The day was peaceful, Rosalia de Castro

The day was peaceful
And calm the atmosphere,
And it was raining, it was raining
Quietly and meekly;
And in the silence I cried and I moaned,
My child, tender pink
Sleeping he died.
When someone flees the world, what peace on their forehead!
When I saw him go away, what a storm in mine!

Earth on the unburied corpse
Before it begins to corrupt ...
Earth!
The hole has already been covered, calm down,
Very soon in the clods removed
Green and thriving will grow the grass.

What are you looking for around the tombs,
Tormented your look, clouded your thought?
Don’t keep taking care of what returns to dust! ...
Nothing is left of the one who rests in the grave
To return to love or offend you.
Never! Is it true that everything
Is already finished forever?
No, impossible to finish what is eternal,
Nor can immensity end.

You left forever; but my soul
Awaits you with loving care,
And I will come or I will go, good of my life,
Where we have to meet.

Something has remained yours in my guts
That death will be no more,
And that God, because just and good,
Never intends to disunite.
In heaven, on earth, in the unfathomable
I will find you and you will find me.
No, impossible to finish what is eternal,
Nor can immensity end.

More ... it's true, he’s gone,
Never to return.
There is nothing eternal for humanity, guest
Of a day in this earthly world,
Where one is born, lives and finally dies.
Everything here is born, lives, and dies.

Era apacible el día, Rosalia de Castro

Era apacible el día
Y templado el ambiente,
Y llovía, llovía
Callada y mansamente;
Y mientras silenciosa
Lloraba y yo gemía,
Mi niño, tierna rosa
Durmiendo se moría.
Al huir de este mundo, ¡qué sosiego en su frente!
Al verle yo alejarse, ¡qué borrasca en la mía!

Tierra sobre el cadáver insepulto
Antes que empiece a corromp-erse... ¡tierra!
Ya el hoyo se ha cubierto, sosegaos,
Bien pronto en los terrones removidos
Verde y pujante crecerá la yerba.

¿Qué andáis buscando en torno de las tumbas,
Torvo el mirar, nublado el pensamiento?
¡No os ocupéis de lo que al polvo vuelve!...
Jamás el que descansa en el sepulcro
Ha de tornar a amaros ni a ofenderos
¡Jamás! ¿Es verdad que todo
Para siempre acabó ya?
No, no puede acabar lo que es eterno,
Ni puede tener fin la inmensidad.

Tú te fuiste por siempre; mas mi alma
Te espera aún con amoroso afán,
Y vendrá o iré yo, bien de mi vida,
Allí donde nos hemos de encontrar.

Algo ha quedado tuyo en mis entrañas
Que no morirá jamás,
Y que Dios, porque es justo y porque es bueno,
A desunir ya nunca volverá.
En el cielo, en la tierra, en lo insondable
Yo te hallaré y me hallarás.
No, no puede acabar lo que es eterno,
Ni puede tener fin la inmensidad.

Mas... es verdad, ha partido
Para nunca más tornar.
Nada hay eterno para el hombre, huésped
De un día en este mundo terrenal,
En donde nace, vive y al fin muere
Cual todo nace, vive y muere acá.

They say that plants don’t speak, Rosalia de Castro

They say that plants don't speak, nor fountains, nor birds, 

Nor the waves with their complaining, nor with their brightness the stars,
They say it, but it's not true, because always when I pass,
They gossip about me and exclaim:
There goes that crazy dreamer
With the eternal spring of life and the wild camps,
And soon, good and soon, she will have gray hair,
And go shaking, frozen, covering the meadow with frost.

—There are gray hairs on my head, there are frost meadows,
But I just dream the more, poor, incurable sleepwalker,
With the eternal spring of life burned out,
And the perennial freshness of the wild camps and the souls,
Though these are gone and those burn.

Stars and fountains and flowers, don’t  complain about my dreams,
Without them, how can I admire you? How can you live without them?

Dicen que no hablan las plantas, Rosalia de Castro

Dicen que no hablan las plantas, ni las fuentes, ni los pájaros,
Ni el onda con sus rumores, ni con su brillo los astros,
Lo dicen, pero no es cierto, pues siempre cuando yo paso,
De mí murmuran y exclaman:
—Ahí va la loca soñando
Con la eterna primavera de la vida y de los campos,
Y ya bien pronto, bien pronto, tendrá los cabellos canos,
Y ve temblando, aterida, que cubre la escarcha el prado.

—Hay canas en mi cabeza, hay en los prados escarcha,
Mas yo prosigo soñando, pobre, incurable sonámbula,
Con la eterna primavera de la vida que se apaga
Y la perenne frescura de los campos y las almas,
Aunque los unos se agostan y aunque las otras se abrasan.

Astros y fuentes y flores, no murmuréis de mis sueños,
Sin ellos, ¿cómo admiraros ni cómo vivir sin ellos?

As Long as We’re Going for Broke

I am not a finger,
irritating by probling
the surface of some body.

I do not make holes for my glorification
or intrude
where holes are already.

I wrote that when I was a senior in high school
and sent it to The Saturday Review.
Maybe they still have it.

I don’t care about the part of the poem
that I can’t remember—
something about a master mind—fuck that!

So why constrain my finger,
which, symbolically,
is the same as my tongue?

Because I myself am primarily a body,
and on my surface
is a deep hole that needs to be filled.

I try to get my finger
to quit pointing at things.
It's rude!

My tongue does go on talking, though.
Maybe it can bring you to Jesus,
but I think it’s just singing.

So when you sing,
is it your tongue
that does it?

The tongue enunciates
the words, but the song comes from the belly
and heart.

Don’t worry about the words,
Jesus said.
The Spirit will provide them.

So what’s the Spirit, then?
Something other than the belly?
No.

The Spirit is the air
heated in the belly,
breathed by the heart

when

you
sing.

Ear

All day yesterday

I wanted to write a poem
about being an ear.

To be an ear,
like the great sea snail,
with its sticky brown foot!

(Not good if you’re Hamlet’s father, right?—
the poison that
into the portals of his ear did pour...)

I wasn’t sure how
to write it. The ear
has whorls,

whorls like the inaccessible interiors
of conch shells, in which you can hear
the sea—

its mighty roar—
That’s what being an ear
should be like, I think!

But the whorls of the ear
are like the petals
of a rose—

like one of Georgia O’Keefe’s—
her roses
are vaginas, right?—

presenting themselves as beautiful
pink pussies,
vulva and clitoris.

And, of course, you worry about the bees,
but all those bees
are sweet, fun girls—

those who want to trade
sticky warm
pollen with me.

To be an ear— 
a hum-bucket,
as it were.

. . .

I am my compost hole—
colorful pit in the yard,
engulfing everything I bring it.

I dug it this summer, feed it
every day, and, when no one’s looking,
I step into it barefoot.

My pussy-ear is amazingly strong,

because of everything it can do,
and everything it puts into me.

Poor Chicken

A                 G           F
One day a month or two ago
My baby called me on the phone.
She said she’d cook us a chicken up.
She didn’t want to spend the night alone.
E            D         C]
I took a bus on over to her place
And she let me in with a smile.
We just stood there in the doorway
[Bb                                 C-G-A]
And hugged and kissed a while.

Well, I took the chicken out of the sack
After making sure my hands were clean.
I said it was the biggest chicken
That I had ever seen.
And then we put that chicken
In a big brass pot with a cover.
Every once in a while between slugs of gin
We’d go and turn it over.

We just sat there in that kitchen.
It didn’t matter what we said.
I loved the way my baby’s hair
Twined around her head.
And then we played some music.
It didn’t matter what we played.
And then we took the chicken out
And we sat down and ate.

I woke up late next morning.
My baby was a little sad.
She wanted to save the bones for soup,
Cause that was all we had.
But we left that chicken out all night,
And I guess it got too hot.
And my baby said that it had gone bad and that we
Had to throw it out.

Next time I saw my baby

She was looking just a little pale.
We couldn’t seem to talk too much.
The words just seemed to fail.
She looked so white and shriveled up,
I said, “Is my baby dead?” [She looked to be half dead]
But I still loved the way her hair
Twined around her head.

1978? for my band 7Hz, with Stephen Phelps

On the Banks of the Sar, Rosalia de Castro

The rustling of the evergreen foliage

Stirs strange rumors,

And on a sea of undulating green

(Loving mansion of the birds),

From my window I see

The temple I wanted so.

The temple I so wanted . . .

Well, I don’t know how to say if I want

What in this rude turbulence without truce
Lacerates my thoughts.

I doubt if grim resentment

Can live with love united in my breast.

Orillas Del Sar, Rosalia de Castro

A través del follaje perenne

Que oír deja rumores extraños,

Y entre un mar de ondulante verdura,

Amorosa mansión de los pájaros,

Desde mis ventanas veo

El templo que quise tanto.

El templo que tanto quise...

Pues no sé decir ya si le quiero,

Que en el rudo vaivén que sin tregua

Se agitan mis pensamientos,

Dudo si el rencor adusto

Vive unido al amor en mi pecho.

The Milk of Paradise

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves
                    ST Coleridge, Kubla Khan

One of my clearest memories of you
comes from the years when I was living at home,
attending college at the University of Colorado, Denver Branch,
after crashing and burning at Boulder.
I remember our guess-the-poet game
using the Untermeyer Treasury book
that we played during drinks before dinner.
Often now when I read a poem I like
I instinctively think of you
and feel a lack because you are no longer here
to share it with me.

You and my father had similar views on poets.
Oddly, you both disliked Elizabeth Bishop.
You must have read “The Fish” and “Roosters”
in the late ‘40’s when North and South made its splash
and decided you didn’t like them for some reason.
I wish I could read you “Crusoe in England” now
(as you read me an abridged Robinson Crusoe when I was a child,
along with The Odyssey for Young People
and so many other works
that became the basis of my literary education),
and see you purse your lips and crinkle your eyes
at the turtles hissing like teakettles.

These days, I like to imagine you
aspiring to be like Elizabeth Bishop –
an alcoholic lesbian living with Lota
de Macedo Soares in the Imperial City of Brazil,
writing a few perfect poems and making
translations from Portuguese
(you yourself taught romance languages and later had a job
translating Portuguese union correspondence) –
instead of living a thwarted life
with a narcissistic husband for whom you had no respect,
and to whose career needs you subordinated your own.
No wonder you terrified me repeatedly when I was eight
by storming out of the house
and disappearing for a day or more,
always returning, to my great relief,
chastened and resigned.

Although my father finally became an English professor,
it was really you who fostered my poetic interests.
You gave me my Signet Keats,
it was your collected Yeats
that I appropriated when I was in high school,
and you were the one,
when I once showed you my self-preoccupied poems,
who gave me the best advice I ever received:
“You should write about human relationships,” you said.

Another poet with whom I try
to identify you is Stevie Smith,
living with her Aunt Lion most of her life
in their House of Mercy,
their house of female habitation,
working as executive secretary for a publishing firm,
and investing her money very wisely.
I especially wish you could share with me her poem,
“The Person from Porlock”:

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse.
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge, in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think that he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

I’m sure you would have appreciated
the rapier justice of these verses
slashing through the Great Man’s shabby pretension.
I can see you pursing your lips and crinkling your eyes
as you lie on your couch at cocktail time
in one of those loose-fitting muumuu smocks  you liked to wear,
legs crossed, right big toe pointing forward and then back,
your martini and chesterfields on the
round wooden coffee table beside you . . .

the way I remember you.

December, 2012