I Am Much Too Alone In This World

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) almost exactly straddles the 19th and 20th century, dying of leukemia at age 51 in Switzerland, though his best literary years were in Paris (1902-1914) where, for a time, he was Rodin's secretary(!).  Both a poet and a novelist, he was admired by his contemporaries but not broadly popularized until after his death.  His reputation has grown over time, his lyrical style, of which this selection is not a prime example, striking. 

For me, this poem captures that yearning to know and be known - authentically, purely - that should be at the start of every love.  It's a manifesto of good intentions that, hopefully, can be carried out through the right balancing of risk/self-protection.  It's also a plea that, one hopes, is shared by the love object and to the same degree.  

(I chose this oil of him vs. a photograph since this is more flattering.  By far.)

I am much too alone


I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

Let's invite something new
by unifying our silences;
if, then and there, we advance,
we'll know it soon enough.

                                                                   Rainer Maria Rilke (transl. by Annemarie S.Kilder)

Sonnet 60 - John Berryman

 Another sonnet by John Berryman.  (Be sure to read any and all that are - or will be - in this blog.  You must.  You will thank me, but you don't have to.) Missing out on Berryman is missing out on what can be the result when a person of his complexity and command of language focuses on Love.  

As for this one.... in whatever continent's city I've waited for a subway train, this is the poem that comes to life just before that train arrives.  It will happen to you, too, after you read the second strophe.  You'll think of this poem the next time you anticipate meeting someone you hope is "the one"..... And if you have found "the one" already, all the more reason to feel like this every time you are apart and reuniting.....  (Speaking of subways,  my iPhone app of the Paris Metro just flashed a message that service on "Ligne 1", the one that runs east-west and stops at the Louvre, is "pertubé" - "perturbed", by which they mean it has a problem.  How apropos of poetry to think of a train as "perturbed"...)
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Sonnet 60

Today is it?  Is it today?  I shudder

For nothing in my chair, and suddenly yawn.

Today I suddenly believe.  Since dawn

When I got up, my muscles like a rudder

strain crosswise from this work.  I rise and mutter

Something, and hum, pace, and sit down again

Hard.  A butterfly in my shoulder then

Stops and aches.  My stomach swings like a shutter.

As the undergrounds piston a force of air

Before their crash into the station, you

Are felt before your coming, and the platforms shake.

So light, so small, so far still, to impair

Action and peace so….risks we take make true

Maybe our safeties….come for our risk’s sake.

                                                                                    John Berryman - American

In This Valley - Yehuda Amichai

With this one, Amichai now has the most poems (5) thus far in this blog.  If you read the others - go to the side-bar and "click" his name under "Poets" - you will begin to get a feel for why.  To write well about Love, one must experience it.  To write with passion about Love, one must also experience its opposite: Loss.  Each is the necessary reference point by which to fully appreciate the other.  His poems are infused with that appreciation, of which a distinctive part is an urgency to live/love fully. Being an Israeli who fought in three wars will do that. 
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In This Valley

In this valley which many waters
carved out in endless years
so that the light breeze may now
pass through it to cool my forehead,
I think about you. From the hills I hear
voices of men and machines wrecking and building.

And there are loves which cannot
be moved to another site.
They must die at their place and in their time
like an old clumsy piece of furniture
that’s destroyed together with
the house in which it stands.

But this valley is a hope
of starting afresh without having to die first,
of loving without forgetting the other love,
of being like the breeze that passes through it now
without being destined for it.
                                                                                                 Yehuda Amichai -Israeli

Canto do Noivo (Song of the Bridegroom) - Murilo Mendes

 Another Brazilian poet.  (May be I am being influenced by having lunch Sunday at a slice of home: a "churrascaria" (grilled meats restaurant) in Northeast Philadelphia, where there is a small Brazilian community.  Murilo Mendes (1901-1975) was a part of the Modernist Movement in Brazilian literature during the 1920s-1930s.  He was also a diplomat, studied in France, taught in Italy, and died in Portugal.  He said that he had his first poetic revelation when he saw Halley's Comet in 1910.  I hope to have done justice to it with my translation.  To me, its "take" on marriage in the voice of a bridegroom is unexpected, making the title a bit ironic.
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Canto do Noivo (Song of the Bridegroom)
                                                                        transl. from Portuguese - Harrison Tao


I will see your shapes take form little by little,
will see them shift in color, in weight, in rhythm,
your breasts swell in the hot night,
the eyes be transformed at the budding idea of a first child.

I will assist in the unfolding of your ages,
watching over all your transformations.

Already in my memory is the girl mother-to-dolls,
and after that, the one by the window in the afternoon,
and the one who changed on knowing me,
and the one close-by the union of bodies and souls.
The others will come. Your hips that will spread out,
the fallen breasts, the blameless eyes, the hair without luster
will be and tether you closer to the meaning of love,
my darling martyr, shape that I destroyed, integrated into mine.
                                   
                                                                                                          Murilo Mendes - Brazilian

It Happens - M. Blumenthal

I came across Blumenthal (1949- ) in the early 90s through his book Against Romance.  Trained as a lawyer, the calling of poetry was stronger and he has spent his career in the wanderings of an academic as a guest lecturer or visiting professor in various places, including Harvard and Hungary, where he stayed for four years as a Fullbright scholar.  He has won prizes but not the biggies - Pulitzer, National Book Award - and I'm not sure how he stands in the current "ranking" of American poets.   Regardless, his poems have a sardonic tone (sometimes tinged with sorrow), something with which I identify.  We are also contemporaries - he is a few years older - and thus share a common background, at least as far as the course of cultural and societal events.  (On the personal side, as you look at the photo, this is a man whose parents gave him away, almost at birth, to an aunt and uncle, a fact he didn't discover until he was ten years old. )  This poem is his "take" on an experience we have all had...)
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It Happens

A man wakes. A woman wakes.
In the separate countries
that are their bodies, it is always
a season, a time of some fruitfulness,
and in their eyes they reveal
the shaken fruition of separate light,
the auspices of an empire
entirely their own. There are flowers
in the vase, tulips perhaps,
and outside, small flakes of snow
feathering into the streets
are a sign of some seasonal ascendancy,
a grief too separate from them
to be of interest, yet part
of the world’s wild order, part
of the making that will become them.

All night, they have shaken their wishes
from themselves like sequins, and they
reach out now, from the rapt attentiveness
of their bodies, to find each other again
in the semi-shock of a world peopled and disparate,
remote yet touchable. He, perhaps, has dreamt
of deer in a yard somewhere, goats
rubbing their clipped horns against a fence,
while she, she is thinking, as he reaches out
to place a hand on her beautiful thigh,
of the red carnation some man once gave her,
in a crowded station in some country
she no longer remembers. The white light
of a wintry day enters the room, and they
do not yet know how great, or small, will be
their love for one another, they do not yet know
whether the song they had sung last night
will survive the resurrected pasts of separate sleep,
whether the whiteness of this dawn is the white
of a clean slate, or merely a fog night has issued
over a continuing clarity, whether love
is really love at all, or whether
what happened before has happened again
and they are two separate empires once more—
drifting off and drifting on, reaching out
for what they once thought was dry land
but is only, alas, another profundity
of deep waters and strange occupants, things
too far beneath the surface to reach out and touch,
to see or to feel, too deep
for even flesh to answer to, or to call.

Michael Blumenthal- American (intimations)

Amar (To Love) - C. Drummond de Andrade

Portuguese is a language whose musicality is apparent to anyone who has heard the lyrics to The Girl From Ipanema.   

However strung together, words in Portuguese have a natural lilt and a cadence that makes the most ordinary speech song-like because Brazilians speak with passion, regardless of subject. Combine that expressive spirit with the tropical abundance of sensual possibilities, and everyone is a poet.  (I've read that, during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, there was an expectation that any self-respecting educated person would have penned a volume of poetry!)   Brazil is also a country, unlike the U.S., where poets are celebrated household names and where poetry is as present at a party as food, drink and music.  Of these poets, Carlos Drumond de Andrade (1902-1987) is generally considered to have been one of the greatest, not just for his poetry but for his influence on poets of his - and later - generations.  He has been translated into English, most notably by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (who lived in Brazil for many years) and others.  The translation below is mine.  (I spent my "Wonder Bread Years" - 4-14 - in Brazil.)

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Amar     (To Love)
                                          transl. from Brazilian Portuguese - Harrison Tao

What can one creature do,
Among his fellow creatures, if not love?
Love and forget,
Love and mis-love,
Love, unlove, love?
Always, even to eyes gone glassy, love?

What else, I ask, can a loving being do,
Alone in a rotating universe, if not
To turn too, and love?
Love what the sea brings ashore,
Love what it buries and what, in the sea-breezes,
Is salt, or love’s yearning, or plain anguish?

To love solemnly the desert palms,
Love what is surrendered or pregnant with demands,
Love the barren, the unpolished,
A flowerless vase, an iron floor,
The inert breast, the street seen in a dream, a bird of prey.

This is our destiny: to love without accounting,
Distributing it to the faithless and the hollow,
An unlimited donation to complete ingratitude,
And, still from the emptied shell, the nervous, patient
Scrounging out of more and more love.

To love even our own lack of love, and in our parched state
To love the implicit water, the implied kiss, the infinite thirst.
                                                                                                       
Carlos Drumond de Andrade (Brazilian)

The First Day - C. Rossetti

 

Rossetti came from one of those families (like the Kennedys) where you could look like an under-achiever because you were "only" a Senator.  

Her brother was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (painter, poet) and her father Gabrieli Rossetti (poet).  Her poetry, reflective of her time (mid 1800's England), isn't usually my taste, but I've always liked this one, perhaps because it isn't as over-written as (I feel) many of her other ones.  (There are photos of her in later life, but they are not flattering in the least: she was not photogenic.... even this illustration is very kind to her looks.)
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The First Day

I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season it might be;
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So, unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom, yet, for many a May.

If only I could recollect it! Such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow.
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much!
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand! - Did one but know!

                                                                                          

Christina Rossetti - English

Love At First Sight - W. Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska looks like someone's sweet grandmother (which she probably also is!), but in the realm of literature she is in rarefied company as a Nobel Prize winner.  As I am not an academic, I won't expound on what makes her worthy.  As a reader of poetry, I can tell you that she is easy to read and understand, her word choices from every-day usage.  But what she constructs with them!  It's like being given the same set of Lego blocks, and she builds Cinderella's Castle in Disneyworld and we - or at least I - make a squarish Soviet-era building.


This poem appeals to my sense of Fate (or lack thereof) about the things that happen to us.  Is there inevitability and all that preceded it was preparation for the main event? 
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Love At First Sight


They would be quite surprised,
that for a long time
chance had been toying with them.

Not altogether ready
to turn into their fate,
it would draw them together, pull them apart,
cut them off on their path,
and, swallowing a giggle,
leap to the side.

There were doorknobs and doorbells,
where touch lay on touch
beforehand.
Suitcases next to one another in the baggage check.
Maybe one night the same dream,
blurred upon awakening.

Every beginning, after all,
is nothing but a sequel,
and the book of events
is always open in the middle.
                                             

Wyslawa Szymborska - Polish

Rescue the Dead - D. Ignatow

I first encountered Ignatow's poems while still in college, shortly after discovering poetry beyond the "usual suspects" spoon-fed in high-school.   It was a paper-back edition of "Rescue The Dead" and the title-poem stunned me with its "definitions" of love, creating questions I never knew existed.  I marveled at the layers of complexity possible in such few - and simple - words strung together as he had done.   As I have aged, it's a poem that has not.  His later poems are so sparse and simple that a critic called them "Zen-like".  (Intimation.)

Last year, I found a signed, first edition hard-cover copy of "Rescue The Dead".
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Rescue The Dead


Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,
is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,
is to respect fire,
is to study man's eyes and his gestures
as he talks,
is to set bread upon the table
and a knife discreetly by,
is to pass through crowds
like a crowd of oneself.
Not to love is to live.

To love is to be led away
into a forest where the secret grave
is dug, singing, praising darkness
under the trees.

To live is to sign your name,
is to ignore the dead,
is to carry a wallet
and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.
My boat wallows in the sea.
You who are free,
rescue the dead.
                                    
David Ignatow  -American

Symptoms of Love*- Robert Graves

 As one of the British literary lions of the last century (20^th), Graves first made his mark as a poet writing about World War I and followed that with a long career – he died in 1985 at age 90 – that included historical novels, seminal essays on literary criticism, and translations of classics.  Of his novels,  I, Claudius  and its sequel  Claudius the God  are perhaps the best known.

In this one, it’s all anxiety and anticipation: who, in love, has not known “laggard dawns”!   The economy of words and conciseness - particularly in the second and third verses - reminds me of a telegram (for those of you old enough to have seen one).

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Symptoms of Love
 
 

Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason. 

Symptoms of true love 
Are leanness, jealousy, 
Laggard dawns; 

Are omens and nightmares – 
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign: 

For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look, 

Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?                                                          

Robert Graves - English
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