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.