Poetry and Paintings/Photos

Parting

A man is standing in the hall
His house not recognizing.
Her sudden leaving was a flight,
Herself, maybe, surprising.

The chaos reigning in the room
He does not try to master.
His tears and headache hide in gloom
The extent of his disaster.

His ears are ringing all day long
As though he has been drinking.
And why is it that all the time
Of waves he keeps on thinking?

When frosty window-panes blank out
The world of light and motion,
Despair and grief are doubly like
The desert of the ocean.

She was as dear to him, as close
In all her ways and features,
As is the seashore to the wave,
The ocean to the beaches.

As over rushes, after storm
The swell of water surges,
Into the deepness of his soul
Her memory submerges.

In years of strife, in times which were
Unthinkable to live in,
Upon a wave of destiny
To him she had been driven,

Through countless obstacles, and past
All dangers never-ended,
The wave had carried, carried her,
Till close to him she'd landed.

And now, so suddenly, she'd left.
What power overrode them?
The parting will destroy them both,
The grief bone-deep corrode them.

He looks around him. On the floor
In frantic haste she'd scattered
The contents of the cupboard, scraps
Of stuff, her sewing patterns.

He wanders through deserted rooms
And tidies up for hours;
Till darkness falls he folds away
Her things into the drawers;

And pricks his finger on a pin
In her unfinished sewing,
And sees the whole of her again,
And silent tears come flowing.

-Boris Pasternak

Kay Sage, Le Passage (1956)

Tempests, sisters of the hurricanes; bluish firmament, whose beauty I refuse to acknowledge; hypocritical sea, image of my own heart; earth, who hold mysteries in your breast; the whole universe; God, who created it with such magnificence, it is thee I invoke: show me a man who is good...But at the same time increase my strength tenfold; for at the sight of such a monster, I may die of astonishment: men have died of less.

-from Maldoror and poems, Lautréamont

Kay Sage

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins

god-step at the margins of thought,

    quick adulterous tread of the heart.

Who is it that goes there?

    Where I see your quick face

notes of an old music pace the air

torso reverberations of a Grecian lyre.

-from 'A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar', by Robert Duncan

the dead can sleep

they don't get up and rage

they don't have a wife.

her white face

like a flower in a closed

window lifts up and

looks at me.

the curtain smokes a cigarette

and a moth dies in a 

freeway crash

as I examine the shadows of my

hands.

-from 'i am dead but i know the dead are not like this', by Charles Bukowski

Zofia Rydet, Zaglada ( photo-collage 1970)

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

- from 'The Man with the Blue Guitar', by Wallace Stevens

The Oldest Child

The night still frightens you.
You know it is interminable
And of vast, unimaginable dimensions.
"That's because His insomnia is permanent,"
You've read some mystic say.
Is it the point of His schoolboy's compass
That pricks your heart?

Somewhere perhaps the lovers lie
Under the dark cypress trees,
Trembling with happiness,
But here there's only your beard of many days
And a night moth shivering
Under your hand pressed against your chest.

Oldest child, Prometheus
Of some cold, cold fire you can't even name
For which you're serving slow time
With that night moth's terror for company. 

- Charles Simic

Francis Bacon, 'Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours '

Errata

Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name 

- Charles Simic

Caroll Taveras, 'Los-que vuelan'