Poetry Thursday

A Hand
Jane Hirshfeld

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb. Nor is it palm and knuckles, not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow, not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins. A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines with their infinite dramas, nor what it has written, not on the page, not on the ecstatic body. Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— not sponge of rising yeast-bread, not rotor pin's smoothness, not ink. The maple's green hands do not cup the proliferant rain. What empties itself falls into the place that is open. A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs. via the Academy of American Poets image via JosyDoodle

Bonnie Jo Campbell does not need my publicity...

...no, and I don't need her sympathy either.

But she's cool.

There, I said it and I'm not sorry.

If you want to know how cool, click you this link rightchere.

That's right. Cool enough to stand by unblinking and watch a donkey get gelded.

Oh, and she's written a few books too.

And if you want to know why I am posting a link to her on my site, it's because she and I briefly kept company if you'd Googled* the phrase "Love and beauty will endure until the game is called for darkness" in the wee hours this weekend, as one of my alert readers recently did.

Gene Fowler said it.

He also said, "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

Shoot. Everybody knows that. Ask Bonnie Jo if you don't believe me.

*****
This particular search was not one of Google's finer moments, by the way. My blog actually did use this quote once, while as far as I can tell, Bonnie Jo's just happened to use all the same words. Only a few hours later, her site is still in the search and mine's out. Go figure.

"The most certain sign of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy."
--Francois de Rochefoucauld

That wouldn't be me.

Poetry Thursday: In the City of Eternal Spring

Since 1991, the International Poetry Festival of Medelln has opened the ground for language and human dignity to blossom, focusing on contemporary poetry from Colombia.

The Festival's web site is one way that I discovered Luz Helena Cordero, a poet of deceptively simple statement who is well represented on the Poetry International web site.

I am currently searching for a copy of her most recent book, Cielo Ausente (Absent Heaven), which is published only in Spanish (Ediciones Sociedad de la Imaginacion, 2001). Any leads from my readers on how I can find her book (or the earlier Óyeme con los Ojos/Hear Me With Your Eyes) would be most appreciated.

Here is one of her works, in Spanish first and then English, from the translation of Nicolas Suescun, whose own writing you can sample here. I've appended some of my own arrogant commentary on aspects of this very good translation...I promise, no words were actually harmed in the close reading of these poems.

FANTASMAS (GHOSTS)
by Luz Helena Cordero V.

Los fantasmas nacen desnudos, como sus dueños,
pero luego se visten con ropas color atardecer
en los ojos de la muchacha que tiembla.
Son títeres que armamos en la infancia,
pedazos de piel, retazos de voces,
crecen como lama detrás de la frente
y nunca nos abandonan.
Son tan personales como la voz o la memoria.
Nadie ha visto un fantasma que no le pertenezca,
que no ame como a sus ojos cerrados ante el espejo.**
Los fantasmas tienen nombre y apellido,
son ciudadanos dentro de nuestros huesos.
Claro que existen. Tienen el rostro de tu miedo.

GHOSTS

Ghosts are born naked, like their owners
but then they dress with twilight-colored clothes*
in the eyes of the trembling girl.
They are puppets we assemble in childhood,
scraps of skin, snippets of voices,
they grow like moss behind our foreheads
and they never abandon us.
They are as personal as voice or memory.
No one has seen a ghost that doesn't belong to them
that does not love as their eyes close in front of the mirror. **
Ghosts have names and surnames,
they are citizens in our bones.
Of course, they exist. They wear the face of your fear.

[Image by Fernando Botero]

*********************************
My nitpicking notes:
* "dueños" might be translated as the sterner word "masters" instead of "owners." And the efficient verb form "atardecer" implies action, either "dusk coming on" or literally "afternoon growing." I might have opted for "but then they dress in clothes the color of dusk" or the simpler "but then they dress in dusky clothes."

** I might have translated this differently, to say "that doesn't love [them] like their own closed eyes before the mirror"

Babel Babel

Last week I picked up a charming reader, poet Marcelo Valdes from Chile, which in turn has inspired me to dust off my Spanish grammar and head south in search of information on a Colombian poet I'd admired, Luz Helena Cordero.

Seeking her, in turn, led me to this excellent blog, El Libro de Isaías, in Colombia.

Perhaps I will actually speak proper Spanish one of these days. One can hope for miracles.

Or one can work around them, thusly.

[image of the Tower of Babel by Hendrick van Cleve]

Shakespeare's Birthday

It's the 443rd birthday (and also deathday) of a remarkable mind.

Also the day Miguel de Cervantes died. Those were years when giants walked the earth.

Here is Sonnet 98, a springtime poem with the chill whiff of mortality from which Shakespeare seldom strayed far. I particularly like the odd use of a colon at the end of this poem; a wonderfully open-ended ending, as if he would go on. I could not find a different version, so I guess this is the punctuation he intended.

SONNET 98

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play:

Really Stacked

Remember what Italo Calvino said about going to bookstores?

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered....Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

And so on. If you want to read the rest, you can always go here.

Or here.

I was pondering Calvino's words during a brief interlude of clarity at Broadside Books in Northampton, Massachusetts the other day. I managed to escape the store's awesome, Calvino-inspired selection with only three books this time, a mere $70 poorer (richer, I'd say).

One new acquisition was Refusing Heaven, the new volume of poetry by Jack Gilbert, who now lives in Northampton, as it happens. I saw him read at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC last spring after I read a wonderful profile in Poets and Writers. Here's a sample:

Maybe Very Happy

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying. “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

categories: life teaching words

Counting Gargoyles

Local literati Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole launched the unbelievable 50th issue of Gargoyle magazine a couple of weeks ago, with a gorgeous cover by Colin Winterbottom (who coincidentally did the cover for my novel Borrowed Light).

The important thing to know, for me anyway, was that this issue of the magazine contains what I consider to be the best story ever written by R. Gilad Schamess, my first husband (how I hate that phrase, and all the history that attends to it). The story is called "Lucky," and it is also readable online here:

Lucky
by R. Gilad Schamess
1965-2000

They kept the luck they found in ledgers. Making it their business, their noses into everything.

There was the car that wouldn't start that kept a family safe from black ice on the highway and twenty-eight deaths, so much twisted metal.

There was the drycleaner's number misprinted in an advertisement that brought together two strangers who fell in love and married.

There was the clumsy painter who knocked a hole in the plaster of the baby's new room, revealing a wasps' nest built in the wall.

There were lottery tickets and gambling sprees and answers to important questions guessed out of the blue and old coins found in attics; they were entered in columns and dated and totaled and covered by the turning of a page.

She kept no food in the house except spices, and she brought home every day what they needed and they ate it all as if there were no dog begging or as if they were preparing to be gone for a long time.

He came home with the papers folded under his arm and more stuffed into his briefcase and some days with magazines in a bag.

They finished the meal and he looked for stories of luck, reading aloud when he found them, and she kept the books.

There were coins in the attic and lottery tickets and lightning striking out of a clear sky the exact spot a man had stood just one second before; he had moved when another man called his name. The other man did not know him but a man with the same name who looked like him.

There were the brothers adopted by different families who married and moved from their homes to the same town to the same neighborhood to meet when their children became friends.

There were hunches to stay in and hunches to go out and to not board that plane and to buy or sell that stock and to look under that cabinet and to try a new route home.

They went out on weekends, driving past where they had left off the last time, with clipboards and the forms they had made and favorite pens, and they found luck that way among houses showing nothing from the outside.

They kept track in ledgers.

She was home earlier and had the dinner ready. He brought the papers and, when they were new, the magazines. When they climbed into bed there were only spices left and the fresh page covering the old.

"We are lucky," they whispered at night. Not remembering how they met, they whispered.

"Lucky. Lucky." Huddled in the dark, only spices in the kitchen, the papers outside in the trash with the clean bones.

-fin-

(with gratitude to Stuart for putting up with my gargoyles, as I put up with his).

categories: life love words

Love and Memory

I've been tearing my hair out trying to write my first real syllabus for my first college teaching gig. English 101 of course. See, I placed out of that. Which means I am so smart that I actually still don't know basic composition. Now I'll have to learn. I think it will be good for me. My poor students...

Anyway. I was looking for my favorite quote about writing, to inspire my students or at least make them laugh:

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

I found out it was written by the eminently quotable newsman Gene Fowler. And I also found this resonant loveliness:

"Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness."

Hard to believe the same hardboiled journalist wrote that. The beauty of that sentence stopped me cold. Almost made me want to run to my journal and rub together two of my own sentences.

Almost.