Constantine P. Cavafy

The Windows

.

In these dark rooms where I live out empty days,

I wander round and round

trying to find the windows.

It will be a great relief when a window opens.

But the windows aren't there to be found -

or at least I can't find them. And perhaps

it's better if I don't find them.

Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny.

Who knows what new things it will expose?

Rainer Maria Rilke

As once the winged energy of delight

carried you over childhood's dark abysses,

now beyond your own life build the great

arch of unimagined bridges.

.

Wonders happen if we can succeed

in passing through the harshest danger;

but only in a bright and purely granted

achievement can we realize the wonder.

.

To work with Things in the indescribable

relationship is not too hard for us;

the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,

and being swept along is not enough.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

MEDITATIONS ON THE SOUTH VALLEY

PART XXXIII

.

Pancho, the barrio idiot.
Rumor is that una bruja from Bernalillo
le embrujo. Unshaven, chattering
and nodding to airy friends
that follow him,
he roams the barrio all day.
I see him at least twice a day—
walking on the ditch behind my house,
hours later walking across the bridge.
Harmless, la gente leave him alone
in his own fantasies,
to share his bread with invisible companions,
to speak back to voices
that brim over from his childhood memories.
I have seen him
on all fours in Raul’s field
with the sheep. Or last Christmas
in the tree meowing like a cat.
You always fill my heart Pancho
with delight.

A Souix Prayer, Chief Yellow Lark

Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds
Whose breath gives life to the world, hear me
I come to you as one of your many children
I am small and weakI need your strength and wisdom
May I walk in beauty
Make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made
And my ears sharp to your voice.
Make me wise so that I may know the things
you have taught your children.
The lessons you have written in every leaf and rock
Make me strong--------!
Not to be superior to my brothers,
but to fight my greatest enemy....myself
Make me ever ready to come to you with straight eyes,
So that when life fades as the fading sunset,
May my spirit come to you without shame

Maria Del Carmen Paiva

SADNESS
.

It is sufficient.

It's already fainted

--that accidental word

that usually sketches itself out in farewells,

and that you bring since who knows when;

or perhaps

it came close

one day

and started the bad habit of nurturing it.

.

Time wears out things,

and although you keep on under those separate stars

and the sun, with its overflowing wings of sulphur,

you keep on living in spite of all this

and what has already happened.

You deserve the name that life gives you

with its unforeseen and unknown impulse.

Homero Aridjis

SOMETIMES WE TOUCH A BODY

Sometimes we touch a body and we wake it

and it is a way through the night which opens

to our senses the pulsing of its arms like the sea's

.
and we love it like the sea

like a naked song

like the only Summer

.
We say it is light as one says now

we say it is yesterday and other places

.

we fill it with bodies and bodies

with gulls our own gulls
.

We go climbing it peak after peak

with ears and roofs and door latches
.

with hotels and ditches and memories

and landscapes and time and asteroids

.
We fill it to the brim with ourselves and with soul

with collars of islands and with soul

.
We feel ourselves living and everyday

we feel ourselves beautiful but shadow

Wu Cailun

Favor and disgrace are meaningless --

What's the use of contending?

Drifting clouds do not obstruct the shining moonlight.

Let the ox and the horse be called,

To both I can respond --

But how could I let a speck of dust

Into the city of the mind?

Miguel Hernandez

YOU THREW ME A LEMON

.

You threw me a lemon, so bitter,
with a hand warm and so pure,
that its shape was not spoiled,
and I tasted its bitterness regardless.

With that yellow blow, from a sweet lethargy,
my blood passed to an anxious fever,
feeling the bite of the tip
of a breast that was firm and full.

But on gazing at you and seeing the smile
that broke from you, at this acid act,
so different from my voracious malice,

my blood stood still, inside my shirt,
and became that porous and golden breast
a pointed and dazzling pain.

Richard Wilbur

The delectable names of harsh places:

Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.

In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,

We hear no ill of brittle parch and glare.

.

So late October's pasture-fringe,

With aster-blur and ferns of toasted gold,

Invites to barrens where the crop to come

Is stone prized upward by the deepening freeze.

.

Speechless and cold the stars arise

On the small garden where we have dominion.

Yet in three tongues we speak of Taurus' name

And of Aldebaran and the Hyades,

.

Recalling what at best we know,

That there is beauty bleak and far from ours,

Great reaches where the Lord's delighting mind,

Though not inhuman, ponders other things.

Sun Buer

Cut brambles long enough,
Sprout after sprout,
And the lotus will bloom
Of its own accord:
Already waiting in the clearing,
The single image of light.
The day you see this,
That day you will become it.

Marianne Bluger

NAMES OF YAHWEY

Hard rain on my seared root

you are - and lightning bolt

.

you're wind come wild

thrashing one black tree

against the light-cracked sky

.

you are what breaks

apocalypse - the day

and you thick night

.

you are the changeless

peaks and you deep valley

torrent carving stone

.

you're stone that holds

all raging in - you are

the raging

you the din

.

and you the Holy

silence when it ends.

Pablo Neruda

BIRD

It was passed from one bird to another,

the whole gift of the day.

The day went from flute to flute,

went dressed in vegetation,

in flights which opened a tunnel

through the wind would pass

to where birds were breaking open

the dense blue air

-and there, night came in.

.

When I returned from so many journeys,

I stayed suspended and green

between sun and geography -

I saw how wings worked,

how perfumes are transmitted

by feathery telegraph,

and from above I saw the path,

the springs and the roof tiles,

the fishermen at their trades,

the trousers of the foam;

I saw it all from my green sky.

I had no more alphabet

than the swallows in their courses,

the tiny, shining water

of the small bird on fire

which dances out of the pollen.

Octavio Paz

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

Pablo Neruda

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming

Flowers I ache from the perfumes of spring.

I have forgotten your face, I no longer

Remember your hands; how did your lips

Feel on mine?

.

Because of you, I love the white statues

Drowsing in the parks, the white statues that

Have neither voice nor sight.

.

I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;

I have forgotten your eyes.

.

Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to

My vague memory of you. I live with pain

That is like a wound; if you touch me, you will

Make to me an irreperable harm.

.

Your caresses enfold me, like climbing

Vines on melancholy walls.

.

I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to

Glimpse you in every window.

.

Because of you, the heady perfumes of

Summer pain me; because of you,

I again Seek out the signs that precipitate desires:

Shooting stars, falling objects.

Gabriela Mistral

THE STRANGER

_"She speaks with the accent of her wild seas

Of I know not what seaweeds, of I know not what sands;

She worships a god without bulk or weight,

Old as if she would die.

This garden of ours which she estranged from us

She sowed with cactus and thorn.

She exhales the breath of the desert.

And she loved with a piercing passion

She never tells us of, and which, if she told,

Would be the map of another star.

She will live among us for eighty years

But always seem newly come,

With that language of hers which moans and pants

And only creatures of the field understand.

And she is going to die in our midst

Some night of her worst affliction,

With only her fate for a pillow,

Of a death unspoken and strange."

Robert Hunter

Driving that train, high on cocaine

Casey Jones you'd better watch your speed

Trouble ahead, trouble behind

And you know that notion just crossed my mind
.

This old engine makes it on time

Leaves Central Station 'bout a quarter to nine

Hits River Junction at seventeen to

At a quarter to ten you know it's travelling again
.

Trouble ahead, the lady in red

Take my advice you'd be better off dead

Switchman's sleeping, train Hundred and Two

Is on the wrong track and headed for you

Trouble with you is the trouble with me

Got two good eyes but we still don't see

Come round the bend, you know it's the end

The fireman screams and the engine just gleams

Gerald Fisher

Father Sky is grayAs the new light appears

And the laughter of the birds is still

the clouds shed their tears

and the land drinks of this heavenly dew

puddles replace the dustirresistible temptations for little feet

Turning my face to the sky

and feeling the gentleness of the mist

washing away my caresfilling my heart with happiness

Lifting my spirits like the quenching of the crops

Raising my armsI turn to the four winds

and give thanks for this

gentle…Summer Rain.

Eunice Odio

FINAL ACCORD

.

On the border of joyous harvesters water trembles,

and offers for the order of the contented lip

a sweet course born of pregnant mornings,

and agrarian transparency, sweetly lit.

.

The crowned wheat of tightened density

retains the overflowing color on which they order

—neighbor to the flesh—to satiate itself in spring.

.

The cattle decrease tenderly in the dark

where the ground expands its shadowy current,

and the bee completes its snow journey,

and hides its manure among timid jaspers.

.

And you, Beloved,

who set the plow on a fixed course

to encircle the afternoon and hasten the rose,

.

Where is your chest abounding with roots,

where is the naked temple without rest or end?

.

Over the gentle pastures, innocent shepherds

prepare the grape which houses the wine,

and gather the climate in which its smell grows

and imparts handfuls of joy to the tongue.

.

Thus summer attends to its nascent beauty

and releases its birds onto the solitary wind.

.

Thus the mother-of-pearl scatters its stillness

and delight and its wild color renews and provides.

.

Oh offerings,

Oh earthly gifts,

Oh soft nourishment;

.

Only to exhaust the seed-time with your chest,

.

Only to flow into joy and to stay

.

Oh skin, Oh overflowing stammering ashes!

Eunice Odio

Epigraph

Your hand in which nightingales

unfold their palid nakedness,

their broad moss-crowned chest

is the hand that opens to the leaning wind

clear jasmine amid the dark temple.

.

Yes, the water beads down the forehead,

and plows the small placidness of iris

and clusters of violins between fingers.

.

III

.

Lend me your ear and listen to my song

that is like the seed of seasons.

.

That is like the house of summer

where a boy emerges from my hand,

and the soul pushes to the edge,

and the soul—like the skin—can’t be felt.

.

We will enter the summer suddenly like trees

vernally open by rustlings and dust,

.

Because all flows back toward the arrival,

the womb ascends to the capital of fruit

and the air forms an equation of swallows.

.

Sacramental buds of grass,

oh offerings surging from the entrails,

sum of traveled nourishment!

.

And there at the level of the chest and the plowed field

is the seed of silence and desert light.

Everything returns to its exact form.

Life reclaims its small ambition

of being, entirely, profound greenness,

hidden edifice and open light.

Eunice Odio

Preludes

.

I Listen to the song of your name in me

flesh for the necessary fruit.

.

When the solitude

beneath your name could be heard and tightened,

When I was like a buried boy

to whom they call by his former name,

and he responds, but there is no voice within himself;

.

And my hand was at the depth,

submerged,

it had a glimpse, the key, my own form,

.

And I felt you beyond my chest in our embrace

like a joyous and consummated crown.

.

You called me to your name,

and I came,

with clear identity of origin,

with the true habitual grace

with which cathedrals dream of their honor.

.

By day you are beside the night.

With you I am day,

and by virtue of the absence in which I evoke myself

I see how my form divides me,

how I breathe in your hair without risk,

inside my voice and not throughout it.

Eunice Odio

II

.

Someone brushes past my veins

and the furrow opens between flower and lip.

.

Night arrives

in a column of love and nightingales;

its blue helmet, lacustrine, wipes the dawn,

fog descends through its skin

and brushes of wounded feather and dawn flee.

.

And before being,

inaugural darkness

for the coming arrival of a planet,

fleeting crystal,

calm of submerged brilliance,

the night is made of air and a darkened stalk.

Eunice Odio

I

Introduction I

Oh gift,

oh gift of self, your hair,

white speech,blue design,

hyacinth future.

.

I could sing a song

so I am suspected of smoke,

in air, and of an animal

carved amid foam

in long, light, bursts of

a harp’s laughter.

.

I could bring memories to the heart

like fingernails falling off the soul.

.

But I am almost at the border of your body,

.

But your nakedness has come to the foot of the furrow

dressed in its suit of profundity;

The sea ponders your age

.

and blind dolphins in branches turn pale in the sky above,

the sky weighs more with less air

a waterless sea with only its waves.

.

And on the landscape’s edge you tremble

ah, deepsea fisherman of foam

whose hips grow amid coral beads,

.

Violin-stained twilight,

fleeting companion of my side.

Seamus Heaney

SONG
.

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes.

.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens

Anna Akhmatova

MUSE

.

When, in the night, I wait for her, impatient,
Life seems to me, as hanging by a thread.
What just means liberty, or youth, or approbation,
When compared with the gentle piper's tread?

And she came in, threw out the mantle's edges,
Declined to me with a sincere heed.
I say to her, "Did you dictate the Pages
Of Hell to Dante?" She answers, "Yes, I did."

Carsilaso de la Vega

SONG III

.

Surrounded by the gentle sound

of clear water in motion,

near the Danube, no island could exist

that might be a spot chosen where

anyone as I am now, could rest;

where eternally spring

appears in its verdure

strewn with flowers;

where nightingales

renew either pleasure or sadness

with their suave plaints,

and never, day or night, desist from them.

.

Here was I placed,

or, to speak more truly,

imprisoned, forced and alone in a foreign land;

they can well do this

to one who can suffer it

and to one, to himself, condemns himself.

Tao Chien

.
.LAMENT

The ways of heaven are mysterious,
the spirits pose a problem.
Since childhood, I struggled to do right—
forty-four years of struggle.
Things went bad when I was twenty.
At thirty, I lost my wife.
Fires burned my houses down
and weevils ate my grain.
Winds and rain ruined everything:
I couldn’t fill a mouth.
In summer, we went hungry;
in winter we all slept cold.
Evenings, we longed for the cock crow;
at dawn, we chased away the crows.
It’s my own poor karma, not heaven,
that leaves me troubled and bitter.
A name unearned, left for all the ages,
means no more to me than mist.

Robert Hunter

In the timbers of Fennario the wolves are running round

The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground
Don't murder me, I beg of you don't murder me

Please don't murder me
I sat down to supper, 'twas a bottle of red whiskey

I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me
When I awoke, the dire wolf, six hundred pounds of sin

Was grinning at my window, all I said was "Come on in"
The wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game

I cut my deck to the queen of spades but the cards were all the same
In the back-wash of Fennario, the black and bloody mire

The dire wolf collects his due while the boys sing round the fire

Ruben Dario

NOCTURNE

Silence of the night , a sad, nocturnal silence--

Why does my soul tremble so?

I hear the humming of my blood,and

a soft storm passes through my brain.

Insomnia! Not to be able to sleep, and

yet to dream. I am the autospecimen

of spiritual dissection, the auto-Hamlet

!To dilute my sadnessin the wine of the

night in the marvelous crystal of the dark--

And I ask myself: When will the dawn come?

Someone has closed a door--

Someone has walked past--

The clock has rung three--If only it were She!--