This week's photos relate to a piece of music my son is composing. He hasn't finished it, but what I've heard so far brings to my mind a kind of melancholy, shadow-land cityscape. The pictures, from several years ago, are an incomplete expression of that..

Anyway, it's a very moody piece that  reminded me of a kind edgy urban landscape, something like this week's series of photos.

As to poems, I understand that I am indulging myself this week(but it is my ball, after all). But even saying that, there's really not  as much of me as it might appear, since all my poems, new and old, are short to  very short.

My library poems are all from a single anthropology, The FSG book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. It's a big book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011.
          












Back to find again the  short poem mojo

























The first poem this week from the Latin American poetry anthology is by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond De Andrade. Born in 1902, he is considered by some to be the greatest Portuguese language poet of all time. He died in 1987.

His poem was translated by Mark Strand.











Your Shoulders Hold Up the World

A time comes when you can no  longer say: my God.
A time of total cleaning up.
A time when you can no longer say: my love.
Because love  proved useless.
And the eyes don't cry.
And the hands do  only rough work.
And the heart is dry.

Women knock at your door in vain, you won't open.
You remain alone, the light turned off,
and our enormous eyes shine in the dark.
It is obvious  you want nothing  from your  friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars,famine,family fights inside buildings
prove only  that life goes on
and not  everybody has freed himself yet.
Some (the delicate ones) judging  the spectacle cruel
will  prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't  help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.
















Continuing from last week, my quest for less.














beacon

crescent moon
hangs white
against the midnight sky,
it's gentle arc
a beacon
to the weary
and day-worn

          2004



before the estate sale

quiet walk
through
a dead man's house

soft steps
echo
in this husk
of a life

seashells
whisper
of a falling tide

end
of the end
beginning

          2004



burning

though
hot
I'm not

you truly set me burning
when you walked out those swinging doors
in your skimpy white short-shorts

tight cheeks flexing against  the soft cotton
like two little monkeys in a velvet bag

waving goodbye

seismic
is the word that comes to mind

          2000 (published in The Melic Review -2002)



caress

midnight

hot breath
and
whispers

soft
       slow
               glide
                       of skin
                       on skin

tongue

strikes
like the bite
of a velvet adder

secrets
unveiled

surrendered

to the touch

to the smoldering
tough

of midnight

          2001 (Published in The Green Tricycle - 2003)



cat dance

cat dances brightly through yellow
alley shadows of early afternoon

meow
she murmurs

she crouches
she leaps

death prances lightly through languid
alley shadows of yellow afternoon

          1971 (Published in The Muse Apprentice - 2004)



clean sweep

gray rain
on a gray day
flushes gutters
long months dry

    garbage
                 scars water
                                    fallen fresh
                                                        from the sky

          2004



cowboy movie

comecomecome
she said to me
in her low voice
and sighed
as I moved closer

comecomecome
she said to me

jjjjjjjesus

stuttersam
     crawled
into his corner
     and sighed
     and cried
in the shallow shadows
of his silver sombrero

comecomecome
she cried to me

    1970 (Published in Maelstrom - 2000)



 dark chocolate

she hoards anger
like sweet chocolate
in a brightly colored box

     savors it
          stores it

lets the dark flavor grow
in anticipation

a secret remembered
on the back of her tongue

a secret cache of ire
released in quiet bites

     a nibble here
          a nibble there

and hurt
in random

     b     u     r     s     t     s

pervades the air
around her

     2000 (Published in Experimentia -2001)









Next from the anthology I have Peruvian poet, Odi Gonzales.

Born in 1962, Gonzales is a Language Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese. With a advanced degree in Quechua oral tradition, he writes in Spanish, Quechua and English.

His poem was translated from Quechua by Alice Krogel and Jose  Ramon Ruiz Sanchez.











Umantuu

wherever  it is you go,
my rainbow siren,
with your tenacious  tambourine
call my soul  that wanders frightened
wild, silent
since first its hair was cut

lure it,  diva of the depths,
with your wiles and your caresses

revealing, perverse,
your fertile breasts
of turbid milk

wherever it is that you encounter, invisible
flower of the mist,
harness my spirit that flees
with its asthma and its imaginary armies
guide it now, sleepless siren whistling
by the narrow street of goldfinches by he path
of the cliffs.

wherever it is that you arrive, wanderer
nymph  of the stormy gales, lead my stray soul
companion of pristine air,
drag it if it does not want to come
to this my deathbed












 Another new from the search for short.





















Next from Chile, Gabriela Mistral.

Born in 1989, a poet, educator, diplomat and humanist, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature (the first Latin American woman to be so honored).

An interesting side-note, Mistral was one of the first to recognize the importance of Pablo Neruda, the other great Chilean Noble Prize winner, having known him when he was a teenager and she was school director in his home town. After a lifetime living all around the world, she lived in New York at the time of her  death in 1957.

Her poem  was  translated by Ursula K.  Le Guin.








A Word

     I have a word inside my mouth
and don't let it get out and don't get rid of it,
though its blood-gush pushes at me.
If I let it our  it would scorch the bright grass,
drain blood from lambs,drop birds from the air.

     I  have to untangle it from my tongue,
find a rat-hole for it,
bury it under  heaps of quicklime,
so it can't keep flying, as the cloud does.

     I can't show any signs of life
while it's coming and going through my blood,
and rising and falling with my crazy breathing.
My father Job spoke it as he burned,
but I can't let it use my poor mouth, no,
because it'll  roll on; women will find it
as they go down to the river, it'll twist into their hair
and wither poor dry thickets up in fire.

     I want to  sow it with seeds that grow so wild
they'll cover it overnight and swallow it
and not leave a shred of a syllable of it.
Or sever it like this, like biting
a snake in half with my teeth.

     And they go home, go in, and go to  sleep,
cut free from it,  sliced off from it,
and wake up after a couple of thousand days
newborn out of sleep and forgetting.

     Not knowing  that I'd  had between my lips
a word of iodine and saltpeter,
and not remembering a night,
a house in a foreign country,
the ambush, the lightning at the door,
and my  body going on without its soul.













More short stuff from the past.

















explaining it all to my dog Reba

she stares

rapt

big, brown eyes
wide, unblinking

hanging on every word
like it was God's own true
revelation she was hearing

and I'm thinking,
Christ,
I'm really on a roll tonight

submerging  myself
in the techniques of instruction,
overwhelming myself
with my own higher-being brilliance

          2004



familiar conversations

shepherds  graze their sheep in the hot afternoon sun,
while in the village center
men visit an open-air barbershop...

they rest between mud wall,
in the generous shade of a large banyan tree
as their hair and beards are trimmed.

the indistinct murmur of their low voices
are a whispers in the sun-backed silence
of the dusty street.

the familiar conversations of men and their barbers
drifts through the village
on a weak desert breeze.

          1968 (Published by Hawkwind - 2003)



finding religion at 3 am

hanging my head over a dirty toilet
I wouldn't even  piss in
on a better day,
gagging,
the smell of my own breath
and the taste in my mouth
setting off
another round of dry heaves

god
please don't make me sober
now

          2000 (Published by Avant Garde Times - 2001)



first frost

first frost
and leaves fall
soft and slow
like red and yellow
snowflakes
drifting in the sun

          2003



girl on a cellphone

puffy in her face

droopy
like a marshmallow
to close
to the fire

leans against a car

kicks the tires

wipes a tear
from her cheek

kicks the tire

leans against the car

rests her head
on the window glass

wipes a tear
from her cheek

hangs up

sits
on the curb
and
weeps

          2001 (Published by Hawkwind - 2002)








Dulce Maria Loynaz, was a Cuban poet, born in 1902 and died in 1992. She was the daughter of a hero in the Cuban Liberation Army. She was a lawyer who practiced rarely and whose family position allowed her to travel the world and meet with some of the greatest Spanish language poets of her time. She quit writing and publishing and withdrew from society in a self-imposed internal exile when the Communist triumphed in 1959. It  wasn't until 25 years  later when she was in her 80s that her work was rediscovered and welcomed widely by her countrymen.

Her poem was translated by Ilan Stavans.











I dreamed of classifying...

I dreamed of classifying
Good and Evil, as the wise men
classify butterflies:
I dreamed of pinning down Good and Evil
in the dark velvet
of a glass  box...
Under the white
butterfly, a sign would read "GOOD."
Under the black
butterfly, a sign would  read:  "EVIL."
But the white butterfly
didn't represent good, nor did the black butterfliy
represent evil...And  between my two butterflies,
green, golden, infinite, were flying
all the butterflies on  earth!...












Can we live today without our cell phones. If  I  have the determination, circumstance may have given me an opportunity to find out.






















Next  from the anthology, two short poems by Humberto Ak'abal . Born in 1952, Ak'abal is a  K'icke' Maya poet from Guatemala. His work has been published in French, English, Estonian, German. Arabic and Italian translations in addition to his original Spanish and K'iche'.

His poems were translated by Ilan Stavans.










The Dance

All  of us dance
on a cent's edge.

The poor - because they are poor -
lose their step,
and fall

and everyone else
falls on top.



I Took Your Name Out or My Mind

I took  your  name out of my mind
and lost it on the mountain.

It was picked up by the air
and found its path
through the ravine.

I began to forget

Suddenly
it crashed against the cliffs
and bounced back:

rain made it sing
and your name  reached me while crying.













Here are some more of my short to shorta-shorts.













in the soup

what's that fly doing in my soup
                                  she said

the back stroke
               i said

and there you have it,
                           the
                           nub
of our relationship

she found flies
and i laughed them off

                          until
  
                     one

               day

she invited a

s
   p
      i
        d
            e
               r

to sit down

b
    e
       s
          i
            d
                e
                    r

and i was in the soup

     2000 (Published by Mitochondria - 2004)



I saw her smile

I saw her smile
in the primate house
at the Kabul Zoo.

The monkeys swung and played
behind their cool bars
in the high Afghan  ar
and made us all laugh.
In her delight
she dropped her veil

    and
    for one
    heart-stopping
    so-quick
    second

we stood face to face.

    Then,
with flashing ebony eyes
and a shy, bewitching smile,
she brought the silken curtain
of her beguiling modesty
again between us
and walked away,
content in her conquest.

     1999 (Published by Alchemy - 1999)




 Kabul Reflection

It's mid-afternoon
on a cold and dreary day
in a city lost in the last  millennium.

Rows of mud houses hang over the rickety city
from the surrounding brown slopes
like a thousand bleary eyes
watching
from the mountain's unforgiving core.

In the faded club room
atop the Spirazan Hotel
I  drink cheap Russian vodka
and watch the mountain
watching me
never
blinking.

Premonitions of bloody despair
and mountain revenge
follow me to fretful sleep.

     1968












 Next from the Latin American poetry anthology is Mexican poet Coral Bracho. Born in Mexico City in 1951, Bracho, poet, translator and Doctor of Literature, has published six poetry collections and is winner of the Aguacalientes National Poetry Prize in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000.

Her poem was translated by Forrest Gander.











They Began to Call You

They began to call you, the rocks, breathing
their innumerable visages, their gesticulant
throbbing,
from the cliff  face. You could see
the entrance of the cave and you knew. Totems
fusing together. One
respiration over another. It's for you. And  what could it
have been?

And what would they have won from you and for what?
But you didn't enter, only
stood there taking it in.











After a cooler, longer and  wetter spring, hot dry summer has arrived but until mid-morning it's cool and pleasant with a fresh breeze if you can find a shady place.






















Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario was born in 1867. He  initiated the Spanish American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century. He died in 1916 at the age of 49.

His poem was translated by Greg Simon and Steven F.White.












Love Your Rhythm...

Love your rhythm and rhythmize your deeds.
Obey its laws, as in your poetry.
You're a cosmos in a cosmos set free.
Be the fountain of  songs that your soul needs.

The celestial openness you surely are
will  make worlds sprout in you that are diverse,
and if your meters start to sound dispersed,
use Pythagoras to unite your  stars.

Hear divine rhetoric in each feather
of every bird that takes to air, and learn
nighttime geometric heat  and weather.

Kill  all indifference that is taciturn
and string pearl  on crystal together
in the place where truth tips over its urn.












Time for more short stuff.














mid-night dreams

softly walking
barefoot through the dark,
through fields of fantasy,
fields of rosewood and clover,
Jeremiah brush close to the ground
with silver bells moving slowly
in the velvet breeze of mid-night

softly walking
barefoot through the dark,
scent of rosewood and clover
and a whispering  sound of bells,
little silver bells, softly coming
barefoot through the dark
to me...to me...to meeee...

     2002











Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges was a short story writer, essayist, poet and translator was a key figure in Spanish language literature. Founder and principle practitioner of postmodernist literature, Borges died in 1986.

His poem was translated by Alistair Reid.









The Cyclical Night

     To Sylvina Bullrich

They knew it, the fervent pupils of Pythagoras:
That stars and men revolve in a cycle,
that fateful atoms will bring back the  vital
Gold Aphrodite, Thebans, and agoras.

In future epochs the centaur will oppress
With solid uncleft hoof the beast of the Lapith;
When Rome was dust the Minotaur will moan
Once more in the endless dark of its rank palace.

Every sleepless night will come back in minute
Detail. this writing hand will be born from the same
Womb, and  bitter  armies contrive their doom.
(Edinburgh's David Hume made this  very point.)

I do not know if we will recur in a second
Cycle,  like numbers in a periodic fraction;
But I know that  a vague Pythagorean rotation
Night after night sets me down in the world

On the outskirts of this city. A remote street
That might be either north or west or south,
But always with a blue-washed wall, the shade
Of a fig tree, and a sidewalk of  broken concrete.

This,here, is Buenos Aires. Time, which brings
Either love or money to men, hands on to me
Only this withered rose, this empty tracery
Of streets with names recurring from the past

In my blood: Laprida,Cabrera,Soler,Suarez...
Names in which secret bugle calls are sounding,
Invoking republics, cavalry, and mornings,
Joyful victories, men dying in action.

Squares weighed down by a night in non one's care
Are the vast patios of an empty palace,
And  the single-minded streets crating space
Are corridors for sleep  and nameless fear.

It returns, the hollow dark of Anaxagoras;
In my human flesh, or plan,  of an endless poem beginning:
"They knew it, the fervent pupils of Pythagoras..."












 A morning poem from my morning nest.



















I suppose it may be possible to do a collection of  the greatest twentieth century Latin American poets and not  include Pablo Neruda. But why would anyone want to do that even if they could.

Born in 1904, the Chilean poet, politician and diplomat was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He died two years later in 1973.

His poem was translated by Alastair Reid.







Your Laughter

Deprive  me of bread. of you want,
deprive me of air, but
don't deprive me of your laughter.

Don't  deprive me of the rose,
the stick you stirred the grains with,
the water splashing
swiftly in your joy,
the sudden silver wave
born in you.

My struggle is painful. As I return
with my eyes sometimes tired
from watching
the unchanging earth,
your laughter enters
and raises to heaven
in search of me
to open all the doors of life.

My loved one, in the darkest hour,
unsheathe your laughter,
and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the cobblestones,
laugh, for your laughter
will be for my hands
like an unsullied sword.

Near the sea in autumn,
your  laughter must rise
in its cascade of foam,
and in spring, my love,
I  want your laughter
to be like the flower I anticipated,
the blue flower, the rose
of my resonant homeland.

Laugh at the night,
at the last day, at  the moon,
laugh at  the  twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
young man who loves you.
Yet when I open my eyes
and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never stop your laughter
for I would die.













Here are some more short stuff.














hymnal

from somewhere in the very deep
a great blue sang today,
a song of salty tides,
of bright mornings
fresh with ocean air,
a song of love among the giantss

from somewhere in the other deep,

an every-growing choir responds,
sings of star-blinks and novas flashing,
of creation
and cyclic obliteration,
songs of spinning  little worlds
that come and go and leave behind
the poetry of their time in passing,
each another song,
sung and recorded for time never-ending
in a book of all the life that ever was to sing

    2004



sonny blue

sonny blue rides life
like a fast horse
barely-broke and buckin'

holding tight
jingly mexican spurs
digging into the pasty white flank
of convention and caution

pushing
every day
like he was  racing the devil
to the wide, swinging doors of hell

giddy-up
he yells into the hard-rushing wind
giddy-up goddammit,
giddy-up

    2002 (Published by Tryst - 2002)



       t                 f         i
                    r          l       e


          little wings so soft
                  so soft

          like a mother's kiss
                                    brush
          against the thick
                  summer
                     air

yellow-black-yellow-black-yellow-black

           a cloud of
                
                            w          s
s              f       o       e
          n        l                r
    u

            in flight

     2003



while a bald man burns

three gulls circle
     while
a bald man burns
in the fierce island sun
     while
I trace gargoyles
in the sand
with my toe
     while
you pretend to study
the book in your hand
     while
three gulls circle
in the fierce island sun

     2000 (Published by Avant Garde Times - 2001)



walking Reba at midnight

moon so bright
    sky
    charcoal gray
candy puff clouds
    like lace
    in the trees

     2004



the smell of summer ended

the first
cold front of fall
and all the stores are packed
with bundled shoppers smelling of
moth balls

    2004



the cruelty of cats at play

her black smile
cut like a dagger through the dark,
     unseen
     slicing cleanly to the heart

"I have something to tell you,"
     she whispered

    2000 (Published by Muse Apprentice - 2004)








Last this week from my anthology of Latin American poets, this is Dominican poet and  writer, Pedro Mir. Highly respected by his countrymen, he was named  Poet  Laureate of Dominican Republic in 1984. He died in 2000.

His poem was translated by Robert Marquez.










Amen to  Butterflies

The author
under the title

Amen to Butterflies

TO THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR'S  WIFE

because, during the occupation of Veracruz
by her country's troops,
she said:

"This is the dance of death
and I believe we play the violin!"

and for the warning that words  contain,
for all they have of heartbreak and perhaps eve of the maternal,

dedicates
this poem of
fifty years  later
when the trigger on the violin is gayer  still,
much more tumultuous the frenzy of the dance.

Butterfly:
caricature of an airplane.
Pulse of the abyss,
scholar  among blossoms.
Before those hands
smashed you on the wall
...the children's eyes...
   Pedro Ma.Cruz,  raices iluminadas








I've been indulging myself with all this short poems (well, it is my ball after all), now I indulge myself with two longer poems.

I wrote the first poem inspired by a man, a plumber, who met with my dad just about every afternoon after work for a single beer before going home. I was there with them for a lot of those afternoons, from the time i was ten or eleven until I left home.

The plumber was a short, scrawny, bald-headed man who smoked his cigarettes down to a nearly burning his lips nub. He owned his own business and was about as independent-minded as anyone could ever be.

After the first poem I was thinking what a great character Luny was, good for a series, so I wrote the second piece. After the second piece I realized I had written a very short series since, with the two I had written both the first and last chapter in the Luny story couldn't gin up any interest in writing the in between parts.

So that's where it ended.






Introducing Luny

Luny says,

     Hit's a big sombitch,
     ain't hit,

and I nod,
it really is very, very large

     Seen one like hit once in Tupelo.

He scratches and spits and scratches again.

     Hit was almost as big as this,
     but not quite.

He takes off his hat and wipes sweat from his head.

     Black too,
     just like this'un

We circle it in opposite directions,
me at a distance, intimidated
as any normal person would be.

But not Luny.

Luny doesn't give a damn,
he just wants to look.
He walks right up to it, sticks
his face right up to it,
pokes at it with his finger.

     Lookeehere, you ever seen such a thing?

And I look at Luny, climbing
over all the wonders of the world, sticking
his fingers into every crack  in the universal order
of things as they should and always will  be, saying

     Well, wouldja look at that!

Then moving on to the next curiosity to grab
a hold of his always hungry hillbilly mind.

And I think, nope, I never did see such a thing.



Millie, Billie,  Lolly, Lou and Lester

Luny met Molly on Sunday evening
in Tuscaloosa at a potluck supper
at the First Corinthian Baptist Church.

I was there talking to Luny
when Molly walked in, a slender little gal
in a flowery dress carrying a big bowl
of country cornbread dressing.

     Didja see that girl,
     Luny asked,
     the pretty one in the flowerdy dress?

I said I did.

     Do you know'er?

I said I did.

     Can I meet'er?

I'll introduce you, I said,
I think  she'll like you.

So I did, and I could tell
right away, she did.

     Pleased to meetcha, Mr. Luny,
     she said.

     Just call me Luny,
     he said,
     most everybody does.

     And you can call me Molly,
     she said.

He did and pretty soon they wandered off,
heads together, talking and laughing,
leaving me to spend the rest of the evening
with Brother Borchuck, talking about
the can bottom benches out front and the need
to get them re-strung before one of
the heavier brothers or sisters of the church
busted through them and sued us all,
including the Lord.

I didn't see Luny again until I was leaving.
He was in his pickup, smoking one of his
roll-your-own Bugler cigarettes,
spitting stray tobacco from his
lower lip like you have to do when
you roll them as loose as he does.

     That Molly sure is pretty,
     he said,
     blowing tobacco from his lip.

I agreed and said
I think she likes you.

     I know she does,
     he said.

Luny took another drag from his cigarette
and blew it out and pulled on his left ear.

     Says she likes kids,
     says she'd like to have a bunch.

A bunch of kids, I said,
that's a lot of responsibility.

     Yeah, I don't think I'd want more than five,












Last for the week, frustration at the unremitting stupidity on all sides.























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