Dwale: 1979–July 2, 2021
+From Face Down in the Leaves, 2019, Weasel Press.
++
p.26
+The seasonal storms have poured upon the grassy flat,
+The leafless stalks abound like thirsty mouths.
+Puddles form and soon are swarmed with little fish,
+And all the arid life has fled despair.
+
+And here, wrapped in rain, lies the oldest soul,
+The changes wrack his bones with painful cold.
+His skin is like the sky at night, as many scars
+Have marked his hide as there are glinting stars.
+
+At once he feels his lungs become bereft of breath,
+His daughter nudges him, to no effect.
+She walks away rememb’ring days they stalked the plains,
+Within her womb there grows a golden bloom.
+- u-- u - u -u - u- u
+- u- u -u - u- u
+u- u - u - u - u - u
+- u - u- u - u -u
+
+- u u - u u - u- u
+- u- u - u - u- u
+- u - u - u - u - u- u
+- u - u - u - u- u
+
+- u - u - u -u -u - u
+- u- u- u - u -u
+- u -u -u- u - u - u
+-u - u - u - u- u
++
p.8
+Summer, season of hot insomnia,
+That much never seems to change at all.
+Laying awake in the red desert night,
+I shape forest from shade and wait for fall.
+
+Ten years now gone, and who thought I would miss
+Cricket songs, cicadas and katydids?
+Then I’d gladly have grabbed a big hammer,
+Smashed them flat as Pinocchio’s conscience.
+
+Testing palisades of clocks and yardsticks,
+No advent waits for the restive dreamer.
+I bandage my tattered, bitten left hand
+And shed the smoke rings on my cloven finger.
++
Face down in the leaves
+p.9
+We crawl through moist humus like millipedes,
+Feasting on dirt and dead, crumbling leaves
+While striped skies cycle through violet hues,
+While time’s kisses take the shape of a bruise.
+Endeavors wear the warmer years away,
+Reduced at last to heaven’s dormant clay.
+Alive, I lick brambles until my tongue
+Tears, despairing ever being so young.
+
+I think of you. I don’t smile when I do.
+
+A moment more and then the day is gone,
+In evening grey, we mourn the vanished dawn,
+And so on, maybe waiting for someone
+To come drag us back to where we belong.
+In dreams we interred, with your pure throat bare,
+I know your breath, your jasmine-scented air.
+Alive, a god to mites and mud-daubers.
+The harvestmen scuttle and bob onwards.
++
Dirt Garden
+p.5
+My garden of foxtails and milk-thistle,
+Alive and wild, more so than tended rows
+In growth, has died. I killed them a little,
+The crab-grass clumps, Datura and nettle.
+“Time and time, I commit these small murders,
+To whose benefit?” I ask why and wonder,
+The scent of sap on scuffed and bloody hands.
+If I indwelt some luring scrap of land
+Far from here, secluded, my own to call,
+I would welcome these same weeds, one and all,
+To plant their roots in my warm, earthen roof,
+Just they and I, with no need of reproof,
+And thank the thorns for making a hale fence,
+The compost for being my winter blanket.
++
Analysis
+Related
+“Winter” by Eric Whitacre, text by Edward Esch - https://ericwhitacre.com/music-catalog/winter
+I.
+The snow is falling,
+sleeping,
+whispering,
+dreaming of water.
+
+II.
+Gold, silver, iron, stone;
+pure and gentle, silently melting,
+the sun sings softly through the quiet ice.
+
+III.
+A single snowflake awakens,
+shimmers,
+glows,
+watches the world with weary eyes,
+darkens,
+settles,
+and disappears.
+From “Mid-Winter Songs” by Morten Lauridsen, text by Robert Graves - https://genius.com/albums/Morten-lauridsen/Mid-winter-songs
+Lament for Pasiphaë
+
+pg.206
+
+Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
+My eye, dazzled with tears, shall dazzle yours
+Conjuring you to shine and not to move
+You, sun, and I all afternoon have laboured
+Beneath a dewless and oppressive cloud–
+A fleece now gilded with our commen grief
+That this must be a night without a moon
+Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
+
+Faithless she was not: she was very woman
+Smiling with dire impartiality
+Sovereign, with heart unmatched, adored of men
+Until Spring’s cuckoo with bedraggled plumes
+Tempted her pity and her truth betrayed
+Then she who shone for all resigned her being
+And this must be a night without a moon
+Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
+
+Like Snow
+
+pg.143
+
+She, then, like snow in a dark night
+Fell secretly. And the world waked
+With dazzling of the drowsy eye
+So that some muttered ‘Too much light,’
+And drew the curtains close
+Like snow, warmer than fingers feared
+And to soil friendly;
+Holding the histories of the night
+In yet unmelted tracks
+
+She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep
+
+pg.173
+
+She tells her love while half asleep
+In the dark hours
+With half-words whispered low:
+
+As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
+And puts out grass and flowers
+Despite the snow
+Despite the falling snow
+
+Mid-Winter Waking
+
+pg.165
+
+Stirring suddenly from long hibernation
+I knew myself once more a poet
+Guarded by timeless prinicipalities
+Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
+And presently dared open both my eyes
+
+O gracious, lofty, shone against from under
+Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;
+And you, sudden warm airs that blow
+Before the expected season of new blossom
+While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go–
+
+Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter
+I foudn her hand in mine laid closely
+Who hsall watch out the Spring with me
+We stared in silence all around us
+But found no winter anywhere to see
+
+Intercession in Late October
+
+Poetry vol.71 no.1 - October 1947 - pg.23 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=24836
+
+How hard the year dies: no frost yet
+On drifts of yellow sand Midas reclines
+Fearless of moaning reed or sullen wave
+Firm and fragrant still the brambleberries
+On ivy-bloom butterflies wag
+
+Spare him a little longer, Crone
+For his clean hands and love-submissive heart
+Haiku by Issa - https://archive.org/details/autumnwindselect0000koba/page/10/mode/2up
+Heedless that the dews
+mark the passing of our day —
+we bind ourselves to others
+
+(Mi no ue no tsuyu to mo shirade hodashikeri - p.11 - spring)
+
+O winds of autumn!
+Nearer we draw to the Buddha
+As the years advance
+
+(Akikaze yo hotoke ni chikaki toshi no hodo - p.11 - autumn)
+
+Floating weeds,
+as blow the winds of the floating world —
+drifting and drifting
+
+(Ukigusa ya ukiyo no kaze no iu mama ni - p.18 - spring)
+
+A blessing indeed —
+This snow on the bed-quilt,
+This, too, is from the pure land
+
+(Arigata ya fusama no yuki mo Jodo yori - p.46 - winter)
+
+Is this it, then,
+My last resting place —
+Five feet of snow!
+
+(Kore ga maa tsui no sumika ka yuki goshaku - p.37 - winter)
+
+On the hill of summer
+Stands the slender maiden flower
+In a solitary humor
+
+(Natsuyama ya / Hitori kigen no / Ominaeshi - p.65 - summer)
+
+Red dragon-fly —
+He’s the one that likes the evening,
+Or so it seems.
+
+(Akatombo / Kare mo yubo ga / Suki ja yara - p.65 - autumn)
+
+Heedless that the tolling bell
+Marks our own closing day —
+We take this evening’s cool
+
+(Mi no ue no kane tomo shirade yusuzumi - p.39 - summer)
+Some underlines in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger, 2016, New Directions Publishing Corporation.
+++Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.
+
p.3
+++In its way a spiritual exercise, translation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility toward the text.
+
p.20
+++As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different — not merely another — reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.
+[…] the poem continues in a state of restless change.
+
“To Autumn” verse 1 by Keats
+Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
+ Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
+Conspiring with him how to load and bless
+ With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
+To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
+ And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
+ To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
+ With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
+And still more, later flowers for the bees,
+Until they think warm days will never cease,
+ For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
+