Some News From Another World
"For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love." - W.H. Auden[1]
Adrienne, I am growing tomatoes, the last of them, before winter ellipses all warmth from the days. And in their shade, along with the earthworm, a burrowing silence drills and drills.
I know this enthusiasm for earth, and its vegetal matter we - a framer's grandson and a musician's daughter - don't share. But love for me is an extension of this hard labor, the weight of which I carry for joy, a sowing, and its delayed reaping, if weathers permit.
I bend over the green stems with their fumy smells as I grow colder at the edges, a haunting like the blackness of an icon's eye. What music did I expect to give you, one who can play Bach blindfolded; arias in airy cathedrals when all I know how to do is chop wood?
But if I manage to keep my sanity and these tomatoes from pestilence, when this season is done and bones of this world are embraced by ice, come by for some stew and silence. And in the shadows of fires we can try to remember those memories we will have forgotten out of love.
for N
[1] from Auden's "Canzone"
My Poems
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"You're Still Alive" - Osip Mandelstam
You're still alive, you're not alone yet -
she's still beside you, with her empty hands,
and a joy reaches you both across immense plains
through mists and hunger and flying snow.
Opulent poverty, regal indigence! Live in it calmly, be at peace. Blessed are these days, these nights, and innocent in the labor's singing sweetness.
Miserable is the man who runs from a dog in his shadow, whom a wind reaps at the knees, and poor the one who holds out his rag of life to beg mercy of a shadow.
Voronezh, January 1937
(Translated from the Russian by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin)
Note: I was reading this poem like a mantra on the subway yesterday, when I looked up and saw few other folks in the compartment clutching self-help books, fashion magazines, or mystery novels - the one that come in paperback with flashy covers. And I was happy for the joy - partly bestowed by the "she", the muse figure - of this poem, by the great Mandelstam.
Also, if I were ever to learn Russian, it would be to read Dostoevsky's "White Nights" and the Holy Trinity (Mandelstam, Ahkmatova, and Tsvetaeva) in the original.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Morning Music
Norah Jones - "Thinking About You"
Note: I remembered this song this this morning, when in a short pause in my run-walk across the park, I saw migrating monarchs flying in across the New York Bay - from the directions of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Ellis Island, make landfall on the Jersey shore, and struggling against the unusually strong headwind blowing in from east.
Fall is nearly here; Rilke's verses about homelessness are on my mind, as well as moments of transcendence on recognizing the fact that I, another migrant, am in the middle of one of the greatest and perennial migrations on our little planet. How can "thinking about you" be far behind?
Music Posts
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