E-Book, Englisch, 114 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-910367-14-8
Verlag: The Poetry Business
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Kein
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
The Love of Strangers ‘So, if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’
Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (1931) I Easy to love the dead! So I love you more each year, More tenderly, precisely draw you back Into your landscapes -- they ached without you ... Your orchard of emerald domes and spires, of fruit With pebbly skin, grown from the sticks you brought Out of the clouds around Atlixco, Puebla. Fuerte they called the tree That stood against Pacific frosts And learned to yield crates of fat fruit each season. In that high village where you found the bud-wood, Below the snow-line, New Spain’s first poet Endured her childhood: little bastard In her grandfather’s rustic library, somehow Clutching a quill at his long table, 1660. If l say l am fair, I say no more than is true; Your eyes attest I am, my deeds prove me so. Fair! That great medallion at her breast, And shrouded (like your one daughter) in nun’s habit! A saint, severe from love and abstinence. With her you shared thin air, dizzying vista -- Not century, language, faith. Severe you were, From love as well, without theology, so that you died In a night ward restrained by nameless sisters And your ashes were salted over the rusty hectares Of my godfather’s poor ranch in Tamaulipas ... I draw your little airplane edging along the Cuban coast Like a moth enraptured by a sunlit velvet sleeve Spread on an endless shelf of white-flecked blue. You landed on an army polo field, The horses crazed and rearing as you taxied, The officers indignant, curious ... Havana as it was, you the first human bird ever to land In that promiscuous opulence. You’d flown across From sober, parched Yucatan. Big headlines Announced that Cuba was much less an island ... Banquets, and the women. ‘No papaya for me,’ you said, ‘I do not take to it.’ Bursts of laughter behind fans, Your host in a loud whisper, ‘Fruta bomba! Here papaya has another meaning!’ Beyond gaping arches, Steep cliffs of ficus, florifundio, The shanties had another meaning, singing, GuillŽn’s Barefoot island ripened in its gullies, its sweet fields: I’ll drink you in a single gulp, dark girl, dark night; Take off your robe of foam! In my billfold I have a photograph of you: 1919, Maracaibo Bay. A pipe’s clenched in your teeth. You lean on the tiller of a little boat. Who held the camera? It’s time you came back home, Your road is going wrong . .. (Mart), the poet). I recognize the rage stored in that frown, Which burst, the way that fire destroys a cloud, Chasing wild echoes round a hemisphere And rain for days. Then the California landscape, A mortal splendour, you belong like the mountains, The sea, far from the thickening centre, snared by no man. My first memory’s there: Capistrano, The Big Acre, the avocado plantings, Dragging old orange trees out with a fork truck, Their short roots thick and squat like the roots of teeth. Our reservoir, the rattlesnakes alarmed along furrows. Gophers raised domes among the vegetables, Pulling our well-grown asparagus Stalk by stalk into their vaulted cellars. At night Skunks with steaming broods crawled under the house; We had to poke them out with sticks and shoot them. We had a jeep and eucalyptus trees. How hot All the days were, red grapes got ripe for the ants, And the low house was haunted mornings, evenings, By you, tall and dusty from your work. That world ceased When we moved back to Mexico, you sat down once more At your big green roll-top desk and the heavy ledgers. The truth is, you were continually outliving Your fantasies -- or you ran short of money. Enchantments failed. We were growing old. I was five. At sixty your liberty had ended. Sixteen years till your death -- and the pain of losing Year by year both memory and illusion. The boy With the terrier who was such a superior ratter In Torreon; in Aguascalientes, the massacre of the Chinese When Villa was afraid to occupy the town The Federals had deserted, leaving common folk To their revenges, and your dad quickly Boarded up the shop and hid as many Chinamen As fit in cellars and attic; the Dictator Three years earlier, omnipotent, relaxed, Passing where you and your cousin Howard In short trousers squatted fishing by the canal At Xochimilco, and the old copper-faced caudillo Smiled in the flowered barge, saluted you back ... They got forgotten in the grim refrain ‘I have about ten more years’; then the refrain Got forgotten and you started coasting. When you were a captain at the end of the First World War -- It’s there you learned to talk like Teddy Roosevelt -- You went to France for the first and only time To help assess the war debt. You saw Verdun Where every inch of soil was overturned And suddenly you were glad God hadn’t answered Your boy scout prayer for ‘action’. But when you’re old things change; An old man longs to have died young. You would have done it well, and left behind Hearts that only time and money mend. And something remains apart from what you spoke of, Something that’s mine, I can’t be sure of it. Who showed me -- it was you -- The great black rose window in some chapel -- And the Sequoiahs, did I go down on my knees? And here below, a sad, a shadowy house ... and who is she? I came -- I must have come -- full of love and my cot Was cold, the room was cold. There were bears and creatures. Days passed, you were the long hand of the clock Morning and evening, morning and evening, time went by With its feasts, its toys and solstices, till rose And cold room were memory and less than that, An almost deadened nerve; but the gilded cornices, The steep sash, the sickles of the trees come back Now that I have a son. How cold is his room? I am standing tall myself As a grandfather clock. If it were not for time We could be brothers, the three of us. As it is I feel your cheekbones in my smile, Your gestures bend my arms and wag my head. The pure tone of your whistle finds my lips As if I was an echo, a reflection, And you stood over there with your neutral smile Watching what time, not silvered glass, Does to the very last of your sloughed skins. Half of my life you’ve been dead And yet not absent for a single day! I steer continually By your prohibitions. ‘Dear Papacito’, school letters began When most of the time I meant to wound. After all, You’d sent me four thousand miles into exile And called it education. I had grievances. I hurt you Because you were too guileless not to trust me. You wadded up draft after draft of your replies But kept my letters in a drawer In your steel roll-top desk at Pino 458. After you died I found them stashed there As if they were love letters. But this is the first. II If I’d known how well, after your death, I’d come to know you That day you climbed four flights (and you almost eighty) For an interview in Churton Place, I would have taken more attentive note; And the time we taped you down in Maiden Newton -- Late winter, pitch dark at five, thorned boughs across the door- And caught your rusty voice doing ‘Gloriana Dying’, with you dying ... My heart wasn’t in it. Now she’s in deep: You may imagine you’re dead. I tell you different. If dead, what are these spells you still weave? If dead Why are you so indiscreet, your secrets spill Like leaves from a frost-stung tree, with besom and basket She gathers facts, as if such truth really mattered. It puzzles me how you kept no secret from yourself, You were your chronicler and stood in your own eyes Naked as a girl half-loved, distrusted. Wanting to write of you I write of her. She climbs with her bright youth into your frame And both of you are altered -- merged? Married, is it? She borrows your irony, or is borrowed by it; Your styles were made for each other, but I love only her. Just now she’s away in your house, sleeps in your musty room In the bed you died on, loved on, and she gives you -- You were a white witch -- house room, heart room. I say...
