Voceo

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.

Transferencia y Tres epistolas que arden

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.

Gioconda Belli: Guns and Roses

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.

Salmo a vos.

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.

Reflections on Heterosexuality

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   

1-trust-in-love-beth-budesheim

 
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.

Love Poem 2

 

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

Love Poem

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?

A Prayer for Graduate Students

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.

Seven Deep Thoughts

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:

7_quick_takes

 

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.

A couple of shorts

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

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