My Vocabulary Did This to Me Page 11
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