Edward Krasinski

(photo by Eustachy Kossakowski)

Marina Tzvetaeva

Don't misunderstand me: I live not to write poems, I write poems in order to live. (Who would make writing poems an end in itself?) I write not because I know, but but in order to know. Until I've written about a thing (have looked at it), it doesn't exist. My way of knowing is through expression--there's the knowledge, right from under the pen. Until I've written a thing, I don't think about it. (You're the same, you know.) The pen channels experiences of what is extant, but dormant. Just as the Sybil doesn't know until the words come. The Sybil knows immediately. The word is the background of the thing in us. The word is the path to the thing, and not the other way around. (If it were the other way around, we would need words, not things, and the ultimate goal--is the thing.)

Marina Tzvetaeva, in a letter to Boris Pasternak, 1926

Campos de Soria

VII

Colinas plateadas,
grises alcores, cárdenas roquedas
por donde traza el Duero
su curva de ballesta
en torno a Soria, oscuros encinares,
ariscos pedregales, calvas sierras,
caminos blancos y álamos del río,
tardes de Soria, mística y guerrera,
hoy siento por vosotros, en el fondo
del corazón, tristeza,
tristeza que es amor! ¡Campos de Soria
donde parece que las rocas sueñan,
conmigo vais! ¡Colinas plateadas,
grises alcores, cárdenas roquedas!...

Antonio Machado

Noche Porteña

March or April of 1961? Arriving in the airport at Ezeiza, after 24 hour milk-run down the west coast of South America, over the Andes and into Argentina. Late afternoon, drive to La Plata with the Kraiselburd family: Elias, Lea, Gustavo, Gaston. Abuela? Flatness of the land, nothing visible over a horizon. Arriving in La Plata in the evening, trying to make out what the place was like from back seat of their family car. Cobblestone paving, yellowish street lamps, far between. Pools of light at leafy intersections, then bumpy blocks of darkness. No sense of destination until we'd almost arrived. Calle 52, Numero 362? Me trato de acordar...

George Oppen

. .

Of the dawn
Over Frisco
Lighting the large hills
And the very small coves
At their feet, and we
Perched in the dawn wind
Of that coast like leaves
Of the most recent weed----And yet the things

That happen! Signs,
Promises----we took it
As sign, as promise

Still for nothing wavered,
Nothing begged or was unreal, the thing
Happening, filling our eyesight
Out to the horizon----I remember the sky
And the moving sea.

(from "Guest Room," This In Which, New Directions, 1965)

Hojin, 2007

Valley Land

Blurry road on a rainly day, somewhere in the valley, Highway 120, walnut groves and fruit trees in gray morning light. Twin palms hold their own against a faint line of power poles, all cast at a slight angle by the movement of the car--Lartigue, maybe--that's what comes to mind, a roadside in France, 1913...

Aquí Me Pongo a Cantar

Aquí me pongo a cantar
Al compás de la vigüela;
Que el hombre que lo desvela
Una pena extraordinaria,
Como la ave solitaria
Con el cantar se consuela.

from José Hernandez: Martin Fierro

Yurodivy

A fool-for-Christ (yurodivy) is determined to follow the crucified Christ and to live keeping completely away from all earthly comforts. But at the same time he is aware that such behaviour threatens to create for him the reputation of a saint among the people and to strengthen his self-love and increase his pride as being one of God's elect - which is one of the most dangerous rocks in one's struggle for sanctity. So as not to be taken for a saint, a fool-for-Christ rejects the outer aspect of dignity and composure of mind that inspires respect and prefers to appear a miserable, weak creature, deserving mockery and even violence. Deprivations to which they subject themselves, their heroic, almost superhuman ascetic podvigs - all this must seem to be devoid of any value and to evoke nothing but contempt. In other words it is a complete denial of human dignity and even any spiritual value of one's own being - humility raised to a heroic degree and at times, as it may seem on the surface, falling into the extreme. But in the heart of a fool-for-Christ lives the memory of the Cross and the One Crucified, the slaps on His face, the spitting and the flagellation, which encourages them at any moment to endure any reviling and oppression for Christ's sake. (Leroy Bolier)

Małgorzata

From a Greek source--margaron--meaning "pearl." Margarita in Latin, then Marguerite (Old French). Saint's name day--the 18th of January--along with Bogumił, Jaropełk, Krystyna, Liberata, Piotr,and Pryska... But here as a girl scout trio, Warszawianki, where Levis become a ballroom gown, the only smidgen of the 18th century being perhaps the unintended gracefulness of their poses--Ovid redone after a waxy dressmaker's guide--szablon...

Van Gulik

In Fresno, it is 1923, and your shy father
Has picked up a Chinese fan abandoned
Among the corsages crushed into the dance floor.
On it, a man with scrolls is crossing a rope bridge
Over gradually whitening water.
If you look closely you can see brush strokes intended
To be trout.
You can see that the whole scene
Is centuries older
Than the hotel, or Fresno in the hard glare of morning.
And the girl
Who used this fan to cover her mouth
Or her breasts under the cool brilliance
Of chandeliers
Is gone on a train sliding along tracks that are
Pitted with rust.

Larry Levis, from "Lost Fan, Hotel Californian, Fresno, 1923"
(lines 1-16)

Reb Ahron

Hodu l'hashem ki tov, ki l'olam chasdo... Naugehide banquette, whispy beard, the volume of Likutei Torah close at hand, two narrow columns on heavy white page... Velvet yarmulkah and the freckles of a young man, now magnified by the lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles. Spectacle--the quiet afternoons, learning in chevrusa, with a like-minded soul, warm breeze through the high Yerushalmi windows, late cup of tea. The very overlapping...

This morning, even before dawn--the lulav and esrog...

Po Chu-i

Beside the Pond, Under Bamboo

A path winds past brambleweave fence and simple home,
jade-green: ten acres of idle dwelling, a pond gracing half.

After eating my fill and dozing refreshed at the window,
I wander off under the trees, alone, my feet light as air,

for water clarifies the spirit no less than a perfect friend,
and bamboo is a master that frees the mind to emptiness.

Why worry about that world of people, why plague mind
and ruin eyes in search of a kindred spirit here or there?

Po Chü-i
(translated by David Hinton)

El Colegio Nacional de La Plata

El Colegio Nacional de La Plata... a symposium on interdisciplinary education, from a posted photo. But just what is it that Iike so much here? The woman's expression, certainly, in parallel with the authoritative bemusement of the man with the microphone--held almost delicately, as if a certain refinement were required. The rumpled suit--a daily costume, it seems, his thoughts on other matters? But it's her face I return to, each time--a locus of feeling.

Bachillerato in 1962, La Plata, Argentina, Quinto Tercero--my own class. A long time ago. I wonder about Professor Agavios and his lectures on Cosmographía ("Se toma una esfera celeste tan grande como se quiera...") and also Profesor Escalante--La Literatura Europea. Baudelaire, Charles Peguy...Edgar Allen Poe...

Solano, morning...

Red-orange neon of Clean-Living Cleaners, under the eaves of the 7-eleven... View through window of the copyshop, particularly beautiful on a gray morning. Interior light against run of darkened sky... Final scene in Antonioni's The Passenger, a town late afternoon, somewhere in Spain, setting sun, lamplight from within. "A lantern pushing away the darkness , such a friendly image..."

Autumn Thoughts

Autumn Thoughts, Sent Far Away

We share all these disappointments of failing
autumn a thousand miles apart. This is where

autumn wind easily plunders courtyard trees,
but the sorrows of distance never scatter away.

Swallow shadows shake out homeward wings.
Orchid scents thin, drifting from old thickets.

These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling
lonely away— we share such emptiness here.

Po Chü-i

(David Hinton translation)

Larry Levis: Those Graves in Rome

Those Graves In Rome
There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats's name isn't even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn's,
And Joseph Severn's infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
But you'd have to know the story--how bedridden
Keats wanted the inscription to be
Simple, & unbearable: "Here lies one
Whose name is writ in water." On a warm day,
I stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn't. All we did was follow
A lame man in a rumpled suit who climbed
A slight incline of graves blurring into
The passing marble of other graves to visit
The vacant home of whatever is not left
Of Shelley & Trelawney. That walk uphill must
Be hard if you can't walk. At the top, the man
Wheezed for breath; sweat beaded his face,
And his wife wore a look of concern so
Habitual it seemed more like the way
Our bodies, someday, will have to wear stone.
Later that night, the three of us strolled,
Our arms around each other, through the Via
Del Corso & toward the Piazza di Espagna
As each street grew quieter until
Finally we heard nothing at the end
Except the occasional scrape of our own steps,
And so said good-bye. Among such friends,
Who never allowed anything, still alive,
To die, I'd almost forgotten that what
Most people leave behind them disappears.
Three days later, staying alone in a cheap
Hotel in Naples, I noticed a child's smeared
Fingerprint on a bannister. It
Had been indifferently preserved beneath
A patina of varnish applied, I guessed, after
The last war. It seemed I could almost hear
His shout, years later, on that street. But this
Is speculation, & no doubt the simplest fact
Could shame me. Perhaps the child was from
Calabria, & went back to it with
A mother who failed to find work, & perhaps
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then--
The children crying to the doctors for quinine.
And to the tourists, who looked like doctors, for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either--although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name--not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

Larry Levis

In the Studio

And down by the brimming river... —W.H. Auden

A friend of mine once observed—his source, I believe, was in Marx—that the world in which seems most true to us is the one we experience in the first five years of our lives. We were driving down San Pablo Avenue into Oakland at the time—the year was 1976—and given intensely palpable layers of the city on every side, my first inclination was to exclaim, "But just look at the present all around us!" Nevertheless, his point is one I've continued to think about, and I still find it a good way to pose the question of time (past and present) in painting. Not just the point about childhood, but also the one about a world which seems true.

The paintings I make have various sources: lost songs, city shadows, family stories, the water's edge. These stories—or moments, if you will—are important to me as points of departure. But more crucial still are atmosphere, the cast of the light, a lowering sky, or tones of warm and cool. For the meanings here—like the pictures themselves—emerge in the act of painting, hidden in the movement of the brush.

90th and Park

Arrival on Sunday evening. Our driver, from somewhere in Africa, a warm face, inward-seeming. “Triborough Bridge or Midtown?” We select the latter (for the Triborough there’s a toll). Across Queens Boulevard, Rego Park, massive girder viaducts as we approach the river from the other side. Finally, last span, and down into the familiar numbered streets of Manhattan, crosstown block of apartments, dailiness of people’s lives right to the rivers edge—you enter in…

1111 Park, at 90th, Ann L.’s apartment, on the tenth floor. She’s still in Maine for the last of the holiday, quiet evening. Two doorman stand as we enter, offer to help with the luggage. One hands me an envelope, folded in half the long way, key inside, attached to a photo of Ann’s grandson, wearing a yarmulkah.

Apartment at night, an entire life, and past. Paintings by lamplight, some Ann’s own, a Milton Avery kind of feel. A horizontal run along the walls, nicely irregular, one to the next, but all of them chosen with one sensibility. Folk art from Ann’s travels, tucked in here and there. A wooden frog from India? Flat pieces, off-beat shapes, connected by small metal pins. Strings for movement—a puppet, or children’s toy.

View from all the windows, buildings by night—a view of old New York, shape of water tower on black girders just in front of the window—Antonioni, but without the anomie. A joining in, vast open-armed city, anonymous and alive.

Apartment lights, warm and discreet, each all different distances. Window shades, lights behind, balconies etched against glowing black sky. Pencil-thin high-rise off towards the river, dots of light on various floors. Nearer—bank of windows on Lexington, something commercial, but old.

East River, Evening

East River, late afternoon, Labor Day 2007. Swirls and churning, gray-green beast pouring down the chanel towards Roosevelt Island. Hot afternoon, city folk gathered along the promenade, strolling, an old rottweiler on his master’s leash, a shepherd, a retriever… People sitting on the dark green benches, reading, books of all kinds—a city of readers, where the words matter, or so it feels, fragility of the printed page, or perhaps just the intimacy of figure with a book set against the expanse of the river.

The air goes from warmer to cooler with each slight breeze—you wonder where the wind comes from here, not constant, off the bay as at home.

John Finley Park, at 90th Street, Gracie Manshion, the mayor’s abode. Hizzoner, hidden away behind the trees. Sloping up and above, the East River Drive with muffled roar of cars carved out below.

Languages of all kinds—people calling their children in phrases you’ve never heard. Young guy with elaborate SLR squatting to frame his lithe Southeast Asian companinion. She sits, graceful and a touch self-conscious, in front of the ancient curved iron railing running along the water’s edge.

Looking downtown, a broad view of the city, antique steel bracelet of the Queensborough Bridge, silver filigree, 19th century arch. One section covered with a padded blanket, as if for the evening. Tall buildings, always, topped by energetic cranes. Feeling of age and potential.