When the wren wakes I’ll ask

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Do you ever wake up wondering how to live? I don’t mean in the face of terror and imminent death, as so many around the world are facing in this war torn world, I mean just the daily ordinariness of getting up and getting on with things, whatever those things are. I look around and wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, something that I don’t know about or have forgotten. And why. I wonder: Is despair a reasonable response to some days’ unfoldings, or is hope the only way to go? Is gratitude just a way of distracting from doing the vacuuming? When is trying to make something happen worth doing and when is it folly? And do you only know when you’ve either succeeded or failed? When is desire just a failure of gratitude and when is it a useful engine for change? And when is effecting change a useful effort and when should you just sit still and breathe for a while? And when have you been breathing and sitting still for too long like a scared rabbit and you should just go make a run for it? These are things I wonder some days. Dysphoria, c’est moi, as a natural state of being, some days. More days than I care to admit to. So, sometimes, poems can provide some momentary stay against all that. I said “momentary.” There’s only so much poetry can do. Here’s a little prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his book Kitchen Hymns, from Copper Canyon Press.

[untitled/missæ]

Pádraig Ó Tuama

I bless myself in the name
of the deer and ox
the heron and the hare
evangelists of land and wood
and air. The fox as well, that red
predator of chickens, prey of cars.
And the salmon and the trout
sleeping in the reeds.
When the wren wakes, I’ll ask
her blessing, and if she comes out
she’ll bring it. The squirrel buries
when she thinks no one else can
see. I bless myself in her secrecy.
There’s a field mouse I’ve seen
scampering at dusk, picking up the seeds
dropped by the finches and the tits
throughout the day. Some nest of frenzy
waits her kindness and her pluck.
I go in the name of all of them,
their chaos, and their industry,
their replacements, their population,
their forgettable ways, their untame natures,
their ignorance of why,
or how, or who.

Still, I listen. I search

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I had an interesting experience recently trying to write a braided essay, that is, an essay that intersperses subject matter such that each thread sheds some light on the others. I had it as an open file on my desktop for two weeks or so, and when thoughts occurred to me on any of the threads, I jotted them down. After a while I braided the whole thing, snipped out some stuff, was kind of happy with it, but thought it might be confusing or confused. Trusted Reader took a look and didn’t like the illogic of it all, so reordered it into more of a sandwich than a braid, and I realized two things. One was that the braid itself lent, to me, interesting energy to the piece, and two, that, all in all, the energy was undeserved, as I really hadn’t logically said much at all. So, I’m walking away from it, wiser, but still like the approach I took, and maybe could use a few bits and pieces again. This is writing work: Look around, think stuff, try stuff, let it sit, revise, wait, snip, relook, get a different perspective, turn it upside down, ask yourself what you think you’re up to, repeat.

I hate the precious idea of a “muse.” Ideas may float like waves of pollen or surge up like the snags of skunk cabbage, they’re not sprinkled on you like fairy dust by some fucking lady in a diaphonous gown. You have to be alert, maybe on the hunt like a mushroom tracker, or a garbage picker looking for discarded treasures. You have to squint your eyes, rest your mind, look to one side of the dim stars. You have to listen through the din for a faint peep. And then…and THEN…you have to figure out how to make something of it. And then make it.

The muses were the daughters of the head god dude and memory. (Which is actually kind of interesting, memory as a mother of muse.) But mythology is just a bunch of made up stories. And those ancient Greeks were just more misogynists who made up female gods but kept real flesh and blood women well under control. So I say to hell with the idea of “the muse.” And yes to the inspiration of being a body-in-the-world, flailing about. And a restless, doubt-filled, querelous, messy, glorious mind.

That being said (and regular readers know how much I like to argue with and contradict myself), I like this poem by Linda Pastan. I think she threads the needle between the work of and the magic of inspiration and creativity with this little poem.

Muse

Linda Pastan

No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.

Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing.
And sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment

a small voice comes through
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.

I listen for fraught accords between soil and stalks

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Early March, below zero, but blue at least, and the long winter loosing in drips and a rouging of the forsythia. Difficult days of promise and betrayal, of hope and despair, large and small. I cannot get out of my own way, nor see around the muddle in my head. My brain is noisy and clanging. But the sun is leaking through the trees, and small birds move in the thicket. I know what I don’t know, but that does not make me brave. I try to stay present but spin out into what-ifs. Time is water in my hands, but the skin on the back of my hands is dry. I think of the word slake. An edgy word, knife-ish, as if the end of thirst is painful. But there seems no end to thirst.

Here is a poem by Lawrence Wray full of sound, and something achey, like thirst but not quite, like promise but with the possibility of its opposite inside.

Sibylant

Lawrence Wray

Knuckled-under, eye-sore, road-weary, the last
years distraught
                        like walking blank through our day, stripped.

Hush, sh — the fringe. All the grass has gone to tassel.
We are doffed,
                        dodder like the grass stalks’ seed-heavy heads.

I mowed a narrow swath to the gate for us,
but left the rest
                        to reach, to shift and be given as we wish to be.

I was careful of the fleabane tatterflowers
strewn in
                        that have always stood for us, even if we forget.

Their delicate bristle was accented in sunlight.

Since we are braided into rootmeshes, thickets,
and boreal,
                        since we are bladed like the grass is,

I listen for fraught accords between soil and stalks
and open passage.
                        May we be unwieldy, splayed, the sprawl,

and traced no more or less than this lank grass.
It can be for us —
                        seed flecks cling to our sleeves when we pass,

yes — revealed, presencing, and unspoiled.
Will you come?
                        You now a meadow tingling again with breeze.

https://otherwisecollective.com/ph-mag-issue-19/sibylant

the fate of the cruel & unusual

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I love this love poem, the “philia” kind, dear old pal. Nostalgia in its “algia,” an ache, but funny and odd, in the way that old friendships and memories can be. There is a helplessness to it, how the speaker is awash in his own foibles, ones that he knows he can admit to this old friend, who likely knew them all too well, and maybe had a few more. It cracks me up. It makes me sad-laugh, laugh-cry, this apostrophe, which is a strange word for speech or a poem addressed to a person, as its etymology lies in words meaning “turning away from,” but is also used to describe an indicator of possession, as well as an indicator of something missing. Which also makes me sad in a isn’t-that-funny way.

Listen, Leo

Jon Anderson

Listen, Leo, remember the lifeboat
we pilfered from what you said
was an abandoned garage sale,
1442 Columbus, not the explorer,
the street? Last night I came to,
retired to the basement to ponder
my position on circumspection,
the fate of the cruel & unusual,
& drink until I passed out.
I had my underwear on & my .45.
I was planning to feast on that bag
of Chicken Shack backs & beaks
we got at the place that went broke,
put my legs up on a six-pack & drift.
Anyway, this eerie blow started
emanating from the sewage pool,
mostly greenish. It winked
so I shot it, Leo, I’ve had enough!
Then this long low lump along
the wall near the bulkhead
started toward me, so slow
I had time to think. Went
to the attic & came back down
bearing Mr. Doublt-Aught.
Leo, I perforated the lifeboat.
It has become a dead one,
incapable, now, of surfacing
above its circumstance.
We can never return to it now.
It’s gone. Gone like the snow.
Gone like I got a little behind.
It’s a sad world. Leo, we fell,
like yesterday’s laundry
into the tub, let’s face a fact.
There’s nobody left like us.
I got a weathered pate, you
got a ticket to Nova Scotia &
I’m swimming beside the boat.
When we gotta die, we’re gone.
Leo, I confess, I adore your face.
Give me a little papa kiss.
Give me a muscle up. Leo,
there’s nobody left like us.

or maybe things were not communicated clearly.

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Some days all I can say is ay yi yi. Or oy. Or fuuuuuuuuck. You know, those wordless expressions of mostly-vowel sounds the outbreathing of which, the offgassing of which you hope will take away some of the poison, some of the poison you’ve inhaled inadvertently from the world, the sorrows, the woe and strife, the basic are-you-kidding-me’s that tumble into our faces, singular and collective, big picture and small. At the level of finding-a-parking-space or the level of world-peace. Oof. That’s another one of my exhales. Jeeesh. Yeesh. Ach du liebe. Eventually I’ll gather my words together and make a coherent sentence. But I won’t be sure about it. It’ll be mostly noise created by consonants, as if I know what I’m talking about. But it’s the vowels. It’s the vowels that carry the spiritual truths, the hopes and dreams, terror and aghastness, the weariness.

I like this poem for how confident it is. Here’s the deal, the poem says. Here’s what’s gonna go down. I don’t know this poet, but I’ll follow her anywhere.

The Index

Rena Priest

In the beginning there was darkness,
then a bunch of other stuff–and lots of people.
Some things were said and loosely interpreted,

or maybe things were not communicated clearly.
Regardless–there has always been an index.
That thing about the meek–how we

shall inherit the earth; that was a promise
made in a treaty at the dawn of time
agreed upon in primordial darkness

and documented in the spiritual record.
The nature of the agreement was thus:
The world will seemingly be pushed past capacity.

A new planet will be “discovered” 31 light-years away.
Space travel will advance rapidly,
making the journey feasible. The ice sheets will melt.

Things will get ugly. The only way to leave
will be to buy a ticket. Tickets will be priced at exactly
the amount that can be accrued

by abandoning basic humanity.
The index will show how you came by your fortune:
If you murdered, trafficked or exploited the vulnerable,

stole, embezzled, poisoned, cheated, swindled,
or otherwise subdued nature to come by wealth
great enough to afford passage to the new earth;

if your ancestors did these things and you’ve done nothing
to benefit from their crimes yet do nothing to atone
through returning inherited wealth to the greater good

you shall be granted passage. It was agreed.
The meek shall stay, the powerful shall leave.
And it all shall start again.

The meek shall inherit the earth,
and what shall we do with it,
but set about putting aside our meekness?

https://poets.org/poem/index-0

Tell me, train-sound

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I have been thinking about the artifices of art, the superficial surfaces, the pleasing semblances. “It looks just like a photograph,” said someone approvingly of a realistic scene painted in oils. (No one says of the photograph, “It looks just like the real thing.” They might say, “It looks like a painting.”) And the so-called “real thing”? What does it look like? And a misty version of that realistic scene? Is that integrating something of emotion, or the murkiness of memory? And the impressionistic version, is that closer to how the brain grabs at colors and edges and scents and sounds and forgets all kinds of details? And if the surface of the scene is nubbled with thick paint, what then? Are we disappointed to find that the painting is a painting? Or does it enhance the experience with its tactility, its boldness? And if there are other substances on the surface — tissue paper, string? And if someone sticks a sticker of a dinosaur and calls it absurdist? That too can be pleasing. Or not. What does it mean to “enter” an artwork? What does it mean that something of the work prevents entry? I’m reading a collection of poems that have a lot of…er…words in them, but I can’t quite make sense of it all. I can’t gain entry. A poem is all artifice. Text and space and form. No one mistakes a poem for a photograph or for the “real thing.” But I can get lost in fiction. Can look up suddenly from the page, disoriented to time and place and even myself. Isn’t that funny? And music — it’s all artifice! Banging and strums and dingledingle. And it can make me cry. What is up with that? Fool me once. Fool me forever. Please.

Here’s a wonderfully strange and transportive poem by James Dickey. Just go along for the ride.

The Strength of Fields

James L. Dickey

…a separation from the world
a penetration to some source of power
and a life-enhancing return…

                        Van Gennep: Rites de Passage

Moth-force a small town always has,

            Given the night.

                                                What field-forms can be,
            Outlying the small civic light-decisions over
                        A man walking near home?
                                                            Men are not where he is
    Exactly now, but they are around him   around him like the strength

Of fields.         The solar system floats on
   Above him in town-moths.
                                                  Tell me, train-sound,
   With all your long-lost grief,
                                                what I can give.
    Dear Lord of all the fields
                                                what am I going to do?
                                    Street-lights, blue-force and frail
As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how
    To withdraw     how to penetrate and find the source
      Of the power you always had
                                                light as a moth, and rising
        With the level and moonlit expansion
     Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

            You?    I?    What difference is there?   We can all be saved

            By a secret blooming. Now as I walk
The night     and you walk with me    we know simplicity
     Is close to the source that sleeping men
            Search for in their home-deep beds.
            We know that the sun is away   we know that the sun can be conquered
      By moths, in blue home-town air.
            The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The died lie under
The pastures.   They look on and help.     Tell me, freight-train,
                                    When there is no one else
    To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea
            Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,
              Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar
                        Like the profound, unstoppable craving
            Of nations for their wish.
                                                            Hunger, time and the moon:

            The moon lying on the brain
                                                            as on the excited sea   as on
               The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake
            With purpose.   Wild hope can always spring
            From tended strength.   Everything is in that.
                 That and nothing but kindness.   More kindness, Dear Lord
Of the renewing green.   That is where it all has to start:
            With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
                Than save every sleeping one
                 And night-walking one

            Of us.
                                    My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

der Nebelgang

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“A translation,” I thought as I’d paused on the ski trail to catch my breath and look around, listen around. (No sound. No birdsong, no human sound: no gear shift or metal grind or churn of airplane overhead.) I looked up. A complex skeleton of tree overhead, each limb outlined in thick white. A translation of a tree, those thick white lines underscored by thin lines of black beneath. A white tree version of the damp-black tree beneath, a bit cumbersome, a bit heavy, but beautiful, the two kinds of lines living together. I love side-by-side translations, love to eyeball the disparate marks between the two, to see how the translator handled the line break, the punctuation. Love to examine the original for repeating words or ideographs or glyphs. When they live side by side on a page or set of pages, the original and the translation can reside like limb and snowshade.

I may be flirting with the limits of free use here, but I’ve just had such an enjoyable time poking through Wickerwork, poems by Christian Lehnert, translated by Richard Sieburth, published by Archipelago Books, 2022, and messed around with by me, with help from a certain unmentionable online translation program, and some German-English dictionaries. Again, I realize, given Lehnert’s interest and careful attention to form, rhythm, and rhyme, I am guilty of the treason of translation. Sieburth’s translations are perfectly fine. I mean no disrespect to this lovely volume. It’s just that I poked around and found some little gems in the language that delighted me. So. Here are two more poems from this intriguing collection, and the results of my meddling.

Erster Advent, 2016,  Autobahn vor Breitenau

Ein Rauhgefieder treibt, es weiß den Weg nicht mehr.
So heißt der Nebelgang: Gezeiten ohne Meer.

Sieburth’s translation

The wings, raw with wind, no longer know their reach.
Thus the name of the fogs rolling: tides with no beach.

My find:

A rough-feathered bird drifts along, it no longer knows the way.
That is what the misty paths are called: tides without a sea.

And here’s one more:

Ruhendes Jetzt

Die Apfelblüte fällt, verwelkt, kehrt nie zurück.
Du findest dich in ihr für einen Augenblick.

Sieburth’s translation:

Now at rest

The apple blossom falls, fades, with this you can never reckon,
yet find yourself within it for a never-ending second.

My find:

Resting now

The apple blossoms fall, withered, never to return.
You find yourself in them for a moment.

Und Leiber stiegen auf / ein Tausendklagen /

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The mead of poetry is honey and blood, according to the Icelandic Snorra Edda. I like that sense of sweet things and life’s essential fluid, of stickiness and the taste of iron. A little buzz of life, a little drop of death. It gives me, to quote John Irving’s Owen Meany, “the SHIVERS.”

I like when a poem gives me the SHIVERS. A book of poems in the library recently caught my eye — it was small in size, with a pretty cover, and it spoke to me, although I’d never heard of the author, nor the translator, nor the publisher. It’s called Wickerwork, by Christian Lehnert, translated from his German native language by Richard Sieburth. Lehnart is a contemporary poet, lauded in Germany, born in Dresden, teaching in Leipzig.

I bogged down two pages into Sieburth’s introduction but skipping forward to the actual poems I was intrigued to find, in the first section, small, interesting pieces based on flora, and sometimes fauna. I do love a short poem. And a little Latin nomenclature. The poems are laid out with two-line poems on one side and eight-line poems on the facing page. I’m unclear why, but the intro told me the author is much interested in form.

One poem caught me, and I spent time with the translated lines, and then pondering over the German, a language I don’t speak but have sung in, so I have the feel of it a bit in my mouth, and have tackled translations before with the help of dictionaries and a simplistic sense of German’s syntax and strategies. And being curious inherently, although I was interested in Sieburth’s translation, something made me dump the little poem into Google translate (I hear the gasped horror of translators and foreign language teachers everywhere) just to get a sense of some of the choices the translator had made. And it was then that I got the shivers. Sieburth wanted to maintain the rhymes and form of the original, but of course, in so doing, you trade off some possibilities of language. (English is a notoriously terrible language to rhyme in.) But the author, of course, may be horrified at my jettisoning his careful planning in form. But oh, the poems seem so much more strange and interesting in English when unleashed. Forgive me, Mr. Lehnert! But I did get the shivers!

Der Aufbruch der Graugänse

Christian Lehnert

Ein Schwingen / Laut und Schwingenschlag / gesagt
War nichts / doch nichts blieb sich von nun an gleich:
Die Auen zitterten um einen Teich /
Dort war kein Land / dort war ein andrer Tag.

Ich stand in einer Schalung / einem Pochen /
Das in die Knie kroch / sah Flügel ragen /
Und Leiber stiegen auf / ein Tausendklagen /
Und alles schrie / das Licht war wie gestochen.

Translation by Richard Sieburth

Grey geese breaking into flight

A leap / sheer wingbeat and alarm / not a word
uttered / yet nothing quite itself from this point on:
The meadows taking fright around the pond /
The land disappearing / and the day unheard.

As I stood there in a formwork / a pain sliced
Through my knees / I saw wings rushing into flight
And bodies on the rise / thousands of cries /
Everything screaming / the light had been knifed.

my translation

the departure of the greylag geese

A flapping / loud and the beating of wings / nothing
was said / yet nothing would ever be the same:
The meadows trembled around a pond /
there was no land there / there was another day.

I stood in a formwork / a throbbing
crept into my knees / and I saw wings protruding /
And bodies rose up / with a thousand cries /
and everything screamed / the light was as if stung.

When the speaker felt that throbbing in his knees and, to my reading, glanced down and felt he was growing wings. Isn’t that amazing? And do you, as I do, become out-of-bodied when you hear the cry and flap of a flock of geese scrolling across the sky? Do you feel, as I do, some kind of primal call to go? Or at least a great sadness at their departure, which heralds the shift in seasons, the irrefutable changes rendered by it, what it portends. The shiver of the coming winter.

Anyway, such is the pleasure and discoveries of translation.

the methodology of giving up

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Something is scratching in the walls and I imagine it’s the stucco itself, chilly and damp out there in the dark morning, seeking to ease inside for a bit of warmth. “Is a River Alive?” asks Robert Macfarlane in his recent book, and I have long wondered the same of rocks. I have a nodding acquaintance with many. Well, I’m doing the nodding, anyway. At least in the quick time frame of human life.

An animate world is the kind I want to live in, so I make assumptions that anima is everywhere. “Sorry,” I say to the throw rug whose corner I flipped up with careless footing. I feel a little bad it has to stare up at that water stain in the ceiling I can’t get around to painting over. But the stain looks like a feather. So that’s nice.

It is an old tradition, to see the world this way. I am reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Simpson is a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and is a scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, the indigenous people of southern Ontario. This book is an imaginative and strange telling of tales in which characters are at once human and other-animate — a tree, for example, that pushes its shopping cart around Toronto; a caribou spirit who wears a backpack it found on the street. One section is voiced by the geese preparing for departure, trying not to feel judgey about the ones choosing to stay behind (in the changing climate that allows such choice now). Two sections are the voice of a frozen body of water, Mashkawaji, which in Ojibwe means “is frozen.”

Here is a poem from Mashkawaji’s second section, called Mashkawaji’s Theory of Ice.

the failure of melting

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

the frozen sighed
and gave up

the lake wrote
its letter of resignation

with the useful
usefulness
of despair

july 15
30 cubic metres
five storeys

your finger is
tracing nothing on my arm
as if we are the only ones here

i bring you coffee
a blanket
moonlight

i bring you stitches
a feather

three books

the caribou
sit
measuring emptiness

the fish
study
the methodology of giving up

the molecules
calculate
the accumulated effects of hate

you break
down
to a less ordered state

the ice
breathes
and gives in

the lake
runs
out of options

july 15
30 cubic metres
five storeys

just like
the Gwich’in*
always said

there are all kinds
of ways
to fail.

*The Gwich’in are northerly indigenous people of North American, living in Alaska, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories