Favourite Fragments

Rilke

The Gazelle

…to see you: tensed, as if leg were a gun

loaded with leaps, but not fired while your neck

holds your head still, listening; as when,

while swimming in some isolated places,

a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look:

the forest pool reflected in her face.

Rilke

The Blindman’s song

…Each morning the sunlight comes into your house,

and you welcome it as a friend

And you know what it’s like to see face-to-face:

and that tempts you to be kind.

Rilke

Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grows distant in your sight,

one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rilke

You who never arrived

in my arms, Beloved, who were lost

from the start,

I don’t even know what songs

would please you. I have given up trying

to recognize you in the surging wave of the next

moment. All the immense

images in me – the far off, deeply felt landscape,

cities, towers and bridges, and un-

suspected turns in the path,

and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods –

all rise within me to mean

you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all

the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing. An open window

in a country house-, and you almost

stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, -

and sometimes in a shop, the mirrors

were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back

my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same

bird echoed through both of us

yesterday, separate, in the evening…

Pablo Neruda

Furies and sufferings

In the pit of our breast we are together,

in the heart’s plantations we traverse

a summer of tigers.

Lying in wait for a length of cold skin,

a sliver of untouchable complexion,

with our mouths inhaling sweat, with green veins

we meet in the damp shadows,

in a rain of kisses…

Pablo Neruda

To the ship’s figurehead

…Under the strange night your waist let

fall the pure weight of the ship in the waves

cutting in the somber magnitude a way

of overthrown fire, of phosphorescent honey.

The wind opened in your curls its tempestuous box

the unchained metal of its howl,

and in the dawn the light received you trembling

in the ports, kissing your wet diadem…

Pablo Neruda

From Autumn Lament

[addressing himself to his beloved]

Mathilde Urrutia, I leave you here

What I ad and did not have

What I am and what I’m not.

My love is a child crying

Afraid to leave your arms,
I leave him to you for ever:

You most beautiful of women.

You are the one most beautiful,

The wind has most tattooed

Like a little southern tree

Like a hazel tree in August,

You are as succulent for me

As a baker’s full of bread,

Your heart is made of earth

But your hands are celestial.

You are red and you are hot,

you are white and very salty

like a laurel sauce with onions,

you are a piano laughing

with all the notes of your soul,

your eyelids and your hair,

consent to shed on me,

I breathe in your golden shadow

and your ears delight me

as if I had found them

in the pools of coral reefs;

for your fingernails I fought

with terrifying fish…

…What can I leave you, Mathilde Urrutia,

If in your touch you own

that perfume of burned leaves,

that strawberry fragrance,

and between your breasts

the sea-dusk of Cauquenes,

the laurel smell of Chile?

Pablo Neruda

Oh Earth, Wait for me

Return me, oh sun

to my wild destiny,

rain of the ancient wood,

bring me back the aroma and the swords

that fall from the sky,

the solitary peace of pasture and rock,

the damp at the river margins,

the smell of the larch tree,

the wind alive like a heart

beating in the crowded restlessness

of the towering araucaria.

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,

the towers of silence which rose

from the solemnity of their roots,

I want to go back to being what I have not been,

and learn to go back from such deeps

that amongst all natural things

I could live or not live; it does not matter

to be one stone more, the dark stone,

the pure stone which the river bears away.

Pablo Neruda

Memory

…Take pity on the poet.

I was always quick to forget

and in those hands of mine

grasped only the intangible

and unrelated things

which could only be compared

by being non-existent.

The smoke was like an aroma,

the aroma was like smoke

the skin of a sleeping body

Which woke to my kisses;

but do not ask me the date

or the name of what I dreamed –

I cannot measure the road

which may have had no country,

or that truth which changed,

which the day perhaps subdued

to become a wandering light

like a firefly in the dark.

Michael Ondaatje

750 AD the statue of a Samadhi Buddha

was carefully hidden, escaping war,

the treasure hunters, fifty-year feuds.

He was discovered by monks in 1968

sitting upright

buried in anuradhapura earth,

eyes half closed, hands

in the gesture of meditation.

Pulled from the earth with ropes

into a surrounding world.

pulled into the heatwave, insect noise,

bathers splashing in tanks.

Bronze became bronze

around him,

colour became colour.

Michael Ondaatje

What we lost.

The interior love poem

The deeper levels of the self

Landscapes of daily life

Dates when the abandonment

Of certain principles occurred.

The rule of courtesy – how to enter

a temple or forest, how to touch

a master’s feet before lesson or performance.

The art of the drum. The art of eye-painting.

How to cut an arrow. Gestures between lovers.

The pattern of her teeth marks on his skin

drawn by a monk from memory

The limits of betrayal. The five ways

a lover could mock an ex-lover.

Nine finger and eye gestures

to signal key emotions.

The small boats of solitude.

Lyrics that rose

from love

back into the air

naked with guile

and praise.

Our works and days.

We knew how monsoons

(south-west, north-east)

would govern behaviour

and when to discover

the knowledge of the dead

hidden in the clouds,

in rivers, in unbroken rock.

All this we burned or traded for power and wealth

from the eight compass points of vengeance

from the two levels of envy

Michael Ondaatje

An old book on the poisons

of madness, a map

of forest monasteries,

a chronicle brought across

the sea in Sanskrit slokas.

I hold all these

but you have beome a ghost for me.

I hold only your shadow

since those days I drove

your nature away.

A falcon who became a coward.

I hold you the way astronomers

draw constellations for each other

in the markets of wisdom

placing shells

on a dark blanket

saying ‘these

are the heavens’

Calculating the movement

of the great stars.

Caroline Caddy

Placing the Affections

We channel the vigorous brim

that spurts clear-waisted through us

from the black basin of the sky.

Double stars one pouring itself

into the other.

Shy from what we are

there are places we must go

gulping holes

that lead to foundation –

- it’s alright, it’s OK –

to take a face and turn it into

your angel for life.

James K Baxter

High Country Weather

Alone we are born

And die alone

Yet see the red-gold cirrus

Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road

Ride easy, stranger:

Surrender to the sky

Your heart of anger.

Jan Kemp

Poem

A puriri moth’s wing

Lies light in my hand –

My breath can lift it

Light as this torn wing

We lie on love’s breath.