
retreat on the
Wang River as a shack. It was
a palatial estate
with servants everywhere.
He was a rich guy.
I call myself a recluse yet
I run around
almost as much as anyone.
Poets never tell the truth.
Ryokan Says
With what can I
compare this life?
Weeds floating on water.
And there you are with your
dreams of immortality
through poetry.
Pretty pompous --
don't you think? -- for a
weed floating on water?
Not sure which story this is from, I'll track it down and edit this post later. Now here's a master of short story form:
"Kallipareos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook...Because she is not teaching Greek, she simply put it away.
That is what happens with that kind of thing. You put it away and now and again, you look in the closet for something else, and you remember, and you think, soon. Then after a while it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it, and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.
The thing that was your brightest treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not have contemplated, at one time, and now it becomes something you can hardly remember. That is what happens."
--Alice Munro
