In Between Reading Neruda
Photo by me. Others here
What did I read, I wonder,
In those in-between years
That spanned abandonment,
And grief, and finally silence,
As I open this old book of love Sonnets I had just bought in a used Bookstore? I shake the dust And scatter syllables with
My tongue, which has by now Forgotten most of the twenty-one Names it had once invented for you. And while I am chanting this line
y te parces a la palbra melancolia, Stray news arrives, in gossip’s Envelope, of an impeding Wedding. Yours. And with scarcely
A pause, talk goes on to other busy Matters that the days fill themselves With, remaining as blank as before. I press ahead with this recitation:
How the night wind revolves in The sky and sings! And how dust Settles over skin that has changed And yet remembers all the same.
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A Witness Report
[A]
A friend had called me A poetry bum few days Ago, when I showed up
At his house in my Black sweater with venti- Lation holes at the elbows,
To gather camellias, half Red & half white, for a jug That stands empty (even now)
In these long rooms of my cave. One has to gather his metaphors Where one can – leaves of grass
In a tin can, muted by the rain Falling over city streets, a homeless With his dog waiting under
An overpass. Something is over. Something is passing. Time, one Suspects, is living out its eternity
Somewhere here, close at hand, Irredeemable by an imagination hobbled By the ball and chain of pain.
[B]
Later that night, swilling Jack (from Tennessee) and pungent Cane liquor (from Brazil) I attempt
-ed small talk (anything bigger is Considered impolite, even if it is Precisely this that kills most of us,
This loud pounding of rain on The window, this aura of loneliness We each wear, if not as a dress,
As a necktie, as a noose, this sense Of shame, of reluctance at being our Brother’s keeper. Here pass the joint.)
With Mauricio (suitably and Appropriately stoned, and perhaps Unaware that he is a poet).
I asked him, “So, Mauricio, What are you doing here, in This Terminal City?” half listening
And half expecting the usual litany: Knife grinder, con artist, hang man, Pickpocket, aerialist, escaped convict.
To which he replied: “I am simply walking Around here, my friend.”
For João
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Curtains at Cafe Primrose
[A] All that labor becomes A soft flapping in the breeze.She works with silk. She works into the nights, Her needle dipping and rising Between the folds, her eyes Finding tracks of flowers Hidden in the wash Of crimson.
Isn’t this what happens Too, when a man and a woman Lie down together in a quiet room,
This discovery and exposure Of what one suspected was there, Hidden behind the curtain,
Silence behind quick breathing?
[B] Make love as the full moon Shines or go to Hell. The fiend will grind Your bones Into pigments for death.
The man with the scythe Will strike. Unfold the fan With you face Painted on it. Reach for the gun hidden
In the lake with an yellow Boat, covered with blood of Slaughter. Study the bones, Study how mucles Move, study your Dreams for the face of that Woman you have been waiting For all these years at Cafe Primrose.
Notes: This poem was written after watching a visually rich, but really odd movie about a Japanese painter-poet, Takehisa Yumeji, called "Yumeji". I have used lines Yumeji keeps chanting in the course of the movie, and borrowed the title from his supposedly most famous poem, 'The Evening Primrose' (Yoi-machi-gusa):
waiting for the person who did not come the primrose is disconsolate this evening the moon too will not come.
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