A Drinking Song

 

Wine comes in at the mouth  
And love comes in at the eye;  
That’s all we shall know for truth  
Before we grow old and die.  
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats

I Saw a Man

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never”--

 

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.

Stephen Crane

A todos los poetas

A todos los poetas, felicidades. A todos los que intentan en vano traducir la noche.

TRADUCIR LA NOCHE

Hay un pobre hombre que intenta traducir la noche,

buscar vocablos que la representen,

edificar significados que la expliquen,

juntar fonemas y grafemas que la definan,

desarticular las metáforas que se tragaron su luz.

Le tomará toda una vida el empeño,

y no será suficiente.

© Ernesto González, 2009

National Poetry Month

Abril, aparte de ser el mes más cruel, es también el Mes Nacional de la Poesía en los Estados Unidos. Esta oficialidad me parece que esta reñida con la esencia de la poesía, pero si hay que dedicarle un mes a algo mejor que sea a esto y no a otra cosa. Revisando la página web de la Academia de Poetas Americanos, hallé una lista de recomendaciones para celebrar este mes. Algunas son muy cómicas. Les transcribo varias:

1) Memorícese un poema.

2) Ponga la poesía en un lugar inesperado. (¿Dónde?)

3) Juegue al Cadáver Exquisito.

4) Apoye monetariamente una organización literaria (EHB, PD no califica).

5) Recoja su copia de "The Waste Land" en la oficina de correos de su vecindad. La Academia de Poetas Americanos envió copias de este poemario a varios correos del país.

6) Lleve un poema a almorzar.

7) Escriba un poema con tiza en la acera. (Creo que estoy un poco viejo para estar jugando con tiza, pero la idea no es mala).

8) Pídale al Servicio de Correos de los Estados Unidos que emita más estampillas que honren a poetas.

9) Guárdese un poema en el bolsillo y compártalo con familiares y amigos.

Love under the Republicans (Or Democrats)

Sin tiempo para traducirlo, les dejo este poema para tiempos malos.

Love under the Republicans (Or Democrats)

Come live with me and be my love

And we will all the pleasures prove

Of a marriage conducted with economy

In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy.

We’ll live in a dear little walk-up flat

With practically room to swing a cat

And a potted cactus to give it hauteur

And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water.

We’ll eat, without undue discouragement,

Foods low in cost but high in nouragement

And quaff with pleasure, while chatting wittily,

The peculiar wine of Little Italy.

We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty

And buy our clothes for something-fifty.

We’ll bus for miles on holidays

For seas at depressing matinees,

And every Sunday we’ll have a lark

And take a walk in Central Park.

And one of these days not too remote

You’ll probably up and cut my throat.

Ogden Nash

(1902-1971)

Thought or desire?

The Enigma of Desire (Salvador Dalí)

Then comes this thought

(or is it a desire?)

and takes over

and fills the empty hallways

of contentment.

Oh, what a wicked hand

it turns out to be.

I see these dead stones

rolling, gathering dirt

and abandoned dreams.

I listen to the buried bulbs.

I smell flowers filled

with disgraced wisdom.

Enough, I have heard enough.

Let me have a minute of anticipated silence.

Let me enter these whispering terrors

by myself, nervously at ease.

Let me enter this thought.

Let me fulfill her desire.

The word

The organ is not here, only the word.

It feeds the tension, the elasticity, the bark.

There have been motionless tempests,

echoless screams, graves of prosperity.

The word belongs in a sentence

that is yet to be uttered.

The word is part of an unsolved puzzle.

The word is an anguished skeleton, a promise

that has not been kept.

The word is made of meaning, not letters or sounds.

Could it ever be uttered?

Desire

This is the moment of desire.

It lives in the mind, this obsession.

It hunts and kills ideas, drives around

a dilapidated mansion like a stranger

in a new neighborhood.

Someone has turned on the lights.

I hear a noise, a harp maybe.

I encounter visions, dead birds,

subtle apparitions.

This is the moment of desire. 

Poem Written on a Rainy Day

Walking in the rain is like being able
to go through walls of solid rock, unspotted,
undisturbed, a witness to all miseries, to all joys.
I love rain, the melodious fall of microscopic drops;
the city is no longer the same,
rain washes its noises away,
its fierce ugliness, its manic rush.

Reading, I love reading.
I read when I'm happy, when I'm miserable,
when I lose, when I succeed.
I read when I love and when I hate: I'm not a man who lives
but a man who reads.
I read my heart, my liver, my lungs, my hands, my bones.

And I love writing, writing about you, about them, about us,
writing about life and about death,
about dreams, about hopes, about frustrations.
I love writing about what we know and never say.

I love all this, and more,
things I have known, things I have not known,
and even things I will never know.

A Hateful Love Litany

Este poema lo escribí hace unos veinte años. Es quizás el primero que escribí en inglés. Aquí se los dejo, para que lo disfruten o lo sufran.


Stay awake, virgin of the poisonous roses;
Stay alert, talk to the knights of envy
And frustration, to the dark corners of my life.

Dirty rotten virgin of the killing roses,
Be the road where my feet and legs crumble,
Be the cavern swallowing my destiny,
Be the edge banishing my illusions.

Give me your rust, let me drink it slowly,
So I have the worst hallucinations,
So I dream of monsters and witches,
So I speak the language of the devil.

Stay by my side, open your tender magnetic eyes,
Stain your face with your saliva,
Drown my naive lust in your filthy blood.

Stay awake, virgin of the poisonous roses, let me die with you
In the torturing silence of the night.

I've lost the world;
I've been left handless and hopeless and helpless.
I need a place to die and rest as a
Good citizen of despondency, my dear nation, my creator.

I've lost my flag, my dignity, my soul;
These are only words now,
meaningless, dry, lacerating.

Stay awake, virgin of the poisonous roses,
Be the merciless killer to free me from living.
Murder me, destroy this young body
That once had a glaring mind.
Now I'm only a configuration with no heart,
No feelings, no hopes, no love.

As physical as a rock, and as insensitive.

Desperate acts of faithful treason

Deaths by the hour, reasons and no flowers,
The muted voice of wisdom, chains, drills, dangerous derivations.
Indefinite definitions, creative annihilations,
Where have you gone, AGE OF REASON?
Deranged derisions are broadcast daily on television.
I breathe and defecate.
I commit desperate acts of faithful treason.
.

Hope is the thing with feathers (Emily Dickinson)

Emily Dickinson



Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Poem

Quite expectedly and regrettably, you have returned to
The condensed shadows of your forgotten and forbidden kingdom.
Was it all a dream, this chaotic collection of mysterious memories?
I think I have lived, I live so that I can think, I think so that I can die
Burned by these unsuppressed desires melodiously dangling in my mind.

Gone but not erased are the days of lust when every second of darkness
Brought us closer to the unstoppable fire that burned us yet never fully consumed us.
Where have you disappeared to, where have you vanished to?
Was it all a dream, this chaotic collection of mysterious memories?
Was it all a dream?

Blessed Be Your Graciousness

Who said the fruit is forbidden?
Who said the treacherous fruit that bleeds and enslaves
Should be kept from blooming so divinely?
Overpowered as I am by this impetous desire,
I leave certain questions unanswered.
Let me not to this command succumb
Like a door that is pushed open by the rude intrusion
Of untimely storm winds.
What an honest indifference!
What a solemn cowardice!

Let this all be a satire, a secret that is heard
And then hastily forgotten.
These tainted thoughts, these sensual scents lingering so sweetly,
So desperately,
These shattering shamefulness.

Yet I speak of you and tremble like a villain
that has repented his malefactions.
I speak of you and my words are my tyrants,
holding me in their despising grip.

Yet I know I am lost, traveling in this sea of calamity
and hopelessness and dancing with shadows
and shadows of my shadow.
Blessed be your graciousness that damns me thus.

Happiness

happiness is a green potato
waiting to be picked up
removing the dirt around it
as it slowly ripens
happiness is green
so green it can look like money
so green it can resemble hope
so green it can be mistaken for grass

happiness is slow-coming
but when it finally reaches you,
it is ready to be eaten
or about to get rotten.

Return

She who was gone shall now return.
She who was dead shall now have a rebirth.
I wonder why things, strange things are one way
and one way only and I give myself to endless hours
of thinking.
Why is this rose a rose and not a serpent?
Can the hour return to its minute?
Can the voice penetrate this sudden darkness?
I who was gone will now return.
I who was dead will now rejoice.
Time is a lonely seed,
a flower that withers slowly amidst the season’s anguish.
She who was here is now forgotten.
She who was forgotten is now here.

Get Drunk (By Charles Boudelaire)

Get Drunk

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness
of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

suggestions at dinnertime

only because we are frail we wait
we cling to every hope
life has no meaning we can only hope to wait
walking through destructions, disillusions, and desires
is anyone listening
where is god?
is he listening?
only because we live we die
only because we think we act
we are the carriers of fire,
the unconquered ships, the light beyond darkness.

Un nuevo poema y su traduccion (a Z.V. con cariño)

Memory

The memory of
that instant is like a dead leave inside a book,
A burned desire, an obscure resurrection,
A quiet, perhaps deserted, road.
Here I am, twenty years later, a few pounds heavier,
An old man clinging to salvaged recollections.
Gentle words do not suffice.
The violin does not suffocate the sadness.
It’s all a masquerade, I say,
A dream within a dream, a fire burning inside a log
Buried under a lake.
My heart is a vacant lot.
It can be filled with dust, sand, inexplicable images,
Trotting unicorns, naked ballerinas.
My heart is a wasteland, filled with rocks and weeds
And blood and carcasses.
Do you see how the garden bleeds,
How the body awakens,
How the skin burns with desire?
My heart is a strange place.



Recuerdo

El recuerdo de ese instante es como una hoja muerta dentro de un libro, un deseo ardiente, una oscura resurrección.
Una quieta y tal vez desierta calle.
Heme aquí, veinte años más tarde, con unas cuantas libras de más,
Un hombre viejo que se aferra a un recuerdo recuperado.
No bastan las palabras dulces.
El violín no apaga la tristeza.
Todo es como un baile de máscaras, digo.
Un sueño dentro de un sueño, un fuego que arde dentro de un madero enterrado en el fondo de un lago.
Mi corazón es un solar abandonado
que se puede amueblar con polvo, arena, imágenes inexplicables, desnudas bailarinas.
Mi corazón es un terreno baldío, lleno de rocas y hierbas y sangre y cadáveres.
¿Ves cómo el jardín sangra, cómo el cuerpo despierta, cómo la piel arde en deseos?

Mi corazón es un lugar extraño.