for the one in love

I am far, far beyond that island of days where once, it seems, I watched a flower grow, and counted the step of the sun, and fed, if my memory serves, the smiling animal at his appointed hour. I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.

How can i find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.

from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

by Elizabeth Smart



.
.

like a drifting cloud

If someone asks
My abode
I reply:
“The east edge of
The Milky Way.”

Like a drifting cloud,
Bound by nothing:
I just let go
Giving myself up
To the whim of the wind

Ryokan

Wenn jemand
nach meinem Wohnsitz fragt,
Antworte ich:
„Am östlichen Rand
Der Milchstraße“.

Gleich einer ziehenden Wolke,
Durch nichts gebunden:
Ich lasse einfach los,
Gebe mich
In die Launen des Windes.

(für Renée)



.
.

how much

How much I desire!
Inside my little satchel,
the moon, and flowers

Bashō
(tr. Sam Hamill)



.
.

unknowable

No, the human heart
Is unknowable.
But in my birthplace
The flowers still smell
The same as always.

Ki No Tsurayuki
(tr. Kenneth Rexroth)

.
.

autumn palimpsest

why do you keep re-writing
the faces of what has already been,
layer upon layer of feverish scribble?
the past cannot be altered,
the stranger said, his amber voice
stern.

i stood there broken,
the quiet of the dead for my only flame.
oh if the sky could know of the loneliness
of its blue.

outside, the tree was gently falling
into autumn, unaware that it did so,
and why.

and how hard i wished for the time of the tree,
how hard.


.
.

grief (1)

.
.

on the last day of summer, the siren songs

.
.

my glorious feast

you tell me that the leaves of the sycamore are starting to curl
at the edges
and the purple of the thistles deepens like expensive silk.
with a swift gesture that takes possession of your needless
melancholy
(your pale longing, uncalled-for in the turmoil of my blood)
i brush away this early autumn from yet another year of waiting
what do i care, i have my poppies, wounds breaking open
on my skin of delight, their flames hidden
behind the veil of my hair (otherwise
you would have gone blind by now, my gentle love).
i am the exalted gardener of a poison you'll never know,
blessed be my pity.
soon, very soon, they will open their hungry mouths to devour me.
and you will climb your sycamore, trembling
for a glimpse of the holy, still unable to see
the face of the god in my exacting arts of destruction
when like the old queen of Carthage i glow
towards my erasure, my glorious feast,
alone.

.
.

...

what do i know about you? tell me, what can one know about the other?


between the impenetrable and the unattainable, i lay down my arms - even memory escapes me.




.
.

i have always wondered whether, when taking a photograph, it is i who absorbs the soul of the landscape or the landscape absorbs mine

.
.

the radiance of now

morning joy

.
.

the melancholy diary of hotel rooms (Paris)

'He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?'

... a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”

(excerpts from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

don't bind my flowers with your tedious geometries

.
.

tinged with blood

Under the plane trees,
young women are passing by,
upon their eyelids
is a colour tinged with blood.
Summer has surely arrived.

Kenkichi Nakamura

.
.

and if i...

none of the roads i knew led to him.
the doors wouldn't open,
they didn't seem to be closed, either.

one of the old masters said:
'To learn bamboo painting,
take a branch of bamboo
and let its shadow fall upon a white wall
on a moonlit night,
then the true shape of the bamboo will emerge.'

and if i took one of his gestures -
those gestures detached of whatever
they were supposed to hold,
for which i was unable to find a name -
and let its shadow fall upon the white skin
of my moonlit night,
would then, oh master Kuo Hsi,
the true shape of his absence emerge?

a jar

A Jar
I want to love a jar.
Today—oh!
O jar, that arises in the calmness of my heart!

You have nothing in you.
Your emptiness!

O jar, my heart
strangely trembles
calling you, “My jar.”



Jūkichi Yagi
(1925)
Tr. William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura

Note:
i had thought 'my jar' in the last line to be suspicious as soon as i saw this translation, and sure enough, going back to the Japanese original confirmed it: there is no 'my' in Japanese, a language which practically never uses pronouns (some linguists argue there are no pronouns in Japanese, at least not what we call 'pronoun' in Indo-European languages) and which values most the qualities of ambiguity/indirectness/indetermination/vagueness.