My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  A diamond

  Is there

  At the heart of the moon or the branches or my nakedness

  And there is nothing in the universe like diamond

  Nothing in the whole mind.

  The poem is a seagull resting on a pier at the end of the ocean.

  A dog howls at the moon

  A dog howls at the branches

  A dog howls at the nakedness

  A dog howling with pure mind.

  I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull’s belly.

  The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond

  Two words called seagull are peacefully floating out where the waves are.

  The dog is dead there with the moon, with the branches, with my nakedness

  And there is nothing in the universe like diamond

  Nothing in the whole mind.

  The Little Halfwit

  A Translation for Robin Blaser

  I said, “Afternoon”

  But it wasn’t there.

  The afternoon was another thing

  Which had gone someplace.

  (And the light shrugged its shoulders

  Like a little girl.)

  “Afternoon” But this is useless,

  This is untrue, this has to it

  Half a moon of lead. The other

  Will never get here.

  (And the light that everyone sees

  Played at being a statue.)

  The other one was tiny

  And ate pomegranates.

  This one is big and green and I’m not able

  To grab her in my arms or dress her.

  Is she ever coming? What was she?

  (And the light as it went along, as a joke

  Separated the little halfwit from his own shadow.)

  Verlaine

  A Translation for Pat Wilson

  A song

  Which I shall never sing

  Has fallen asleep on my lips.

  A song

  Which I shall never sing—

  Above the honeysuckle

  There’s a firefly

  And the moon stings

  With a ray into the water—

  At that time I’ll imagine

  The song

  Which I shall never sing.

  A song full of lips

  And far-off washes

  A song full of lost

  Hours in the shadow

  A song of a star that’s alive

  Above enduring day.

  Dear Lorca,

  When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

  It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem—and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummy-sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.

  I yell “Shit” down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as “Alas.” But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word “Shit” will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear.

  Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection—as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the street, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, “See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!” What does one do with all this crap?

  Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

  I repeat—the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

  Love,

  Jack

  The Ballad of the Dead Woodcutter

  A Translation for Louis Marbury

  Because the figtree was sapless

  It has cracked at the root.

  Oh, you have fallen down on your head

  You have fallen on your head.

  Because the oaktree was rootless

  It has cracked at the branch.

  Oh, you have fallen down on your head

  You have fallen on your head.

  Because I walked through the branches

  I have scratched out my heart.

  Oh, you have fallen down on your head

  You have fallen on your head.

  The Ballad of Weeping

  A Translation for Bob Connor

  I have closed my window

  Because I do not want to hear the weeping

  But behind the gray walls

  Nothing can be heard but weeping.

  A few dogs might bark

  A few angels might sing

  There might be room for a thousand violins in the palm of my hand.

  But the weeping is a big dog

  The weeping is a big angel

  The weeping is a big violin

  The tears put a muzzle on the air

  And nothing can be heard but weeping.

  Alba

  A Translation for Russ Fitzgerald

  If your hand had been meaningless

  Not a single blade of grass

  Would spring from the earth’s surface.

  Easy to write, to kiss—

  No, I said, read your paper.

  Be there

  Like the earth

  When shadow covers the wet grass.

  Song of the Poor

  A Translation

  Ay qué trabajo me cuesta

  quererte como te quiero!

  Because I love you the table

  And the heart and the lamplight

  Feel sorry for me.

  Who will buy from me

  That small belt I have

  And that sadness of white thread

  To weave handkerchiefs?

  Because I love you the ceiling

  And the heart and the air

  Feel sorry for me.

  Ay qué trabajo me cuesta

  quererte como te quiero!

  Ode for Walt Whitman

  A Translation for Steve Jonas

  Along East River and the Bronx

  The kids were singing, showing off their bodies

  At the wheel, at oil, the rawhide, and the hammer.

  Ninety thousand miners were drawing silver out of boulders

  While children made perspective drawings of stairways.

  But no one went to sleep

  No one wanted to be a river

  No one loved the big leaves, no one

  The blue tongue of the coastline.

  Along East River into Queens

  The kids were wrestling with industry.

  The Jews sold circumcision’s rose

  To the faun of the river.

  The sky flowed through the bridges and rooftops—

  Herds of buffalo the wind was pushing.

  But none of them would stay.

  No one wanted to be cloud. No one

  Looked for the ferns

  Or the yellow wheel of the drum.

  But if the moon comes out

  The pulleys will slide around to disturb the sky

  A limit of needles will fence in your memory

  And there will be coffins to carry out your un
employed.

  New York of mud,

  New York of wire fences and death,

  What angel do you carry hidden in your cheek?

  What perfect voice will tell you the truth about wheat

  Or the terrible sleep of your wet-dreamed anemones?

  Not for one moment, beautiful old Walt Whitman,

  Have I stopped seeing your beard full of butterflies

  Or your shoulders of corduroy worn thin by the moon

  Or your muscles of a virgin Apollo

  Or your voice like a column of ashes

  Ancient and beautiful as the fog.

  You gave a cry like a bird

  With his prick pierced through by a needle

  Enemy of satyrs

  Enemy of the grape

  And lover of bodies under rough cloth.

  Not for one moment, tight-cocked beauty,

  Who in mountains of coal, advertisements, and railroads

  Had dreamed of being a river and of sleeping like one

  With a particular comrade, one who could put in your bosom

  The young pain of an ignorant leopard.

  Not for one moment, blood-Adam, male,

  Man alone in the sea, beautiful

  Old Walt Whitman.

  Because on the rooftops

  Bunched together in bars

  Pouring out in clusters from toilets

  Trembling between the legs of taxi-drivers

  Or spinning upon platforms of whiskey

  The cocksuckers, Walt Whitman, were counting on you.

  That one also, also. And they throw themselves down on

  Your burning virgin beard,

  Blonds of the North, negroes from the seashore,

  Crowds of shouts and gestures

  Like cats or snakes

  The cocksuckers, Walt Whitman, the cocksuckers,

  Muddy with tears, meat for the whip,

  Tooth or boot of the cowboys.

  That one also, also. Painted fingers

  Sprout out along the beach of your dreams

  And you give a friend an apple

  Which tastes faintly of gas-fumes

  And the sun sings a song for the bellybuttons

  Of the little boys who play games below bridges.

  But you weren’t looking for the scratched eyes

  Or the blackswamp-country where children are sinking

  Or the frozen spit

  Or the wounded curves like a toad’s paunch

  Which cocksuckers wear in bars and night-clubs

  While the moon beats them along the corners of terror.

  You were looking for a naked man who would be like a river

  Bull and dream, a connection between the wheel and the seaweed,

  Be father for your agony, your death’s camellia

  And moan in the flames of your hidden equator.

  For it is just that a man not look for his pleasure

  In the forest of blood of the following morning.

  The sky has coastlines where life can be avoided

  And some bodies must not repeat themselves at sunrise.

  Agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream.

  That is the world, my friend, agony, agony.

  The dead decompose themselves under the clock of the cities.

  War enters weeping, with a million gray rats.

  The rich give to their girlfriends

  Tiny illuminated dyings

  And life is not noble, or good, or sacred.

  A man is able if he wishes to lead his desire

  Through vein of coral or the celestial naked.

  Tomorrow his loves will be rock and Time

  A breeze that comes sleeping through their clusters.

  That is why I do not cry out, old Walt Whitman,

  Against the little boy who writes

  A girl’s name on his pillow,

  Or the kid who puts on a wedding dress

  In the darkness of a closet

  Or the lonely men in bars

  Who drink with sickness the waters of prostitution

  Or the men with green eyelids

  Who love men and scald their lips in silence,

  But against the rest of you, cocksuckers of cities,

  Hard-up and dirty-brained,

  Mothers of mud, harpies, dreamless enemies

  Of the Love that distributes crowns of gladness.

  Against the rest of you always, who give the kids

  Drippings of sucked-off death with sour poison.

  Against the rest of you always

  Fairies of North America,

  Pajaros of Havana,

  Jotos of Mexico,

  Sarasas of Cadiz,

  Apios of Seville,

  Cancos of Madrid,

  Adelaidas of Portugal,

  Cocksuckers of all the world, assassins of doves,

  Slaves of women, lapdogs of their dressing tables,

  Opening their flys in parks with a fever of fans

  Or ambushed in the rigid landscapes of poison.

  Let there be no mercy. Death

  Trickles from all of your eyes, groups

  Itself like gray flowers on beaches of mud.

  Let there be no mercy. Watch out for them.

  Let the bewildered, the pure,

  The classical, the appointed, the praying

  Lock the gates of this Bacchanalia.

  And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the banks of the Hudson

  With your beard toward the pole and your palms open

  Soft clay or snow, your tongue is invoking

  Comrades to keep vigil over your gazelle without body.

  Sleep, there is nothing left here.

  A dance of walls shakes across the prairies

  And America drowns itself with machines and weeping.

  Let the hard air of midnight

  Sweep away all the flowers and letters from the arch in which you sleep

  And a little black boy announce to the white men of gold

  The arrival of the reign of the ear of wheat.

  Aquatic Park

  A Translation for Jack Spicer

  A green boat

  Fishing in blue water

  The gulls circle the pier

  Calling their hunger

  A wind rises from the west

  Like the passing of desire

  Two boys play on the beach

  Laughing

  Their gangling legs cast shadows

  On the wet sand

  Then,

  Sprawling in the boat

  A beautiful black fish.

  Forest

  A Translation for Joe Dunn

  You want me to tell you

  The secret of springtime—

  And I relate to that secret

  Like a high-branching firtree

  Whose thousand little fingers

  Point a thousand little roads.

  I will tell you never, my love,

  Because the river runs slowly

  But I shall put into my branching voice

  The ashy sky of your gaze.

  Turn me around, brown child

  Be careful of my needles.

  Turn me around and around, playing

  At the well pump of love.

  The secret of springtime. How

  I wish I could tell you!

  Dear Lorca,

  I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.

  We have both tried to be independent of images (you from the start and I only when I grew old enough to tire of trying to make things conn
ect), to make things visible rather than to make pictures of them (phantasia non imaginari). How easy it is in erotic musings or in the truer imagination of a dream to invent a beautiful boy. How difficult to take a boy in a blue bathing suit that I have watched as casually as a tree and to make him visible in a poem as a tree is visible, not as an image or a picture but as something alive—caught forever in the structure of words. Live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits. The poem is a collage of the real.

  But things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage. The piece of lemon you shellac to the canvas begins to develop a mold, the newspaper tells of incredibly ancient events in forgotten slang, the boy becomes a grandfather. Yes, but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its objects, in turn, visible—lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalents into being.

  Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time. That tree you saw in Spain is a tree I could never have seen in California, that lemon has a different smell and a different taste, BUT the answer is this—every place and every time has a real object to correspond with your real object—that lemon may become this lemon, or it may even become this piece of seaweed, or this particular color of gray in this ocean. One does not need to imagine that lemon; one needs to discover it.

  Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other.

  Love,

  Jack

  Narcissus

  A Translation for Basil King

  Poor Narcissus

  Your dim fragrance

  And the dim heart of the river

  I want to stay at your edge

  Flower of love

  Poor Narcissus

  Ripples and sleeping fish

  Cross your white eyes

  Songbirds and butterflies

  Japanese mine

  I so tall beside you

  Flower of love

  Poor Narcissus

  How wide-awake the frogs are

  They won’t stay out of the surface

  In which your madness and my madness

  Mirrors itself