my dark rapunzel

the navel

november

People say the sea is deep —
it's not as deep by half as love.
The sea at least still has its coasts, 
love's farthest reaches have no shore.
With harp in hand I'll climb the tower
To empty rooms full of the moon,
And strum the song of missing him.
My heart and harp will break as one.

Li Ye
poet-courtesan (and perhaps Daoist nun), 
8th century

(note: i borrowed the first 4 lines of the translation from Women Writers of Traditional China, while the last 4 are translated by A.Z. Foreman, i liked his version better in this case)

shake us, we, the palms of the wound

The leaves asleep under the wind

are the wounds’ ship,

and the ages collapsed on top of each other

are the wound’s glory,

and the trees rising out of our eyelashes

are the wound’s lake.
The wound is to be found on bridges

where the grave lengthens

and patience goes on to no end

between the shores of our love and death.

The wound is a sign,
and the wound is a crossing too.

If I had a harbor in the land
of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship,
if I had the remains
of a city, if I had a city
in the land of children and weeping,
I would have written all this down for the wound’s sake,
a song like a spear
that penetrates trees, stone, and sky,
soft like water
unbridled, startling like conquest.

Rain down on our desert

O world adorned with dream and longing.

Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound,

tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound,

that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands.

World adorned with dream and longing

world that falls on my brow

like the lash of a wound,

don’t come close—the wound is closer—

don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful.

That magic that your eyes had flung

on the last kingdoms—

the wound has passed over it,

passed and did not leave a single sail

to tempt toward salvation, did not leave

a single island behind.

 

from Adonis, The Wound, tr. by Khaled Mattawa, 

with my thanks to the Black Sun for this discovery

(for e.)

the ceremony

the poet said once leopards
they break into the temple and drink to the dregs
what is in the sacrificial pitchers,
this being repeated over and over again; finally
it can be calculated in advance,
and it becomes a part of the ceremony -
 

and you said too: you can guess why i said this.

yet the ceremony was taking place there, within her body bursting free through the night, her movements, sharp and hungry, tracing the outline of the field which was the only temple and the only thing which was repeated over and over again, at dawn, was how she broke down on her knees in front of the small thicket bearing white-glimmering flowers, out of breath, bruises on her skin, and had it been possible to calculate all this in advance and make her part of an order which wasn't hers, it wouldn't have been her any longer, and their delusion would have turned back against them, eventually, their gods blind and empty, their words hollow.

still summer

despite what you say, it is still summer, i need summer still, i cling to it and most of all to that gesture of yours when you slowly raised your hand, the fingers stained by the red of berries, the dress all sparkling under the sun, and made as if to touch me, through the thicket of little white flowers swaying in the wind. 

instead, you picked a flower and turned away, walking away from me with its thin stalk between your teeth.

ah, the summer fields (2)

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ah, the summer fields (1)

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Mary Oliver 

(from The Summer Day)

spring cleaning

and what if the oldest shoes are the dearest?

with more precision and more truthfulness than our memory, they keep track, in each crack and dirt mark and dust-blackened spot, of what we have learned to call "our life", "our past" - though nobody knows exactly to whom this past, this life, belong.

with tenderness, the old shoes stare back at us, while we, gentle hypocrites or simply forgetful, unable to glimpse beyond our self-woven illusions, never take notice.

but with a tearing flutter

if my thoughts could turn into ravens 

fly i would whisper fly


 

(it is not with a whisper, but with a tearing flutter
that they will settle, laying the night
upon your white body)

twenty years after

i have always hated the imposture of such titles, i found them unsettling even when i would read the books with delight, in those early years (those early years - saying this loud, with different accents, yields different meanings, none of them right, though). it is not in front of god that the soul is groundless, it is in front of memory.  

(and still no lover's lips pressed upon hers taste as excruciatingly bittersweet as those crushed petals, that day)

for you do not describe the past...

Nacre upon nacre upon nacre, bluish upon bluish upon bluish, each age and each house in which I have dwelled (if it was not all a hallucination of nothingness) is a filter deforming the previous one, blending itself with them, making them narrower and more heterogenous bands. For you do not describe the past by writing about old things, but the misty air between you and it.

Thinking about myself at different ages, as so many consumed previous lives, it is as though I spoke about a long, uninterrupted chain of corpses, a tunnel of bodies dying one within the other. A moment ago, the one who, reflected by the dark lacquer of the coffee cup, had written here the words “dying one within the other” collapsed off the stool, his skin cracked, the bones of his face became visible, his eyes leaked out oozing black blood. In a moment, the one who will write “the one who will write” will also collapse down upon the other’s dust. How could you penetrate this ossuary? And why would you do so? And what gauze mask, what surgical gloves would protect you from the infection emanated by memory?

from Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, translated into English as  Glaring (vol. 1)

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july the 7th: Tanabata

He is coming, my long-desired lord, 

whom I have been waiting to meet here, 

on the banks of the River of Heaven.... 

The moment of loosening my girdle is nigh!

On the River of Heaven

the sound of the water has become loud: 

perhaps my long-awaited lord 

will soon be coming in his boat

The love-longing of one whole year 
having ended tonight, 
every day from tomorrow 
I must again pine for him as before!

When autumn comes, 
and the river-mists spread over the Heavenly Stream, 
I turn toward the river, and long
 and the nights of my longing are many!

*poems about Tanabata from the Manyoshu , tr. by Lafcadio Hearn

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