The Beauty of Sorrow, after Pauline Oliveros

The best time to look at sorrow
is a quarter before midnight.

It looks dead from the ground up,
a single withered stick.
Then opens gently,
like the luna flower.

It bursts with all the radiant loneliness
of the desert,
a shock of moonlight that pulses
only once a year,

when you least expect it,
when you’ve forgotten
the intoxication,
the pungent scent of grief.

…….

Reina de la noche
covers the arid valley
from here to the moon.

They open their mouths
like fish in water,
sucking in the dry air.
Their small tongues
are smeared with silver.

Such beauty can never last.

…….

The best time to listen to sorrow
is anytime if you are
in the desert.

You can listen to it
in the just intonation
of summer, when everything
is one music, seamless and slow.

I like to press my ear against
your sternum, I like to hear life
being pumped all over you.

I like the way the sage
is always silent
and full of healing,
if we only knew.

It’s not like here,
in this shitty apartment,
where sorrow yells in your ear
and all you hear
is your heart opening and closing,

and only because
it’s supposed to.

…….

I can live with sorrow
all day without you.
I’ve gotten good
at making it feel at home.
I think I will get even better
tomorrow, and the day
after tomorrow.

I will be so good I will have
rivals, I will evoke such envy.

I will wear it around my neck,
the way those pimps
wear a viper sometimes,
just to show they’re somebody,
just to show they’re special and mean.

I can live without you
sometimes, I can feel your name
scratched into my heart
like graffiti.

Someone must have left it there
in the dead of night,
when no one was looking.

I swear it wasn’t me.

…….

If there’s a best time to eat sorrow
it must be now,
when your hunger gnaws so deep
it feels like having a soul.

You can let it take over you
like the spirit
the shaman wakes
with a single drum.

You can turn it into poetry
or religion, whatever
is easier to swallow.

Either way it remains
what it is,
a slow, elusive bloom
that opens your body up,

and you can’t help staring
at the dead light streaming
towards you,

the dead waking the living
with these small revelations.

books i found in thrift shops in the last 60 days

1. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

2. Dante, La Vita Nuova

3. Ovid, Heroides

4. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia 1

5. Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

6. Fray Ramon Panes, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians

7. Playwrights on Playwriting, Toby Cole, ed.

8. Alessandro Piperno, The Worst Intentions

9. Essential Works of Socialism, Irving Howe, ed.

10. Jeanette Winterson, Passion

11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays on Existentialism

12. Blaise Pascal, Pensees

two nudes in paris

My fave galpal in Paris, Bonnie Melvin, read this translation of my poem Two Nudes at the Sulyap festival recently. The poem was translated by Anne Latour and Branko Aleksic -- merci a tous!

Deux Nus

Elle craint Avril plus que tout, ce moment où la mousson
étouffe le peu de dévotion qui reste entre nous. J’en veux
à la mousson, pas à elle. Depuis Sarawak
quand il longe la côte sud ouest, l’air empeste le cardamome,
la laitance de crabe, les cadavres. Des soldats bombardent Pikit,
trois mille réfugiés musulmans affluent
dans les églises chrétiennes. L’ironie ne la frappe pas qui veut
que nous finissions toujours par soigner ceux
que nous maltraitons le plus. Elle est couchée sur le lit telle ma
république battue par le vent et la pluie, trop triste pour réagir
à la médiocrité de mon étreinte, à ce que ma jouissance
vienne ou trop vite ou trop lente. Vous pourriez croire que j’invente
mais elle m’a dit ce matin : L’argent
est le plus bel objet du monde.
Elle cherche à croire en quelque chose,
un au-delà de l’évidence trop claire, trop proche
pour être vue. Cher Eric , écrit-elle, je ne me précipite vers toi
que lorsque je suis sur le point de me désagréger.
L’été aux tropiques est un long carême, tout de repentir
et de résurrection, et il me rend malade. Elle colle ses pouces
dans les stigmates secs de croûtes de mes mains, sans douleur.
Elle me dit que l’on n’échappe pas à la guerre. Il faut bombarder
quelques villes si l’on veut la paix. Si nous avons des enfants
ils seront neuf sur dix qui jamais ne conjugueront le futur.
Pour quelque raison elle trouve cela réconfortant .
Lorsqu’elle est ainsi couchée, en position fœtale, un bras déplié,
contact avec mon visage, elle me rappelle le cap
extrême nord des Sulawesi. Elle me l’a montré une fois
sur la carte : une île jungle presque de forme humaine,
grouillante de terreur, incroyablement pauvre.

Traduit de l’anglais par Anne Latour et Branko Aleksic

poem

He asked me why I was so distant
and I said it was because of
anti-matter. It’s because I have
x-ray vision or think I do
and the skeletons drive past
in their invisible automobiles
and I am not scared,
I drink the full red grapes
right off the vine, the women
from Guangzhou are counting
all the fish massacred at four o'clock,
and somewhere in the night
God exists in his own mind,
counting the quarks left over
from all the revelations,
true or false. I pray to this space
that opens before me, wider
than my soul can carry.
And in the dark I dream
about nothing, I evolve
into orangutans, my mind wrapped
in the silence before words
before illogic. I am primitive
therefore, I don’t know the signals
for love, I refuse the dress code,
I check in when I want to,
I have an open ticket.
Inside out the world makes sense
but only if you don’t live in it,
the spoons bending in the smallness
of non-space, language useless,
desire absurd. You say evil
and I say no, you say in emptiness
is where you’ll find it and I say
x is not x, my anger is for
all of you, all the self-delusion.
It is not pity, it is real, it cuts me
straight through. I can see behind
the glass. I can stick my hand in
and not feel a thing.
I can fly over the broken world
and never touch ground.

sublimation

alors, viens!

among the exoplanets

The fade-out is not impossible.
You take the Acela
while I take the downtown B.
The stations will be packed.
This story has grown old.
Still I will close gently,
and let the credits scroll.
It will be torrid in the 80s.
The cold hearts glisten
in the waiting room.

The instructions will be simple.
On a clear night
in La Silla, Chile,
a goatherd looking for a lost kid
will look up to find
a mirror of the earth,
twice as big, double
all the sorrow,
all the epiphany.

I cannot hurt you any more
than I can hurt you.
There are secret wars
that need to be investigated.
You were never
here, you were the space
I was lost in, the light years
spun from a web between now
between then.
You were my nowhere.

The fade-out will not kill me
or you. We will remember
all or nothing.
Someone’s bound to discover 

life as we want it,
and for a moment
hope will return,
and longing. If I knew
what I really wanted,
I would let you know.

If I knew what to search for
here, all the wrong moves,
all the enigmas. Or there, among
the exoplanets.
Maybe we can count on it,
a better world,
bigger, faster, double
all the promise. If I knew
it would make a difference,
I would let you know.