Monday, April 02, 2007
11:42 PM
dahil sawa na akong magdrama at gusto ko nang matulog...
Without Devotion
Marie Howe
Cut loose, without devotion, a man becomes a comic.
His antics are passed
around the family table and mimicked so well, years
later the family still laughs.
Without devotion, any life becomes a stranger's story
told and told again to help another sleep
or live. And it is possible
in the murmuring din of that collective loyalty
for the body to forget what it once loved.
A mouth on the mouth becomes a story mouth.
It's what they think they knew---what the body knew
alone, better than it ever knew anything.
Without devotion, his every gesture---
how he slouched in the family pantry, his fingers
curled into a fist, the small thing he said
while waiting for water to boil---
becomes potentially hilarious. Lucky for him
the body, sometimes, refuses translation,
that often it will speak, secretly,
in its own voice, and insist, haplessly,
on its acquired tastes. Without devotion, it might
stand among them and listen, laughing,
but look, how the body clenches,
as the much discussed smoke intermittently clears.
It has remembered the man standing, wearing
his winter coat.
Watch how it tears from the table, yapping, ferocious
in its stupid inarticulate joy.
Labels: poetry
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
9:11 PM
Say hello to my new friend!
This is the midget snowman Ben and I built outside our house yesterday afternoon, with red kidney beans for eyes, a green pepper for a nose, four red chili peppers for a mouth, my maroon scarf wrapped around its head and neck, and Maita's fluffy green gloves on sticks for hands. We've baptized him Bobby. Look at Bobby lounging on the plastic lawn chair. Notice that he's naked where it matters. See him snicker while giving the world the finger. That's our Bobby.
* * *
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
2:53 PM
1. Along with his copy of Von Trier's Five Obstructions, Daniel lent me his DVD of Chris Marker's 1982 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), saying it reminded him of what I've been trying to do with my poetry. A compliment, really -- unless we emphasize the word "trying."But it's true, I LOVE this film that looks like a travelogue and reads like a letter and feels like watching a stone skipping across a pond, sending multiple, overlapping ripples to the edge. I'm not even talking about the seamless marriage of the images with the script -- even just the script itself is gorgeous. From the perspective (an unseen woman reading the letters and observations of an itinerant filmmaker) to the concerns (memory, history, survival in both the city and the wilderness, the function of cinema) to the lyrical language ("Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains; tied together with electric wire, she shows her veins"), to its obsession with people's faces looking back at the camera, the film, like the list of Sei Shonagon mentioned in it, "quickens the heart." I WISH I HAD WRITTEN IT."When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn-up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters. I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid."
2. A Lesson in Other-ness:Last Tuesday, the class workshopped 5 poems from my "Lost and Found" series. One poem mentions the common street sign: Bawal magtapon ng basura dito. Despite the footnote with the English translation, Prof R asked me to read the Tagalog phrase and explain its context. So I did, and said there would almost always be a mound of garbage thrown defiantly under or near those signs. She stared at me with a hand against her cheek, fascinated. "Say it again," she said. So I did, more reluctantly this time. "One more time, please. Your language is so beautiful. Humor me." My classmates and I exchanged looks. She must've been high on something again. But I did anyway.And THEN, after a thorough discussion of the poems, she turned to me and said, "Can you say something about the weather in Tagalog?" I raised my eyebrows, and said, with exaggerated shoulder shivers: Oo, malamig ang panahon. Sawa na ako sa snow. Pero tutal, hindi mo naman naiintindihan ang sinasabi ko ngayon -- pwede kitang tawaging tanga o mataba o ... ewan, basta, nawiwirduhan ako sa yo. Ba't ang kulit mo? "Wow," she says, "your language is so melodic. Why not, one of these days, write an erotic poem to your language?" Anobayaaan...
3. I bought myself a small pot of ivy with Summer last week after our Valentine lunch at Thai Basil and last-minute shoe-shopping. The potted plant perches on my window sill, leaves happily outlined in a spring green lighter than the color of their hearts. I want to keep it alive at least until spring thaws all the ice and I see sprouts instead of snow in gardens. Spring better hurry -- a few leaves are already beginning to brown, despite all my efforts and lambing. I've taken to calling the ivy by name. Violan. Haha.Someone asked me how being in this country, away from family and most friends, has "improved" (oh, I hate that word) me lately. I could reply by talking about my apparently stubborn streak of optimism, the resilience (again, maybe just another form of stubborness), the willingness to be patient and find delight in the present even when disappearing seems easier. Or I could just say, I have a plant now.
4. The past week was horribly taxing, from Papa's hospital scare and other emotional events that felt like more than one rug was being pulled out from under me. The fantastic news is that Papa is recovering quicker and better than anybody expected, with the only complication being a manageable diabetes -- which means he won't be seeing ice cream over crepes anytime soon (this picture was taken at Cafe Breton, where my family celebrated my birthday last year without me). Otherwise, the doctors are saying he could be released as early as this Friday!I found myself saying Thank God a lot, wondering how empty that expression really is to me. I found myself saying I love you to family and friends, and meaning it. Again, I'm amazed by the generosity of people who came over to hold me and buy phone cards to call home with, who sent their e-mails of support, who let me finish their wine and sleep in their beds with other friends, who let me cry and talk myself out at the kitchen table one morning. You are all awesome.
5. Please, Spring, come soon. Let me write an erotic poem to you, bwahaha -- though nothing I write will surpass Cummings' spring poems:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
Labels: family, love, movies, poetry, school, spring
Friday, February 16, 2007
3:07 PM
"I am not being trivial. Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness. What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself into silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind—back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that the victims are killed, but there are no empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along."* * *
My dad had a stroke last Wednesday night, Valentine's Day. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, with skyrocketing blood pressure levels and a clot in his cerebellum. He's still in the ICU, but is lucid and getting better and wondering when/if he can still drink beer. Prayers and positive thoughts for a full and speedy recovery would be greatly appreciated.Labels: family, poetry, winter
Monday, February 05, 2007
2:19 PM
The Windchill Factor
I'm pretty sure I posted this poem in one of my blogs years ago (with so many under my belt, it's hard to remember which blog and which February) -- but it's only this year that I've come to REALLY understand it's less about Valentine-less moping and more about wintry despair and sluggishness. This year, I've learned about windchill, how the strength and speed of winds blowing from the lake turn the already awful chill (today at -15 Celsius) into something more frigid (-24). I've learned that "flurries" are not delicious, "cold feet" are not something to be taken lightly, and that "ice-breakers" aren't fun songs or games you do to "warm up" a group. That ice is not my element, that I can't skate and glide across the ice to save my life. That wearing powder blush on my cheeks is unnecessary, as my entire face gets red anyway every time I step outside. I've been fighting this almost instinctive urge to store heat by eating (and getting) fat. I've had to deal with territory wars in the kitchen, over the freezer and Ziploc containers and utensils (one housemate and her ever-present boyfriend have taken to hiding her pans and knives in her third-floor room). I've started apartment-searching again, and today had to walk out into a snowy world -- I felt like I was a character in a TV with really bad reception, bad white static. I miss my black fur sausage sleeping on a pillow beside me.February
Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
he’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
Sunday, January 28, 2007
11:28 PM
Snow
by Margaret Avison
Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break
And re-creation. Sedges and wild rice
Chase rivery pewter. The astonished cinders quake
With rhizomes. All ways through the electric air
Trundle candy-bright disks; they are desolate
Toys if the soul's gates seal, and cannot bear,
Must shudder under, creation's unseen freight.
But soft, there is snow's legend: colour of mourning
Along the yellow Yangtze where the wheel
Spins an indifferent stasis that's death's warning.
Asters of tumbled quietness reveal
Their petals. Suffering this starry blur
The rest may ring your change, sad listener.
Labels: poetry
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
3:04 PM
goodbyes and other pound-ings
Last Sunday, the housemates decided to go up on the roof at midnight and eat the chocolate cake Nathalie had baked. It was Nathalie's second to the last night with us, and we wanted to do something special. We stepped out of the 3rd floor window, climbed the sloping part of the roof to the flat surface covered in ice and snow, and looked up at a clear sky and a great view of downtown Toronto (no pictures, as most of the cameras wouldn't work in -8 degrees Celsius weather). Nathalie said she didn't like saying goodbye, so I didn't, and just hugged her, and we danced a little on the roof. Later, while sipping hot tom yam goong and bandaging my right thumb (which I'd cut against the metal roof ledge while sliding down), I thought about how Nathalie came to live with us, and how temporary our living arrangements are...(Fresh from Paris, she had just started work at a coat store along Queen St., where Ben happened to be shopping. He struck up a conversation, found out she was looking for a place, he said we had an extra room in the house, and days later she moved in and had dinner with us.) It all seems so random and ephemeral and wonderful nevertheless, the friendships and connections I've made in this city...
* * *
I've been tackling Pound's Pisan Cantos (LXXIV - LXXXIV), and can't help but be informed by the context in which they were produced... Pound wrote them in 1945 during the 7 months he was detained in a disciplinary camp for military/war criminals near Pisa, Italy --- where, for the first 3 weeks he was kept isolated in an open-air, barbed wire cage, until he broke down physically and emotionally, and was transferred to the building, where he recuperated and wrote. What I find impressive is all the allusions he supplies from memory, aided by the 2 books he had with him: a volume of works by Confucius, and a Chinese dictionary. But what I LIKE is the quality of tenderness in these cantos, the snippets of dialogue and details from his life in the camp... There are definite chinks in his intellectual armor here, probably since he didn't know whether he'd be executed or not, whether he'd see his wife and mistress and daughter again. Though the verse is peppered with dry jibes such as: "the army vocabulary contains almost 48 words
one verb and participle one substantive
one adjective and one phrase sexless that is
used as a sort of pronoun
from a watchman's club to a vamp or fair lady"
there are also lyrical passages that show us a glimpse of his tender side, like when he says "beauty is difficult" and is
"measured by the to whom it happens
and to what, and if to a work of art
then to all who have seen and who will not" (LXXVI)
and when he says:
"your eyes are like tigers,
with no word written in them
You also have I carried to nowhere
to an ill house and there is
no end to the journey.
The chess board too lucid
the squares are too even...theatre of war...
"theatre" is good. There are those who did not want
it to come to an end" (LXXVIII)
and when he ends with:
"nothing matters but the quality
of the affection ---
in the end --- that has carved the trace in the mind" (LXXVI)
Labels: house, poetry
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
5:57 PM
you were vast unto others
by Jen Bervin
date the paper -- it's your early work --
date the spaces -- it's late --
write -- be late with you --
write to get lost in the day -- get the time from
friends -- make them a memorable meal --
and forget what you made --
write you waste nothing -- write -- nothing is
wasted on you -- write it on your hand --
write + you are not too old to write on your
hand -- write there is still space there -- and
you have been in it --
write the precise points -- that touch -- the
rivers of energy in the body -- enter them and
tell me -- if they are still wet -- tell me where
they've been -- tell me -- who touched you all
winter -- tell me -- who you'll remember in
spring --
tell me where you've been necessary --
the mercury in the snow -- the river in light --
(Read the rest of the poem here...)
Labels: poetry
Sunday, January 07, 2007
10:23 PM
Where Do I Begin
For the first time in a long time, I'm quietly happy. Despite the bandaged thumb, the sniffles, the dwindling resources, the homesickness, the fact that winter term classes start this Tuesday, and the frustrating knowledge that the fact I'm not Canadian closes me off to scholarships and literary contests and other opportunities available to my peers. Today I received so much: Sunday morning backrubs, freshly brewed coffee and the New York Times and the thought of waffles, more hugs than I'd gotten in a month, the return of a friend who's more like a sister now, turones de kasoy, books I'd requested from my shelves back home, notes and little gifts from dear friends I miss, and this reemerging capacity for tenderness. Despite everything, I'm still pretty lucky. I just need to get through this year and this grad school ordeal I've gotten myself into with more resolve and groundedness.
* * *
Museum
by Robert Hass
On the morning of the Kathe Kollwitz exhibit, a young man and woman come into the museum restaurant. She is carrying a baby; he carries the air-freight edition of the Sunday New York Times. She sits in a high-backed wicker chair, cradling the infant in her arms. He fills a tray with fresh fruit, rolls, and coffee in white cups and brings it to the table. His hair is tousled, her eyes are puffy. They look like they were thrown down into sleep and then yanked out if it like divers coming up for air. He holds the baby. She drinks coffee, scans the front page, butters a roll and eats it in their little corner in the sun. After a while, she holds the baby. He reads the Book Review and eats some fruit. Then he holds the baby while she finds the section of the paper she wants and eats fruit and smokes. They’ve hardly exchanged a look. Meanwhile, I have fallen in love with this equitable arrangement, and with the baby who cooperates by sleeping. All around then are faces Kathe Kollwitz carved in wood of people with no talent or capacity for suffering who are suffering the numbest kinds of pain: hunger, helpless terror. But this young couple is reading the Sunday paper in the sun, the baby is sleeping, the green has begun to emerge from the rind of the cantaloupe, and everything seems possible.
Labels: life, love, poetry
Thursday, January 04, 2007
4:53 PM
How I Became Impossible
Mary Ruefle
I was born shy, congenitally unable to do anything
profitable, to see anything in color, to love plums,
with a marked aversion to traveling around the room,
which is perfectly normal in infants.
Who wrote this? were my first words.
I did not like to be torched.
More snow fell than was able to melt,
I became green-eyed and in due time traveled
to other countries where I formed opinions
on hard, cold, shiny objects and soft, warm,
nappy things. Late in life I began to develop
a passion for persimmons and was absolutely delighted
when a postcard arrived for the recently departed.
I became recalcitrant, spending more and more time
with my rowboat. All my life I thought polar bears
and penguins grew up together playing side by side
on the ice, sharing the same vista, bits of blubber
and innocent lore. One day I read a scientific journal:
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other. These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas. I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.
Labels: poetry
