Bilingual/Bilingüe- Rhina P. Espaillat

My father liked them separate, one there,

one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart

(el corazón) and lock the alien part

to what he was—his memory, his name

(su nombre)—with a key he could not claim.

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”

he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from

any child? I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,

I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run

where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

I like to think he knew that, even when,

proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen,

he stood outside mis versos, half in fear

of words he loved but wanted not to hear.

Across a Great Wilderness without You - Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—
                                                  language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,

each bullet hole suffused with moon,

like the platinum thread beyond them

where the river runs the length of the valley.

That's where the fish are.

                                   Tomorrow

I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled

stone beneath the bank, their bodies

desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,

the way prayers become more hopeless

when uttered aloud.

                            The phone's disconnected.

Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:

I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm

over my bed. It's the sound of them

shouldering against each other that terrifies me,

as if it might hurt to brush across another being's

living flesh.

                But I carry a gun now. I've cut down

a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—

my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools

I've retired from their life of touching you.

excuses no.2

I'm continuing NaPo. I think. Thing is, I got caught up in numbers. I would write every day not even for the sake of writing something, but being able to tell myself that I wrote something. I hope the difference is clear. I want to write poetry and care about every word, not the number beside the title, day one, day two, day three. I want to write a poem, a real poem, every day until September. After exams and a camp, in a few weeks, I'll be free to actually think about poetry, to put myself into it. For now, I'll stay with the routine and hide the effects of doing so. I might post some poems I love so this doesn't get too abandoned too quickly. See you lovelies.

The Strength of Fields- James Dickey

... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ...

Van Gennep: Rites de Passage

Moth-force a small town always has,   

          Given the night.

                                           What field-forms can be,

         Outlying the small civic light-decisions over

               A man walking near home?

                                                         Men are not where he is   

      Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength

Of fields.    The solar system floats on

    Above him in town-moths.

                                             Tell me, train-sound,

    With all your long-lost grief,

                                             what I can give.   

    Dear Lord of all the fields

                                             what am I going to do?

                                        Street-lights, blue-force and frail

As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how

    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source   

      Of the power you always had

                                             light as a moth, and rising

       With the level and moonlit expansion

    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved

       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk

The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity   

   Is close to the source that sleeping men

       Search for in their home-deep beds.

       We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered   

   By moths, in blue home-town air.

          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under

The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,

                            When there is no one else

   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea

         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,

          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar

               Like the profound, unstoppable craving

            Of nations for their wish.

                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:

         The moon lying on the brain

                                                    as on the excited sea    as on

          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                   My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

napo eight (seven got lost in the mail): le silence est d'or

This poem came to life with a line of this song (French lyrics here), but went in a completely different direction. To those who don't know French: le silence est d'or=the silence is golden. To clarify, I don't actually know French myself.
__________

le silence est d'or
for those who skip across commas of cummings
like professional frogs in spring (rather than
loud autumn-dry hares), which est d'or.

le silence est d'or
for us woven in the picnic blanket under the sunbulb,
rejoicing ice cream though withering
through heat & age. The difference est d'or.

le silence est d'or
for her in the apple room the magritte
room the room for
sinners like eve like cain like god who est d'or.

le silence est d'or
for my lips, the horizontal icicle,
for my eyes, frozen ponds in waiting
to be broken.

le silence est d'or
watching your hair curl like a language
caught among the leaves,
returning into spring.

napo six: spade/Chopin

________

Wrote three or four poems yesterday, none of which I'm particularly proud of. Here are two:

Spade

Prove you are a poet.

So she leans over the windowsill
pointing at the garbage
without fear of her passion for black.
And the garbage sits like smoke in the lungs.
Poets are  never soothed.
They continuously trip over,
thus invented the line break.
Even the happiest of poets
find the world tragic-- whether losing
their love or looking at the pink spade
beside the garbage
nobody has seen. But even plastic
needs to be watched, to be babysat,
to be written about
(as a lover, as a muse).

Chopin

formless creature
the rose crushed between her fingers

like the skipping of Chopin
Chopin is Warsaw

the brush of a blue-eyed stranger's hair
a lullaby for workaholics

the forest and the city
unite my ears

all I'm lacking now
is a rose on the piano and a note

we all find our form
in notes in petals in neon double-deckers

napo three: freedom&form

 The promised poem from third of April:



The stars crouch in my pocket,
beheaded and curling
around the raincoat walls like a stain of burnt milk.
I run. Cloths drag like pious whine,
antibiotic, rosary. Beauty
cannot be freedom. The depth
of imprisonment is the silk and the shine.

Will form free me?

On the road I want to be naked.
Touch the stones with my skin
like the eyes of  a fake painting.
Drive my chest into the wind
and reverse with the lung.

I'm walking in the rain
under an umbrella of parallel universes
and their tourists' letters home:
darling I've forgotten the roses
darling I hear washing machines in my sleep
and then wake.

The rain is under me now. The sun is
in my eyeball, a vivid image of  bushes.
cut  by the student gardener, sweating and
hung over.

Nudity is necessary because
it is the will not to lie.

But my pockets are too heavy
for the hitchhike across  freedom,
but my stars are too dim to shine through
the curtain across form.

napo five: moon

The moon in the afternoon.

Tiles cannot hush it. I tuck away all the signs
of it existing. My hands can make clouds,
but I cover it with a towel. It was closer
and easier, and wet. Rain for free.

Watching the moon when there are no stars
is  a traumatic experience.Painfully geometric
darkness washes us, water.

Now I know the moon is only a plughole.
I bathe in the sky like men in a heart,
breaking the shells of the bubbles.

What a perfect way to waste
the afternoon in the moon.

napo four: beginning

beginning the poem
is starting a journey across organs of one body.

a lumpy body that never leaves the sofa
except when falling
while reaching for the tissues.

poetry kills me
more effectively than selling my soul to the devil.

forgetting I had a soul
even when the stars pressure me into knowing.

I'm listening to waltz of the snowflakes, and spring has come
to me like a poetry journal comes to the farmer ploughing his field.

nobody is asking me to begin this poem.
an invented obligation, like that of sitting in the sun every morning
for the sake of the orange juice.

I will never end it either. What I like about endings is:
they cannot end.
the journals keep coming
and spring ploughs away the doubt of start.

___________

Overall, today was exceptionally bad. I sat for a few hours, unable to write a word of sense, and even reading didn't help much. After gobbling up unreasonable amounts of Frank O'Hara (I hope it's not visible in this piece), something happened, I wrote something, I probably won't ever look at it again. But hey, it still counts. It's a poem. Three minutes to midnight. I'd better publish.

excuses.

Darlings,
I wrote a poem today, but I think part/most of/all of it is going to be submitted to a poetry contest on youngwritersonline.net. I'll probably post today's poem on Saturday. As for today in general, it was okay. I realised I'm writing too much about stars, continued writing about stars, read a random poetry journal with slippery pages, revised before my exams (oh, you're sure to hear more about them later on), and ate a lot.

Bye for now.

I didn't know

I didn't know people.
I didn't know people read.
I didn't know people read me.

I didn't know that entering the library, over a year overdue, with glasses and new words, Deutsch words, words of poets, Dante's Inferno back at home after a 2011 in my dusty corner, a woman would just smile, say "I wouldn't call you if there wasn't anything important".

I didn't know.
I didn't know my writing.
I didn't know my writing is important.
I didn't know my writing is important to people.

I didn't know that this village of mud and alcohol reads, reads poetry, reads poetry and likes it, though says it's "hard".
I didn't know the poetry I wrote two years ago, the cliché and occasionally too deep for its own good, is hard.
I didn't know people enter that small library at the end of the word, asking for Nasim's poetry, asking for Nasim's poetry reading.
I didn't know the people who laugh at me on the corridors long for my words. That they will ever listen. I guess I'm now going to be richer in so much knowing it will overwhelm me like a big salty turquoise wave in the mouth, a wave you love, a wave that strangles you, a wave (or your body, or your body, or a tide) that is passionate.

Yesterday when there was snow, I was what-the-helling. Now I have no words but dziękuję*.

Let me know first dear, I need to put the posters up.

______

*thank you in Polish
PS: No, this isn't my second NaPo poem, in case you were half-wondering. It's just a quick result of absolute amazement. I hope that, after reading, you will know why.

napo one: tick

I

I don't know the difference between foetus and embryo.
I don't understand birth
of form of children of fire
of this snow that smells of salt
                                             of what
 I cannot grasp. I am a creature only of tail,
 curved and long like  an adult back.

But I am too primitive for adult. I am
only a clock bundled in meat, raw,
who hasn't yet learned to tick.
A clock who dissolves when a mist or a star
bites its curving side
and tries to separate
one hand from another.

II

All ticks.
Wombs, blood, flowers.
Being a clock doesn't mean deafness--
it is the mute throb of a heart in a human
that the ticking is to me.
Life takes
the moments I need my ticking.
Replaces them with water in plastic cups
(made of barbarically melted jellyfish after they had cracked into grains of an hourglass),
with platefuls of placenta dough
(shaped into stars by little girls sitting in lotus positions in a circle in a universe and lifting their skirts to praise the taste of their food).
Clocks aren't the only tickers.
Clocks barely tick.
A watch only transfers from the wrist
from the core of its owner.
A tide only takes from the internal translucency
from the core of the jellyfish,
The falseness of clocks suits the declaration of love
not form not children not fire

Time is only rhythm, ticking is only
the tribal call to start beating and breathing
and dance.

III

God made everything to tick like him.
In various shapes hid one rhythm,
a muffled staccato,  and
God conductor of the orchestra
wore his suit in glory, the suit you see
galaxies, the eyes meteorites.
God crashes into your heart
and watches the devastation a clock can bring.
When they tell you god is a fake,
you kick into their ribs, hoping
the abyss between them is also a lie.
Then you lie on the floor
hearing it tick
and cursing that tick until
God has no other way but to be fake.
You wonder what kind of people
would pay to go for his concert.
None, ticks your tongue.

IV

i am lying in an empty bath
missing my mother
who is downstairs

the newborn lightbulb
is also hungry
and intensity eats me

like a hot stone
its narrow throat
intensely beautiful

intensely timeless
i am lying in an empty intenseness
time is downstairs

V

She asks
              do you love me
She means
                can you hear us ticking together
She knows
                there is a disorder that doesn't let this happen
Creator answers
                         how can one object love another

VI

the mother's time
isn't the child's time

just as the cloud's substance
isn't the rain's substance

VII

They are buying a ticket to a concert to celebrate the birth.

PSSSSS: This is very rough. Unedited. Fresh. With a tendency to grow weaker. Thing is, I'm now really tired and in need of an early night before tomorrow. Sleep helps creativity, so...
Let me know what you think.

The snow says hi.

Whoa.

It's an April evening (yesss, I can say that starting from today), already after dark, and it's been snowing on and off all day. It's only been a few hours since I remembered NaPoWriMo has begun, although I was under the impression I couldn't wait to do it before I forgot it existed. That's me. Stressed today, will probably forget tomorrow. I did NaNoWriMo. It was different, though. It's easier, at least to me, to get started with prose, reach some wordcount and feel pleased with yourself; poetry doesn't like time. They feel like enemies. You have a day for a poem, that's it, thirty times. <-Is that hell? Then again, it's something like 24/26/28 times (I'm forgetful, but I think it's 26) you have to do something before it becomes a routine, so if I last long enough, I might end up outrageously prolific. Or so I hope.

Writing a 'poem' is easy. Why, I can always sit down, write a few lines, press enter, word vomit. What I'd like to achieve throughout this month is maybe not poems I'm proud of, but pieces I'm not ashamed of; pieces which I can bear to post here, press the "publish" button, have it done with. This is much harder to do.

This blog I'll use to record my napoings, but also/maybe/hopefully continue. If I see some inspiring pictures, read some inspiring poems, feel I have a message to deliver to the universe of the web, I'll come here and let the words jump up to you, even if you have no idea who I am; I hope my poetry will speak for itself. I know it can, if I try hard enough.

Now I'm going to run myself a bath, drown in essential oils (clary sage is glorious, try it) and burning water until my ears start ringing and I nearly pass out. I think it's the most inspiring thing I can do at the moment. And chocolate. Never forget your sense of taste, reader.

With lots of love and spring and snow,

Nasim.