[Image: “Le Petit Prince,” by user Xava du on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license.) The Spanish caption provided by the photographer: Cuando el misterio es demasiado impresionante, es imposible desobedecer; the English translation of this passage (originally in French) from Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince is usually rendered as When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.]
From whiskey river:
All Hallows’ Eve
In the great silence of my favorite month,
October (the red of maples, the bronze of oaks,
A clear-yellow leaf here and there on birches),
I celebrated the standstill of time.The vast country of the dead had its beginning everywhere:
At the turn of a tree-lined alley, across park lawns.
But I did not have to enter, I was not called yet.Motorboats pulled up on the river bank, paths in pine needles.
It was getting dark early, no lights on the other side.I was going to attend the ball of ghosts and witches.
A delegation would appear there in masks and wigs,
And dance, unrecognized, in the chorus of the living.
(Czesaw Milosz [source])
…and:
Rain
As the falling rain
trickles among the stones
memories come bubbling out.
It’s as if the rain
had pierced my temples.
Streaming
streaming chaotically
come memories:
the reedy voice
of the servant
telling me tales
of ghosts.
They sat beside me
the ghosts
and the bed creaked
that purple-dark afternoon
when I learned you were leaving forever,
a gleaming pebble
from constant rubbing
becomes a comet.
Rain is falling
falling
and memories keep flooding by
they show me a senseless
world
a voracious
world—abyss
ambush
whirlwind
spur
but I keep loving it
because I do
because of my five senses
because of my amazement
because every morning,
because forever, I have loved it
without knowing why.
(Claribel Alegría, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden [source])
Cape Cod Pantoum [*]
Tonight you’re loaning Billy your car, a brand-new
seal-gray Volkswagen Passat with four doors,
though last week at 3 A.M., he stole your canoe,
and sank it in the autumn sea, then swam ashore.Tonight you’re lending Billy your car — it’s brand-new —
and he’s a well-meaning, blue-eyed Byronic drinking man
who last week, at 3 A.M., stole your beached canoe,
and when it sank he blamed it on a dolphin.A well-meaning, blue-eyed, Byronic, hard-drinking man
whose phone calls you take, no matter the hour,
who sank your canoe and blamed it on a dolphin,
and the young man with him, whom the sea sadly devoured,so you’ll always take Billy’s call, no matter the hour.
Because, you sigh, his mother’s dying, too, and he’s drinking again.
He’s no longer a young man (he’s sad and he’s drowning),
and neither are you, and all friends sometimes sin.Besides, you sigh, his mother’s dying, too, that’s why he’s drinking.
She wasn’t a beauty — she came on to you long ago.
And he’s not a young man; he’s drunk and he’s drowning.
So you press the phone to your cheek, stare out the dark window.Who hasn’t come on to you? (Who wasn’t lovely long ago?)
(Even Billy did; his tragic need, his blank blue eyes.)
You press the phone to cheek, stare out the dark window,
and listen to him make a mess of our peaceful lives.Now back in bed, we return to our disrupted romance.
Although last week, at 3 A.M., he stole your canoe,
you set a sinking man adrift in the sea of second chance:
tonight you’ve loaned Billy your car again, brand-new.
(Maria Nazos [source])
…and:
I should think we might fairly gauge the future of biological science, centuries ahead, by estimating the time it will take to reach a complete, comprehensive understanding of odor. It may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries. Smoke: tobacco burning, coal smoke, wood-fire smoke, leaf smoke. Most of all, leaf smoke. This is the only odor I can will back to consciousness just by thinking about it. I can sit in a chair, thinking, and call up clearly to mind the smell of burning autumn leaves, coded and stored away somewhere in a temporal lobe, firing off explosive signals into every part of my right hemisphere. But nothing else: if I try to recall the thick smell of Edinburgh in winter, or the accidental burning of a plastic comb, or a rose, or a glass of wine, I cannot do this; I can get a clear picture of any face I feel like remembering, and I can hear whatever Beethoven quartet I want to recall, but except for the leaf bonfire I cannot really remember a smell in its absence. To be sure, I know the odor of cinnamon or juniper and can name such things with accuracy when they turn up in front of my nose, but I cannot imagine them into existence.
…we should be hanging on to some of the few great smells left to us, and I would vote for the preservation of leaf bonfires, by law if necessary. This one is pure pleasure, fetched like music intact out of numberless modular columns of neurones filled chockablock with all the natural details of childhood, firing off memories in every corner of the brain. An autumn curbside bonfire has everything needed for education: danger, surprise (you know in advance that if you poke the right part of the base of leaves with the right kind of stick, a blinding flare of heat and fragrance will follow instantly, but it is still an astonishment when it happens), risk, and victory over odds (if you jump across at precisely the right moment the flare and sparks will miss your pants), and above all the aroma of comradeship (if you smell that odor in the distance you know that there are friends somewhere in the next block, jumping and exulting in their leaves, maybe catching fire).
(Lewis Thomas [source])
* See this page at the Academy of American Poets site for information about the poetic form known as the pantoum.
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