My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

Poor Narcissus

  My sorrow

  Self of my sorrow.

  He Died at Sunrise

  A Translation for Allen Joyce

  Night of four moons

  And a single tree,

  With a single shadow

  And a single bird.

  I look into my body for

  The tracks of your lips.

  A stream kisses into the wind

  Without touch.

  I carry the No you gave me

  Clenched in my palm

  Like something made of wax

  An almost-white lemon.

  Night of four moons

  And a single tree

  At the point of a needle

  Is my love, spinning.

  Ballad of the Terrible Presence

  A Translation for Joe LeSueur

  I want the river lost from its bed

  I want the wind lost from its valleys

  I want the night to be there without eyes

  And my heart without the golden flower

  So that the oxen talk with big leaves

  And the earthworm is dead of shadow

  So that the teeth of the skull glisten

  And the yellows give a complete color to silk.

  I can look at the agony of wounded night

  Struggling, twisted up against noontime

  I can stand all the sunsets of green poison

  And the wornout rainbows that time suffers

  But don’t make your clean body too visible

  Like a black cactus opened out among rushes

  Let me go in an anguish of star clusters

  Lose me. But don’t show me that cool flesh.

  Ballad of Sleeping Somewhere Else

  A Translation for Ebbe Borregaard

  The pine needles fall

  Like an ax in the forest.

  Can you hear them crumble

  There where we are sleeping?

  The windows are close to the wall

  Here in the darkness they remain open.

  (When I saw you in the morning

  My arms were full of paper.)

  Five hundred miles away

  The moon is a hatchet of silver.

  (When I saw you in the morning

  My eyes were full of paper.)

  Here the walls are firm

  They do not crumble and remain certain.

  (When I saw you in the morning

  My heart was full of paper.)

  Five hundred miles away

  The stars are glass that is breaking.

  The windows sag on the wall

  I feel cold glass in the blankets.

  Child, you are too tall for this bed.

  The pine needles fall

  Like an ax in the forest.

  Can you hear them crumble

  There where we are sleeping?

  Dear Lorca,

  When you had finished a poem what did it want you to do with it? Was it happy enough merely to exist or did it demand imperiously that you share it with somebody like the beauty of a beautiful person forces him to search the world for someone that can declare that beauty? And where did your poems find people?

  Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody and anybody physically capable can receive them. They may be beautiful (we have both written some that were) but they are meretricious. From the moment of their conception they inform us in a dulcet voice that, thank you, they can take care of themselves. I swear that if one of them were hidden beneath my carpet, it would shout out and seduce somebody. The quiet poems are what I worry about—the ones that must be seduced. They could travel about with me for years and no one would notice them. And yet, properly wed, they are more beautiful than their whorish cousins.

  But I am speaking of the first night, when I leave my apartment almost breathless, searching for someone to show the poem to. Often now there is no one. My fellow poets (those I showed poetry to ten years ago) are as little interested in my poetry as I am in theirs. We both compare the poems shown (unfavorably, of course) with the poems we were writing ten years ago when we could learn from each other. We are polite but it is as if we were trading snapshots of our children—old acquaintances who disapprove of each other’s wives. Or were you more generous, García Lorca?

  There are the young, of course. I have been reduced to them (or my poems have) lately. The advantage in them is that they haven’t yet decided what kind of poetry they are going to write tomorrow and are always looking for some device of yours to use. Yours, that’s the trouble. Yours and not the poem’s. They read the poem once to catch the marks of your style and then again, if they are at all pretty, to see if there is any reference to them in the poem. That’s all. I know. I used to do it myself.

  When you are in love there is no real problem. The person you love is always interested because he knows that the poems are always about him. If only because each poem will someday be said to belong to the Miss X or Mr. Y period of the poet’s life. I may not be a better poet when I am in love, but I am a far less frustrated one. My poems have an audience.

  Finally there are friends. There have only been two of them in my life who could read my poems and one of that two really prefers to put them in print so he can see them better. The other is far away.

  All this is to explain why I dedicate each of our poems to someone.

  Love,

  Jack

  Narcissus

  A Translation for Richard Rummonds

  Child,

  How you keep falling into rivers.

  At the bottom there’s a rose

  And in the rose there’s another river.

  Look at that bird. Look,

  That yellow bird.

  My eyes have fallen down

  Into the water.

  My god,

  How they’re slipping! Youngster!

  —And I’m in the rose myself.

  When I was lost in water I

  Understood but won’t tell you.

  Ballad of the Dead Boy

  A Translation for Graham Mackintosh

  Every afternoon in Granada

  Every afternoon a boy dies

  Every afternoon the river sits itself down

  To talk things over with its neighbors.

  All the dead wear wings of moss.

  The cloudy wind and the bright wind

  Are two pheasants who fly around towers

  And the day is a boy with a wound in him.

  There wasn’t a touch of lark in the sky

  When I met you at the wine cavern

  Or a fragment of cloud near the earth

  When you drowned on the river.

  A giant of water went slopping over the mountains

  And the canyon spun around the dogs and lilies.

  Your body, with the violet shadow of my hands,

  Was dead there on the banks, an archangel, cold.

  Song for September

  A Translation for Don Allen

  In the distant night the children are singing:

  A little river

  And a colored fountain

  THE CHILDREN: When will our hearts come back from your holiday?

  I: When my words no longer need me.

  THE CHILDREN: You have left us here to sing the death of your summer

  A little river

  And a colored fountain

  What September flowers do you hold in your hand?

  I: A bloody rose and a white lily.

  THE CHILDREN: Dip them in the water of an old song

  A little river

  And a colored fountain

  What are you tasting in your thirsty mouth?

  I: The flavor of the bones of my big skull.

  THE CHILDREN: Drink the kind water of an old song

  A little river

  And a colored fountain

  Why have you gone so very far from the death of your summer?

  I: I am looking for a magical clockworkman. />
  THE CHILDREN: And how will you find the highway of poets?

  I: The fountain and a river and an old song.

  THE CHILDREN: You are going very far.

  I: I am going very far, farther than my poems, farther than the mountains, farther than the birds. I am going to ask Christ to give me back my childhood, ripe with sunburn and feathers and a wooden sword.

  THE CHILDREN: You have left us here to sing the death of your summer.

  And you will never return.

  A little river

  And a colored fountain

  And you will never return.

  Buster Keaton Rides Again: A Sequel

  A Translation for The Big Cat Up There

  BUSTER KEATON (entering a long dark corridor): This must be Room 73.

  PIGEON: Sir, I am a pigeon.

  BUSTER KEATON (taking a dictionary out of his back pocket): I don’t understand what anybody is talking about.

  (No one rides by on a bicycle. The corridor is quite silent.)

  PIGEON: I have to go to the bathroom.

  BUSTER KEATON: In a minute.

  (Two chambermaids come by carrying towels. They give one to the pigeon and one to Buster Keaton.)

  IST CHAMBERMAID: Why do you suppose human beings have lips?

  2ND CHAMBERMAID: Nothing like that entered my head.

  BUSTER KEATON: No. There were supposed to be three chambermaids.

  (He takes out a chessboard and begins playing upon it.)

  PIGEON: I could love you if I were a dove.

  BUSTER KEATON (biting the chessboard): When I was a child I was put in jail for not giving information to the police.

  3 CHAMBERMAIDS: Yes.

  BUSTER KEATON: I am not a Catholic.

  PIGEON: Don’t you believe that God died?

  BUSTER KEATON (crying): No.

  (4 Spanish dancers come in. They are mostly male.)

  IST SPANISH DANCER: I have a little magazine up my ass.

  4 CHAMBERMAIDS: Oh!

  (Buster Keaton forgets his politeness and becomes a Catholic. He takes mass, says Holy Mary Mother of God, and distributes rosaries to all the policemen in the room. He hangs by his heels from a crucifix.)

  VIRGIN MARY (coming in abruptly): Buster Keaton you have bumped The Car.

  BUSTER KEATON: No.

  (Alcohol comes in wearing the disguise of a cockroach. It is blue. It crawls silently up Buster Keaton’s leg.)

  BUSTER KEATON: No.

  (Alcohol and the Virgin Mary perform a dance. They both pretend to have been lovers.)

  BUSTER KEATON: I will never see either of you in Rockland. I am not going to Rockland.

  (He takes the chessboard and invents a new alphabet.)

  VIRGIN MARY: Holy Mary Mother of God Pray For Us Sinners Now At The Hour Of Our Death.

  ALCOHOL: Dada is as dada does.

  VIRGIN MARY: Did. (She falls into a blue robe.)

  BUSTER KEATON: I wonder if there is anything but love in the universe.

  (Suddenly, at the last possible time before the curtain falls, somebody kisses the Virgin Mary, and Buster Keaton, and everybody.)

  ALCOHOL: If I weren’t tone-deaf I would sing.

  BUSTER KEATON (sadly): I announce a new world.

  (Three literary critics disguised as chambermaids bring down the curtain. Buster Keaton, bleeding, breaks through the curtain. He stands in the middle of the stage holding a fresh pomegranate in his arms.)

  BUSTER KEATON (even more sadly): I announce the death of Orpheus.

  (Everyone comes in. Policemen, waitresses, and Irene Tavener. They perform a complicated symbolic dance. Alcohol nibbles at the legs of every dancer.)

  BUSTER KEATON (bleeding profusely): I love you. I love you. (As a last effort he throws the bleeding pomegranate from his heart.) No kidding, I love you.

  VIRGIN MARY (taking him into her arms): You have bumped the car.

  (The gaudy blue curtain, silent and alive like the mouth of a seagull, covers everything.)

  The Ballad of Escape

  A Translation for Nat Harden

  I have become lost many times along the ocean

  With my ears filled with newly cut flowers

  With my tongue full of loving and agony

  I have become lost many times along the ocean

  Like I lose myself in the hearts of some boys.

  There is no night in which, giving a kiss,

  One does not feel the smiles of the faceless people

  And there is no one in touching something recently born

  Who can quite forget the motionless skulls of horses.

  Because the roses always search in the forehead

  For a hard landscape of bone

  And the hands of a man have no other purpose

  Than to be like the roots that grow beneath wheat-fields.

  Like I lose myself in the hearts of some boys

  I have become lost many times along the ocean

  Along the vastness of water I wander searching

  An end to the lives that have tried to complete me.

  Venus

  A Translation for Ann Simon

  The dead girl

  In the winding shell of the bed

  Naked of the little wind and flowers

  Surges on into perennial light.

  The world stayed behind

  Lily of cotton and shadow.

  It peeked timidly out of the mirror

  Looking on at that infinite passage.

  The dead girl

  Was eaten from inside by love.

  In the unyieldingness of seafoam

  She lost her hair.

  Friday, the 13th

  A Translation for Will Holther

  At the base of the throat is a little machine

  Which makes us able to say anything.

  Below it are carpets

  Red, blue, and green-colored.

  I say the flesh is not grass.

  It is an empty house

  In which there is nothing

  But a little machine

  And big, dark carpets.

  Song of Two Windows

  A Translation for James Broughton

  Wind, window, moon

  (I open the window to the sky)

  Wind, window, moon

  (I open the window to the earth)

  Then

  From the sky

  The voices of two girls.

  In the middle of my mirror

  A girl is drowning

  The voice of a single girl.

  She holds cold fire like a glass

  Each thing she watches

  Has become double.

  Cold fire is

  Cold fire is.

  In the middle of my mirror

  A girl is drowning

  The voice of a single girl.

  A branch of night

  Enters through my window

  A great dark branch

  With bracelets of water

  Behind a blue mirror

  Someone is drowning

  The wounded instants

  Along the clock—pass.

  I stick my head out of the window and I see a chopper of wind ready to cut it off. Upon that invisible guillotine I have mounted the heads without eyes of all my desires, and the odor of lemon fills all of the instant while the wind changes to a flower of gas.

  At the pool there has died

  A girl of water

  She has pushed the earth aside

  Like a ripe apple

  Down from her head to her thighs

  A fish crosses her, calling softly

  The wind whispers, “Darling”

  But is unable to awaken her

  The pool holds loosely

  Its rider of something

  And in the air its gray nipples

  Vibrate with frogs.

  God, we hail you. We will make payment

  To Our Lady of Water

  For the girl in the pool

&n
bsp; Dead below the ripples.

  I will soon put at her side

  Two small gourds

  Because they can keep afloat,

  Yes, even in water.

  Dear Lorca,

  Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet’s life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) he loses his balance for a moment, slips into being who he is, uses his poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead man.

  I, for example, could not finish the last letter I was writing you about sounds. You were like a friend in a distant city to whom I was suddenly unable to write, not because the fabric of my life had changed, but because I was suddenly, temporarily, not in the fabric of my life. I could not tell you about it because both it and I were momentary.

  Even the objects change. The seagulls, the greenness of the ocean, the fish—they become things to be traded for a smile or the sound of conversation—counters rather than objects. Nothing matters except the big lie of the personal—the lie in which these objects do not believe.

  That instant, I said. It may last for a minute, a night, or a month, but, this I promise you, García Lorca, the loneliness returns. The poet encysts the intruder. The objects come back to their own places, silent and unsmiling. I again begin to write you a letter on the sound of a poem. And this immediate thing, this personal adventure, will not have been transferred into the poem like the waves and the birds were, will, at best, show in the lovely pattern of cracks in some poem where autobiography shattered but did not quite destroy the surface. And the encysted emotion will itself become an object, to be transferred at last into poetry like the waves and the birds.

  And I will again become your special comrade.

  Love,

  Jack

  The Moon and Lady Death

  A Translation for Helen Adam

  The moon has marble teeth

  How old and sad she looks!

  There is a dry river

  There is a hill without grass