if and and but

Yesterday was Shakespeare's (alleged) birthday, so here (a day late, because yesterday was a little bit of a doozy) is a Shakespeare poem! It is also a poem about horses, since I haven't posted one of those yet this year, and is obviously a sonnet.

He was a man knew horses, so we moved
As wills were one, and all was won at will,
In hand with such sleight handling as improved
Those parks and parcels where we're racing still,

Pounding like pairs of hooves or pairs of hearts
Through woodland scenes and lush, dramatic spaces,
With all our parts in play to play all parts
In pace with pace to put us through his paces.

Ages have passed. All channels channel what
Imagined these green plots and gave them names
Down to the smallest role, if and and but,
What flies the time (the globe gone up in flames),

What thunders back to ring the ringing course
And runs like the streaking will, like Shakespeare's horse.

—Joseph Harrison, "Shakespeare's Horse," from Shakespeare's Horse (Waywiser Press, 2015) but in this case actually from Poem-A-Day on April 10, 2014, where I believe it was originally published.

a hundred mountains

For several years, I've wanted to post Ursula K. Le Guin's poem "For Gabriela Mistral," which is a gorgeous poem about translation and geography and language and connection across time. But as much as I love poets writing about other poets, I felt a little weird posting it without actually having read any Mistral. Then, this year for my birthday, Lucy got me a volume of Mistral poetry translated by Le Guin, and I had a different problem, which was picking a poem to post alongside the Le Guin poem. So here is Le Guin on Mistral, for today, and Mistral herself—also about connections and words—for April 20, one of my missed days.

                    En el Valle de Elqui, ceñido
                de cien montañas o de más...

Forty years beyond her mortal years
she came back to me, to our Pacific,
she came here, she
who sank the meek and blinded saint
and the grim men from Spain
in the glory of the lord of angels
and a gust of the craziest wind.
She stood on this northern shore
where gulls whirled like torn paper
and said in the language that I spoke
before I spoke words, "Come!"

"Come!" she said, standing
heavy-bodied and rough-voiced,
deep-breasted as the hills:
"I came north, but you didn't know me.
I've gone home now to the valley
encircled by a hundred mountains,
a hundred mountains, maybe more.
You must come and you must learn
my language."

    If I walk south
with the ocean always on my right
and the mountains on my left,
swimming the mouths of the rivers,
the estuaries and the great canal,
if I walk from high tide to low tide
and full moon to new moon, south,
and from the equinox to solstice, south,
across the equator in a dream of volcanoes,
if I walk through all the Tropics
past bays of amethyst and bays of jade
from April spring to April autumn, south,
and cross the deserts of niter and asbestos
with the sea silver on my right
and a hundred mountains on my left,
a hundred mountains, maybe more,
I will come to the valley.

If I walk all the way, my poet,
if I can walk all the way,
I will come to you.
And I will speak your language.

—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), "For Gabriela Mistral," from Sixty Odd (1994-1999), and in this case from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems: 1960-1920 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

*

                A Blanca Subercaseaux

    Yo no sé si podré venir.
A ver si te cumplo, hermana.

    Llego, si vengo, en aire dulce
por no helarte la llanada
o en el filo de tu sueño
con amor, y sin palabra.

    Empínate por si me cuesta
hallémonos a media marcha,
y me llevas un poco de tierra
por que recuerde mi Posada.

    No temas si bulto no llevo
tampoco si llego mudada.
Y no llores si no te respondo
porque mi culpa fue la palabra.
Pero dame la tuya, la tuya,
que era como paloma posada.


                    For Blanca Subercaseaux

    I don't know if I can come
let's see if I can reach you, sister.

    I'll arrive, if I do, on a mild wind,
so as not to freeze your plains,
or at the edges of your dream,
with love, and without a word.

    Stand up tall, in case I find it
hard to meet halfway,
and bring me a little earth
to remember my Inn by.

    Don't worry if I don't have a shape,
or if I look different.
And don't cry if I don't answer,
for my sin was words.
But give me yours, your word
that was like a dove alighting.

—Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), "Encargo a Blanca" or "Message to Blanca," translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Lagar or Winepress, 1954. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

where language is concealed

Getting this in just under the wire, tonight. I've never posted any Eavan Boland before—I hadn't even read her before a friend introduced me to her work last year—and she is absolutely fucking incredible.

In my last year in College
I set out
to write an essay on
the Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find

the country already lost to me
in song and figure as I scribbled down
names for sweet euphony
and safe digression.

And when I came to the word insinuate
I saw that language could writhe and creep
and the lore of snakes
which I had learned as a child not to fear—
because the Saint had sent them out of Ireland—
came nearer.

Chiasmus. Litotes. Periphrasis. Old
indices and agents of persuasion. How
I remember them in that room where
a girl is writing at a desk with
dusk already in
the streets outside. I can see her. I could say to her–

we will live, we have lived
where language is concealed. Is perilous,
We will be—we have been—citizens
of its hiding place. But it is too late

to shut the book of satin phrases,
to refuse to enter
an evening bitter with peat smoke,
where newspaper sellers shout headlines
and friends call out their farewells in
a city of whispers
and interiors where

the dear vowels
Irish Ireland ours are
absorbed into Autumn air,
are out of earshot in the distances
we are stepping into where we never

imagine words such as hate
and territory and the like—unbanished still
as they always would be—wait
and are waiting under
beautiful speech. To strike.

—Eavan Boland (1944-2020), "Writing in a Time of Violence," from In a Time of Violence, 1994.

sin fronteras

I'm on vacation! This is not a poem about being on vacation. 

To live in the Borderlands means you

     are neither hispana india negra española

     ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed

     caught in the crossfire between camps

     while carrying all five races on your back

     not knowing which side to turn to, run from;

To live in the Borderlands means knowing 

     that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,

     is no longer speaking to you,

     that mexicanas call you rajetas, 

     that denying the Anglo inside you

     is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

Cuando vives en la frontera

     people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,

     you're a burra, buey, scapegoat,

     forerunner of a new race,

     half and half—both woman and man, neither—

     a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to

     put chile in the borscht,

     eat whole wheat tortillas,

     speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;

     be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;

Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to

     resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,

     the pull of the gun barrel,

     the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;

In the Borderlands

     you are the battleground

     where enemies are kin to each other;

     you are at home, a stranger,

     the border disputes have been settled

     the volley of shots have shattered the truce

     you are wounded, lost in action

     dead, fighting back;

To live in the Borderlands means

     the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off

     your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart

     pound you pinch you roll you out

     smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive the Borderlands

     you must live sin fronteras

     be a crossroads.

—Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004), "To live in the Borderlands means you," from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which is an absolutely incredible book that I cannot recommend highly enough. In the book, this poem comes with a glossary: 

gabacha—a Chicano term for a white woman 

rajetas—literally, "split," that is, having betrayed your word 

burra—donkey

buoy—oxen

sin fronteras—without borders

each day is fulminant

Today was both Maya Angelou's birthday—she would have been 90—and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. I was booked solid all day and am completely exhausted and haven't really had any energy to think about any of that, but: Angelou, right?

     FOR DAVID P—B    

The eye follows, the land
Slips upward, creases down, forms 
The gentle buttocks of a young 
Giant. In the nestle,
Old adobe bricks, washed of 
Whiteness, paled to umber,
Await another century.

Star Jasmine and old vines
Lay claim upon the ghosted land, 
Then quiet pools whisper 
Private childhood secrets.

Flush on inner cottage walls 
Antiquitous faces,
Used to the gelid breath
Of old manors, glare disdainfully 
Over breached time.

Around and through these 
Cold phantasmatalities, 
He walks, insisting
To the languid air,
Activity, music,
A generosity of graces.

His lupin fields spurn old
Deceit and agile poppies dance
In golden riot.   Each day is
Fulminant, exploding brightly 
Under the gaze of his exquisite 
Sires, frozen in the famed paint 
Of dead masters. Audacious 
Sunlight casts defiance
At their feet.

—Maya Angelou (1928-2014), "California Prodigal" from And Still I Rise, 1978.

art my way back

I went looking for contemporary poets from Croatia, ideally writing in English, and found Ana Božičević. Her poetry is weird and layered and very contemporary and not always entirely to my taste, but I also really like it; I especially like this one, which was a Poem-a-Day at the Academy of American Poets on November 26, 2013. I think my favorite thing about this poem is the enjambment and the accompanying punctuation, which is completely killer.

Skinny dirt road
In the middle of the ocean.
That led to the house of art.
I took it. The engine nearly
Drowned. I lied that it was fun
That I’d do it again. When I got to
That shore
The house was gone and when
I looked back, so was the path.
Now I’m old. Drown in my bed
A thousand miles inland.
For years I thought
I could
Art my way back. Cats sing
Of rose dawns. This country’s a
Mirror image
Of the one I left, except
I’ve bad dreams. And
You’re the only
Person who’s not here.
Is it the same
For you.

—Ana Božičević (b. 1977), "Joyride," 2013.

from one golden page to another

It's still April 30 in my timezone, though just barely. I've had a busy day—among other things, I started a new job—but I'm also feeling a little bittersweet about the end of the month. It seems like it's gone by unusually quickly; I wish I'd had a little more time with April, this year.

On the other hand, there's always next year. See you then, and here's one to be going on with:

for forty years
the sheets of white paper have
passed under my hands and I have tried
    to improve their peaceful

emptiness putting down
little curls little shafts
of letters words
    little flames leaping

not one page
was less to me than fascinating
discursive full of cadence
    its pale nerves hiding

in the curves of the Qs
behind the soldierly Hs
in the webbed feet of the Ws
    forty years

and again this morning as always
I am stopped as the world comes back
wet and beautiful I am thinking
    that language

is not even a river
is not a tree is not a green field
is not even a black ant traveling
    briskly modestly

from day to day from one
golden page to another.

—Mary Oliver (b. 1935), "Forty Years," from West Wind, 1997 (and Poetry Magazine, March 1996). I love a lot of poets, and a lot of poetry, but there's something about Mary Oliver that gets me right in the heart, every single time.

love is not as simple

When it's late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it's a little more complicated than that.

It's more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor's clothes.

No, it's more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It's a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

—Billy Collins (b. 1941), "Adage," from Ballistics, 2008.

One of the things I love about Billy Collins—and the things I love about Billy Collins are legion, because he's one of my favorite poets—is the way he takes familiar things, like tropes, and cliches, and daily life, and the ordinary world, and gives them just enough of a turn to show them in a different light, and make you see them in a different way. On some level that's just poetry, but the way Collins does it is transformative and delicate and magical, and sometimes funny and sharp-edged and dangerous, in a way that I really appreciate.

island

Rita Dove, always and forever.

Shape the lips to an o, say a.
That's island.

One word of Swedish has changed the whole neighborhood.
When I look up, the yellow house on the corner
is a galleon stranded in flowers. Around it

the wind. Even the high roar of a leaf-mulcher
could be the horn-blast from a ship
as it skirts to the misted shoals.

We don't need much more to keep things going.
Families complete themselves
and refuse to budge from the present,
the present extends its glass forehead to sea
(backyard breezes, scattered cardinals)

and if, one evening, the house on the corner
took off over the marshland,
neither I nor my neighbor
would be amazed. Sometimes

a word is found so right it trembles
at the slightest explanation.
You start out with one thing, end
up with another, and nothing's
like it used to be, not even the future.

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Ö" from The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.

leave comfort root-room

I am overplaying my hand, a bit, posting Hopkins this early in the month. It was that kind of day, though; maybe one of these years I will post a Hopkins poem that isn't a sonnet. MAYBE SOMEDAY I WILL POST THE EPITHALAMION. Anyway, not today.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "My own heart"

Oh gosh, the things he does with language. It cannot have been easy to live in your head, GMH, but I remain extraordinarily glad that you wrote it all down.