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CINEMA CALENDAR OF THE ABSTRACT HEART
the fibres give in to your starry warmth
a lamp is called green and sees
carefully stepping into a season of fever
the wind has swept the rivers' magic
and i've perforated the nerve
by the clear frozen lake ... {excerpt}
VICTORY
There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’t freezing
from the need that created it. The lost children
distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone
it’s the one who cries out who doesn’t get a coat.
The children fuse colors because they don’t want to
separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut
each other in the neck and gut, don’t care
which one of them will end up later in surgery.
And drugged sons pretending to be costumes,
well, they’re not welcome to comprehension either.
Why does a wild child confuse a moon
with a hole in his skin?
One was born soaked in gin.
His first sip was from a bottle of denial.
What can “leave me alone” mean after that?
The system is settled, dimensions fixed.
Another one’s hand feels like a starfish.
Makes me hysterical like the word perestroika.
{excerpt}
from THE NERVE METER
An actor is seen as if through crystals.
Inspiration in stages.
One musn’t let in too much literature.
I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.
I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point
—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality
(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),
and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—
in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled
—are lost in the shadows of man.
In sleep, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs.
Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes.
It must be understood that all of intelligence is only a vast contingency, and that one can lose it, not like a lunatic who is dead, but like a living person who is in life and who feels working on himself its attraction and its inspiration (of intelligence, not of life).
The titillations of intelligence and this sudden reversal of contending parties.
Words halfway to intelligence.
This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought.
This dialogue in thought.
The ingestion, the breaking off of everything.
And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.
To find oneself again in a state of extreme shock, clarified by unreality, with, in a corner of oneself, some fragments of the real world.
To think without the slightest breaking off, without pitfalls in my thought, without one of those sudden disappearances to which my marrow is accustomed as a transmitter of currents.
{excerpt}
OBLIQUE RAIN
translated from the Portuguese by Isabel Pinto Franco
III
The Great Sphinx of Egypt dreams into this paper . . .
I write—and she appears through my transparent hand
And at the corner of the paper the pyramids arise . . .
I write—am troubled to see the tip of my quill
Become King Cheops’ profile . . .
All of a sudden I stop . . .
Everything darkens . . . I fall into an abyss made of time . . .
I’m buried under the pyramids writing verses under the clear light of
this lamp
And all Egypt crushes me from above through the lines I draw with
the quill . . .
I hear the Sphinx laugh inside
The sound of my quill running on paper . . .
A huge hand goes through me not being able to see it,
Sweeps everything to the corner of the ceiling that stands behind me,
And on the paper where I write, between it and the quill that writes
Lies King Cheops’ cadaver, staring at me with wide open eyes,
And in between our looks crossing each other the river Nile runs
And a happiness of sailing boats wanders
In a diffuse diagonal
Between me and what I think . . .
Funerals of King Cheops in old gold and Me! . . .
from Aturuxos calados
Regard a tree.
Who would have better seized light’s longing?
Longing a labor is first, is first.
First the cold path of it. (Bring water.) Egregious
is a few steps over wet stones
hai ailala
or you might miss it
Shirred up, wet against the grain
silica might call out
its finger to the chest
pressed me still :
That day we passed between the two Toledos
anos annals années a-néantes espidas pido pidas
: rain’s hoof-marks
Horses shirred sleeping in wet fields
para María do Cebreiro
na hortiña do espello (¿espello?)
espiñas
as espiñas dos borrachos do neón
os borrachos do comprensible, do entendemento
estendido
ningures
o son aire rumor
en consecuencia
moi poucas palabriñas
cortesías
menos as eguas do pensamento,
empuxadas da lonxe.
That limitless strophe
: month
Sage or wary
Physically song’s capacity
obriga cargada
onérous
these days.
Did I have seized ruckus
Job’s weir
catching (outcome) those fishes
and old leaves
me in the mill house at La Chaux
it all broken down, stone pushed into
auga agua eaux
Writing’s “succumb” with great
happiness.
{excerpt from -- http://www.pshares.org/issues/articl...articleID=7555 }
LANGUAGES
THERE are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
{excerpt}
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/arts/21ziprin.html also... a "youtube" poem by Lionel Ziprin --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFveObkbc60
from Poetry Magazine, April 2009
{translation issue}
THE NORTH WIND WHIPS
The north wind whips through,
in the streets papers and leaves
are chased with resentment.
Houses moan,
dogs curl into balls.
There is something in
the afternoon's fingers,
a catfish spine,
a rusty nail.
Someone unthinkingly
smoked cigarettes in heaven,
left it overcast, listless.
Here, at ground level, no one could
take their shadow for a walk,
sheltered in their houses, people
are surprised to discover their misery.
Someone didn't show,
their host was insulted.
Today the world,
agreed to open her thighs,
suddeny the village comprehends
that it is sometimes necessary to close their doors.
Who can tell me
why I meditate on this afternoon? ... {excerpt}
{translated from the Isthmus Zapotec by David Shook}
DIES IRAE
A tinny angelus rings in your ear.
Is this the message from the Great Unknown?
A secret raven? A red sky? Signs of the times?
The “dark place” where most people don’t want to go?
Or are they merely selling the weather?
Wreathed in sea-smoke, Leukothea, the white goddess,
Speaks to you (in archaic Greek) of calculus,
The “lack” in lilac, lyrical blue milk of the mother.
“A hand passes over flowing water,” she says,
“You are moved by your motion.
Yet only the golden string knows where it is going.”
& looking up from his book, the counting master replies,
“The sleep-maker listens for a foot on the stairs.
Jews of One Lemon, Nothing can save you.”
{excerpt, first stanza-- http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/asekoff.php ....."Dies Irae", Latin for day of mourning, the name of the hymn sung at the mass of the dead}
THE MEDITERRANEAN
Quem das finem, rex magne, dolorum?
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore,
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl to take that sweet land in!
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-- ...
{excerpt}
SOMETHING LIKE THAT
(translated by Liz Werner)
PARRA LAUGHS like he’s condemned to hell
but when haven’t poets laughed?
at least he declares that he’s laughing
they pass the years pass
the years
at least they seem to be passing
hypothesis non fingo
everything goes on as if they were passing
now he starts to cry
forgetting that he’s an antipoet
0
STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS
nobody reads poetry nowadays
it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad
0
FOUR DEFECTS that my Ophelia won’t forgive me for:
old
lowlife
communist
and National Literature Prize
<<My family may be able to forgive you
for the first three
but never for the last>>
0
MY CORPSE and I
understand each other marvelously
my corpse asks me: do you believe in God?
and I respond with a hearty NO
my corpse asks: do you believe in the government?
and I respond with the hammer and sickle
my corpse asks: do you believe in the police?
and I respond with a punch in the face
then he gets up out of his coffin
and we go arm in arm to the altar
0
THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes
nothing otherworldly
God
*** the truth
******* the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes
whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
******* and we're right back to being enemies ... {excerpt}