complainte de la butte

I've had bronchitis for the last ten days. The worst thing has been not being able to sing while I work (or cook, or take a shower, or walk to campus). I don't realise how much I do sing during the day until I'm not able to do it.

Les éscaliers de la Butte sont dûrs aux misereux; les ailes des moulins protegent les amoreux.

WALKING AROUND
after Pablo Neruda

It so happens that I am tired.
And it happens that I walk, and walk, and work
and love and am required to love, and eat,
and speak and must listen.
And because of this: I am tired. I bite my nails.

The electricity goes out, and I don’t take notice of it.
I sit in the dark, or I light candles. Sometimes it is too hard
to strike a match. Otherwise, I leave.

I come to your house and watch the windows
or look for your car. Sometimes I bring a flower,
sometimes I tear at the petioles of a neighbor’s rose bush.
The expected thorn, the long ride,
the darkened window of your bedroom.
The grit of the sidewalk.
The streetlight’s full moon.

When I leave, without seeing you, and also when I’ve been with you,
I walk away quickly. And because of this, I am tired.
Because I must look a straight line forward;
because I must put down foot, and then again foot;
because you are waiting, or are out;
know I am leaving or never knew I was here,
my body aches from stopping the turn.
Walking between nothing and something exhausts me.

It so happens the streetlight is burnt into my eyelids;
my nails are bitten to the quick.
When I am hungry, my thoughts turn to food,
even if it is wax.
Whether I go out or stay home,
there is always hunger in my overcoat.
Hunger in my shoes.

The candles in my bedroom have extinguished themselves.
It happens that I am tired, and I go home,
where there is no electricity, and I eat the candles cold
and finally sleep.

--

See Neruda's poem here. Robert Bly's translation here.

In American Poet, October 2007.

stop/motion

[Don't care much about the fact that it's for t.v., but wow. What work. Animation is amazing.]

27

This is what 27 looks like. That was my exact thought as I sat on a bench outside the bank, waiting for my friend to finish his tasks. I like how it looks. I like the numbers together, two and seven. I like that they add up to nine, which is three threes. And nine times three is twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven things: I love unsalted butter. I'm a good cook, but don't cook for myself.
Pink, red, yellow-green, and slate blue are my favorite colors. My favorite poem is "Lucky Life," by Gerald Stern, followed by "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Song of Despair," by Pablo Neruda, "Skunk Hour," by Robert Lowell, and "Ceriserie," by Joshua Clover. I have three brothers. I draw what I wear every day (I've been doing it since February). My favorite time of day is early in the morning. I love watching the clouds move across the sky here. I'm allergic to artificial cinnamon flavoring but I love the candy Hot Tamales. Languages I would like to learn are Czech, Welsh, Finnish, and Greek. I don't kill bugs anymore (except mosquitoes and probably silverfish and centipedes). I like my feet and hands. I've never broken a bone, but I've lacerated my liver. I can't travel without tape and scissors. It's hard for me to use pretty notebooks, but I'm getting better at it. Riding on a train is an automatic positive. I never liked basil until my best friend cooked with it. I really enjoy grocery shopping. I bake things without recipes (and they usually turn out). I like dogs. I get homesick for places that aren't really 'home,' like France and Japan. The word 'kingfisher' has always been evocative for me. Every time I pass lavender plants in the parking lots here I pick some for my room. I ran a five-minute (well, 5:07) mile in high school. I miss the smell of lithography. My friends are amazing and talented and I feel hugely lucky to know them. I believe people are essentially good.

Have some cake, from me.

By way of the Green Line bus

--

Certain qualities of light are present here; I have never experienced them before. Green is part of it--gardens, fields behind the main campus--and part of it is atmospheric, how the light is almost always filtered through something. And when it is purely sunny, it seems more intensely light than back home, maybe because it is usually cloudy, maybe because we are surrounded by ocean here (in a more immediate way).