morphe
There is a wonderful page early in Sartre’s La Nausée when the narrator describes his love of finding discarded scraps of paper in the street. (Well … understand, I am saying I remember this page … I can’t promise that it is really there, or that it is as I remember.…) It is one of my favorite passages in modern literature, even though it comes from this writer who is not one of my favorite writers, because I recognize myself with an unsteady little smile. I cannot walk past a stray piece of paper blowing across the sidewalk in the winter breeze without trapping it under my shoe and stooping over to investigate. Grocery lists, some child’s lost homework, a lover’s desperate postcard sent from Prague and asking her to remember a kiss in a park under frozen trees, a page torn from the Book of Ecclesiastes with underlining in red and Chinese marginalia, a suicide note.
Last Saturday I found the note card above, wet and muddy and lying in the street in South Bend, Indiana. I carried it home and dried it under a lamp. Black marks on gray paper. Someone wrote these words and stared at this rectangle of paper for a while, her mind taking this shape. Such evocative words. Are they not, themselves, about the experience of finding this note card, the mysteries that step shyly out of the shadows, into the light, for a moment? I say nothing more.
--------------------------------------
1) If can then x
2) If cannot then x
~ (1.)
~ (2.)
morphe = shape
eidos = form
character = trait / portrait
schema = outline / appearance
grammar of assent
ice music
Orga de gheaţă
Se aude ceva,
Nu-i aşa?
E muzica
Orgii de gheaţă
Care-mi atârnă de streaşină.
Nu reuşesc să disting
Nici un sunet,
Dar ştiu,
Sunt convinsă,
Că nu se poate
Să nu se audă nimic,
Iar acest instrument
Perfect
Şi atât de repede pieritor
Să fi fost inventat
Numai
Pentru cine ştie ce
Nevăzut, îndepărtat,
Indiferent
Ascultător.
Ana Blandiana
The Ice Organ
You hear something,
Don‘t you?
It’s the music
Of the ice organ
Hanging from my eaves.
I can’t make out
A sound.
Still I know,
I am convinced,
It can't be
That there is nothing to be heard---
And that instrument,
Perfect
And so quickly vanishing,
Could have been invented
Only
For who knows what
Unseen, remote,
Indifferent
Listener.
(my translation)
L’Orgue de glace
On entend quelque chose,
N’est-ce pas?
C’est la musique
De l’orgue de glace
Suspendue de mon avant-toit.
Je ne peux pas distinguer
Une seule note.
Pourtant, je sais,
Je suis convaincue,
Qu'il est impossible
Qu'il n'y ait pas de musique,
Et que l’on ait inventé
Cet instrument
Parfait
Et si éphémère
Seulement
Pour qui sait quel
Auditeur
Invisible, lointain,
Et indifférent.
(ma version française)
I am grateful to Roxana, who first showed me this poem!
.
The Woman in the Snow
I dreamed of her breath
and her dark eyes for a year
I dreamed I wandered the labyrinths
of her fingerprints for a year
I dreamed for a year of the taste of kissing
the soft skin at the backs of her knees
I dreamed for a year that her voice her blood
her thighs were scarlet calligraphy in my veins
I dreamed of caressing her smooth breasts
and the rising tight buds of her nipples for a year
I dreamed for a year that my sleep
was tangled in the night of her hair
When I woke I found the day beating
in her throat like a hummingbird’s wings
.
.JPG)
the eye in which i wait
Do You Remember the Beach?
Do you remember the beach
Covered with bitter shards
On which
We could not walk barefoot?
The way in which
You gazed at the sea
And said you were listening to me?
Do you recall
The hysterical gulls
Spinning in the toll
Of bells from unseen churches
With congregations of fish,
The way in which
You were running away
Towards the sea
Shouting to me that you needed
Distance
To look at me?
Do you remember the beach
Covered with bitter shards
On which
We could not walk barefoot?
The way in which
You gazed at the sea
And said you were listening to me?
Do you recall
The hysterical gulls
Spinning in the toll
Of bells from unseen churches
With congregations of fish,
The way in which
You were running away
Towards the sea
Shouting to me that you needed
Distance
To look at me?
The snow
Was going out
Mingled with birds
In the water.
With an almost joyful desperation
I watched
Your footprints on the sea
And the sea
Closed like an eyelid
Over the eye in which I was waiting.
-Ana Blandiana
(Translated by Peter Jay and Anca Cristofovici)
Was going out
Mingled with birds
In the water.
With an almost joyful desperation
I watched
Your footprints on the sea
And the sea
Closed like an eyelid
Over the eye in which I was waiting.
-Ana Blandiana
(Translated by Peter Jay and Anca Cristofovici)
dream ice wind
rêve
sans fin
ni trêve
à rien
-Samuel Beckett
reive--
no end
nor leave--
the wind
(my own not-exactly-translation)
in die Traumwäscherei ohne sorge sei ohne sorge
was aber geschieht
am besten
wenn Totenstille
eintritt
-Ingeborg Bachmann
in the dream laundry carefree be carefree
but what happens
best of all
when dead silence
sets in
(translated by Peter Filkins)
----------------------------------------------------------.JPG)
To the Roaring Wind
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
-Wallace Stevens
New poems are coming soon. I promise.
I’ve been so entranced by newfound possibilities that this has turned into a photography blog in recent days --- though I haven’t forgotten (as it says on the tin) that the original aim was poetry. I am, yes, in love with the silence of photographs, just as I have always loved the quiet at the end of poems --- the poem is essentially a way of finding a better silence, nicht wahr? --- (and I categorically reject the thought that photography and poetry are fundamentally different) --- but still, I feel a bit of a slacker, as Dylan Thomas:
On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
….The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
But no, not “bitterly.”
Poems are coming….
.
continual departure
from Les Roses
VI
Une rose seule, c'est toutes les roses
et celle-ci : l'irremplaçable,
le parfait, le souple vocable
encadré par le texte des choses.
Comment jamais dire sans elle
ce que furent nos espérances,
et les tendres intermittences
dans la partance continuelle.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A single rose is all roses
and this one: irreplaceable,
perfect, supple vocable
the text of things encloses.
How could we say, without her,
what were our hopes,
and the brief, tender stops
in continual departure.
.
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