October 31, 2009 at 8:05 pm (Love Poems and Poems About Love, Spanish Poems and Translations)
Here’s another playful Spanish one that owes somewhat to Oliverio Girondo, somewhat to being in love with someone from Central America.
Voceo
Escribo en voceo
En vos y yo
Porque mi voz hace trenzas
con la de vos
y mi corazón
por vos
a Dios tutea.
Amor ves que vos
mi voz sos.
Alma y cuerpo me enrollo
en un circulo de brazos
un espiral de corazonazos
para, en voz y arte
vocearte
y vociferarte.
October 23, 2009 at 11:37 pm (Love Poems and Poems About Love, Spanish Poems and Translations)
I often write what I read, and since I’m reading a lot of Spanish poetry, a lot of the poetry I’ve been writing is coming out in Spanish. The Spanish language is, in my opinion, one of the best kinds for lyric poetry since direct affective language is not discouraged like it is in English. In English a word like “love” or “soul” smacks of bad romanticism and poetic cliches In Spanish they are strong enough to still carry a poetic and rhetorical resonance. The first poem is a love poem, the second is more complicated. (Love, theology and linguistics all sharing the same bed, none of them snoring thank goodness)
Transferencia
Todas las cosas, amor, retienen
Un eco de vos, una leve impresión
No solo las cosas que tocaste
Las sábanas de la cama cuyas arrugas recuerdan
Tus piernas estiradas, tus brazos
Recogidos contra tu cuerpo
En el rollo espartano de tu sueño.
O tus huellas digitales apartando
Olores de miel y limón
En el jabón del lavamanos.
Pero las cosas que una vez, por casualidad
Tocaste
Camisas colgadas
Verduras dormidas en la refri
Cajas del correo, donde cada año dejas caer
cumpleaños y navidades felices
A tu mamá y a tus hermanas.
Estás enredado en el esquema
molecular de mi mundo,
Y tu mundo invade completamente
El mio, trayendo con él
Las palabras que alguna vez dijiste,
Comidas que habrás comido,
Películas que viste o que querás ver.
Tu voz me mancha el oído,
Hasta que cada sonido sea tu timbre
Tu cuerpo me tiñe la mirada
Hasta que toda curva es muslo, brazo
Músculo, cabeza de vos
Todo me revuelve, me envuelve
En tu forma,
En tu alegría solitaria.
Tres epistolas que arden
1.
Amarte es un viaje entre dos yos, entre un yo de vos y un yo de mí. Resbalo entre estos dos polos como una bola de cristal. El yo de vos me es extraño, el yo de mi es un circulo de muros. El yo de vos se apega a tu cuerpo, se amamanta de tu voz, de la luz que se desprende de tus ojos, de los hilos de luz que vuelan de ti con alas plateadas. Aunque habito tal yo, no me pertenece, es tuyo, lo doblas en tu mente, la guardas entre tus manos, la recoges, la alimentas con gotas de ternura. El yo de mi te escudriña a lo lejos, te suma, te divide. Mide los riesgos que el yo de vos alegremente insiste en des-saber.
2.
Eres mío. No me perteneces porque ningún ser humano pertenece a otro. No te someto con el dedo de posesión. Te miro a través de una brecha negra: La nativa separación humana. Te circulo con la mirada tierna y anhelante como la luna a la tierra. Eres tú, Sos vos. Pero eres también mío. Habito en ti como una carpa airosa en las orillas de un rio dulce, como en un nido en la altura de un maple estrellado. Duermo en ti como en un sueño de caracoles y galaxias y pollitos en huevo. Presiono mi oreja a tu pecho y oigo mío, el elemento básico de la ternura, la silaba inicial que desata un torrente de sustantivos y adjetivos amorosos. Mío, el susurro de mi sangre al verte, que se convierte en canción, mío, el pío de todos los pajaritos de mi cerebro, estimulados por la vibración de tu acercamiento.
3.
Tus pies, un poco rotos, un poco heridos, suavizan la tierra donde caminas. Desprenden olores de grama, hierbabuena o manzanillo. Y pienso de repente los pies de Dios caminando en el jardín, acercándose a la pareja humana manchada. Sospecho que hasta caminaba con amor. Que sus pies tocaron la tierra como una caricia tierna, descubriendo sus olores recónditos. Que sus pies fueron primeros a sentir el temblor del pecado humano porque la mismísima tierra endureció y se afiló debajo de ellos. Y estos fueron los mismos pies que la Virgen examinaba con alegría, contando sus diez deditos de pie de niño como toda madre atónita frente a tal milagro común. Diez señales menudas de la continuidad humana. Luego sus pies quizás, de los miembros de Cristo, fueron los primeros en ofrecerse para recibir los clavos de la salvación. Sus pies, humildes y sensibles, que eran su corazón.
October 23, 2009 at 9:11 pm (Latin America Poems, Spanish Poems and Translations)
One of the poets I’m doing my thesis on is the Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, who often mixed eroticism and politics in her poems in a quasi-Nerudian stew. What is really interesting about her is that all of this is written within a distinctly female perspective which foregrounds love, marriage, childbirth, motherhood and creativity in a positive way while at the same time looking towards the wider world. Unlike a lot of women poets, both in Latin America and beyond, who treat their gender as a source of sorrow, she treats it as a source of joy and creative energy. Her poetic style is lyrical yet conversational and very easy to translate
And God made me a woman.
And God made me a woman,
With long hair
The eyes
nose, mouth of a woman
With curves
And folds
And soft hidden places
And he hollowed me out inside
He made me a workshop of human beings
Delicately, he wove my nerves together
And balanced carefully
My number of hormones
He composed my blood,
And injected me with it
So that it would irrigate
My whole body;
In this way ideas were born
And dreams
And instincts.
All that He created softly
With hammer blows of breath
And drillings of love
The thousand things that make me a woman every day
That which make me rise up with pride
Every morning
And bless my sex.
I see you as a tremor
I see you as a tremor
In the water
You go,
You come
And leave rings in my imagination.
When I’m with you
I would like to have many I’s
Invade the air you breathe
Transform myself into heated love
So that you would sweat me out
And I could enter and leave you.
Caress you cerebrally
Or sink into your heart and explode
With every one of your heartbeats
Seed you like a great tree in my body
And care for your leaves and trunk
Give you my sap-blood
And become soft earth for you.
I feel a tickling wind
When we are together
I would like to turn into laughter,
Full of pleasure
Tumble on beaches of tenderness
Recently discovered
But always present
Love you, love you
Until we forget everything,
no longer knowing who is who.
September 29, 2009 at 10:51 pm (Love Poems and Poems About Love, Spanish Poems and Translations)
El mundo está
Rodeándome
Presionando
Mordiendo mis ingles
Rompiéndome la ropa, la piel
Que llevo puesta
Diciéndome “Mostrá que sabés”
“o es que no sabés”
“Actué, preforma, dale.
Sos incompetente”
Tú, amor
Eres mi refugio
Cuantas ganas
A acobijarme en la tienda
De tus brazos
Rellenar mis oídos
Mis ojos
Y mis poros
Con tu risita dulce.
Alimentarme con la maná de tus besos
Tus chistes y cuentos que saben
A canela, a chile verde.
Y poner mi cabeza sobre
Tu pecho, y dormir
Mecida por las olas cálidas
De tu latido.
Amor, dulce amor
Por favorcito
Sóplame
Con tu brisa
animadora
Y lléna las velas
de mi alma gastada.
September 25, 2009 at 4:33 am (Catholicity, Love Poems and Poems About Love)
Yes, my blog has been a regular love-fest as of late. It has been much on my mind. Not only is it the topic of my graduate thesis, but its also a big part of my life at the moment. In 2 months my boyfriend and I will have been together for four years, this being the longest relationship I’ve ever had. In all the debates around the issues of marriage and sexual orientation I don’t think anyone has ever taken the time to really reflect on heterosexuality, what it is fully and completely. This post is a poetic exploration of it based somewhat on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Specifically Christopher West’s comments on why Sexual Difference matters, which can be found here:
http://www.christopherwest.com/page.asp?ContentID=69
Everyone who is alive and walking around on the earth right now is doing so because of a heterosexual couple. Let us pause at this point. Everyone who is alive and walking around on the earth right now, watering their grass, driving between the poplars on First Avenue, standing in line, watching television, eating supper, preparing supper for someone else, singing, laughing at a joke, playing backyard soccer, surfing the internet for a recipe or a bill, is doing so because of a heterosexual couple. Because a man and a woman came together in love, in hope, in desperation, in loneliness, as an experiment, as a mistake. They came together to please themselves, to please the other, to purge themselves, to purge the other. They came together violently, or tenderly, or awkwardly, or laughingly. They lost themselves in each other, they found themselves in each other, they reached into each other and felt a gaping loneliness penetrate them like a cold gust from a warped window, they plunged themselves into each other and found something to grasp a hold of, to pull themselves out of themselves.
And when they came together time coiled around them, tightening like a snare, squeezing them together until the energy of worlds radiated from the fusion, until they dissolved in the river of light that carried the stars to their current position and will keep carrying them further.
Don’t you see that no other relationship is like this? In the knotty, awkward, confused, warm, splendid, firey embrace of one man and one woman there is all men and all women. The whole of humanity complete and compact, bound together in that embrace like the seeds of a pomegranate wrapped tightly in its hemispheres. Nothing is excluded, all males and all females, all male qualities and all female qualities, all variations and differences.
There is sadness in homosexuality which never emerges. It is a rejection, an exclusion. The gay man says to the woman “your body is corrupt terrain, cloying and repulsive” the lesbian calls the man “bestial” and “simian”. Though a heterosexual man may be a misogynist, his rejection of woman softens like wax in the face of desire. Desire itself is a doorway, a hole in the brickwork through which a woman’s roots may enter, forcing apart the the stones until the edifice falls and he stands gazing at the face at the woman who was made for him, he for her. No one can be excluded, for nature will win out. When her mind with its irritations and grievances is sleeping or distracted, her members will call out to him, her hands to his hands, her belly to his belly, her cheek to his chest. She will want him, though she disdains his whole gender. He will long for her though his pride finds little in woman to esteem, and loosed in that union is the only flood which will dissolve all contempt between them.
And their bodies know this. For no child can be born except for when they come together. No other relationship can bring about life. Other relationships can create love, great love, transformative love, but none of them can transmit that love into flesh, into a generation, without their intercession. When they come together the whole of time comes together. The great and small romances of history come together. The burning question and answer of the organism comes together.
September 24, 2009 at 5:15 am (Love Poems and Poems About Love)
The heat of a single atom
Of the love between a man and a woman
is enough to boil a city to rags
and soften mountains like butter.
Love Himself left this microparticle
hidden in the body’s chemical chambers
in the messy shuffle of aches, needs and hungers
among things to be passed on, or taken in.
The scandal of it! His practical joke
Is that it is in everyone
A radiant burst in the head of the data-entry clerk
when he looks at the secretary.
The convict in a blanketless metal bunk
poring over letters by yard-light glare
The pharmacy technician, the teacher
The shut in. Everyone the slick world
Finds objectionable: the fat, the addicted, the screw ups.
Who are too ugly to be on TV.
You didn’t earn it.
It’s a gift, you didn’t win it
It’s a gift,
you don’t deserve it
It’s a gift,
It requires the simple encounter of one man
And one woman. No more than one of each
And no less.
You and I
September 22, 2009 at 4:34 am (Love Poems and Poems About Love)
Para vos.
Every single cell in my body loves you
Corazoncito, your heart-hands
Soft , like small birds, the gentle
wave of your voice,
Every protein, every chromosome
In my body
Loves you, every sequence
Of chemical base pairs,
every gene and DNA strand
Every vein and artery
In which blood flows
Every organ it feeds
And the blood itself
That rushes laughing through
My body
Loves you.
And the balls of my feet
And my palms
My fingers, toes, legs, arms
The twin wings of my hips
The twin sails of my shoulders
My breathing chest, my belly
My face with its nest of small members
Loves you
My life loves you, my past and future
My childhood, my old age
Adulthood’s stretch of circle days
that drop children, bread, poems
in the cupped hands of time
Loves you
Is it that every blood cell decided one by one
That they would rush my face and heart
To get a good look at you, or did
They suddenly turn in your presence
Like iron filings?
Did each element of me
find a link in you
Or did they merely receive the chemical order
And march in your direction.
Did Love Himself sew into every part of me
A bomb that would go off
In your presence, and you in mine
Which would turn the entire world to ash?
September 17, 2009 at 5:11 am (Catholicity, Pre-conversion poems, Uncategorized)
I’m coming to realize that Graduate school is one of the most difficult career directions anyone can undertake and for this reason few people pursue it completely til the end. I’m just going into the third year of my PhD in Hispanic Studies, and every day is a struggle between a continuously diminishing passion for a subject that I used to love and a growing feeling of doubt that I am capable of seeing it through to the end and finding a good job.
Some of the psychological research of Grad students has noticed that a lot of these students go through bouts of both depression and impostor syndrome. And while I’m not a big-fan of putting the term “syndrome” to anything and everything. I can confirm that whatever it is that has been affecting me for the last two years since I’ve been in the doctoral program has the word “impostor” written all over it. It’s the word that the devil in my thoughts keeps lobbing at me constantly. Today for example I attended a seminar dedicated to helping students apply for a government grant and how to write a grant proposal, and this dirty word kept popping into my head as I looked at the requirements for the grant. The requirements said “for students whose research promises to make a valueable contribution to knowledge” and my mind said “impostor”, it said “students with first class academic standing” and my mind said “impostor”, it said ”describe your academic achievements such as awards, publications etc.” and it said “see, you don’t HAVE any awards or any publications…this grant is for real academics, you are nothing but an impostor.”
I feel this every time I read another student’s work, everytime I go to a talk. My mind rolls out a checklist of what I haven’t done, what I should have done and what I will probably never do, and little by little my heart sinks like a stone, I get sucked down into a gray morass and I feel flat and empty, like I’ve wasted so much time and money on a career that will not manifest as anything but wasted time and money.
I wish there was a specific prayer for Grad Students with this problem, or a specific saint to appeal to. The closest one I know of I found in a little poster store in Spanish when I was in LA, but I’ve never seen it in English. It goes:
Oración del estudiante
Señor: recuérdame con frecuencia la obligación
de estudiar, hazme responsable, que
santifique mi trabajo de estudiante y que prepare
bien mi misión en la vida, que sepa agradecer el
privilegio de poder estudiar, que me capacite
a conciencia, que haga rendir mi juventud, dame
valentía y constancia para aprovechar todos los
instantes en el estudio, enséñame a estudiar con metodo, a leer
con reflexión, a consultar a los que saben más para
el día de mañana ser útil a mis hermanos y
verdadera dirigiente de la humanidad
Student’s Prayer
Lord, remind me often of my obligation to study. Make me responsible. May I sanctify my work as a student and prepare well for my mission in life. May I remember to be grateful for the privilege of studying. May I train myself with dedication. May I make fruitful use of my youth. Grant me the courage and constancy to make the most of every moment in my studies. Teach me to study methodically, to read with reflection, to consult those who know more than I do. So that one day I may be useful to my fellows and a true leader of humanity.
The two people I think would make great patron saints for Grad Students, unfortunately haven’t been canonized. The first is G.K. Chesterton, the famed Catholic scholar and writer. The second, one of my favourites, is Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, the 17th Century Mexican nun, poet, mathematician and theologian who longed to go to University, but was prevented from doing so because she had a uterus. Sor Juana would make such a great saint for female grad students. She was the one who used to come up with mathematical formulas while cooking and said “Just think how much more intelligent Aristotle would have been if he had learned to cook”. The Suburban Banshee has an interesting post about this explaining why Sor Juana should be canonized Unfortunately the only canonization Sor Juana has received has been by the feminist movement who consider her a martyr to their cause, brought down by the Evil Catholic Church *sigh* as demonstrated in Maria Luisa Bemberg’s movie “Yo, la peor de todas”, in which the opening scene shows the Archbishop and Viceroy of Mexico revelling in their power like two comic book villains.
But Sor Juana was awesome, she wrote beautiful and complex poems about both religious and secular themes, she wrote lots of devotional excercises, had a very strong devotion to Mary and to St. Teresa of Avila she debated theology and even defended Church teaching against the heresies of a Portuguese priest named Antonio Vieira. She was persecuted in the Church, but then again so was St. Padre Pio. I like Sor Juana so much I even wrote a poem about her (See there is poetry in this post) /
Sor Juana visits a modern university.
I arrived, you were the third thing I noticed, the first was the quality
of light in this place, not as bold as the light I remember:
the cosmic finger in every space, organizing the world’s boldnesses
carving hot trapezoids on stone walls.
a new light, soft, the colour of elote: newborn corn.
And a square fountain, marvellous thing, a waterfall
that doubles back on itself, clear water falling over its shoulder like soft
white hair, moving confined, a single point in space.
Water and light, I noticed them first,
because I am a wave of water and light.
I took a moment to reflect on them
As each place embraces us with what it knows as natural.
.
Natural: like the books you adjusted against your chest to relieve their weight on your arms,
Natural, speaking and hearing ideas with young men, unashamed
your mind running freely across your lips.
stretched on the grass, walking in groups
in pairs, alone. Knots of young women discussing philosophy
and science, leaning their delicate faces into the flame of knowledge.
I saw more of you, so much of you
writing, laughing, pushing your hair from your face,
scratching your heads. Generous movements and wide gestures.
Not the imposed stillness I remembered, passivity forced
Into every angle of the face, body, voice.
And a breath I had been holding for three hundred years
exhaled, circled, drawing a nautilus outward
into space, traced the spiralling paths of the spheres
of heaven, to the place where all ages form one body:
The Aching Form of Wisdom, crouched in the nexus, watching.
September 12, 2009 at 4:55 am (DT's)
I’m a big reader of the blog Conversion Diary. Actually I’m a big reader of a lot of Catholic blogs, an addiction which I’m not sure if it is good or bad. On the one hand it feels so good to read about people who are going through the same experiences with conversion that I am, the good the bad and the “wheeeeere did that come from?” and it has helped me to become stronger in my faith. On the other hand it’s often an excuse to avoid the vertigo that comes from staring into the gaping maw of my thesis proposal….
Anyway as a writing exercise I thought I’d contribute to their “Seven Quick Takes” Friday post with “Seven deep thoughts”…these are pieces of poems or poetic ideas that haven’t found a home in a poem yet, but still sound kind of cool on their own:
1.
I never know what to long for. I only know that longing is an arrow, it needs to be fletched and nocked, and pointed at something. Longing for God still seems like longing for the moon.
2.
Time is measured in the falling of things, shiny sounds that keep its wires threaded into our minds. Emotion has a dissolving effect on time, chews holes in it.
3.
Everything is pain right now. Life ignores it, keeps walking over top of me. Keeps chewing into the cement at Waterfront Station, keeps adding joiners to the next rail line. The students keep coming for their lessons, for their stressed and unstressed syllables, for the right distinction between “royal” and “lawyer”, the sun keeps checking the sky for clouds like an employee surreptitiously glancing at the wall clock. The day, in Churchillian fashion, takes a swig of brandy and marches on.
4.
The loss of you starts to sink in, and keeps on sinking, pulling me down with it, swirling eddies that suck me inward, inside out until I open my eyes and find I’m looking back.
5.
Deception points in two directions, the first to claim that things were better than they were. The second to claim that things were worse.
6.
Poetry demands slowness, not speed. Long days filtering language through one sieve, than another. Gazing at the same trees through the same back fence, day after day until they reveal the warp and woof of knowledge itself. Shadows that grow and shrink. Water light patterns. Poetry is in, not out, and certainly not beyond. It’s in-ness only goes further in, until in is enormous, vast, unfathomable.
7.
He reminds me that His will is not suffering in suffering, but suffering in happiness. Not the dry ache of a spirit twisting brittle in the desert of human selfishness, but the happy burden of the lover who crosses it sipping lightly the syllables of his beloved’s name. He reminds me that one can make an idol of love, blocking out the light of Love itself. He reminds me that his suffering is big enough for mine.
September 9, 2009 at 5:07 am (Love Poems and Poems About Love, Pagan poems, Pre-conversion poems)
Tonight I’m just posting a few oldie and shortie poems of mine from a couple of years ago. I’m too stressed about starting a new semester at University tomorrow, starting the third year of my PhD with so much uncertainty. Everytime I look at my dissertation proposal I start to get nauseous.
Air Holes
There is so much moon between us,
It’s light, milky nightshade
Pulsates back and forth, ferrying me across the
bed, docking me at your body.
What happens when all of this ends? When the intensity
Dies, and we are left staring each other in the face?
Will our differences swell and push us apart?
Or simply become breathing spaces, air holes?
Untitled
You were a sickness to sweat out
of my body, surfacing on skin
at night while in dreams I hid behind
doors you pounded on and fought
a burn that ripped the skin
off my heart like an apple,
leaving it raw and untouchable
by anything that wasn’t cold.
These are the things the moon remembers
stores in its white cerebral folds,
you with your hot weight forming and unfurling
on the rim of the future with an armload of promises.
Autumn filling the sky with nervous waves,
yellowing leaves spreading their unsettling news
While you continued to appear and disappear
as though you were made of sand or water
or ink, stained tea-coloured by time.
and the effort of straightening every story
Barbara