EDITOR Dana Naone

FICTION EDITOR POETRY EDITOR Kapono Dowson · N engin Mahony

MANAGER Bob Lamansky

~ ,._l..r) 3': EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS ~ .::c .:::t: a._ Damaris Allen u.. >- Dudley Mciver oa:: ~ -a:: !::aJ CC'J oo ::; (r _, __, Cover photograph is of an Image found on Kauai -,:<: ::::, and thought to be Keal oewa, the goddess of rain. -, Courtesy of the Gregg M . Sin clair Library from the Bernice P. Bishop Museum Photo Collection.

ADVISORY BOARD Asa Baber Peter Nelson

Hawaii Review is publis hed twice yearly by the Board of Publications, Associ­ ated Students of the University of Hawaii. Subsc riptions and manuscripts should be addressed to Hawaii Review, Hemenway Hall, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped. self-addressed envelope. Subscription rates. $3.00 per y ear; single copies, $1.50.

©1973 by the University of Hawaii HAWAII REVIEW

TWO NUMBER ONE FALL 1973

Article 2 When Fish Dissolve in Light Poetry ALEIXANDRE 8 Fourteen Poems­ Translated by Timothy Baland, Rob­ ert Bly, and Lewis Hyde 54 Two Poems­ Translated by Robert Bly and Vera Dunham 56 Windsong for Prince Henry's Daughter ARD ALLAN NORMAN 57 Five Translations from the Creole UNTERECKER 60 Night Letter 66 Three Poems 68 Five Poems 71 Falling Asleep 76 Poem for My Friend Peter at Pi' ihana Fiction FORD 46 A Rummage Through the Coracles 61 The Eel-Wife 72 A Hawaiian Tale and a Maori Tale COGGSHALL 84 Night Review 89 Robert Bly and James Wright 96 Lewis Hyde

WHEN FISH DISSOLVE IN LIGHT

I People feel different kinds of loneliness. There is the lone­ liness of boredom or of being without friends. For some peop there is the loneliness of feeling separated from the whole from the physical world in particular, the trees, the grass, places where fish hide under water, and the moon. Camus fel how ··strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is 'dense' sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to u with what intensity nature or a landscape can make us nothing. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees this very minute lose the illusory meaning we had dressed .... ,~ ..... in, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise." This feel is neutral. Some find it a source of joy, saying that the world all the more a gift because it has so little to do with us. 0 take it as a sadness, not out of philosophy but just because that' how it meets them every day, every time the mind comes to Vicente Aleixandre's early poems-for almost twenty were fed by the sadness. There are love poems too, and are poems with the surrealist's smile, but the sadness runs neath all of them. "The moon comes out and chases what u to be a man's bones . . .. " This loneliness keeps coming it overflows from the poet's body and contaminates the parts of his life; friendship seems trivial, there isn't any joy the future .. . . And all around the emptiness is that moon, or the light the sea, all those things that move so smoothly they bewilder There must have been a time when we were part of it. We have been born to be one of those pure elements, "a chip of to burn itself up/with love-making." But everywhere you there are lies and suits of clothes and self-consciousness. can feel it-the lost paradise-but it's a thing that isn't

2 always speaks of it with a backwards style that Carlos "'"IVJJLu called " almost affirmative negation." The world that's is given and taken in one phrase. He doesn't say that the girl's breath shakes the leaves. He wishes he could say but he can't, he has to tell us about "the air that doesn't any leaves that aren't green." Aleixandre keeps seeing two things that won't come to­ . As you go through the poems you will find them filled edges, limits, shorelines, and boundaries that can't be The poems are often set by the sea, as if pulled toward energy that's trapped in pools along the shoreline that no one step over: You must never mix blood with such free waves. The color white is wing, is water, is cloud, is sail; but it's never a. face. ("Pajaros Sin Descanso")

There is a way to cross over. There is an energy that runs the universe and makes it whole, and we can enter through love or through any of the forces that break things D111rn--mea1m, anger, hate, poetry, stripping off clothes, getting on all fours with the animals-anything that obliterates ..,...... ,,.v"•"'~·•"" SS. Aleixandre doesn't consider himself a surrealist but there certain affinities. The surrealists share his distrust of the ve mind and his fascination with the sea. Aleixandre has the poet the same way that the surrealists did, as IODlecme who speaks for the earth with forces that rise through soles of his· feet. Freud's work connects them also. Andre read Freud just before he wrote the first Manifesto of in 1924. Aleixandre read him in 1928 and readily the influence on his early work. From Freud, from ~nt~uns, from the voices that come just before sleep, these poets there was an interior world different from the street map Paris. It pulled them powerfully. It's as if they were in a strong mriA'I't.n•v beneath the accelerating tide of rationalism. The an­ DI'IO~r.>lctg:lst in the jungle, the Spanish painters, the French the psychoanalysts were all down there, pushed slowly by the energy of the current above them. But they were not yet in touch with that other world in a way. (Only when you are moving away from the attitude" do you find melted clocks; when you have left it there aren't any clocks at all.) The forces they

3 were entering were only dimly perceived, like the shapes of fish seen deep under water. No one knew what it meant to go down there. Perhaps if they honored this new thing they would have to abandon or destroy the old. Perhaps this new world, for­ gotten for so long, would be weak or unhuman. And if it were the opposite of drawing room decorum it might well be violent. Whatever the reason, there always seems to be a fog of tension and blood around those early surrealist poems. The Nature that Aleixandre sees across the edge of his human eye is not a gentle one: it is full of waves breaking and lightning and growls. The poems are not an affirmation. They are not working out of a full and nourishing surreality, but away from the reality at hand. That too is part of their tension-they are the reflective mind trying to think its way out of coherence and precision. Nothing from the social world can be trusted. The poems try to break themselves down, like a child who tries to become invisi­ ble when he discovers his parents have no interest in him. They are hard to examine closely. The images won't stick together, the syntax breaks, the plot shifts, the objects shine and fade, the proportions of things seem odd. It's as if you have to find the correct place to stand and observe them. If you come too close they seem shaggy and unkempt like the animals in Aleixandre's jungle: "lions like a heart covered with hair. .. , the yellow hyena who disguises himself as the greedy, greedy sunset." But when you back off and watch from a distance it's still hard to focus on them, as if the jungle were now covered with steam. It may be a matter of finding the right light. Aleixandre has written that the poems are best understood when seen in rain­ bow light. He often describes his poetry as " una aspiraci6n a la luz," a longing for the light. The earliest poems, he said, were lit with black light, as if he'd been dragged far under the sea where nothing could penetrate, where the fish must attract each other with their own luminescence. Then he began to rise. In D estruction or Love, the fourth book, a light can be seen in the distance but it has traveled so far through the water that when it arrives it's red. But he keeps rising. The Shadow of Paradise, he says, is " a song for the dawn of the world, a hymn sung for light from the knowledge of darkness." His backwards style is a way of writing in this half-light. It is important that he found a way to keep writing for Aleixandre is one of the few pessimistic poets of this century who managed to rise and find something above the. emptiness. The shift was quite dramatic. It came with The Story of the

4 Death still hovers over the poems in this book but it _ .,,..,L£0., accepted now, passed over to something else. The book human fellowship, a spiritual unity, friendliness. He has that it "was begun as a work of love in the strict sense." there it opens outward to a world of people. It makes his books seem reticent. He has so much to say! The poems social, the style is narrative, almost talky. There are real ,.,.,""'I>JA"' all around and he pays attention to them, to friends and to strangers and dead heroes, to his dog. Aleixandre him­ appears more and more in the poems. Where before he had attentive to nature and longed to join it, now nature is the background for the lives of human beings. In the intro­ r..auc·non to his selected poems he wrote, "This now is the opposite of human loneliness. No, we aren't alone."

II Vicente Aleixandre was born in 1898 in Seville where his was regional military commander. His father was engineer. During most of his childhood the family lived in Malaga on the Mediterranean coast just southeast of Seville. It would seem that as he grew up Aleixandre had two careers. The one, an informal and hidden attention to literature, grew quietly beneath the other more formal and public life. In college he studied law and business administration. By the time he was twenty-two he was teaching business law in Madrid and help­ ing to edit an economics review. At one point a railway company mred him and his first published pieces were some articles about trains! He spent the summer of 1917, when he was nineteen, in a town in the mountains. There a friend gave him a book of ;!VoeJrns by Ruben Dario. Until that time he had read widely, but mostly Nineteenth Century novels, not poetry. That summer, Dario struck, he read Antonio Machado and Juan Ramon l:'tl:unenez. And he began to write. But always in secret, as if it just a pastime. Carlos Bousoiio, who has written the best on Aleixandre, says that in those years "not even his friends knew the secret, passionate work Aleixandre himself to in his uneasy solitude." He still taught law; he reading the Spanish mystics when he wrote those railway ,...... -u"'""''· This went on for eight years. Finally, when he was twenty­ he collapsed with an illness that forced him, or allowed him, to abandon his job and spend two years "inactive" in the

5 mountains. Almost immediately he began to publish poems and within three years his first book appeared. He was ill again \ several times during the 1930s, including a long convalescence that isolated him during the Spanish Civil War. He is one of the ' few Spanish poets who was able to both survive the war andre­ main in Spain. He has never been a political poet. His first book after the war established him as a guiding force among Spain's younger poets. When, in 1968, the publish­ ing house Insula came to issue a volume honoring Aleixandre, they could include poems from Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Gerardo Diego, Miguel Hernandez, Bias de Otero and more than seventy other Spanish poets. Aleixandre is still writing, still living on the outskirts of Madrid and spending the summers in the mountains at Mira­ Bores de la Sierra. Other than some poems in magazines, he has never been published in the United States before this vol­ ume, the first, as he would put it, to come to light here. I thank him for helping me with the selection of the poems. [Editor's Note: These poems are from the manuscript for a planned volume of translations of Aleixandre's poems, edited by Lewis Hyde, to be published by Beacon Press.]

III As I worked on this book during the last few years I came across a story or parable that has helped me explain some of my ideas about translation. The story is the power vision of a chief of the Oglala Sioux Indians. In this man's vision he found himself in a world where everything was spirit. The trees were spirit-trees and the mountains were spirit-mountains. Nothing was hard and everything seemed to float. He was riding on his horse and yet he could see the shadow of the horse dancing all around him as if it were giving off light and at the same time casting a shadow. Among the Oglala Sioux a person took his name from his power vision. So what should they call the man who had this vision? This is the problem of translation. The translator has to find the words that will make the vision reappear whenever they are spoken. I began to think about this when I read the vision because they called this man Crazy Horse and it's clear that his name has not been well translated into English. Better names might have been Prancing Shadow or The Horse that Does the Spirit Dance. Though as soon as you try to find a better name the other problems of translation arise. In this case you

6 _.uu''"" that we have no sacred dancing in our culture so it's hard us to find the words that will call the vision back. With poetry this was often the poet's situation in the first _lloC,,-he saw something unusual and tried to find the language would recall it. The translator's job is to try to see the thing the poem and then find the words in his own tongue will lead back to it. This " vision" view of translation is opposed to what might called " syntax" translation in which the translator tries to uce the structure of the text: the word order, the way the break, the use of articles and so on. It may be that different require different kinds of translators. Mallarme's sonnets allejo's Trilce might need a syntax translator, but Aleixandre someone looking for the vision. Not that I have ignored way the poems are put together, it's just a matter of em­ Whenever I deviate from the Spanish form or lexicon because my picture of the thing behind the text has led me altered phrasing in English. My goal has been to re-create flavor of the poems in common American speech.

7 Vicente Aleixandre

LA MUERTE 0 ANTESALA DE CONSULTA

lban entrando uno a uno y las paredes desangradas no eran de marmol frio. Entraban innumerables y se saludaban con los sombreros. Demonios de corta vista visitaban los corazones. S miraban con desconfianza. Estropajos yacian sobre los suelos y las avis pas los ignoraban. Un sabor a tierra reseca descargaba de pronto sobre las lenguas y se hablaba de todo con conocimiento. Aquella dama, aquella senora argumentaba con su sombrero y los pechos de todos se hundian muy lentamente. Aguas. Naufragio. Equilibrio de las miradas. El cielo permanecia a su nivel, y un humo de lejania salvaba todas las cosas. Los dedos de la mano del mas viejo tenian tanta tristeza que el pasillo se acercaba lentamente, a la deriva, recargado de historias. Todos pasaban integramente a si mismos y un tel6n de humo se hacia sangre todo. Sin remediarlo, las camisas temblaban bajo las cha­ quetas y las marcas de ropa estaban bordadas sobre la carne. ·• i.Me amas, di ?" La mas joven sonreia llena de anuncios. Bri­ sas, brisas de abajo resolvian toda la niebla, y ella quedaba des­ nuda, irisada de acentos, hecha pura prosodia. "Te amo, si" -y las paredes delicuescentes casi se deshasian en vaho-. "Te amo, si, temblorosa, aunque te deshagas como un helado." La abraz6 como a musica. Le silbaban los oidos. Ecos, suenos de melodia se detenian, vacilaban en las gargantas como un agua muy triste. "Tienes los ojos tan claros que se trasparentan los sesos." Una lagrima. Moscas blancas bordoneaban sin entusiasmo. La luz de percal barato se amontonaba por los rincones. Todos los senores sentados sobre sus inocencias bostezaban sin desconfianza. El amor es una raz6n de Estado. Nos hacemos cargo de que los besos no son de "biscuit glace". Pero si ahora se abriese esa puerta todos nos besarfamos en la boca. iQue asco que el mundo no gire sobre sus goznes! Voy a dar media vuelta a mis penas para que los canarios flautas puedan amarme. Ellos, los amantes, faltaban a su deber y se fatigaban como los pajaros. Sobre las sillas las formas no son de metal. Te beso, pero tus pes­ tafias . .. Las agujas del aire estaban sobre las frentes: que os­ cura misi6n la mia de amarte. Las paredes de niquel no consen-

8 DEATH OR THE WAITING ROOM

They were going in one by one and the bloodless walls were made of cold marble. Countless numbers went in, greeting other with a tip of the hat. Nearsighted devils went to visit hearts. They watched each other suspiciously. Mops lay on floor, unnoticed by the wasps. All of a sudden the taste of ~~a~~1-n••t- dirt broke over their tongues and they talked about with cleverness. That woman, that lady there got an argument with her hat and everybody's breasts began to very slowly. Water. Shipwreck. A balance of glances. The stayed at its proper level and a smoke from the distance everything. The fingers of the oldest man's hands were sad that the corridor drifted slowly over to him, full of stories tell. As a group everyone went on ahead of themselves and a of smoke turned completely to blood. Without doing any­ about it, the shirts were trembling under their jackets and shirt lables were embroidered on flesh. " Say, do you love The youngest girl smiled, full of advertising. The wind, little wind from beneath dissolved the mist and she was left made into pure prosody, iridescent with accents. "Yes, love you." - and the soggy walls nearly turned into steam-. "I you, yes, Oh Shivering One, even though you're melting an ice cream cone." He hugged her like music. It made his whistle. The echos, the tunes from a dream, were stopped hesitating in their throats like a very sad water. "Your are so clear that your brains shine right through." White wandered around without enthusiasm. The light from cheap was piled up in the corners. All the gentlemen yawned a lack of trust as they sat on their innocence. Love is an affair of State. We fully realize that kisses aren't made of baked Alaska. But if that door were to open now we'd all give your­ selves French kisses. What a drag that the world doesn't swing on its hinges! I'm going to turn my sorrow half way around so the singing canaries will love me. They, the lovers, didn't do what they should have done and got tired like the birds. The shapes on the chairs aren't made of metal. I kiss you, but your eyelashes. ... The airborne needles were above their heads: I have such a dark mission, loving you. The nickel walls didn't

9 tian el crepusculo, lo devolvian herido. Los amantes volaban masticando la luz. Permiteme que te diga. Las viejas contaban muertes, muertes y respiraban por sus encajes. Las barbas de los demas crecian hacia el espanto: la hora final las segara sin dolor. Abanicos de tela paraban, acariciaban escrupulos. Ternura de presentirse horizontal. Fronteras. La hora grande se acercaba en la bruma. La sala cabeceaba sobre el mar de cascaras de naranja. Remariamos sin entranas si los pulsos no estuvieran en las mufiecas. El mar es amargo. Tu beso me ha sentado mal al est6mago. Se acerca la hora. La puerta. presta a abrirse, se tenia de amarillo 16brego lamentandose de su torpeza. Donde encontrarte, oh sentido de la vida, si ya no hay tiempo. Todos los seres esperaban la voz de Jehova refulgente de metal blanco. Los amantes se besaban sobre los nombres. Los pa:i'i.uelos eran narc6ticos y restaiiaban la carne exangiie. Las siete y diez. La puerta volaba sin plumas y el angel del Senor anunci6 a Maria. Puede pasar el primero.

10 the twilight so they sent it back, wounded. The lovers about chewing the light. Allow me to tell you. The old ladies up the casualties, the casualties and they breathed their lace. Everyone else's beard grew down toward . the final hour will mow them down painlessly. The cloth wavered, toying with their scrupulousness. How touching see yourself laid out ahead of time. Boundaries. The great hour was getting closer in the fog. The room on the sea of orange peels. We could row gutlessly if weren't for the heartbeats in our wrists. The sea is bitter. kiss gave me a stomach ache. The time is coming. The door-the one about to open-had been painted a mourn­ yellow because it felt so heavy. Where will you be found, oh of Life, when there isn't any time left. Everybody for Jehovah's gleaming white metal voice. The lovers each other's names. The narcotic handkerchiefs sopped the bloodless flesh. Ten after seven. The door flew up with- any feathers and the Angel of the Lord announced Mary. ...,...,." ..... ·s first can come in now.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

11 Vicente Aleixandre

ELVALS

Eres hermosa como la piedra, oh difunta; oh viva, oh viva, eres dichosa como la nave. Esta orquesta que agita mis cuidados como una negligencia, como un elegante biendecir de buen tono, ignora el vello de los pubis, ignora la risa que sale del estern6n como una gran batuta. Unas olas de afrecho, un poco de serrin en los ojos o si acaso en las sienes, o acaso adornando las cabelleras; unas faldas largas hechas de colas de cocodrilos; unas lenguas o unas sonrisas hechas con caparazones de cangrejos. Todo lo que esta suficientemente visto no puede sorprender a nadie. Las damas aguardan su momento sentadas sobre una lagrima, disimulando la humedad a fuerza de abanico insistente. Y los caballeros abandonados de sus traseros quieren atraer todas las miradas a la fuerza hacia sus bigotes. Pero el vals ha llegado. Es una playa sin ondas, es un entrechocar de conchas, de tacones, de espumas o de dentaduras postizas. Es todo lo revue to que arriba. Pechos exuberantes en bandeja en los brazos, dulces tartas caidas sobre los hombros llorosos, una languidez que revierte, un beso sorprendido en el instante que se hacia "cabello de angel", un dulce " si" de crista! pintado de verde. Un polvillo de azucar sobre las frentes da una blancura candida a las palabras limadas,

12 THE WALTZ

You are beautiful as a stone, my dead woman! my living, living woman, you are happy as a ship! orchestra which stirs up worries like a thoughtlessness, an elegant witticism in a fashionable drawl, nothing of the down on the secret mound, nothing of the laugh which rises from the breastbone like an immense baton. A few waves made of bran, of sawdust in the eyes, perhaps even on the temples perhaps decorating the women's hair. skirts made of alligator tails, tongues or smiles made of the shells of crabs. those things that have been seen so often take no one by surprise. The ladies wait for their moment seated upon a tear, ~·1uu~ their dampness hidden with a stubborn fan, the gentlemen, abandoned by their buttocks, to draw all looks toward their moustaches. But the waltz is here. It is a beach with no waves, lt is a clashing together of seashells, heels, foam and false teeth. It is the churned up things arriving. Exultant breasts on the serving tray of arms. sweet cakes fallen on the weeping shoulders, a langourousness that comes over you again, a kiss taken by surprise just as it turns into cotton candy, a sweet "yes" of glass painted green. Powdered sugar on the foreheads gives a simple whiteness to the polished words

13 y las manos se acortan mas redondeadas que nunca, mientras fruncen los vestidos hechos de esparto querido. Las cabezas son nubes, la musica es una larga goma, las colas de plomo casi vuelan, y el estrepito se ha convertido en los corazones en oleadas de sangre, en un licor, si blanco, que sabe a memoria o a cita. Adios, adios, esmeralda, amatista o misterio; adios, como una bola enorme ha llegado el instante, el preciso momento de la desnudez cabeza abajo, cuando los vellos van a pinchar los labios obscenos que saben . Es el instante, el momento de decir la palabra que estalla, el momento en que los vestidos se convertira.n en aves, las ventanas en gritos, las luces en! socorro! y ese beso que estaba (en el rinc6n) entre dos bocas se convertira en una espina que dispensara la muerte diciendo: Yo os amo.

14 the hands grow short, and rounder than ever wrinkle up the dresses as though they were sweet esparto grass. The heads are clouds, the music is a long piece of rubber. tails made of lead almost fly, and the noise turned into waves of blood inside the heart, into a white liqueur that tastes of memories or a rendezvous. Goodbye, goodbye, emerald, amethyst, secret, the instant has arrived like an enormous ball, precise moment of nakedness head down the downy hair begins to penetrate the obscene lips that know. It is the instant, the moment of pronouncing the word that explodes, moment in which the dresses will turn into birds, windows into cries. lights into "help!" the kiss that was over there (in the corner) between two mouths be changed into a fishbone will distribute death saying:

Translated by Robert Bly

15 Vicente Aleixandre

MADRE, MADRE

La tristeza u hoyo en la tierra, dulcemente cavado a fuerza de palabra, a fuerza de pensar en el mar, donde a merced de las ondas bogan lanchas ligeras. Ligeras como pajaros nubiles, amorosas como guarismos, como ese afan postrero de besar a la orilla o estampa dolorida de uno solo o pie errado. La tristeza como un pozo en el agua, pozo seco que ahonda el respiro de arena, pozo. -Madre, l.. me escuchas?, eres un dulce espejo donde una gaviota siente calor o pluma. Madre, madre, te llamo, espejo mio silente, dulce sonrisa abierta como un vidrio cortado. Madre, madre, esta herida, esta mano tocada, madre, en un pozo abierto en el pecho o extravio. La tristeza no siempre acaba en una flor, ni esta puede crecer hasta alcanzar el aire, surtir. -Madre,(, me escuchas? Soy yo que como ...... u. tengo mi coraz6n amoroso aqui fuera.

16 MOTHER, MOTHER

Sadness, or a hollow in the earth. dug through force of words, force of thoughts about the sea, frail rowboats float at the mercy of the waves. Rowboats frail like birds at mating time, digits filled with love, that final longing to kiss the shore goodbye, the painful footprint of a hermit or a footstep gone astray. Sadness like a well in the water, dry well that forces the sand's breathing deeper, well. "Mother, are you listening? You're the soft mirror a seagull can feel warmth or feather. , mother, I'm calling you, own quiet mirror, opened smile like a piece of cut glass. , mother, this hurt, mother, this hand someone touched a well opened in the chest, or confusion." Sadness doesn't always blossom as a flower, the flower grow enough to overtake the air, spout. "Mother, are you listening to me? I'm the one wears love's heart here on the outside, like wire."

Translated by Timothy Baland

17 Vicente Aleixandre

LA SELVA Y EL MAR

Alla por las remotas luces o aceros aun no usados, tigres del tamaiio del odio, leones como un corazmi hirsuto, sangre como la tristeza aplacada, se baten con la hiena amarilla que toma la forma del poniente insaciable. Oh la blancura subita, las ojeras violaceas de unos ojos marchitos, cuando las fieras muestran sus espadas o dientes como latidos de un coraz6n que casi todo lo ignora, menos el amor, al descubierto en los cuellos ana donde la arteria golpea, donde no se sabe si es el amor o el odio lo que reluce en los blancos colmillos. Acariciar la fosca melena mientras se siente la poderosa garra en la tierra, mientras las raices de los arboles, temblorosas, sienten las uiias profundas como un amor que asi invade. Mirar esos ojos que solo de noche fulgen, donde todavia un cervatillo ya devorado luce su diminuta imagen do oro nocturno, un adios que centellea de postuma ternura. El tigre, elle6n cazador, el elefante que en sus colmillos lleva algun suave collar, la cobra que se parece al amor mas ardiente, el aguila que acaricia a la roca como los sesos duros, el pequeiio escorpi6n que con sus pinzas solo aspira a oprimir un instante la vida, la menguada presencia de un cuerpo de hombre que jamas podra ser confundido con una selva, ese piso feliz por el que viborillas perspicaces hacen su nido en la axila del musgo. mientras la pulcra coccinela

18 THE JUNGLE AND THE SEA

Over in the distance the lights or the weapons that are still new, are tigers as big as hate lions like a heart with hair growing on it blood like weary sadness all of them are fighting with the yellow hyena who disguises himself as the greedy, greedy sunset. Such sudden whiteness the dark circles around those dried eyes, the wild animals draw their swords or teeth blood out of a heart that doesn't know anything love, that beats so clearly in those jugular veins, you can't tell if the thing that gleams their white teeth is love or hate. To run a hand through that surly mane the powerful claw sticks in the ground, the trembling roots of trees the claws go deeper a love that sinks in the same way. To stare into those eyes that only burn at night, a little fawn, eaten a while ago, can still be seen a tiny reflection of the black gold, .. good-by" that shines from a tenderness beyond death. The tiger. the hunting lion, the elephant that wears some soft necklace around its tusks, cobra that looks like a lover's fire, eagle that fondles its rock as if it were a hard brain, little scorpion who dreams of oppressing an instant of life with nothing but its stinger, foolish presence of a human body that could never be confused with the jungle, that happy level where the wise little vipers nest in the armpit of the moss, the elegant mealy bug

19 se evade de una hoja de magnolia sedosa ... Todo suena cuando el rumor del bosque siempre virgen se levanta como dos alas de oro, elitros, bronce 0 caracol rotundo, frente a un mar que jamas confundira sus espumas con las ramillas tiernas. La espera sosegada, esa esperanza siempre verde, pajaro, paraiso, fasto de plumas no tocadas, inventa los ramajes mas altos, donde los colmillos de musica, donde las garras poderosas, el amor que se clava, la sangre ardiente que brota de la herida, no alcanzara, por mas que el surtidor se prolongue, por mas que los pechos entreabiertos en tierra proyecten su dolor o su avidez a los cielos azules. Pajaro de la dicha, azul pajaro o pluma, sobre un sordo rumor de fieras solitarias, del amor o castigo contra los troncos esteriles, frente al mar remotisimo que como la luz se retira.

20 down a magnolia leaf that feels like silk .. . when the murmur of the forever virgin forest rises up like two golden wings- covers, a trumpet or a rounded sounding-shell- the whole jungle shakes with music of a sea which will never mix its waves with the small, soft branches. The branches at the top formed by quiet waiting, hope which stays green forever, paradise. elegance of untouched feathers. jaws of music, powerful claws, the love that digs itself in, burning blood that spatters out of a wound, never reach those branches. No matter how far up it spurts, how much this earth's hearts try to open throw their pain or their greed up into the blue sky. Bird of happiness, bird or feather, the sound of the savage, lonesome animals, of love-making or the whipping of sterile tree trunks, out toward the distant sea that recedes like the light.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

21 Vicente Aleixandre

UNIDAD EN ELLA

Cuerpo feliz que fluye entre mis manos. rostro amado donde contemplo el mundo, donde graciosos pajaros se copian fugitivos, volando ala region donde nada se olvida. Tu forma externa, diamante o rubi duro. brillo de un sol que entre mis manos deslumbra, crater que me convoca con su musica intima, con esa indescifrable Hamada de tus dientes. Muero porque me arrojo, porque quiero morir, porque quiero vivir en el fuego, porque este aire de fuera noes mio, sino el caliente aliento que si me acerco quema y dora mis labios desde un fondo. Deja, deja que mire, teiiido del amor, enrojecido el rostro por tu purpurea vida, deja que mire el hondo clamor de tus entranas donde muero y renuncio a vivir para siempre. Quiero amor o la muerte, quiero morir del todo. quiero ser tu, tu sangre, esa lava rugiente que regando encerrada bellos miembros extremos siente asi los hermosos limites de la vida. Este beso en tus labios como una lenta espina, como un mar que vol6 hecho un espejo, como el brillo de un ala, es todavia unas manos, un repasar de tu crujiente pelo, un crepitar de la luz vengadora, luz o espada mortal que sobre mi cuello amenaza, pero que nunca podra destruir la unidad de este mundo.

22 WHOLENESS WITHIN HER

Joyous flesh that flows between my hands, face where I can look upon the world, delicate birds copy themselves and disappear, off to where nothing is forgotten. The shape of your body, diamond or hard ruby, that shines from between my hands, s mouth that gathers me in with its intimate music, your teeth calling a call no one understands. I throw myself in and die, because I want to die, I want to live in fire, because this air outside mine, it's the hot breath from underneath turns my lips gold and fiery when I come close. No, stop looking at me, discolored with love, purple life has turned my face red, staring at the low cries in your belly I'm dying and throwing off this life, forever. I want love or death, I want to be totally dead, to turn into you, your blood, that roaring, confined lava sends the tips of our fingers flying out like water can feel the beautiful edges of life. This kiss on your lips like a thorn that moves slowly, an ocean that flew up, made into a mirror, the shine on a wing, kiss is still a pair of hands, a passing over of your breathing hair, · --...... · u~ noise from the grudge-bearing light, or fatal sword that threatens my neck, it could never break up the wholeness of this world.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

23 Vicente Aleixandre

VIDA

Un pajaro de papel en el pecho dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado; vivir, vivir, el sol cruje invisible, besos o pajaros, tarde o pronto o nunca. Para morir basta un ruidillo, el de otro coraz6n al callarse, o ese regazo ajeno que en la tierra es un navio dorado para los pelos rubios. Cabeza dolorida, sienes de oro, sol que va a ponerse: aqui en la sombra suefto con un rio, juncos de verde sangre que ahora nace, suefto apoyado en ti calor o vida.

24 LIFE

A paper bird I have in my chest tells me the time for kisses has not yet come. To live! To live! ... no one sees the sun crackle, kisses or birds, late, or on time or never. A tiny noise is enough to kill you, the noise of some other heart falling silent, or that faroff lap which on this earth is a gold ship where the blond hair sails! Head full of pain, gold temples, sun dying, I keep dreaming of a river in this darkness, reeds full of green blood just being born, and I dream leaning on you, warmth or life.

Translated by Robert Bly

25 Vicente Aleixandre

ELARBOL' El arbol jamas duerme. Dura pierna de roble, a veces tan desnuda, quiere un sol muy oscuro. Es un muslo piafante que un momento se para, mientras todo el horizonte se retira con miedo. Un arboles un muslo que en la tierra se yergue, como la erecta vida. No quiere ser ni blanco ni rosado, y es verde, verde siempre como los duros ojos. Rodilla inmensa donde los besos no imitaran jamas falsas hormigas. Donde la luna no pretendera ser un sutil encaje. Porque la espuma que una noche osara hasta rozarlo a la manana es roca, dura roca sin musgo. Venas donde a veces los labios que las besan sienten el brio del acero que cumple, sienten ese calor que hace la sangre brillante cuando escapa apretada entre los sabios musculos. Si. Una flor quiere a veces ser un brazo potente. Pero nunca vereis que un arbol quiera ser otra cosa, Un coraz6n de un hombre a veces resuena golpeando. Pero un arbol es sabio, y plantado domina. Todo un cielo o un rubor sobre sus ramas descansa. Cestos de pajaros niiios no osan colgar de sus yemas. Y la tierra esta quieta toda ante vuestros ojos. Pero yo se que ella se alzarla como un mar por tocarle. En lo sumo, gigante, sintiendo las estrellas todas rizadas sin un viento, resonando misteriosamente sin ningun viento dorado, un arbol vive y puede pero no clama nunca, ni a los hombres mortales arroja nunca su sombra.

26 THE TREE

tree never sleeps. leg of oak, sometimes so naked, it wants a sun that's very dark. thigh that stamps the ground and then pauses for a moment the whole horizon retreats in fear. A tree is a thigh that grows on the earth like life standing up. 't want to be white or pink, it's green, always green like the hard eyes. Immense knee where kisses will never try to act like false ants. the moon won't pretend to be a piece of fine lace. the white foam that might risk grazing it one night in the morning, hard stone without moss. Where sometimes the lips that kiss the blood vessels feel the shine of the weapon that's on duty, feel the heat given off by the brilliant blood slips away, squeezed between the wise muscles. Yes. Sometimes a flower wants to be a mighty branch. you'll never see a tree that wants to be anything else. ~&&c:~uulc::::~ a man's heart pounds with sound. a tree is wise and rooted and dominant. The whole sky or a reddening rests on its branches. baby birds don't dare hang their baskets from its buds. the earth is all still before our eyes. I know she could swell up like a sea and touch it. At the top, gigantic, feeling the stars all quaking without wind, a mysterious music with no golden wind, is alive and it can cry out but never does, it never throws its shadow down for men, who must die.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

27 Vicente Aleixandre

EL CUERPO Y EL ALMA

Pero es mas triste todavia, mucho mas triste. Triste como la rama que deja caer su fruto para nadie. Mas triste, mas. Como ese vaho que de la tierra exhala despues la pulpa muerta. Como esa mano que del cuerpo tendido se eleva y quiere solamente acariciar las luces, la sonrisa doliente, la noche aterciopelada y muda. Luz de la noche sobre el cuerpo tendido sin alma. Alma fuera, alma fuera del cuerpo, planeando tan delicadamente sobre la triste forma abandonada. Alma de niebla dulce, suspendida sobre su ayer amante, cuerpo inerme que palido se enfria con las nocturnas horas y queda quieto, solo, dulcemente vacio. Alma de amor que vela y se separa vacilando, y al fin se aleja tiernamente fria.

28 THEBODYANDTHESOUL

But it is sadder than that, much, much sadder. Sad as a branch letting its fruit fall for no one. Sadder, much sadder. Like the mist the dead fruit breathes out from the ground. Like this hand that rises from the corpse lying in state and merely wants to touch the lamps, the grieving smile, the night speechless and velvet. Luminous night above the corpse stretched out without its soul. The soul outside, soul outside the body, swooping with such delicacy over the shape sad and abandoned. Soul of soft mist, held floating above its former lover, the defenceless and pale body, which grows colder as the night goes on, it remains silent, alone, empty in a gentle way. Soul of love that watches and hesitates to free itself, but finally leaves, gentle and cold.

Translated by Robert Bly

29 Vicente Aleixandre

MANO ENTREGADA

Pero otro dia toco tu mano. Mano tibia. Tu delicada mano silente. A veces cierro mis ojos y toco leve tu mano, leve toque que comprueba su forma, que tienta su estructura, sintiendo bajo la piel alada el duro hueso insobornable, el triste hueso adonde no llega nunca el amor. Oh carne dulce, que si se empapa del amor hermoso. Es por la piel secreta, secretamente abierta, invisi entreabierta, por donde el calor tibio propaga su voz, su afan dulce; por donde mi voz penetra hasta tus venas tibias, para rodar por ellas en tu escondida sangre, como otra sangre que sonara oscura, que dulcemente oscura te besara por dentro, recorriendo despacio como sonido puro ese cuerpo, que ahora resuena mio, mio poblado de mis profundas, oh resonado cuerpo de mi amor. oh poseido cuerpo, oh cuerpo solo sonido de mi voz poseyendole. Por eso, cuando acaricio tu mano, se que solo el hueso rehusa mi amor-el nunca incandescente hueso del hombre-. Y que una zona triste de tu ser se rehusa, mientras tu carne entera llega un instante hl.cido en que total flamea, por virtud de ese lento contacto de tu de tu porosa mano suavisima que gime. tu delicada mano silente, por donde entro despacio, despacisimo, secretamente en tu vida, hasta tus venas hondas totales donde bogo, donde te pueblo y canto completo entre tu carne.

30 HER HAND GIVEN OVER

One more day I touch your hand. your warm hand! hand is thin and quiet-sometimes I shut eyes and stroke it gently, softly. its shape, to touch ,_,... ,,..,,, re. the skin with its wings and beneath that bone that can't be bribed, the sad bone that never gets any Oh sweet flesh that soaks itself in such splendid love! The live heat spreads its voice, its gentle longing, your secret, hidden skin that starts to open; my voice slides through it into your blood it wanders, floating in your hidden streams a second blood singing a shadow song, dark like honey you from within, flowing slowly like a clear tone in your body an echo of my body now, my body full of busy voices. echoing body wrapped around with just the sound of my voice! So I know when I touch your hand only the bone refuses love-the never luminous human bone-. I know there's a sad layer in you that doesn't accept me your flesh comes white hot for a second. with flame from that lazy stroking on your hand, silky, porous hand that begins to moan, fine, quiet hand where I come in . so slowly. secretly into your life, to all the deepest blood vessels where I float live and finish my song inside of you.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

31 Vicente Aleixandre

EL NINO"" Y EL HOMBRE A Jose A. Munoz Rojas

I El nino comprende al hombre que va a ser, y callandose, por indicios, nos muestra, como un padre, al hombre que apenas todavia se puede adivinar. Pero el lo lleva, y lo conduce, y a veces lo desmiente en si mismo, valientemente, como defendiEmdolo. Si mirasemos hondamente en los ojos del nino, en su rostro inocente y dulce, veriamos alii, quieto, ligado, silencioso, al hombre que despues va a estallar, al rostro experimentado y duro, al rostro espeso y oscuro que con una mirada de desesperaci6n nos contempla. Y nada podemos hacer por ei. Esta reducido, maniatado, tremendo. Y detras de los barrotes, a traves de la pura luz de la tranquila pupila dulcisima, vemos la desesperaci6n y el violento callar, el cuerpo crudo y la mirada feroz, y un momento nos asomamos con sobrecogimiento para mirar el cargado y tapiado silencio que nos contempla. Si. Por eso vemos al nino con descuidada risa perseguir por el parque el aro gayo de rodantes colores. Y le vemos despedir de sus manos los pajaros inocentes. Y pisar unas flores timidas tan levemente que nunca estruja su viviente aromar. Y dar gritos alegres y venir corriendo a nosotros y sonreirnos con aquellos ojos felices donde solo apresuradamente miramos, oh ignorantes, oh ligeros, la ilusi6n de vivir y la confiada llamada a los corazones.

32 THE BOY AND THE MAN For Jose A . Munoz Rojas

I :m:sldle the small boy is the man he will become. a word he makes the signs, like a priest, that show us the man he'll be, hardly visible now. carries that man, he leads him around and sometimes hides him ...... "'' .. of himself as if he were a brave watchman. look way down in the boy's eyes, into his innocent and pretty face, him there, never moving, quiet, trapped. the man who's going to break out, we see the hard face of a man who's lived a long time, a thick, dark face ••one~~...... back at us in desperation. we can't do a thing for him. He is held back, his hands tied. Frightening. through the cage, through the clear light from that sweet still eye, see his desperation, his violent silence, his rough body and wild-animal eyes, a moment we're surprised-it worries us this constrained and electric silence staring at us. That's why we see the boy chase his bright hoop of spinning color through the park with a careless laugh. we see him let innocent birds fly out of his hands. walk through the bashful flowers so lightly that he never bruises their living odor. shout joyfully and come running up and smile at us those merry eyes. And we (so ignorant and careless!) hastily in at life's illusion and the trusting appeal to our hearts.

33 II

Oh, niiio, que acabaste antes de lo que nadie esperaba, niiio que, con una tristeza infinita de los que te rodeaban, acabaste en la risa. Estas tendido, blanco en tu dulzura p6stuma, y un rayo de luz continuamente se abate sobre tu cabeza dorada. En un momento de soledad yo me acerco. Rubio el bucle inocente, externa y tersa a(m la aterciopelada mejilla inm6vil, un halo de quietud pensativa y vigilante en toda tu actitud de pronto se me revela. Yo me acerco y te miro. Me acerco mas y me asomo. Oh, si, yo se bien lo que tu vigilas. Nino grande, inmenso, que cuidas celosamente al que del todo ha muerto. Alli esta oculto, detras de tus grandes ojos, alli en la otra pieza callada. Alli, dormido, desligado, presente. Distendido el revuelto ceiio, catda la innecesaria mordaza Aflojado en su secreto sueiio, casi dulce en su terrible cara reposo. Y al verdadero muerto, al hombre que definitivamente no naci6, el niiio vigilante calladamente bajo su apariencia lo vela. Y todos pasan, y nadie sabe que junto a la definitiva soledad del hondo muerto en su seno, un niiio pide silencio con un dedo en los labios.

34 II

Little boy, you were done before anyone expected. you finished in laughter, leaving everyone around you with an endless sadness. you're laid out, pale with the sweetness that comes after death, all the time a beam of light shines on your golden head. When we're alone for a moment I move close to you. innocent hair is blond, your velvet, motionless cheek is still smooth and pudgy. _.... .u.~•;y I can see the halo of thoughtful, calm all around your body. I go closer and watch. Even closer, and I look in. yes, I know what it is you're protecting. boy, huge child, you're jealously guarding the one who really died. is hidden in there, on the other side of your large eyes, in that other, quiet chamber. There in the present, asleep and set free. overturned frown has stretched out, the needless, broken muzzle has fallen off. ....,.... .,"' into his secret dream, this terrible face is almost pretty now that it's at rest. beneath his own face the watchful boy takes care one who's really dead, the man who was never born at all. the people go by the boy, lying beside the true loneliness of a death sunk inside of him, no one sees him putting a finger to his lips, asking us to be quiet.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

35 Vicente Aleixandre

, LA EXPLOSION

Yo se que todo esto tiene un nombre: existirse. El amor no es el estallido, aunque tambien exactamente lo sea. Es como una explosion que durase toda la vida, Que arranca en el rompimiento que es conocerse y que se abre, se abre, se colorea como una rftfaga repentina que, trasladada en el tiempo, se alza, se alza y se corona en el transcurrir de la vida, haciendo que una tarde sea la existencia toda, mejor dicho, que toda la existencia sea como una gran tarde, como una gran tarde toda del amor, donde toda la luz se diria repentina, repentina en la vida entera, hasta colmarse en el fin, hasta cumplirse y coronarse en la altura y alli dar la luz completa, la que se despliega y traslada como una gran onda, como una gran luz en que los dos nos reconociE~ramos. Toda la minuciosidad del alma la hemos recorrido. Si, somos los amantes que nos quisieramos una tarde. La hemos recorrido, ese alma, minuciosamente, cada dia sorprendilmdonos con un espacio mas. Lo mismo que los enamorados de una tarde, tendidos, revelados, van recorriendo su cuerpo luminoso, y se ab- sorben, y en una tarde son y toda la luz se da y estalla, y se hace, y ha sido una tarde sola del amor, infinita, y luego en la oscuridad se pierden, y nunca ya se veran, porque nunca se reconocerian ... Pero esto es una gran tarde que durase toda la vida. Como tendidos, nos existimos, amor mio, y tu alma, trasladada a la dimension de la vida, es como un gran cuerpo que en una tarde infinita yo fuera reconociendo.

36 THE EXPLOSION

I know they have a name for all this: to be given life. isn't a bomb bursting. though at the same time that's really what it is. like an explosion that lasts a whole lifetime. comes out of that breakage they call knowing yourself, and then it opens wider and wider, "'-'•"-'~oc,u like a quick cloud of sunlight that rolls through time floats up and up until it ripens in the passage of life, that an afternoon becomes all existence, or better: all existence is like one long afternoon, a roomy afternoon full of love, where the light in the universe suddenly gathers, suddenly in a whole lifetime, at last it's full, it's all formed and ripened at the top from there the fullest light comes down, the light that unrolls and unfolds a huge wave, like a huge light that lets us look on each other at last. We've gone over all the soul's smallest details. we're the lovers who fell in love one afternoon. gone over that soul so slowly, always surprised to find it still larger in the morning. same way that afternoon lovers, lying there, go over and over their glowing body, absorbed in themselves, in that afternoon all the light comes out and bursts and grows, it's been an endless afternoon of love. then later they're lost in the dark, and now they'll never see each other because they never could. ... But ours is a long afternoon that lasts a lifetime. We give each other life, if we were lying down and your soul, my love, into this life-place, is like a huge body I devoted myself to one endless afternoon.

37 Toda la tarde entera del vivir te he querido. y ahora lo que alii cae noes el poniente, es solo la vida toda lo que alii cae; y el ocaso no es: es el vivir mismo el que termina, y te quiero. Te quiero y esta tarde se acaba, tarde dulce, existida, en que nos hemos ido queriendo. Vida que toda entera como una tarde ha durado. A:iios como una hora en que he recorrido tu alma, descubrilmdola despacio, como minuto a minuto. Porque lo que alii esta acabando, quid., si, sea la vida. Pero ahora aqui el estaliido que empez6 se corona y en el colmo, en los brilios, toda estas descubierta, y fue una tarde, un rompiente, y el cenit y las luces en alto ahora se abren del todo, y aqui estas: inos tenemos!

38 loved you every moment of that afternoon. now, that isn't the sunset falling over there, that's of life falling; and that isn't sinking; it's life itself coming to an end, I love you. I love you and this afternoon is ending, luxurious, breathing afternoon where we've been making love. life gone by all together like an afternoon. years were just an hour during which I've gone into your soul, uncovering it, minute by minute. se what's just finishing over there could be life, is life. the first flash is finishing here and now you're fully revealed in the ripening and the sparks, it was an afternoon, a breaking wave, and the summit and the lights the top are all open now, and you're here and we're inside each other!

Translated by Lewis Hyde

39 Vicente Aleixandre

AMI PERRO

Oh, si, lo se, buen " Sirio" , cuando me miras con tus ojos profundos, Yo bajo a donde tu estas, o asciendo a donde tu estas y en tu reino me mezclo contigo, buen " Sirio". buen perro y me salvo contigo. Aqui en tu reino de serenidad y silencio, donde la voz h nunca se oye, converso en el oscurecer y entro profundamente en tu UA•o;;u. • v,~ Tu me has conducido a tu habitaci6n, donde existe el que nunca se pone. Un presente continuo preside nuestro dia.Iogo, en el que el es el tuyo tan solo. Yo callo y mudo te contemplo, y me yergo y te miro. Oh, profundos ojos conocedores. Pero no puedo decirte nada, aunque tu me comprendes ... yo te escucho. Alli oigo tu ronco decir y saber desde el mismo centro infinito tu presente. Tus largas orejas suav:lsimas, tu cuerpo de soberania fuerza, tu ruda pezufta peluda que toea la materia del mundo, el arco de tu aparici6n y esos hondos ojos apaciguados donde la Creacion jamas irrumpi6 como una sorpresa. Alli, en tu cueva, en tu averno donde todo es cenit, te aunque no pude hablarte. Todo era fiesta en mi coraz6n, que saltaba en tu derredor, tras tu eras tu mirar entendHmdome. Desde mi sucederse y mi consumirse te veo, un instante u... •-•u tu vera, pretendiendo quedarme y reconocer me. Pero yo pase, transcurri y tu, oh gran perro mio, persistes. Residido en tu luz, inmovil en tu seguridad, no pudiste mas entenderme. Y yo sali de tu cueva y descendi ami alveolo viajador, y , al la cabeza, en la linde vi, no se, algo como unos ojos misericordes.

40 TO MY DOG

Yes, it's clear to me, good Sirius, whenever you look at me with your big, thoughtful eyes. come down here where you live-or I come up- join you in your kingdom where you save me, my good dog Sirius. in your calm and quiet world where there are no human voices chat with you in the evening and go straight to the middle of your day. brought me to your home where time isn't a matter of sunsets. unending present stands over our conversation, in which you're the only one who talks. silent and look at you as if I'd lost my voice. I sit up and watch. Your eyes are so thoughtful and wise! even though you'd understand there's nothing I can say. . . I just listen. hear your hoarse speech and wisdom rise from the boundless core of the present. long, incredibly soft ears, your strong proud body, rough, shaggy paws in touch with the material world, curve of your silhouette and those calm, unfathomed eyes the Creation never breaks in to surprise you. in your cave, in your dark hole full of light, I knew what you meant though I couldn't speak. heart swelled with joy and went bounding around you (while you kept giving me that knowing look). my busyness and exhaustion I can see you, pausing a moment at the edge of yourself, to stop me and figure me out. I kept going, I went on while you stayed, my big friend. live in your own light, your security doesn't change, the best you could do for me was understand. I left your cave and went down to my little traveler's compartment. And when I turned my head at the border could see-what was it?- something like the eyes of pardon.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

41 Vicente Aleixandre

LLUEVE

En esta tarde llueve, y llueve pura tu imagen. En mi el dia se abre. Entraste. No oigo. La memoria me datu imagen s6lo. S6lo tu beso o lluvia cae en recuerdo. Llueve tu voz, y llueve el beso triste, el beso hondo, beso mojado en lluvia. Ellabio es humedo. Humedo de recuerdo el beso Bora desde unos cielos grises delicados. Llueve tu amor mojando mi memoria, y cae, cae. El beso al hondo cae. y gris aun cae la lluvia.

42 IT'S RAINING

This evening it's raining, and my picture of you is raining. The day falls open in my memory. You walked in. 't hear. Memory gives me nothing but your picture. only your kiss or the rain is falling. voice is raining, your sad kiss is raining, deep kiss, kiss soaked with rain. Lips are moist. with its memories the kiss weeps some delicate heavens. falls from your love dampening my memory, on falling. The kiss far down. The gray rain on falling.

Translated by Robert Bly

43 Vicente Aleixandre

COMO MOISES ES EL VIEJO

Como Moises en lo alto del monte. Cada hombre puede ser aquel y mover la palabra y alzar los brazos y sentir como barre la luz, de su rostro, el polvo viejo de los caminos. Porque alli esta la puesta. Mira hacia atras: el alba. Adelante: mas sombras. i Y apuntaban las luces! y el agita los brazos y proclama la vida, desde su muerte a solas. Porque como Moises, muere. No con las tablas vanas y el punz6n, y el rayo en las alturas, sino rotos los textos en la tierra, ardidos los cabellos, quemados los oidos por las palabras terribles, y aim aliento en los ojos, y en el pulm6n la llama, y en la boca la luz. Para morir basta un ocaso. Una porci6n de sombra en la raya del horizonte. Un hormiguear de juventudes, esperanzas, voces. Y alla la sucesi6n, la tierra: el limite. Lo que veran los otros.

44 THE OLD MAN IS LIKE MOSES

Like Moses on top of the mountain. Every man can be like that deliver the word and lift his arms feel how the light sweeps old road dust from his face. Because the sunset is over there. behind him: the dawn. the growing shadows. And the lights began to shine! he swings his arms and speaks for the living inside of his own death, all alone. Because like Moses. he dies. with the useless tablets and the chisel and the lightning in the mountains with words broken on the ground, his hair fire, his ears singed by the terrifying words. the breath is still in his eyes and the spark in his lungs his mouth full of light. A sunset is sufficient for death. of shadow on the edge of the horizon. of youth and hope and voices. there, the generations to come, the earth: the borderline. thing the others will see.

Translated by Lewis Hyde

45 Richard Ford

A RUMMAGE THROUGH THE CORACLES

The student should read the following sentences using a loud, clear, uninhibited and energetic voice. no attempt to understand what you are reading. Conce111trat instead on developing a sharp, well-inflected accent. or's note: Do not be alanned at our apparent ln(lllltertana to meaning. It is of course important, and will be in'""''~"'',.. in Lesson III.) Santo Tomas Santo Tomas es famoso. Santo Tomas es un muy religioso y muy sutil. Noes (noes) un sultan o un Es solamente un sacerdote. Pero es un hombre muy tante en la historia del mundo, porque es un filOsofo profundo en todo el mundo. (Repeat this two more times.) I long for the past tense. Everything up to now is in the ent tense giving the language an eerie, other-worldly quality is becoming oppressive. Though it is easy. Everything easy when you're just beginning. I found that out a long ago, years ago in fact when I learned the game of badminton cidentally, a great favorite of the Duke of Beaufort who the game, often now mispronounced as "badmitton", after country where he happened to be staying at the time). It is course perfectly easy to knock the shuttlecock over the net you find soon that it's just as easy for your opponent to do same from his side. So that mastering all the niceties and lows of the game becomes somewhat harder than it seems first grasping the spindly racket. I have to presume that the same is true of Spanish-even the corrupted Mexican sion-that its difficulties will begin to present themselves long like all those smiling faces of the animals we can't see

46 picture of the woods, until we suddenly spot one and can no longer see the woods themselves for the droves of ducks, squirrels, pigs, and bunnies crowding out everything else. UlJne•tlEts seem to operate in this same way. There is a trick, however, that I've taught myself. It is that at the onset of the most excruciating anxieties pertaining to of the exploding number of subjects that regularly rise up cause me excruciating anxieties, I lace together my fingers a way opposite from which you would construct a church, -~tpl,e, etc., place the edges of my 2 thumbnails together on a •eli

47 in a week of the first superficial lesion showing up on his instep, before the pathologists could even get a sample. have said, though my friend was not one of them, that such ness is an undisguised blessing. I say, however, once you're you're dead. My other response was to rush in a frenzy to the college firmary, a building traditionally reserved for students and faculty types are driven off like mendicants, and burst through the vestibule and down the long institutional fears rocketing and exploding and sending nurses lapping against the walls like bilge water. I followed the strand of tape down the hall and around the corner and straight in Horvath's office, who was sitting smoking an enormous and staring blissfully at the eye chart. ''I'm rotting by striations," I exclaimed hysterically, ~~ ...... 1 ing one last nurse at the door. "Help me Horvath!" "Grab your ankles and give us a cough," he said, laying cigar across the ash tray like an enormous redwood log. "My legs are splitting. Moles are crawling beneath the face of my skin." "So," Horvath mumbled removing his glasses and IJ...... u .. an eyelash off the lens. "My legs are in decrepitude," I said, dropping my pants motioning toward the violet buboes. "Have you lost weight?" Horvath said. "Of course I've lost weight, but all of it explicable down the last gram. I've even regained a pound and a quarter in last week." I tried to distend my stomach. "Stretch marks," Horvath said reproachfully pressing long scar with a tongue depressant. "Where is your Where is your courage? A grown man coming here and mewling . What a disgusting spectacle. Take your mutiny of here." He shoved me backwards and out the door with the depressant.

Santo Tomas es famoso. Santo Tomas .es sutil. The City Man was written by somebody else, some latter day saint history. Santo Jerome, Santa Monica, Santo Patrick, Ron none of these is correct, of course. I myself, however, abide the same city.

A man has come to fix the drain in the basement, wearing

48 osier coracle on his back. In it he carries all his tools: his Friend, his monogrammed set of Stillson wrenches, peat rubber flashlight, and his snake, coiled inside the rusty cowling ready to strike out at whatever calcified grease, and food are blocking my drain. I wait in the dining room a glass of Tawny Port and listening to him work in the 118Jl!leiJtt. The sound travels up through the pipes like some in­ Muzak. He has worn a grey shirt with his name stitched the oval patch above the cigarette pocket. "Doc". I'm certain has many others at home exactly like it, washed and ironed hanging in the closet. There is no use, however, in getting over Doc, since he will soon be up here very business­ asking for $36.81 plus parts. He assured me on his way in I owed him $15 when I hung up the phone. There is some satisfaction in knowing you don't have malig­ melonoma. There is the happy prospect of one more spring, of going out like a roman candle a week before the Jan­ thaw, before spring training even begins, and the rookies still at Orlando in the instructional leagues, shagging flies taking infield. But malignant melonoma aside (I have my thumbnails -""""'"together now as if glue were drying between them, so get away with setting melonoma aside for the moment) about the coracle the plumber has brought with him? does he get his osiers at this time of year? "Well, how's it going," I say amiably to announce my entry the basement and at the same time dispel his alarm. "You own a dog," he growls irritably. "Not at the present time, why?" I say, staring admiringly his coracle, resting on the damp concrete beside the drain, like a turtle tupped over onto its back. "Because of this here gook," he says and pulls a long and smelling ganglion of hair and pale festoon out of the drain the end of a bent coathanger. "The Harrises owned a dog. They were the people who lived before." "Maybe," he says holding the nasty business up between us several seconds as if it were the remains of a miscarriage I being held responsible for and ought to have a look at as a exemplum. "I can't help admiring your coracle here," I say, inching to where it's lying on its back, partly full of tools that are ~:meld to the osiers inside the shell. I can see where tools are

49 missing and in use, as their outlines have been carefully on the osiers where they are normally fastened. "It ain't bad," he says, peering down into the tiny drain and holding his rubber flashlight up around his head so as shine where he happens to be looking. "I've had better ones, I've had worse. This one," he motions with his finger, ''I've maybe a year, little over. I don't think it'll go another year. there another coathanger in there?" I reach in the coracle, grab the hanger, strip the paper it and hand it over. "You can't beat these things," he says, ramming the down into the hole with terrible force. "What happens when it wears out?" I say, examining fine osier weaving that has gone into the coracle. "What happens to what," he says suspiciously. "To the coracle." " It wears out, that's all. Just like everything else, you up. It leaks, it don't float good, the tools don't hold on no it starts to look seedy, so you get a new one." " Is there any way I could buy this one when it wears "Why not. But why don't you just go down to the shop. got a whole big pile of them behind the building waiting to hauled off. Tell 'em Doc said it was okay for you to through 'em all. Try to find you one that's solid osiers leather straps. It's liable to last the longest of any of them." I go up satisfied with our visit, and have another port. Doc finishes his business, comes upstairs with the strapped to his back, delivers his bill for $32.68 which I to pay at the earliest possible opportunity which he says is skin off his back one way or the other, and goes off down driveway.

In May I am going to Mexico and have made several though infantile sallies towards learning Spanish. I have a Spanish self-teaching workbook, and a fat diccionario lished by the Follette World Wide publishing company contains a helpful traveller's conversation guide to the Summer Olympics. "6 Ya tantearon la primera a typical phrase, which means "Have they announced the of the first heat?" (Spanish uses the question mark at both of the sentence, which strikes me as an efficient though unadventurous way of treating the language.) I expect, to depend more heavily on such phrases as, cuello

50 monga treinta y cuatro, which means, neck 14lh, sleeve I'm convinced I must fill my closets with a virtual sunburst wedding shirts, beads, huaraches, outlandish sashes, scarves, and the finest leather goods. There's no longer use holding back. I've held back perhaps too long already. find now that I am able to talk about Mexico very sensibly without having to jam my thumbs together like cymbals. I coing off to Mexico principally to learn Spanish, though my are many-sided. On the one hand I would like to read in his native tongue. I would like to know Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Infante, Asturias out of their own language. well, it is simply good for a man to know another man's There are then possibilities for thought and action would not otherwise exist. And the continual opening of _.,,&.0,,...... is, while not alone sufficiente, es por lo menos, por la supervivencia. I am confirmed in this. El Cid es y semihistorico. Ole. I am considering moving away to Mexico permanent­ iiDC>u~;n the practical considerations are somewhat hazy and possibly bring about a lasting schism between my wife and should she elect not to go with me, as she has twice aug­ she will not do. There are naturally certain difficult IBtlODIS of ethics embedded herein, though at the moment I the slightest idea of what they are. Such matters as this my horizon and bring storms brewing to the peripheries world, causing me to remain indentured here far longer I would otherwise care to, ultimately causing me anxieties sort that produce embolisms the size of donut holes that percolating into my heart, so that I must devise these digital to stave off the aggravation. My father made the transi- as they say, from this life to the other, on the basis of such obstruction at age 54. I myself have more ambition that that. I've been discovered studiously bending my thumbs in­ by more and more of my colleagues and the lengthy puwa.uo•ns have themselves become a source of boredom and as well as becoming a widening source of profes­ dubiety among my colleagues as to my fitness to carry on duties on the executive committee. Such things, of course, never kept secret. Port, I believe, would eventually solve problem, though only on a per diem basis, and the quantities are often as not a lead-in to nausea and stomach dis- and later, liver collapse. My wife compares me to Miniver , having never read the poem. It's just that title that

51 seems to her suitable for someone who introduces a great of port into his system day after treacherous day-gender withstanding. If there is a hint of growing weariness with marriage or with my wife, let me strike it off before it metastasizes. No weariness exists-no boredom, no angst, no anomie, no re1sues11-' ness, no perturbation of the spirit, no crying in the of monogamy. Only some exploding urge to fly away to to rusticate, to live a freer life, to seek out male companion worthy of my trust, to model my person after Gilbert Roland, affect thin cigars (puros), to shave my beard and support a moustache. In effect, to leave this place where I am ""'~..... , •• Michigan is a timeless doldrum. People go to their jobs wicker coracles strapped to their backs in case the water denly rises out of the backed up drains and sumps and in the cellars where they're working. They take precautions. affect webbed feet and long curving yellow bills, others themselves in electrical tape before leaving out of a mo others wear suits of polished armor to the delight of the uu.. vJL7< students. The permutations describe an endless spiral. Hola what I want to say. Hola Cisco, Hola Pancho, Hola Santo HoJa Santo Patrick. Drive the vermin from my life. Clean the out of my ears. The dog has just come downstairs where I've had him in the bathroom during the time the plumber was here. needn't divulge everything to everyone. I warmly admire dog, and he is apparently become fond of me, so that there's use subjecting him to the plumber's scourges. He has gone to inspect the basement, where he spends much of his time. certain that he'll demand to be poisoned when I pass away. My wife is entering the front door. The dog is rushing the basement and greeting her enthusiastically, licking boots and twisting himself into a knot, trying to explain that have had him locked in the bathroom all day and that he forced to leave behind a souvenir of himself to punctuate inequity. Lately she has been in a state of nervous antagon and disaffection, since discovering that the A&P injects into its rib steaks to raise the weight. It is an outrage she more than I, though I try to console her with the knowledge the Nationalists on Taiwan practice the same shabby ~t ...,. .. ·nt-•n• ; only with sewer water. Though through these contretemps she has not been with me, even in my occasional moments of derangement,

52 sore at the fates for betraying her, so that we continue to the close, fiduciary relationship that I love and need. What will ultimately decide about coming to Mexico with me and there forever is for her and not me to consider. ''Hola Carmencita," I begin from my chair in the dining Her name is Melody, but I refuse to say Melody in Spanish. "Buenas.. tardes, Tomas," she sings from the door. "Como "Bien, bien ahora," I reply. "Cuello catorce y media. Monga y cuatro, si? Let's go to Mexico right away. Now." "Oye Tomas. Tengo un acertijo. (She speaks unblemished ,...... ,,.. . I am a poor beggar to her accent.) Senor Pete and Senor were in el hacienda," she says from someplace where I see her, some bathroom someplace. "Senor Pete went por una leetle siesta. So who was left?" "Senor Pete. Senor Pete was left alone." "No-no," she cries, invisible to me, laughing cheerfully. Repeat." "Repeat. Santo Tomas es famoso. Santo Tomas es religioso. sutil, es profundo, es filosO!o, es todo. Hola, bola, bola. Hola el mundo. Estoy esperando. I am waiting."

53 Andrei Voznesensky

ANT

He arrived with me from the other shore, lost, having wandered onto my boat. The ants heaps don't dig him. He's an ant from the other shore. A black ant . . . with such white eggs! Maybe even whiter than .... But he's an ant from the other shore, you know, he's an other-shore ant. In his other-shoredness. the Catholics see him as just a fundamentalist Orthodox ant. The rule there is all needles shall be carried points downward, not in the air. I'd like to take you back with me, runaway brother, but in this crowd you can't tell who belongs to which shore. Brother ant, even I don't have the astrolabe to find the way to that other shore. The strawberries on that other shore have gotten too ripe and are turning .. . Even if I had the astrolabe I couldn't make the shores come any closer. I'm a sort of ferryman between two countries. Kicking up spray with my oars, I think: "There is an earth from which we leapt and its dawnlight rises through all worlds." After a month afloat like Captain Bering the ant on his driftwood will soon reach his family. They will answer him from the other shore: "You are an ant from the other shore."

54 WOMAN IN AUGUST

You sit down again at the mirror, and still refuse to allow yourself to see, just as in the woods out there, this new beauty, alien to you, strange. In times of grief we notice gray hair. So the green leaves rise to meet us on a. clear day in summer, but on a dark day copper comes forward.

Translated from the Russian by Robert Bly and Vera Dunham

55 Rafael JesO.s Gonzalez

WINDSONG FOR PRINCE HENRY'S DAUGHTER for Carmen

Cuatro cosas tiene el hombre que no sirven en la mar: ancla, governalle y remos, y miedo de naufragar. Antonio Machado

Take a sextant to watch the stars by and cut the firmament in sixths; take an astrolabe (because it has a lovely name), and bees' wax, not against the sirens' song you wouldn't want to miss, but because you might want the smell of flowers just for one moment on the wine-dark sea. Take one secret word you'll want to roll and knead within your mind, a few friends' names (to invoke the angels by), and a small mirror scratched with this charm: There is one center to the universe and it moves to wherever you are.

56 Allan Norman

SONG OF THE DUSTS for Kristina Ford

This night the woman of dusts is walking on the beach. From her eyes the memory dust shines, and it is remembering the moths. From her breasts the moth dust shines, and by this they know where to return. From her heart the dust of her age shines, and one by one the years rise between two wings.

SONG OF THE BEES

The bees are blowing smoke once more from mouths I cannot see, but I am not certain it is what makes them sleep. Their smoke has gathered once more, but I am not certain this makes a cloud. Though the bees have to rise in something. Now the sky grows dark and lightning comes often, but how can I be certain this means the bees have arrived there? Yet each m orning after a storm I can hear the hive, and know the honey is thick in it. And I am certain I hear a song known only by those who have been away.

57 Howard Allan Norman

FINDING THE CRICKET

I light my one match where the rock seems to sing. "Oh brief moon I can smell," the cricket says up to it.

THE TWO CANDLES

This candle tied to the top of my head to see my way in the dark, this candle is dripping his children into my hair as a man would let down his children from his shoulders into the black grasses. Oh I feel his sons, his daughters beginning to sleep in my hair. He is growing smaller, this candle, soon he will be the size of his children. This is why he does not ask for wind or rain, so he can become a child again. His whole life the candle has lit his own way toward the black grasses. We both stand in the dark with a flame rising from the top of our heads.

58 THE BARREL WOMAN

I stand in the smells of my body, my own spice tree. I do this so the barrel woman made of spice tree wood will smell me and bring the water she has caught in her open mouth. Barrel, one house that stands on its roof. She has stood in the splinters of her body waiting for rain all her round days.

Translated from the Creole, West Indies with PaulB Barto.v.

59 John Unterecker

NIGHT LETTER January 17 Makua, 6:09 p .m .; Manhattan, 11:09 p .m.

The sun through 12-foot breakers: an irridescence. You are running for a midnight cab. Broadway is white with snowstorm. Do we touch in a click of time, diamonds jewelling the air, snowflakes? On rare nights, the sun flares green when it drops in the You are red, green; red, green: traffic lights. At Seventy-second Street, when you leave the cab, you are caught in a whirlwind, irridescent in headlights. I try to imagine the great tides of the stars, great burning fountains lifted to wave crests' plunging or whirling like January snowstorms out of silence. Janet, keep warm, keep well, in this year's beginning.

60 THE EEL-WIFE

One moment Hasuko's ring was secure upon her finger; the it was only a twinkle in the pond. In the moonless night, couldn't tell it apart from the stars. She rolled the sleeve of her summer kimono and bent to fish ring out of the water. A sudden blotting out of the stars made lose sight of it. For a moment she couldn't cry. Something caught her hand and was holding it! She held still, afraid she would be drawn into the pool. When she ventured to at her hand, she was relieved to find that it came out easily. did not notice the blood flowing in the water. Some neighbors came to see what had frightened the young who often wandered alone at nights. They found her sitting _.,I!I~''J by the pond and carried her into the house. Her hus­ who was a doctor, came and sewed her hand with small All the men and women gathered outside while he her ring-finger in its place. For a while there was only the of the scissors and the soft exclamations of the women. It was a deep wound, going down to the bone between two He told her in his doctor-voice that it was a miracle the was intact. It appalled her to hear herself say: "At least you my blood isn't green, and that I am a woman." He didn't , and in the silence her heart pounded in her ears. When he was done, he made her drink something that like hot vinegar down her throat. She began to feel her She felt she shouldn't be there, so conspicuously the of the disturbance. She tried to communicate this to her But the words wouldn't come, so she turned and looked the window. The men were heading for the pond with their She saw them throw in shreds of fish, then dip their in the water and put them through all the rockholes. But

61 she knew from their faces flickering in the torchlight that was only the dripping spears, the water, and the darkness of pond. She turned to find the women looking in at her from the Rising, she fixed them tea. When the men returned, their heads silently, she hid her hand in her kimono sleeve said it didn't matter; it had just frightened her a little. Then smiled, and turned to the women, saying: "I didn't know my band could sew so well: here I have been doing all the Everyone laughed, and her husband, who was talking to of the men, turned to look at her. The neighbors left in spirits, only regretting that they had not been able to find the Hasuko heard them as they went down the path, speculating its size, and wondering where it had gone. Long after they had gone, she awoke with a throbbing in her hand. She still felt a certain shyness towards her h and didn't want to bring him back from so great a distance sleep just to look at her hand. She sat in bed, fingering edging of her futon. She had finally lain back when something moved within It re-started the painful hammering and made her hold breath. Again it moved; through the whole length of her this time. It was then that she knew why the men had not able to find the eel ... That night it was as if her body was a pond, her nnn"·-n:A... providing cavities for the snake-body. She could feel it her body; gliding from lungs to liver, from liver to heart. Her band lay with his back towards her. Hasuko lay clutching futon for hours. She was awakened in the morning by her hand slipping the pillow. She felt it being lifted in a firm hold and pulled back so fiercely that it began to bleed again. "Hold still," came her husband's voice. "I won't hurt you." She sat up and told him what had happened the night As she told him, she felt as if she were a child making up a to get an adult's attention. " I shouldn't wonder," he said examining her hand. " I have been more attentive to you last night. It is swollen: must have had a high fever during the night." In the sunlight everything seemed alright. She got out of and did the chores as well as she was able to. Hasuko saw of the boys from the village near the pond, talking to each in excited voices. She half-expected them to come calling at

62 with the eel in tow. After a while the boys went away to some new diversion. She went down to the pond in the after­ to see if she could find her ring, and was distressed that could not. In the days that followed, Hasuko sometimes broke into She was moved, after such an attack, to do something that not of her own will. It led her into a dark hole of confusion self-torture. Several times at the market she spent the money saved for necessities on combs and pretty-colored materials, hid them in fear that her husband would find them. She home a kitten one day, knowing that her husband had aversion to them; then hid it in a box behind the washboard so he would not know. Once she took his scalpel to pry open a and when it broke she was so afraid that she couldn't meet eyes when he came home. Sada never brought up any of these things, which increased silence of the caverns within Hasuko's body. Sometimes, falling asleep, Hasuko looked up at the paper lanterns, thought they were moons. One night she made o-musubi for dinner. But when Sada home, he found her eating the last one. She could not ex­ to him what she herself didn't understand, and stumbled to help make him comfortable. He did not reproach her for eating before his return, nor for him no rice. He sat and asked her if there was some tea; was not really hungry. Later, she approached him. Not being able to meet his eyes, looked at that point where his kimono crossed, and said: "I feeding one more mouth." "Yes," he said, touching her chin. "I thought as much." Hasuko didn't know what else to say. Did he not mind that wife was feeding an eel?

Hasuko was named for that flowering time of year in which was born. It was nearing that time again. "In a few days it will be lotus season," Hasuko thought. her turning unwillingly to her grandfather's sword on the wall. must be strong enough to see the blossoms." She now slept in a separate bedroom so that he could not see changes that came over her at night. She shut the sliding when she slept, and locked it.

63 " I understand how a woman wants privacy in her ... v~ ...... "''l ment," her husband said, "but you need not lock your against me." Still she locked it. She was afraid for her husband's If at night she crawled out and found her way to Sada's she didn't know what would happen. She didn't have <>n·n~~w over the changes that came over her. She knew that terrible happened during the night because when she awoke the morning she was wet, and tired, and visions came like dreams to tell her what had passed. One night the thought of what she had to go through oec:&llll unbearable. Before any transformation could take place, ran to her husband's room and fell on her knees before his He looked up at his wife whose long hair was slipping from loosely bound band. "Sada," she said, her hand moving to his sleeve, "it is often that I ask something of you .. ." Surprised by the supplication in her voice, he said coldly: "You needn't beg anything of me. I have tried to give everything." "Yes," she said, hiding her face in the dark, and could goon. She felt a joy as sudden as the spilling of fresh water from well within her, and she could not understand it, for tears running into her sleeve. "Sada, there is no child," she said, and fled to her becm:>OI Her grandfather's sword was not as heavy and awkward other samurai swords she had held, but it had not been for a woman's hand. As she touched the point to her breast, could feel the eel squirming inside her body. Before she could understand what was happening, the was fluJlg from her with so great a force that it spun into the posite wall. Sada stood above her, his face a white mask. " If I am so hateful to you," he said, "you should have let do it-to punish me. Why didn't you run away instead of tempting-this! You, a woman, to dishonor me in this way; take away ... to move ... to leave so little." He was silent a long time. Hasuko's fingers clutched her mono hem. Then Sada turned to her: " Why, Hasuko?" Hasuko bit her lip and looked at the floor. Sada knelt before her, taking hold of the hand that its tightness: "Why?"

64 Together they went to the Shinto priest. "You violated the eel's domain by putting your hand in the ," the priest told her. "It is a separation of nature if it does also enter into yours." "I'm sorry," Hasuko said. "Something slipped from my grasp I couldn't think of anything but getting it back." "There is more than one way to think," said the priest, "and often leap into a thought without consideration of how they return." It could have been her husband saying it, for the way Sada's politely avoided hers. She bit her lip and was silent. The priest gave Hasuko a charm to be said that night before pond. Then he prayed before the altar, and accepted the con­ tftr'"'"'nn that they gave him. Hasuko p,ut a fresh fish into the pond, as directed, and said charm so that it carried to the rapidly moving clouds above. a moment the moon was covered. Sada had his arms around waist as a dark shape struggled out of her mouth. There was plop, and when the moon came out again, the fish was gone. water rippled to the edges of the pond and stilled, and in dark water there were only. stars.

65 Mari Nakamura

A LONG TIME APART

I have become a man to please Y.ou. We meet, clasping shoulders as if after a long parting. Moving toward each other, we are not lost for things to say. We shall be brothers, you and I, and share this table as if we had always shared it, talking of women late into the night.

A JAPANESE GIRL SPEAKS

Do I own my arm, or is it an ogre's arm sewed to my shoulder? He should come to claim it before it does something terrible, like taking the hand of someone I don't love, and pressing it to my cheek.

66 TO GREET YOU

I think of the night you taught me to step out of my body. It is an obstruction, an object that comes between you and the thing you touch, you said. I left my body as you left yours. At some point between the objects­ eyes closed and hands floating on knees- we embraced. Tonight I try to leave my body to reach you. My hands become strange to me. My body grows hard. These eyes blink like turtle-eyes in salt water. Will you understand when suddenly, in the middle of dinner, a turtle rides into your kitchen, opening its arms as if it had reached the shore?

67 Harold Yoshikawa

growing small and ugly enough to fit into a molar. this is security. this is the recreation needed to keep from being alone.

THE WIDOW

old mrs. yasuda throws a dry potato out from her yellow bucket. so many things are being explained. look curled there, • a pumpkin flower.

THE DISAPPEARING CHAIR

first, the chair. then, all the way around it, no chair.

68 FROM THE IRON SHIP THE C.S. LONGLINES

rolling through the waffled waves like a needle throwing out its tail, the iron ship speaks. I move below the salty air away from the singing cable's cleft. there's a pounding in the hull, and yet the sea is calm. lying behind us three thousand fathoms of communications, each holding itself against the depth, each hoping the sound will rise again.

69 i lie upon the pebbles that roll into the warm salty air nearby as a seashell opens a crab jumps in the Icy Black FALLING ASLEEP

My head wavers, a stark fish Tied down to glass, crowned by Carved bone glitter, Its bead plummage trapped Deep in tomb flake light. Black dynasty, coiling Silent at my ankle, Your taproots soft as glove-leather From faces stopped Inside your powdered shrine. Shepherds wander through the hills Throwing star jade-stones at sheep Hanging from eucalyptus by piano wire.

71 Lowell Uda

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED TO EAT SQUID

Long ago on Molokai, there lived a woman named Mano­ anoa, who was famous for her appetite for squid. Every day when the fishing canoes came in, she went down to the shore and greeted the fishermen. "Anything good for me today?"she would say. "Perhaps a leg, an eye ... I will work hard for it." The fishermen knew her as a character. She was always there when they came back, and they tolerated her. " We had no luck today," they would say. " Go away." Or if they had some luck, they might give her a squid, or a tentacle or two, for a bit of work. " What's the matter with you?" they laughed. "All you ever eat is squid. Ah, but you are a good worker." One day the fishermen of the village came back with a large number of squid, and Manoanoa was able to obtain a whole one for the promise of two twined baskets. She took the squid home, where she cut off some of its tentacles and hung them in a tree to dry. The rest she cut up into mouth-sized pieces and put into a bowl. Then she went to the side of the house and sitting on her mat began weaving the baskets. "Hey, squid-eater," called the fishermen, walking by with their dripping baskets and lures. " Why aren't you eating your squid?" " I will," Manoanoa called back, "as soon as I finish this bit of work." She held up the twine and the coconut ribs she was working with and waved. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you." Laughing, the fishermen stopped at the nearby spring, drank, chatted, Manoanoa obviously the topic of conversation, then went on. And Manoanoa settled back to her work. She worked quickly and quietly. Her damp fingers smell­ ing faintly of squid twisted and pulled at the twine, and grad­ ually the basket took shape. It would hold several squid easily.

72 "Oh, I must hurry," said Manoanoa. "I have one more bas­ to go." Just then, she heard a voice. " Hey! Defective One!" Smil­ she looked up. She held up her finished basket and waved. no laughing fisherman was walking by. No laughing fisher­ was drinking at the spring or chatting about her. She peered at the bushes and down a row of trees, but saw no one. "0 Defective One!" This time Manoanoa jumped up. The voice had come from roof of her house. She looked up a nd saw a squid crawling toward her. Ink gleamed on its tentacles and head. Its glared red. "0 Defective One," said the squid. " You would divide me as you have divided yourself." The squid fell to the ground at Manoanoa's feet, reaching all directions like the sun. Terrified, Manoanoa ran into the uuu"''"· She knocked over the bowl she had filled with watering just a little while earlier. It was empty. Manoanoa screamed. Out the door she ran. Passing the tree which she had hung some of the tentacles to dry, she saw &hat they were gone. The,re was no doubt about it. The squid 8he had seen on the roof was the one she had gotten from the rftllhe,rn:ten. On she ran till she came to a relative's house, where 8he babbled and cried that whole night. Ever after that Manoanoa ate no more squid. And no more did the fishermen of the village come home from fishing and find Manoanoa waiting for them.

HAUKIWAHO'S FACE

No one knew why Haukiwaho climbed up to the heaven of Rangi, not even Haukiwaho himself. "He was a strange man," said one villager, talking about Haukiwaho as though he were dead. "He was a bold man," said another. "I always thought he was a bit crazy," said yet another. Shaking their heads sadly, all the villagers looked up at &he wide bright sky. High above them the sun blazed fiercely, and they had to shield their eyes. Then, still wondering about Haukiwaho, they moved off slowly toward their huts.

73 Haukiwaho was not dead. He had climbed up to the of Rangi successfully, and now he was roaming about, what he could see, learning what he could learn. He saw strange things, many awesome things, and many ord things. The ordinary things he saw more clearly than " Now I know why I wanted to climb up to the heaven of gi," he said. "I want to share all I have seen and learned with fellows below." So, after a number of days, Haukiwaho returned to and his village. Walking among the familiar huts, he that people were staring at him. Some were walking away. "Wait," said Haukiwaho. " It's me. I have returned." " Who?" said one man, fascinated by Haukiwaho's face. "Haukiwaho," said Haukiwaho. "I have been to the hea of Rangi and back. I have seen many things and I have come tell you about them. Listen! The heaven of Rangi is just like world. Yes, I, I saw it all. Not men, but gods walked about. I the only man." He looked around. Everyone had stopped was staring at him as if something were terribly wrong. " I have seen many things," Haukiwaho went on. "I learned much, more than any man on earth, and have much share with you that no man alive knows. You think the wastes away each month? No, I will tell you. It is eaten up the sun. With its fiery teeth, the sun chews at the moon there is nothing left, and when-" "Ah," said the man who had been fascinated by waho's face. "Now I know why you climbed up to the heaven Rangi, where no man should go." " I wanted to learn all these marvelous things," said waho, " and to share them with my fellows and friends." " No," said the man who had been fascinated by Ha ho's face. "You climbed up to the heaven of Rangi because are an excessively proud man. Feel your face. It is like the you talk about." Haukiwaho felt his face. Where his eyes should have there were holes. His mouth was a large fanged orifice which the wind blew. He had no ears, no nose, no tongue. skin was as dry as bone.

74 Iao Valley John Logan

POEM FOR MY FRIEND PETER AT PI'IHANA

We all live on islands. And you and I've wand­ ered far this day on one: on Maui enroute to Hawaii which they call the Big Isle. I've gone farther than you have because I find myself catapulting away from you a s if afraid to meet, then back. Though it is a horizontal zig zag, I thought of the vertical drop of young men, a rope of hemp around their feet in the initiation ceremony down a sheer hill that (without skill) could easily crack the skull. We've seen the beautiful pink anthurium plant, part of it erect out of its broad adamic leaf, the scarlet I'iwi bird and the strange-boned

76 gorgeously formed and mixed native girls with hibiscus in their dark hair. That far sheer, ancient wind-blown mountain, lush at its base. its long feminine erotic lines partly shrouded hushed in mist. the sun sometimes just catch- ing for a moment the rocketing red ohi'a-lehua flowers which spring up in the wake of volcanic.fires, the yellow mamani clustered like a family of friends on their stalks in bril- liant patches along hills and roads above the native houses or the falling terraces of taro fields that run stretching down like quilts or tawny animal pelts toward the sea again.

77 II. You are patient with the pain I keep which I can neither explain (even to myself) nor escape. And therefore I half begin to love you, as your quick black hair lifts as gentle as your brown eyes still seem in the wind that shifts from higher up the sacred ground. At Pi'ihana you stand where Kamehameha shed the blood of young Hawaiian men in thankful sac- rifice some few of his bat- tles won. (He was turned on to blood by Captain Cook­ who was torn apart- and he showed a tenacity like that of the later ministers of Christ.) The stones of the heiau now are the horrid black of that old dried blood. Once before, you said, you took three of these holy stones away and they've caused you more cursed grief

78 than you deserve, Peter, my friend, well-meaning thief. But there's just too much dangerous life in these ghosts they've left behind. Perhaps the sensual red Af­ rican torch ginger should first have made you wonder. For my part I wonder if the urge to rape an orphan child and steal his semen, leaving his bones all broken up and black inside the private temple of his flesh is like that sacrifice by which Kap:lehameha thieved young life for himself and for the wife- ly earth into which it still soaks slowly back. It drips in the enormous mother vein or extended island cunt left by lava tubes we found and went through underground. Kamehameha had less mana than his son, you said, my guide,

79 and less even than his queen whom he therefore needed to approach naked on his belly like a baby. A thousand youths he threw (or like a mad Circean swineherd drove) over the Pali, Oahu cliff of sheer fall and of sure, overwhelming beauty­ where the wind's so strong it sometimes hangs you or wafts you back again like a sorcerer's wand, or like the spores of ferns or the cork- like seeds of screw-pine the waves will float for months. My own seas, my winds, are weak today and I depend utterly on you, who do not know, so now you walk suddenly out of my sight if only for a minute and I begin to trem- ble with the panic of it. My eyes drop at once from this beautiful island place to my own two feet

80 which I see monstrous in their blackened socks split by plastic thongs into two club shaped parts like the frozen lava flows from Haleakala. The naked feet of Hawaiian men and women are graceful as their hands. But my feet are black and swollen because I've died in this exotic heat that gives life to all other manner of men, women and plants, the hanging red Heliconia, the hundred orchid kinds, and Tamarind.

Ill. Peter, my absent friend, the blood of boys, flowering, may keep an aging king alive, but not me. I should have healed my grotesque feet in the silver pool in the valley of lao at the green root of its great rising, aged pinnacle. But I did not. And now again, it's too late. For Christ's sake Peter why don't you come back! If you're really gone for good

81 would you at least respect my wish? On my Maui grave I want someone to leave a half- empty bottle of wine {perhaps some food for our continuing need.) And don't let some kid steal it from my tomb! Just give me that blood-red funeral urn at my foot. Perhaps an uwekahuna, wailing priest, may wander by then toward home and in the trained, spirited light from his lean body you will all see the gorgeous white plumeria trees that fill my cemetery up li}te girls.

IV. Thank God or Madam Pele whose fiery goddess home has been on Maui and is now in the still smoking sometimes flowing young Volcano where we head­ the desolation blasted stretch on Hawaii. Or thank someone I say­ even Apua'a the lusty pig god whose prick is like a cork screw.

82 Thank one of them that you are walking back in sight again. I know you've been looking for green leaves to place on the stones of the heiau in hope of a safe passage for all of us. But please don't go again, Peter. (That's my oracular message.) Don't leave, and don't let me drive, but get me out of this astonishingly bloody place and after this please keep such terrible beauty to yourself.

©Liveright

83 Gene Coggshall

NIGHT

-What can we do? The question hung like a blackberry, so I picked it and dropped it in my bucket. where it rested, alone, in the bottom. -I mean And the baby in the next room, waffled in dreams as fantas­ tic as the days, restless in new blankets, turned against new sheets. -things are simply not the same. I answer, - 'Simply' is not the right name. • -But the TV ... my wife said, and pointed toward where the set in a simple logic stewed and bubbled. -We could bottle it and market it, I say, -a snake-remedy for complication, I laugh, but my laugh is beer froth spilled on the table, and I wipe it away, continuing - the world isn't TV. -I wouldn't want it that way, Still, a family ... -The Partridge Family singing the same song in the same ruffle-necked outfits-ringnecked partridges. -Don't be funny. -The Brady Bunch versus My Three Sons in a scuffle for the Goody-Two-Shows-of-the-Year award. Outside, the wind blows past the microwaves, trying to change the TV reception into a cold reality, wind and waves powerless to comprehend one another-at war, at play, inter­ weaving like the successive layers of our house, like arctic snow­ drifts waiting for their glacial meaning. Like the layers of mean-

84 between How are you? and I'm fine, I guess. -You keep your best thoughts to yourself. You keep secrets. your wife. (The ceiling needs new paper.) She changed channels, remotely, but the same program up, only the lines of interference changed. Again, and a whirr a new program, a new life, new surroundings, new as old as the last-all as uninteresting as moth wings on planet of butterflies. I retreat like that moth and leave the channel to my wife, who rowed through bayou questions backwater secrets, soap opera conspiracies. And I float her. -We don't do anything. I had thought .. . -There is doing, and there is being. -Well, we aren't anyone, either. I'd planned to . .. -Dreams and schemes, romantic things, effervescence and 'swings. I try to sing, round, like a pitchpipe. But the right key is a different hole. Locked off-key, I carry the tune to cover the among bunched blankets, shapeless. -I guess I just don't know what you think. What you really

-Thoughts are unreal. Like the apartments on TV that exist in some fag interior•decorator's wet-dreams. -I accept TV for fantasy. You don't. You're begging my IIU~,.,~1V11 . Why? -I don't know how to answer it. -You don't try. -I can't try. -You won't try. -Why should I have to? -You're my husband. That was supposed to change things- we married, I mean. A song I wanted to write came to mind, so I wrapped it in a and sang to myself -Customs, forms, the shapes of things, encircle our lives wedding rings. -You can go off, and I have to stay home. It sounds tnte, know, but the grocery store . .. the cleaners ... the roads

My bucket begins to fill. I will have to wash her questions, the bad ones out, perhaps freeze all but a dishful to

85 have at once with cream, with half-and-half. I ease away, away to the refrigerator, bring ice cream back with chocolate syrup draped like a brown flag. -A toast I cry -to better times and chocolate-covered diapers. I raise my spoon but my wife stared from me to her dish to the late news, and her ice cream melted over Congress, over statis­ tics, over a school bus accident, covering each alike. Hung in her crib, the baby flutters like her mobiles, like the delicate monsters that swirl below the ceiling with the same perturbations as planets and dreams. My wife and I hang from the same mobile and flutter touchlessly about one another in circles asked and answered and unquestioned. I grasp my string and pull myself up to where I hear my wife say -We don't fit the way I thought we did. Hug me, and you'll see. I tried, but her ice cream spilled and made the moment sticky, and when she sponged the moment off, something melted that was there, the moment was gone, gone, and in the one that followed our hug, like the wind and the microwaves, met insub­ stantially. -We fit as well as any. -Don't lie to me. Our sharp edges cut each other's spots. Your face hurts mine. -We fit as well as any man and woman. Male plug, receptacle-just the way you'd plug in the TV. -You trivialize us. To you, sex is a recharge, like an toothbrush. -It's a polarization. It drains the passive and charges active, so that the tension is maintained. -And which of us is the passive? -I don't know, I say. I don't know, except that my words fit one .....,v."''"•· · hand in glove, cock in cunt, and my word-contructs grow like barn-footings, joists, interlocking roofing shingles. I some more words to build my wife a shelter, while Johnny son scatters useless talk, a refuse man determined to some cosmic landfill before one o'clock. -Life is defined by its tension between good and evil ( tension) and between life and death (physical tension). Seen this way, contradictions and paradoxes may be loved u.,. .., .., .. _ they form boundaries at the edges of the tension. Imm

86 rob us of our physical tension, in the way that saints are of their morality. Marriage is the meeting place of great sical and moral tensions, and is therefore great itself. -You're a pedant. (The cat is still outside. One of us should let it in.) She turned to face me. -You're a fucking pedant. You define the life out of me, and of the baby. You make a baby by fucking, not by talking. You 't feed it tensions. You have to love it, and damnit! love is the _.u~naJLvc of tensions. -Now who's defining? -Self-defense. If it weren't for the baby, I'd leave you. I trip over her last sudden statement, a dead log, and my of berries spills and spills and spills as if it will never empty. But it empties at last, and I am hollow, too. It is a third moment before I realize the wet, cold ground is our blanket my wife wiped away the ice cream and the old moment and the composure I always feel between clean sheets, between the clean, tight corners of logic, in my hospital of words. -Why? -Because we aren't the way I imagined us. -We could be. Life is really what we define it. You and I sim- ply have to re-define ourselves. -The baby changed all that. Now the baby defines us, to use your metaphor. The baby" defines us, and we no longer form a sentence. She held her face rigidly toward the TV, and her tears turned back upon themselves, were sucked back into their ducts, and I imagine them broken into their constituent chemicals, returned to the stomach, where they are in turn vomited as unchewed meat and potatoes. -Nothing is that final. -You didn't have the baby. If you were ripped apart the way I was, you'd know the meaning of final, to see your crotch split apart in the mirror. -It was a beginning, not an end. The rigidity in her face broke with the slow cracking of pond ice, with the weight and fall of glaciers edging into the sea. -Once, you told me the beginning was the same as the end. I didn't believe you then. Now you tell me that they aren't the same after all, and I can't believe you now. I spend my days alone fig­ uring how to leave you, whether to leave you the baby or take the role of wronged madonna with a girl-child as proof.

87 -Christ was a passive man, like me, I tell her, but I feel my helplessness at the edge of a pond, knee wet and my bucket empty and the blackberries somewhere behind me. -Shut up and hold .me. She pulls me toward her. Despite the TV whistling with a test pattern, despite the wet blanket cold upon my leg, she pulled a hardness into me, into my cock, her underwear crackled against mine. So many times we have tried to even our sorrows by mixing our seed, as if our juices mingled in sexual madnesa have neutralized (acid in base) and we have been left to refresh ourselves with the water. Tonight, other nights, inside the wind she has yanked me free of my clothes, twisted from her own. and locked me in a tangle of sheets and thighs and arms and arms, tight as a virgin, lopse and wet as a mother, frantic as a whore in love. The baby begins to cry. -Damn! I wait, then move again, tentatively, ignoring the baby. -Damn you! she cried, and wrenched loose. -Damn the kid and damn you and damned if I feel like ing. So just pull yourself off while I wa lk the kid. And turn off TV, for crissake.

88 JAMES WRIGHT AND ROBERT BLY

Joining Hands. By Robert Bly. Harper & Row. 67 pp. $2.95 paper. Two Citizens. By James Wright. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 59 pp. $6.95.

There are several reasons why it is appropriate to consider these new books by James Wright and Robert Bly together. First is the long friendship between the poets. They met in Minnesota in 1958 and were closely associated for several years-until Wright left the state for good. Another and far more important reason is the similarity between these books, which is profound, despite the marked surface dissimilarity (no matter what has been written about them:, these two poets are very different stylistically). In an interview done for The Paris Review, Wright com­ mented on the influence which he felt Bly had on him back in Minnesota: "He made it clear to me that the tradition of poetry which I had tried to master, and in which I'd come to a dead end, was not the only one. He reminded me that poetry is a possibility, that, although all poetry is formal, there are many forms, just as there are many forms of feeling." Or, as he put it another way, "there is something about poetry in the human imagination which is like the spring." James Wright seems to have set him­ self the task of investigating all the formal possibilities of poetry over the years. Beg inning with The Branch Will Not Break in 1963, each of his books shows a remarkable stylistic advance over earlier ones-and Two Citizens is no exception. Yet there is a constant element in Wright's style. On the jacket of his first book, The Green Wall, Wright said: ''I've tried very hard to write in the mode of R obert Frost and Edwin Arling­ ton Robinson." When he said that, Wright was not thinking so

89 much of the content of these two poets, but of their method­ what he later called the use of "the pure, clear word." The voice of Robinson may still be hea rd in these newest poems-near the end of one of them Wright tells us "Friends, I have stolen this line from Robinson." The cadences are colloquial, realistic, gen· erally flat; and the lyric effects are all the more remarkable be­ cause of this quietness. In Bly's poems, on the other hand, there is a deep tension between silence, the desire to be a solitary figure completely surrounded by snowy fields, and noise, the cacophonous sounds of the modern urban world. Even in moments of mystical isola­ tion, Bly expresses himself in strangely urban images: " Let us drive cars/Up/the light beams/to the stars ...." The voices that are at war in Bly's poetry are those of Whitman-the Whitman who sang of the technological advances of his age in " Passage to India" and who lamented the dead of the Civil War in "Drum Taps"-and Roethke-the Roethke who pursued the self so deeply in poems like "North America n Sequence." But although their methods differ, these books are remark· ably similar in content. In both, an essentially political problem is faced-how is the poet to endure in a country whose attitude towards poetry and the poetic approabhes pathological hatred, a country which has spent years trying to destroy an alien cul· ture? The solution is in both cases a personal one, involving an immersion in the feminine principles of love, beauty, poetry, and the spirit, and a revulsion from the masculine principles of hatred, power, utility, and the machine. Bly expresses the general idea in the middle section of his book in a prose essay entitled "I Came Out of the Mother Naked." The point of the essay is to distinguish between two worlds of consciousness, the masculine and the feminine, the father and the mother. "F ather consciousness," he says, "tries to control mammal nature through rules, morality, command­ ments," whereas "In mother consciousness there is affection for nature, compassion, love of water, grief and care for the dead, love of whatever is hidden, intuition, ecstasy." America, in its destructiveness and its hatred of the natural and the primitive, is linked by Bly with the masculine principle: "The American ground, with so much mother consciousness in it, had been in· vaded by Puritans, fanatic father types." He goes on to say that " the despising of the feminine soul has been the cause of some of our greatest errors and disasters."

90 Bly does not wish simply to replace the masculine with the av.u.u.uLu..,, 1 but to redress the balance towards the feminine. And sees signs that this is happening-politically, as the "Teeth Mother" attacks us in Southeast Asia-and poetically, as our turn towards "those parts in us that are linked with music, with solitude, water, and trees, the parts that grow when we are far from the centers of ambition." Bly's essay, far from being ..a shuffling interlude of notions on parade" as one reviewer has described it, is the expressed heart of his Sleepers Joining Hands, just as its general idea is the implied heart of Two Cit­ izens by James Wright. Embodied in the poems of Bly's book is a dual search for the ~ av•.u ..1uu ..... soul within a masculine world-a search which is both cultural and personal; Bly undertakes this quest not just for him­ Mlf but for America as well. What the masculine principle has given us is described in detail in Bly's long and powerful poem on the Vietnam War, "The Teeth Mother Naked At Last." The etrange thing about Bly and this book is that so much of his best poetry describes not the feminine, which he loves, but the mas­ culine principle of power and destruction, which he hates. Thus we find beautifully lyrical lines describing hateful subjects: Artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end. 800 steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls. The six-hour infant puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep out the light. • But the room explodes, the children explode Blood leaps on the vegetable walls. We perform such deeds because we are a rich country based on the masculine principle of power, "because we have so few wom­ en sobbing in back rooms,/because we have so few children's heads torn apart by high-velocity bullets,/because we have so few tears falling on our own hands." The third section of the book consists of a long sequence of poems, "Sleepers Joining Hands," in which Bly finds a personal solution to his dual quest: So rather than saying that Christ is God or he is not, it is better to forget all that and lose yourself in the curved energy. I entered that energy one day, that is why I have lived alone in old places, that is why I have knelt in churches, weeping, that is why I h av e become a stranger to m y father .

91 The poem, and the volume, ends with the feminine pru:u.apw dominant-thus Bly can join Whitman in envisioning a cendent union of Americans, based on the idea of universal "The panther rejoices in the gathering dark./Hands rush T,...... ,_ : each other through miles of space./ All the sleepers in the join hands." Sleepers Joining Hands contains the best and most ambi· tious poems yet written by Robert Bly. It is deeply impressive­ and not just as poetry, for it is also important as a statement our national psyche. Bly has not been content to write super­ ficial, merely topical poems. Rather, he has attempted, first, to analyze the cultural spirit which makes us what we are, and, sec­ ond, to present the principles that might cause us to change. book thus reaches to mythic depths and attains a vvuo:::•<=>.l'vu-ILI& both form and theme-beyond what one normally looks for in volume of lyric poems. It is an impressive achievement. James Wright's Two Citizens is at least as impressive, as unravels a dual quest similar to Bly's. But where Bly moves the public to the private, from the national to the perso Wright's quest throughout is largely a private one. The we get here is that of a man trying to come to grips with the tred he feels for his native land. He lea rns to control that ua.u-ti1L&O and even learns to love one part of the American through the interceding love of a woman. The book opens "Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism," a poem which Wright described as "a savage attack upon [America]." More ally, what it attacks is that rapacious spirit in America makes a group of young boys try to stone a helpless goat death. The heroine of the poem is Wright's Aunt Agnes, "Threw stones back at the boys/ And gathered the goat,/ Nuts she was,/ Into her sloppy arms." The language of the passage indicates clearly that, in of his theme, Wright is no sentimentalist. Indeed, there is a directness, a fierce linguistic honesty in these poems which trates Wright's continuing commitment to the Robinsonian of "the pure, clear word." It is, however, reductive to call ideal merely 'Robinsonian,' for it is more largely an poetic ideal. The Puritan settlers of this country, when spoke of language, always called for a 'plain style.' and Whitman tried to use only the most concrete words, capable of drawing blood from stones. Such realistic usage came into its own with poets like Robinson, Frost, and

92 Thus one of Wright's quests here is a desire to repossess clean, direct diction and style of his masters: "Reader,/We a lovely language,/ We would not listen." The final section of "Ars Poetica" brings Wright' s two hatred of America and the wish to repossess her Ian­ together:

When I was a boy I loved my country. Ense petit placidam Sub libertate quietem. Hell, I ain't got nothing. Ah, you bastards, How I hate you. Latin may be translated, 'With a two-edged sword, he seeks quiet beneath liberty.' The 'lovely language' Wright seeks direct, colloquial, rough, and bare. It is indeed a two-edged ...u ...... for it is capable of expressing both deep love and deep uao ...... In the last poem of the book, Wright echoes the above as he recognizes the successful end to this quest: " No, I got much./The one tongue I can write in/Is my Ohioian." In many of the poems in this book, Wright explores Europe a silent American woman, his beloved. She becomes his his "Ecstatic Moth~r. " and as such returns his native Ian­ to him. She also effects the solution to his other quest­ desire somehow to escape from the destructive masculinity America. Wright's use of Europe here is very similar to the made of it by Henry Adams in the Education. In "The Dy­ namo and the Virgin," Adams describes the Great Exposition held in Paris in 1900 and contrasts it with the artistic tradition to be seen across the street in the Louvre. The Exposition fea­ tured industrial and technological exhibits, symbols like the dynamo of the intensely masculine and power-mad spirit of America. In the Louvre one could inspect works inspired by the feminine symbol of transcendent love, the Virgin. Like Adams, Wright turns away from "the Hanna Strip Mine Company" and towards the feminine principle in Europe-found in its great art treasures and artists. He is introduced to this principle of mother consciousness by his beloved muse, who conducts him through Southern Europe. This woman, Wright's wife Annie, is the true center of Two

93 Citizens, and the finest of its poems are the love poems. The beautiful of them all is the last one, "To the Creature of the ation," which ends: You are the earth's body. I will die on the wing. To me, you are everything That matters. chickadee. You live so much in me. Chickadees sing in the snow. I will die on the wing, I love you so. The lines are absolute in their purity, their clarity, their expressiveness. They show James Wright fully in control of plain style, which has learned so much from Robinson and uses this knowledge so subtly. Two Citizens illustrates again the uncanny ability of James Wright to grow as a poet, develop on his own the possibilities inherent in the .n.Juu,.... ,~ tradition of poetry. Like Robert Bly, James Wright has again proven that "there is something about poetry in the imagination which is like the spring."

94 Photo courtesy of Bernice P. Bishop Museum NOTES

VICENTE ALEIXANDRE, with other members of the Generation of 1925, whicb included Frederico Garcfa Lore&, was influenced by Juan Ramon Jimenez aDd Antonio Machado; he in turn has been a strong influence on younger Spanieb poets. Aleixandre, 75 years old, lives outside Madrid. TIMOTHY BALAND lived on an 80-acre farm in Minnesota before moving to New York where he is now going to law school. His translations of Miguel Hernand• were brought out by Beacon Press. ROBERT BLY is editing a book scheduled from Beacon Press entitled Leapi~ Poetry. (Two ofhisAleixandre translations in this issue, "Life" and "It's Raining", first appeared in Mundus Artium, and the translation of Voznesensky's "Ant" wida Vera Dunham, in The New York Times.) GENE COGGSHALL has been variously a candlemaker, a painter, a laboratory technician, and a musician. He is an editor of Epoch magazine. VERA DUNHAM writes that she "was born 100 years ago in Moscow." She is iD fact 60 years old, a professor of Russian literature at Wayne State University, aDd the author of numerous essays and reviews on Soviet fiction and poetry. She hu just finished a book on the Soviet middle class called The Big Deal. RICHARD FORD lives in Ann Arbor. He is a Fellow in the University of Michigu Society of Fellows. RAFAEL JESUS GONZALEZ was born in El Paso, and "grew upinacomplete}J bi-lingual, bi-cultural setting." He teaches at Laney College in Oakland. In &deli-. tion to poems he has published studies of Mexican culture. He is also a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. LEWIS HYDE's translations from Pablo Neruda's Residenciaen la Tierra have ap­ peared in a number of journals. He says he is Working on a long essay on "The Tuber-Mind", which "explains how you would think if you were a potato and shows how in fact you are and explains The Odyssey, Gilgamesh and schizo­ phrenia in the light of this discovery." He doesn't have a home right now, bu' hopes to settle in western Minnesota. JOHN LOGAN is back teaching at State University of New York in Buffalo after a year in San Francisco. His "Poem for My Friend Peter at Pi'ihana" seems to us one of the finest pieces of literature ever written about Hawaii. It is included iD his latest book The Anonymous Lover (Liveright). MARl NAKAMURA, a senior at the University of Hawaii, was born in Tokyo and moved to Hilo when she was three years old. She has some curious scars on her left hand where a moray eel bit her. HOWARD ALLAN NORMAN is living in Michigan this winter and continues translating from several languages. PETER STITT .teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. He will be in Minne­ apolis and London this year to complete a book on the poetry of John Berryman. JIM STORM is preparing a collection of his photographs for his first show. He 11 a recent graduate of the University of Hawaii. LOWELL UDA has asked for his payment in poi, so he'll be sent approximately 60 pounds. He teaches at the University of Montana. JOHN UNTERECKER's new book of poems, Stone, is due next year. This spri~ he will be at the University of Texas. ANDREI VOZNESENSKY has come under official attack in the Soviet Union re­ cently for a cycle of poems published last spring, which included "Ant". HAROLD YOSHIKAWA lives in Makiki and attends the University of Hawaii oc­ casionally.

96 Photo courtesy of Bernice P. Bishop Museum