Wáng Wéi translations BIRDS

Myriad Birds Calling in the Ravine
—Interlinear translation of Wáng Wéi's Niāo Míng Jiàn

I am lost amid the falling petals of the cassia tree
calm spring night in the deserted hills
rising moon startles the mountain birds
birds singing forever deep in the ravine.

—2nd translation
Lulled by a sweet drift of cassia petals
night nestles on the empty ridges
moonrise startles the mountain birds
a cascade of birdsong floods the steep ravine.

Water Ousels in the Gorge
—after Wáng Wéi's Niāo Míng Jiàn
(freewrite transliteration)

They hide between shining trees
A stone hut in the distance
A woman's thoughts like the moon
trapped in the pines
Windows, so like the sun, or eyes
Clouds upon clouds, mountains
and the moon, hidden in the mist
Ousels skim across reflected light
the river mouth singing.


Poetry Inside Out workshop
Niǎo Míng Jiàn
Wáng Wéi 699-759

Rén xián guìhuā luò,
Yèjìng chūnshān kōng.
Yuèchū jīng shān niǎo,
Shí míng chūn jiàn zhōng.

To see the Chinese Mountain Song

FOUND POEMS FROM THE IRISH: (A WOMAN’S LAMENT)

FOUND POEMS FROM THE IRISH:

(A WOMAN’S LAMENT)

I composed a poem on the bottom of the sea:

It’s only a story of a story. An old one, at that.

You know how it ends.
I saw him once in a vision.
And it was then I knew.

I remember him standing in the white heather.

He was my hero, my lively lad,

Skin as white as snow.

Eyes, bright moons,

Arm in arm with the sun.

A shaft of sunlight fell on him.

Like windows opening on the sky.

Out of the ordinary—that quicksilver moment.

Both old and young, we were caught between two times.

What’s destiny to me? Not a honeymoon.

The walls of the otherworld are listening.

Oh love of my heart,

Can you not sing of this life?

From sunset to sun up,

He’d make a nest in your ear.

We had the current and wind with us,

We had the sun and moon with us,

But he said naught of dew nor rain.

We were waiting for spring

But the bottom fell out of the sky.

When we made a knot with our tongues,

We couldn’t untie with our teeth.

Grá. Oh pulse of my heart. Love.

I dropped that word on the ground.
And it shattered like a vessel.

He’s taken the music from the world.

There wasn’t a word left for me.

The music of the sun on the sea and land—

The birds are singing

The daftness of our words

In the face of the wind.

The three drops of a wife:

the drop of blood,

the milk of tears

the milk of sweat.

I have no cause to stay.

He’s a rock of a man, hard

and deaf as stone.

He has not rent, nor concern nor sorrow.

He wants both the hide and its price.

A man hears only what he wants to hear.

Not: You’re my music.

Not: I love you.

It’s not possible to serve two shores.

There are always longer horns on the cattle overseas.

Clear out of my net.

I have plenty else to do.

The sea was rough today.

No fair mouthings (sweet talk).

No bird music—

I had spoken harshly to him.

The heat wilted the flowers.

My garden’s a wilderness again.

No herbs nor healing against death.

The puca’s pissed on the berries.

Don’t let me hear another word!

God’s tears in the web of the little wild ox (spider)

And my mother’s fingers gulping rosary beads.

clocha paidrín.

The tide is ebbing.

The sun’s slipping under.

There’s always a bitter blade of wind.

He never said goodbye to me.

It’s not worth the wait now

(for) a place beyond death.

This world’s closing in on me.

Pray for my sake.

3/9/98

Two poems by Lo Ch'ing 羅青

GOING HOME

Too late
to catch the last bus...

If you must go,
ride your shoes home.

I'll pedal the evening wind
to follow you.

          (tr. Maureen Hurley with Lo Ch'ing 羅青)


CROSSWORD

One jet fighter
a single dove
bisecting the sky
draws
an invisible cross

     (tr. Maureen Hurley with Lo Ch’ing)

UWP journal: poetry files from Vins arrive

13 July. Today I slept late. I’ve been depressed lately, especially yesterday as I dreamed I was still in Amsterdam, and Vins was sitting on the floor, I could see there was a disaster about to happen.

And he said, go home. Sort of like how you tell a dog to go home, the emphasis was on the word go. Cold and deep was his voice, but it wasn’t directed at me. Sure, there was trouble, yes. He was part of it. But he was also shielding me from it. I had no business becoming involved with him. He was telling me to go home out of love, not out of anger or hatred. To protect me from something, I know not what. His own darkness.

Yesterday I finished reading Dracula, it has a quality similar to that, protecting the women folk, especially Mina Leven, though she had a wondrous brain, “like a man’s,” someone said. What catastrophe was about to rain down on Vins’ head here?

I finished my letter to Jan Bogaerts, I’m sure it too is related to my depression. My immobility, my inability to work through the dilemma of both Jan and Vins, childhood friends not speaking to each other—and I was the fulcrum.

Vins says that he loves me, but he is not in love with me, and I know he can’t seem to live with someone. It’s too upsetting for him. Like me, he needs solitude. I leave, give him his space.

Saturday, a letter came with a copy of the poetry files that he had kept. We fought over the phone when I discovered that he went into the private files on my desk. He claimed it was an accident. But I am glad to get the Dutch to English translations. Some poems have gone through the sieve of three languages. Like Marta Manarini: Spanish to Dutch to English.

But it was a wonderful letter particularly adept in avoiding issues of the heart, shedding light on nothing other than I arrived at an unfortunate time. He took his crabbiness out on me.

With Vins, there is no equilibrium between work and people. He feels secure being with a community of teachers, scholars, and writers. I wonder if moving away from friends and lovers, to that of a colleague is the right direction? Then the yes. Our affair had run its course, but we were having trouble letting it go.

There was a very funny story about Vincent van Gogh, buying copiachu, a paint softener, and VO medicine. When Vincent asked if it could be mixed with turpentine, the shopkeeper replied, do you have to destroy your sorry ass even more?

Vincent wanted to give his colors more light and depth, and he used the thinner liberally. Even now his paints aren’t dry And probably never will be. The Potato Eaters and his windmill and trestle paintings are still wet. But the varnish over the top shrank, causing the paint to craze. In 1928 The Potato Eaters was given a new, backing and restorers hot-glued it onto a new canvas. The paint and varnish will remain forever wet.

At Schiphal, all the guards sport machine guns, in preparation for the Israeli Prime Minister’s arrival. Prime Minister Rabin, Dutch Prime Minister Lubin, and the Israeli Embassy are all out to greet the Prime Minister Rabin. Utter chaos.

Jan diagnosed Vins’ hennaed hair as a harbinger of midlife crisis. Maybe so, but it sure was fun slopping what looked like cow shit on each other’s heads, and then washing it out. All green and red.

Unfortunately the henna nested in my hair like a Rastafarian nightmare, and I had to resort to a comb and gobs of cream rinse to coax the last of the henna out. I like my hair hennaed as it’s much thicker and has a red sheen to it. It isn’t all that different from my natural color, but it covers the gray nicely.

Today’s mail brought a parcel from Vinz, half of his birthday roses, because he never bought me flowers, some chocolates, two love, notes, my modem cord, sweatpants, and a wooden Hans Brinker skate. Thawing treasures from the flea market.

BLUE SEGMENT, WHITE CENTER

BLUE SEGMENT, WHITE CENTER

(Or why I didn't go to Russia to marry the singer)

                                    —from paintings by Kandinsky

The birds sing a blue tic-tac-toe with the moon

and ideals carve themselves into oars

to row us across the crest of the 20th century.

Myth and language are buried

in the algebraic equation of the sun,

and the artist's palette. Private symbols explode,

sawhetting across the industrial calligraphy of the sky.

Einstein was right: gravity bends light.

All this deliberation on the natural state

and the shadow of our eventual death

feeds my guilt; I am trapped into accepting

the evolution of air, the shifting of time,

grace notes on the telephone wires,

the piano's thoughts colliding with dust motes—

The hunger of a dream waking

a contextual tableau we punctuated

with molecular definitions

and artificial boundaries

between nations, peoples, lovers.

But I tire of explaining how the open-

armed lover on the Street of Painters  waits with shackles.

When the storyline gets tangled in barbed wire,

the politic wind merely teases it into shape;

it knows no boundaries, no border guards maintaining order

by calling it love, or sings arias til death do us part.

xox       is how the game is played out       

xxo            with illiterate kisses and hugs on ransom notes

xy                    so that chromosomes may evenly divide.

Blue segment, white center:

a flock of birds painted on the channel wall,

suspended flight across the water.

In the muddied clarity between shoreline

and hidden river, distant ships trick the eye

into believing they navigate the land too—

their masts, thin reeds in the autumn wind.

Sinking its teeth upon a reflection

of the moon, how easily the swamp

is placated by its own origin,

its own death.

8/20/92

Schiphol, Amsterdam

THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY WALKS AMONG US

THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY WALKS AMONG US
                                     —for the mongoloid

Musing over complexities of love gone wrong,
of race, of gender, how the domestic warfront
is a soiled microcosm of the larger mirror,
I avoid the mongoloid man walking down Main Street,
who unconsciously slicks back his blond hair.
In that gesture, I could see the father was probably vain,
a lady-killer, but genetics betrayed him.
The shadow of beauty abandoned guilt behind the moon.
In that gesture, it came to me, how his face
held all the elements of race—who we are.
I want to tell the anthropologists—wait!
we've had the model in front of us all along.
I want to tell the xenophobes and the racists,
his face is that of our ancestors.
Caught on the street in the morning sun, 
unadulterated love walks among us.
How easily we make invisible
something common, holy and profound.
Can we still learn to emulate his heart;
he who loves so unreservedly, 
and wears the face of us all?

4/18/92
Forestville, CA

THIS IS JUST TO SAY (for Kathy Evans)

THIS IS JUST TO SAY
             (an occasional poem for Kathy Evans)


Because the collected Love Poems slept all night long
on top of O'Hara's Lunch Poems, Dostoyevsky is implied
though the window sill is composed of pure morning light.
I moved the bottle of grapefruit juice from the floor
beneath the rocking chair (& one lone shoe) to the sink
only to have it explode in the sunlight onto the photos of your children
smiling crazily at us from beneath a juicy glaze—
& Oleg hurries to save them from the indifferent nature
of love in this world; the mathematical division of families—
his own children asleep on the other side of the world,
your mother wondering why a stranger with a Russian accent
answers your phone on a Sunday morning.
We continually face separations of the heart
that is why it hungers for sum totals.
Everything needs translation—
The sea plane outside your window taxies across alluvial mud;
the pilot has to go so far to reach water these days.
The French family on the dock screams goodbye
to their papá as he lifts off from the gravity of this world.
This division cleaves us from what we know to be true.
If only it were so simple: Peterson's Guide to Western Birds
holding us aloft and classified from human wishes,
last year's wives, and the daily remains—
enough to sustain our increasing appetites.
Migratory birds sup most delicately on soup du jour,
the mud — moist, hard and moaning. No free lunch here.
You will not die from the multiple invasions of winter
without a single answer from the abundance of nature.
This thirst we share in common.


4/21/91
Mill Valley  mudflats

1992 Artists' Palette, Mill Valley, 1st Honorable Mention, chosen by Rosalie Moore & Kathy Evans


4/21/91
Hmm, my prose piece is
Easter Sunday, April 19, 1992 typo?

Sunday Morning, Berth 1-11, Sausalito 
GEWOON MAAR OM JE TE LATEN WETEN
         ( een gelegenheidsgedicht voor Kathy Evans)

Omdat de verzamelde Love Poems de hele nacht sliepen
boven op de Lunch Poems van O'Hara zit Dostojevski er ook tussen
al is de vensterbank gemaakt van zuiver morgenlicht.
Ik heb de fles met grapefruitsap, op de vloer
onder de schommelstoel (& een eenzame schoen), op het aanrecht gezet
maar daar explodeerde hij juist in het zonlicht over de fotoos van je kinderen
die met een streep door ze heen naar ons lachen van onder een sappig glazuur—
& Oleg haast zich om ze te redden van de onverschillige aard
van liefde in deze wereld; de wiskundige deling van gezinnen —
zijn eigen kinderen in slaap aan de andere kant van de wereld,
jouw moeder die zich afvraagt waarom een vreemde met een Russisch accent                
bij jou de telefoon opneemt op een zondagmorgen.
We zien steeds scheidingen van het hart onder ogen
daarom hunkert het naar totalen.
Alles heeft vertaling nodig —
Het watervliegtuig voor je raam taxiet over aangespoelde modder;
de piloot moet zo ver gaan om bij water te komen tegenwoordig.
Het Franse gezin aan de kade schreeuwt tot ziens
naar hun papá terwijl die loskomt van de zwaartekracht van deze wereld.
Deze deling klieft ons van wat wij weten dat waar is.
Was het maar zo eenvoudig: Peterson's Guide to Western Birds
die ons omhoog houdt en in een andere klasse dan mensenwensen,
de echtgenoten van verleden jaar, en de dagelijkse overblijfselen —
genoeg om onze toenemende begeerten gaande te houden.
Trekvogels souperen zeer kies op soep du jour,
de modder — vochtig, hard en kreunend. Geen gratis maal hier.
Je zult niet doodgaan aan de meervoudige invasies van de winter
zonder een enkel antwoord van de overvloed van de natuur.
Deze dorst hebben we samen gemeen.


 21/April/91
Maureen Hurley
De  schorren en slikken van Mill Valley
Nederl. vert. Vins van Neerven, 10/92

Poetry USA translations, Soviet poets

 

USSR journal, Lost in translation

10 January, Igor asks what about money for poetry? He says he needs more Sonoma County poems to translate. He wants a penpal. I think he thinks he’s going to strike it rich with us. Rotor magazine said it will donate a computer to Igor for this project. His self-importance needs no translation.

The club is busy with translating sci-fi stories. Famous people like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke. I tell them that I can publish their Soviet poems translated into English in Green Fuse, Poetry USA and feature their work on KPFA, in a radio review. There is no money in it for them. I tell them that we need 17 to 20 poems that will represent Cherkassy. Everybody is sitting back on their laurels. Rotor promises that it will make a Cherkassy equivalent of Poetry USA, publishing California poets in translation.

Igor’s mother hands him a jar, he fills with piss as they discuss the problems of publishing. I’m so frustrated, I want to scream, and quit the program. His loving parents remove the jar of piss, don’t know what to make of that. Try not to think of it. But it is an apt metaphor.

We drink thick marsala and coffee, eat awful Soviet chocolate and discuss poetry. Oleg calls Professor Shpak who translated Thomas McGrath into Russian, to say that we’re running late. I’ve been a crab all day, snapping at everyone. The doctor who adjusted my back, threw me across the bed as if I were a sack of potatoes. I hurt more now than I did before. We are at loggerheads with so many different systems colluding.

His mother, in a blue house dress, sits on the floor next to the Cyrillic typewriter. I think she thinks she’s his agent. How to explain to them that we poets don’t have groups, we don’t have sponsors, and bank accounts. We poets work alone, without pay. Without censorship. Someone mentions Jesse Helms. I have to convince them that this is an altruistic cultural exchange.

Earlier, Oleg and I worked on a poem. The problems of translation make themselves apparent. I understand a few words like dollar, Marina, conversation. The nuances of language I understand, please—everyone is talking all at once. Everything takes longer than expected. The autonomy of two separate groups standing on a 70-year-old cultural bridge that cannot be crossed. Window to the west, indeed.

I leave Igor’s, dissatisfied. So little was accomplished. They are too afraid to publish our poems for fear of censorship, they become their own worst enemies, censoring themselves. How the hell is perestroika supposed to work if everyone is so timid? What next? I need a publisher here as well, apparently. I’m a little annoyed—getting work published here isn’t my responsibility, it’s their’s.

We are running late for every meeting, getting nowhere fast, we are more and more off schedule. Oleg says it’s fine, we’re on Soviet time. Dr. Shpak is next. Perhaps we will do better with him. We need several pans in the fire to accomplish anything at all which only leads to more confusion.

When John Masura told me about Dr. Shpak it sounded like a good connection. Oleg made a face and suggested that Dr. Shpak was a little bit crazy. Called me a proletariat a American poet, and mentions his book. What the hell is a proletariat American poet anyway?

Maybe Dr. Shpak is crazy, but he did translate Thomas McGrath‘s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, into Ukrainian, which sold a whopping 50,000 copies. That’s not slouching, and he has been working on an anthology, Istoriya Amerikanskoy poesii XX stolitia (1912-1945).

Vetted writers like Whitman, Twain, Frost, and London are accepted in the USSR—McGrath is neither mainstream nor safe. The common denominator is love of land, I think. And Marxism. McGrath was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.Valery mentions an essay of his, A Soviet View on McGrath, published in the North Dakota Quarterly. Tells me to contact Fred Whitehead in Kansas City.

But he is also querying me on the American poets of the 1980s. I share what books I brought, an armload from City Lights, and Zeitgeist Press, including David Eggars. Mostly Beat or street poets vs. the academic, mainstream, or Iowa workshoup poets. Apparently the Beats are contraband.

Later, Oleg realized that Dr. Valery Shpak is OK. And I make a mental note that I mustn’t trust his judgment of people so implicitly. He’s not always right— even if he lives here. Old habits die hard.

(Later they will translate one of my “proletariat American” poems into Ukrainian. I have no idea if it was ever published.)

MANTLE

           —for Bob Kaufman
              April 18, 1925 to Jan 12, 1986

News travels slowly.
In the time it took God to make the earth
you died and a voice fell from the sky.
I've been looking for you
in each bent and ragged head
of those stumbling down Telegraph,
of those ranting in Brautigan Square,
of those who live in Market Street doorways.
They say Lenin's legs were blackened
when the shroud slipped off.
I saw the map of death on your face
as you wandered the outskirts of your city.
The same map in my mother's eyes
and in the faces of those in the streets
who followed me even in sleep
but who held my hand in the dark?

A crowd laughed at the screaming woman
whose hands beat against our car window
as a man dragged her into an alley.
Another woman, still drunk, comes over
and complains of lost car keys and stolen children.
And in that order.
The sky caught fire
and seven astronauts were swallowed
by a blue-mantled snail.
Film makers converge upon us,
their eyes taking in odd angles of light.
It's like watching Kennedy shot over and over
with Jackie piecing together bits of skull and memory
with ineffective hands.

Bees carry the skull of night back into the hive.
The dead have taken to scratching poems on the water.
Even if we scatter your ashes to the wind for ten years
and listen for lyrical translations from the other side
it still won't cleanse this place.
Ten years of silence is buried.
We had a vision but the map is lost.
Who will collect the messages?
We confuse pinholes of light
leaking from rotted buckets
for the ancient rain of stars.
In my dreams they are coming and the door won't lock.

While in exile, lean closer to the sun.
Become birdlike
until you land spread-eagled
on this bone of the word
and in this endless blue
your flexing soul
will be the sound deep space sings.

2/2/86      


1988 Green Fuse
1986-88 Falling to Sea Level
1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Prize
         Thread Winding the Loom CPITS

MANTO                                                                        

                                    —para Bob Kaufman

Las noticias viajan lentamente.

En el tiempo que le tomo a dios hacer la tierra

moriste y una voz cayo del cielo.

Te he buscado en cada cabeza agachada y harapienta

de los que tropiezan por la avenida Telegraph

de los que viven erl los zaguanes de la calle Market.

Dicein que 1as piernas de Lenin se ennegrecieron

cuando se deslizó el ataúd.

Vi el mapa de la muerte en tu cara

mientras vagabas por las afueras de tu ciudad.

El mismo mapa en los ojos de mi madre

y en las caras de aquellos en la calle

que me seguían incluso en el sueño

pero ¿quién me cogió la mano en la oscuridad?

La muchedumbre se rió de la mujer gritona

cuyas manos golpedban nuestro parabrisas

mientras un hombre la arrastraba hacia un callejón.

Otra mujer, todavía borracha, viene para

quejarse de las llaves perdidas y los niños robados.

El cielo se encendió y siete astronautas fueron tragados

por un caracol de mano azul.

Cineastes convergen sobre nosotros

sus ojos toman originales ángulos de luz .

Es como mirar a Kennedy tiroteado una y otra vez

mientras Jackie junta pedazos de la calavera

y la memoria con manos inefectivas.

Las abeias llevan la calavera de la noche a la colmena.

Los muertos ya están granando sus poemas en el agua.

Aunque esparéramos tus cenizas al viento por diez años

esperando traducciones líricas del otro lado

ni así se limpiaría este lugar.

Diez años de silencio están enterrados.

Teníamos una visión pero se perdió el mapa.

¿Quién reunirá los mensajes? Confundimos los agujeros de luz

goteando de las cubetas podridas

con la lluvia antigua de las estrellas.

Vienen en mis sueños y la puerta no se podrá cerrar.

En el destierro, inclínate al sol.

Hazte como pájaro

hasta que aterrices extendido en este hueso del mundo

en este azul sin  fin tu alma desdoblada

será el sonido que canta el espacio profundo.

2/2/86                        —traducción John Oliver Simon y Juvenal Acosta                                           

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level

TENGO DINERO

These silver fish in my pocket
sing for their supper
sing for flies and oranges
under a full moon.
At Cabo San Lucas,
the wind through the arch
is like the sighing of empty vaults.
The fishing banks are open for commerce.
"Silver sinkers from old dimes
make the best lures,"
an old Indian said.
The mines are empty.
The mines are empty.
Let's lift the moratorium.
We need silver to seed the clouds;
to line the sow's ear.
The gypsy's fortune speaks in tongues
when the fish won't bite.

12/5/1985

1989 Poetry SF Quarterly, Honorable Mention, spring issue, 

1987 Sculpture Gardens Review

         Marin Poetry Review

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level

TENGO DINERO

Aquellos peces de plata en mi bolsillo
cantan para comer
cantan para moscas y naranjas
bajo de la luna llena.
En Cabo San Lucas,
el viento por el arco
susurra como bovedas vacias.
Los bancos de las pescas
se abren para negocios.
"Los plomos de plata
de las viejas monedas
de diez centavos
son los mejores cebos,"
decia el indio viejo.
Las minas estan vacias.
Las minas estan vacias.
Levantemos el moratorio.
Necesitamos la plata para sembrar
las nubes;
para forrar la oreja la cerda.
La suerte del gitano habla en lenguas
cuando no muerden los peces.

tr. John Oliver Simon y Juvenal Acosta
needs correction accents
1985

FALLING TO SEA LEVEL

FALLING TO SEA LEVEL

              Yo no lo conocÌa, pero aveces

              me entero de uno que otro detalle.

              —Monica Mansour

                               —para John Oliver Simon

Late in the season, small avalanches begin

where our boots break a trail.

I place my feet carefully in each milk-blue hollow

and learn the distance of your stride.

We crawl up the crevice toward the sky.

Rocks tumble into the deep valley

and the space between worlds widens.

We rush to fill it with our hands, lichen & stone.

In the thin blue air above timberline

a cornice of snow gives under our weight.

We imagine it to sweep us up like swimmers

at the crest of a wave.  Wind, uncoded

from fingerprints fluxes the surface

of the lake.  The patterns carried

within us makes us recount the myths.

What passes for human

fallen off from ritual

urges us to jump.

We see beyond each mountain, a cloud;

beyond each cloud, another mountain.

By climbing on all fours, we learn to trust our hands.

Slowly, our hands lead us back to our hearts.

Our hands become small commas to separate sky from world

& the mountain watches them paying out shapes to the wind.

Clouds on the horizon have escaped us this time.

The dark thing that chased us from sleep

today, is a pale witness in snow.

Tracks of a mountain lion take on a new shape

separated from night.

We trace the origin of tracks

to a hollow beneath the last vertical face

of the mountain.

We drink from the same water

and leave rock cairns to mark a trail

no one else will follow.

Perhaps, in the future other climbers

will puzzle over this.

Hold in your hand this poem without words;

a white reminder of what we've lost.

Fur trappings slide from bare shoulders.

Glaciers scrub stones smooth again.

At sea level, the cave fire retreats

to its proper place in time.

I say, what civilized us

was the donning of clothes.

You say, No, language separated us.

And your tongue fills my mouth.

The temptation would be to stay in these mountains

and dress language in lichen & stone for vows,

but at sea level, the gods of dailiness

sweep through us and our grasp upon sky,

stones & skin loosens.  One misstep;

a false handhold could throw us back into air.

The next snowfall would bury our tracks.

When spring comes again,

they will sink back into the earth

without a trace.

The years are turning colder, I said.

There are other witnesses, you said,

The mountain lion and us.

Blue Canyon, Sonora Pass
Rosh Hoshana
Fall 9/17/1985

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level

1988 Women's Voices

1987 Creative Discourse

           Marin Poetry Center
           Poet News/ Sacramento Literary Review

CAYENDO AL NIVEL DEL MAR/FALLING TO SEA LEVEL
      Yo no lo conocía; pero a veces
      me entero de uno que otro detalle.
                        —Monica Mansour

Tarde por la estación, las avalanchas empiezan  
donde nuestras botas hacen un sendero  
en el empinado campo de nieve.  
Pongo los pies con cuidado en cada hueco  
color de leche azulado y aprendo la distancia de tu paso.  
Reptamos por la grieta hacia el cielo.  
Las rocas se derrumban en la valle profunda  
y se ensancha el espacio entre los mundos.  
Precipitamos para llenarlo con 
Las manos, los liquenas v la piedra.

En el aire azul y fino de las montañas  
luna cornisa de nieve se desploma bajo nuestro peso.  
Imaginamos que nos arrasta como nadadores  
en la cresta de una ola. El viento, descifrado  
de las huellas digitales funde el superficie  
del lago. La forma llevada  
adentro nos hace recontar los mitos.  
Lo que pasa para lo humano  
caído rel rito, nos urge saltar.  
Vemos más alla de cada montañ a, una nube;  
más allá de cada nube, otra montaña.  
Subiendo a gatas, aprendemos a confiar en las manos.  
Despacio, nuestras manos nos llevan a los corazones.  
Las manos nos hace pequeñas comas para separar cielo y mundo  
y la montaña las mira arriando formas al viento.  
Las nubes en el horizonte nos escaparon esta vez.

La cosa oscura que nos cazó del sueño  
hoy es un testigo pálido en la nieve.  
Las huellos de una pantera toman una nueva forma  
separadas de la noche.  
Trazamos el origen de huellas  
hacia un hueco abajo de la última cara vertical de la montaña.  
Bebemos de la rnisma agua  
dejamos montones de piedras para marcar un sendero  
que nadie va seguir.  
Quizás en el futuro  
otros alpinistas se preguntarán sobre esto.

Toma en la mano este poema sin palabras;  
un recuerdo blanco de lo que hemos perdido.  
Atavios de pelos nos deslizan de los hombros.  
Los glaciares suavizan las piedras otra vez.  
Al nivel del mar, la hoguera de la caverna retrocede  
         hacia su lugar apropriado en el tiempo.  
Digo, lo que nos civilizó fue la ropa.  
Dices que no, el lenguaje nos separó  
y tu lengua me llena la boca.  
La tentación sería quedarnos en las montanãs  
y vestir el lenguaje en líquenas y piedras para votos,  
pero al nivel del mar, los dioses cotidianos  
nos arrastran y nuestro asimiento en el cielo,  
las piedras, la piel relaja. Un tropezón,  
un asidero falso podria tirarnos  
en el aire. La próxima caida de nieve  
enterraría nuestras huellas.  
Cuando la primavera viene otra vez,  
hundirán en la tierra sin rastro.  
Los años se enfrían, dije.  
Hay otros testigos, dijiste,  
la pantera y nosotros.  

9/1986

1986, 87, 88 Falling to Sea Level