Zombie Tattoo

I nearly always have eight books on my desk. Three are whatever I’m currently reading (sometimes two, sometimes four: nearly always). The others are a King James version of the New Testament, The Little Zen Companion (compiled by David Schiller), a Penguin edition of the Upanishads, e.e. cummings’ Complete Poems: 1913-1962, and Rimbaud: Complete Poems, Selected Letters. The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud is like a sherbet served between courses at an expensive restaurant: When I find my brain fogged by the events of the day, it cleanses the mental palate.

His work is deceptively simple, full of surprises, and all the more astonishing when one learns he gave up creative writing before he was 20. He died in Marseille at the age of 37, a brief, hot light.

In my youth the translation I own was considered the best. This is no longer true; but over the years it has become so familiar I find it hard to surrender. The dogeared book is pock-marked with finger smudges and marginal notes, a dear companion. When I think of transitioning to electronic media, I wonder how future generations will become as fond of a book. How does one become attached to something s/he cannot touch?

It was difficult to choose a favorite poem. I settled on “The first evening (Première soirée)” because it was the first of his verses I read, standing in Oxford’s Books in Atlanta before its demise.

The poem rhymes in the original French, and I encourage you to seek it out if you understand the language. Deceptively simple. There’s no other way to describe it.

The first evening

She had very few clothes on
And big indiscreet trees
Threw their leaves against the panes
Slyly, very close, very close.

Sitting in my big chair,
Half-naked, she clasped her hands.
Her small feet so delicate, so delicate,
Trembled with pleasure on the floor.

—The color of wax, I watched
A small nervous ray of light
Flutter in her smile
And on her breast—a fly on the rose-bush.

—I kissed her delicate ankles.
Abruptly she laughed. It was soft
And it spread out in clear trills,
A lovely crystal laughter.

Her small feet under the petticoat
Escaped. “Please stop!”
—When the first boldness was permitted,
The laugh pretended to punish!

—Poor things trembling under my lips,
I softly kissed her eyes:
—She threw her sentimental head
Backward: “Oh! that’s too much! …

“Sir, I have something to say to you …”
—What was left I put on her breast
In a kiss, which made her laugh
With a kind laugh that was willing …

—She had very few clothes on
And big indiscreet trees
Threw their leaves against the panes
Slyly, very close, very close.

—Arthur Rimbaud

(The twelfth day of a month-long celebration of poetry.) 

On the eleventh day of a month-long celebration of poetry (April being poetry month) I wanted to share one of my favorite poems with you. Unfortunately, it is too long to commit to this space.

Octavio Paz’s “A Fable of Joan Miró (Fábula de Joan Miró)” is a strikingly original use of language from it’s opening verse to it’s closing line, all the more impressive because it loses little in translation from Spanish to English. Perhaps part of its power arises out of the writer’s desire to emulate with words Joan Miró’s singular genius with paint on canvas.

It works. I cannot read this poem without conjuring up vivid mental images. I “see” it more than “hear” it.

I am sharing the poem’s first verse here. Consider the image of the wind. I hope it will encourage you to seek out the entire work (your local library is a good place to start).

Excerpt from “A Fable of Joan Miró”

Blue was immobilized between red and black.
The wind came and went over the page of the plains,
lighting small fires, wallowing in the ashes,
went off with its face sooty, shouting on the corners,
the wind came and went, opening, closing windows and doors,
came and went through the twilit corridors of the skull,
the wind in a scrawl, with ink-stained hands
wrote and erased what it had written on the wall of the day.
The sun was no more than an omen of the color yellow,
a hint of feathers, a cock’s future crow.
The snow had gone astray, the sea had lost its speech
and was a wandering murmur, a few vowels in search of a word.

—Octavio Paz

(As an aside, it interests me that Paz served in Mexico’s diplomatic corps. Perhaps the world would be a far better place if we let poets, not politicians, negotiate peace throughout the world.)

I first discovered the poetry of Federico García Lorca in the Robert Bly anthology The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. For days after reading “Little Infinite Poem” these lines haunted me:

“But two has never been a number;
it is anguish and its shadow,
the demonstration of another’s infinity,
the dead man’s ramparts
and the punishment of new and endless resurrection.

“Dead men hate the number two,
but that number lulls women to sleep,
and as woman fears light,
and light trembles before cockerels,
and cockerels can only fly above the snow,
we’ll have to graze for good on graveyard weeds.”

The idea of grazing on graveyard weeds stuck in my head like a needle in the groove of a scratched record (an image which will have little meaning for those raised on CDs — look it up). It was despair expressed as an ocean of mourners’ tears. Two is impossible. Humans are destined to be lonely forever.

Lorca articulated what I already knew: Love never runs easily. Sometimes it limps along. Sometimes it lies catatonic in a ditch. Yet we keep struggling to make the home stretch, to arrive at the finish line victorious.

Acknowledging despair is only one of a thousand things Lorca does well. His work is often exceptional and never less than thought-provoking, born out of a life that would make a brilliant biopic.

This is day ten in a month-long celebration of poetry:

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

—Federico García Lorca

When it comes to maximum results from an economy of language, few poets rival the Japanese haiku no renga master, Matsuo Bashō.

I was first introduced to the hokku form in high school in Okinawa. My teacher wove a story of the poet lying drunk on sake in the bottom of a boat on a lake, composing odes to the night sky and the full moon. To this day I can’t find any collaboration of what may well have been a fabrication, but I recall thinking that if poets could lie drunk in a boat, then they weren’t the effete, limp-wristed, frill-wearing artistes I imagined them to be. Lying drunk in a boat staring up at the night sky actually sounded like decent work if one could get it.

After the teacher had us write a few haiku, I thought it was pretty easy work, too.

This was before I understood what was going on inside the poems. Today I admire the simple genius of Bashō’s work. My own efforts are frustrated by it. Elegant simplicity is harder than it looks.

Maybe I need a boat, a lake, a night sky, and a bottle of sake.

Haiku

Scarecrow in the hillock
Paddy field—
How unaware! How useful.

—Matsuo Bashō

(Day seven in a month-long celebration of poetry.)

Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems seems to be out of print. (One has to figure that if “rude, contemptuous, arrogant and subversive” Amazon.com doesn’t have it in stock, no one does. (Barnes & Noble is also out.))

It saddens me. Of all the poets I’ve read, Sandburg is most essentially American — not even Walt Whitman shares his love of common people or celebrates them with such candor and empathy.

He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry back in the day when the Pulitzer meant something, when journalism was a sacred craft inhabited by hard-drinking, chain-smoking reporters brought up as copy boys who got the facts straight before hammering them out as simple declarative sentences and not a profession populated by Ivy League assholes showing off their grasp of semiotics.

His work speaks to me in a way that few others do: I can spend hours poring over it and never grow weary. I get his images. He writes of common people in ordinary words that somehow become extraordinary when he strings them together.

Today’s entry in the poem-a-day for the month of April is a serenade for his wife.

Paula

Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.

The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.
I stand on the pier and sing how I know you mornings.
It is not your eyes, your face, I remember.
It is not your dancing, race-horse feet.
It is something else I remember you for on the pier mornings.

Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me.
Your shoulder brushes my arm—a south-west wind crosses the pier.
I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again:

Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.

—Carl Sandburg

Three of Sandburg’s early books are available online at Bartleby.com. They’re well worth reading.