With Eleanor (May 2009)

Umberto Saba, The Goat

Umberto Saba, The Goat


I talked to a goat.
She was alone in a pasture, and tethered.
Stuffed with grass, soaked
by the rain, she bleated.

That monotonous bleating was brother
to my sorrow. And I answered, first
in jest, then because sorrow is eternal,
has one voice and never changes.
I heard this voice in the wails
of a solitary goat.

In a goat with a Semitic face,
I heard all other pain lamenting,
all other lives.


(translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)

Spotkanie Galerii Foksal 1968

Warszawa, 1968, appearing miraculously under the name Hanna Ptaszkowska. The Galeria Foksal, with Henryk Stazewski propped on the floor, holding forth to a gathering of young people. That's Hanna herself, just behind, and Prorok (Prophet), the leader of a group (the only group?) of Polish hippies, his rabbit pelt vest--an investment in the era. Unknown girl to his right, too tall for Gabryela. Likewise the gaunt type leaning on edge of door. Myself, with pipe, tip of rapidograph pen, drawing...

Spotkanie...

____

Note added September 2014: The setting here is a "hippie commune" in Ozarów, just outside Warszawa, not the Foksal Gallery.  Photo by Eustachy Kossakowski.. For other photos see Eustachy Kossakowski Archive at the Museum of Modern Art in Warszawa (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie). The following year was my exhibition at Galerie Foksal (September 1969).

Tadeusz Kantor

(photo by Eustachy Kossakowski)

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)