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It's good to be back.

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off to the midwest

We are off to Michigan to celebrate the holiday with Przemek's family. It's going to be a balancing act, blog friends, please wish me luck. Stay warm in the late autumn evenings, I'll be reading your poetry.

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for yaya, an autumn song

Tonight, this melancholy heart of mine
Is thinking of you
Happily, or with sadness
Autumn is gone. Last autumn was the same

For fifteen days, your husky voice
Has been reciting a poem and a name
For the sake of your loneliness, they've
Turned these maple leaves into beautiful tales

Yet the most beautiful story never stays
As the water washes away combs and hair
The world changes every day. Even a pear tree
Under the moon would sometimes punish her own fruit

Oh, one tree ripples, a thousand trees weep
Since we came to the world
Parting has always been with us
You in seclusion, me in worries

Oh, how useless, how tiring, this misspent life!
You live in a garden of maple, reminding me
Of a beauty, the extreme kind
In the warmth of her blood she's burning

Minute by minute, burning
Oh, what a melancholy light it sends out
To make autumns alike, and to force me
Into this endless craze, for you, tonight!

Zheng Danyi
Translated by Luo Hui


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when we no longer know what to do

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

"The Real Work" by Wendell Berry

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I'm reading Wendell Berry's Fidelity, and am deeply enamored with his writing and characters. His loving depiction of the woods and waterways wove through my dreams last night. The loyalty of his characters and their commitment to each other and the land stayed with me through my day.

the blessed and the blessing trees

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

Woods by Wendell Berry

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An Otter

Christmas day, 4 O'clock,
Stumps of cloud, like yellowing tower blocks,
Lean over
The failing glimmer of Christmas lights
And the quays, utterly empty,

Except

For one dark otter, slick with river slime,

A shape

Made of dark Lee water,
Of thick fluid,
Of rippling muscle,

Swaggering, like any pedestrian,
Up the steps from the riverbed,
Across the street,
Past dim shop displays,shuttered windows,

Toward an empty car askew on the footpath,
Its engine idling, its front door open,
Its headlights ploughing the gloom,

And a girl, its driver,
Standing alone on the pavement,

Innocent, beautiful.
She leans over the otter,
Her long hair hanging down
As a second slinks up from the riverbed,
Like a hand sliding slowly
From a hip to a breast.

-Billy Ramsell

dialogue

Outside I can hear the wind blowing the rain against the windows. November is here. Upstairs in the attic, I am stretched beneath an orange tree. I moved it inside when the temperature dropped, and it has decided to flower. I rest in the heavy perfume of the white flowers. Somewhere in the distance a star twinkles, talking to the flowers. A strange exchange on a stormy night.

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I am the earth

I am the Earth
I am warm, moist soil
I am a single supple stalk
I draw my life
all the way up into corollas of wild berries on the roadside

I am amazed at
a breast of water welling
to flow into the inlet of a muddy rice paddy
I am amazed at
myself being
hot steam blowing fire and sulfur up
from the bottom of the great ocean, deep indigo.
I am amazed at
the crimson blood flow
covering the earth’s surface in human shape;
I am amazed that it swells as the tides ebb and flow, and
gushes out monthly under distant invisible gravity.

A person’s love, a person’s temperament, is
as fragile as a mushroom in its pitiable shape
as helpless as seeking shelter from rain under a shepherd’s purse,
yet I am amazed at myself being a shroud that finally envelops him
at a time when one man is despondent.

I luxuriate and I am the same as soil
I share countless failures and immense waste
with tiny maggots in the dirt
and daffodils quivering at the edges of unknown cliffs

I am amazed that I am the pulsating twilight.
I am amazed that I am a dewdrop
which at a set time rises to the blade tip of a rice plant.

I am the earth.
I live there, and I am the very same earth.

In the four billionth year
I have come to know
the eternal cold moon, my other self, my hetero being,
then, for the first time, I am amazed that I am warm mud.

-Kiyoko Nagase
Translation: 2009, Takako Lento

Tadzio and I took the day off together. I needed some space to think, and spending time with my three-year-old son helps me get my feet back under me. We spent the morning soaking in a hot pool and admiring the steam rising into the cold morning air. We ate a lunch of sweet potatoes and pineapple, took a long afternoon nap, and then admired tonight's full moon. And I am amazed.

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