 | ||||
| Edouard Manet, El Limon, 1880 |
Ode to the Lemon (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its planetarium
lemons descended to the earth.
Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
We opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.
Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid stained glass,
drops
oozed topaz,
altars,
cool architecture.
So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles,
a fragrant nipple
of the earth’s breast,
a ray of light that was made fruit,
the minute fire of a planet.
 |
| Georges Braque, Nature morte aux citron, 1934 |
Ode to the Hummingbird (translated by Maria Jacketti)
The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drop
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming résumé,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!
Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
And from where do you originate?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated,
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.
 |
| Chilean Woodstar |
You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted —
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!
From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of your girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of
silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged.
 |
| Andean Hillstar |
Ode to Numbers (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
Oh. the thirst to know
how many!
The hunger
to know
how many
stars in the sky!
We spent
our childhood counting
stones and plants, fingers and
toes, grains of sand, and teeth,
our youth we passed counting
petals and comets' tails.
We counted
colors, years,
lives, and kisses;
in the country,
oxen ; by the sea ,
the waves. Ships
became proliferating ciphers.
Numbers multiplied .
The cities were thousands, millions,
wheat hundreds
of units that held
within them smaller numbers,
smaller than a single grain.
Time became a number.
Light was numbered
and no matter how it raced with sound
its velocity was 37.
Numbers surrounded us .
When we closed the door
at night, exhausted,
an 800 slipped
beneath the door
and crept with us into bed ,
and in our dreams
40005 and 77s
pounded at our foreheads
with hammers and tongs.
5s
added to 5s
until they sank into the sea or madness,
until the sun greeted us with its zero
and we went running
to the office,
to the workshop,
38to the factory,
to begin again the infinite
I of each new day.
We had time, as men,
for our thirst slowly
to be sated ,
the ancestral desire
to give things a number,
to add them up,
to reduce them
to powder,
wastelands of numbers .
We
papered the world
with numbers and names,
but
things survived,
they fled
from numbers,
went mad in their quantities,
evaporated ,
leaving
an odor or a memory,
leaving the numbers empty.
That' s why
for you
I want things.
Let numbers
go to jail,
let them march
in perfect columns
procreating
until they give the sum
total of infinity.
For you I want only
for the numbers
along the road
to protect you
and for you to protect them .
May the weekly figure of your salary
expand until it spans your chest.
And from the 2 of you, embraced ,
your body and that of your beloved ,
may pairs of children 's eyes be born
that will count aga in
the ancient stars
and countless
heads of grain
that will cover a transformed earth.
 | ||
| Charles Demuth, The Figure 5 in Gold, 1928 |
Ode to Ironing (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Poetry is white:
it comes from the water covered with drops,
it wrinkles and piles up,
the skin of this planet must be stretched,
the sea of its whiteness must be ironed,
and the hands move and move,
the holy surfaces are smoothed out,
and that is how things are made:
hands make the world each day,
fire becomes one with steel,
linen, canvas, and cotton arrive
from the combat of the laundries,
and out of light a dove is born:
chastity
returns from the foam.
 |
| Edgar Degas, La blanchisseuse (Laundress), 1873 |
Ode to My Socks (translated by Robert Bly)
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
sea-blue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.
Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.
The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.
Ode to Broken Things (translated by George Schade)
Things
are being broken
in the house
as if pushed by an invisible
deliberate smasher:
it's not my hands
or yours
or the girls
with tough nails
and earthshaking footsteps:
it was nothing, nobody,
it wasn't the wind,
or the tawny noon,
or the terrestrial night,
it wasn't nose or elbow,
the swelling hip,
ankle
or gust of air:
the plate broke, the lamp fell,
all the flower vases crumbled
one after another, one
in full October
brimming over with scarlet,
worn out by all the violets,
and another empty one
rolled, rolled, rolled
through the winter
until it became
just flower vase gruel,
a broken memory, luminous dust.
And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread
of our weeks,
which one by one
tied up so many hours
to honey, to silence,
to so many births and travails,
that clock fell too
and its delicate blue
viscera vibrated among
the broken glass,
its long heart
uncoiled.
 |
|
Buu Ci, Broken Coffee Cup, 1987 |
Life
grinds away
glass, wearing out clothes,
tearing to shreds,
crushing
forms,
and what lasts in time is like
an island or ship at sea,
perishable,
surrounded by fragile dangers,
by implacable waters and threats.
Let's put everything once and for all, clocks,
plates, glass carved by the cold,
in a sack and take our treasures out to sea:
let our possessions crumble
in a single alarming breaking place,
let what is broken
sound like a river
and let the sea reconstruct
with its long toiling tides
so many useless things
that nobody breaks
but which got broken.
Ode to the Dictionary (translated by Ilan Stavans)
Back like an ox, beast
of burden, systematic
dense book:
young
I ignored you, I was visited
by smugness
and I thought myself complete,
and plump like a
melancholy toad
I proclaimed: “I receive
words
directly
from the roaring Mount Sinai.
I shall reduce
forms into alchemy.
I am a magus.”
The great magus said nothing.
The Dictionary,
old and heavy, with its scruffy
leather jacket,
was silent,
its test tubes undisplayed.
But one day,
after having used it
and perused it,
after
declaring it
a useless and anachronistic camel,
when for long months, without protest,
it served as an armchair
and a pillow,
it rebelled, and plated itself
in my doorstep,
it expanded, shook its leaves
and nests,
it moved the elevation of its foliage:
it was
tree,
neutral,
generous,
apple tree, apple orchard, or apple blossom,
and the words
shining in their inexhaustible cup,
opaque or sonorous,
fertile in the lodging of language,
charged with truth and sound.
I turn
to a single one
of its
pages:
Cape
Cartridge
how wonderful
to pronounce these syllables
with air,
and further on,
Capsule
hollow, awaiting oil or ambrosia,
and near them
Captivate Capture Capuchin
Carousel Carpathian
words
as slippery as smooth grapes
or exploding in the light
like blind seeds awaiting
in the storehouse of vocabulary
alive again and given life:
once again the heart is burning them.
Dictionary, you are not
tomb, sepulcher, coffin,
tumulus, mausoleum,
but preservation,
hidden fire,
plantation of rubies,
living eternity
of essence,
granary of language.
And it is wonderful
to harvest in your fields
a lineage
of words,
the severe
and forgotten
sentence,
daughter of Spain,
hardened
like a plow blade,
fixed in its limit
of antiquated tool,
preserved
in its exact beauty
and the immutability of a medallion.
Or another
word
we find hiding
between lines
that suddenly seems
as delicious and smooth in our mouths
as an almond
or as tender as a fig.
Dictionary, let one
of your thousand hands, one
of your thousand emeralds,
a
single
drop
of your virginal springs,
one grain
of
your
magnanimous granaries
fall
at the right moment
on my lips,
the thread of my pen,
into my inkwell.
From the dense and sonorous
depths of your jungle,
give me,
when I need it,
a single birdsong, the luxury
of a bee,
the fallen fragment
of your ancient wood perfumed
by an eternity of jasmine,
one
syllable,
one tremor, one sound,
one seed:
I am made of earth and with words I sing.
Ode to the Bed (translated by Ilan Stavans)
From bed to bed
in this journey
the journey of life.
He who is born, he who is injured,
and he who dies,
he who loves and he who dreams
Came and went from bed to bed,
we came and left
in this train, in this ship in this
common river
steaming
with life,
common
to every death.
The earth is a bed
flowered with love, dirty with blood,
the sky sheets
dry out
unfolding
the September body and its whiteness,
the sea
crunches
hitting
through the
green
cupola
of the
abyss
and moves white clothes and black clothes.
Oh sea, terrible bed,
perpetual agitation
of death and life,
of bitter air and of foam,
the fish sleep in you,
the night,
the whales,
in you lie the ashes
centrifugal and celestial
of the agonizing meteors:
you palpitate, sea, with all
your sleepy beings,
you build and destroy
the incessant thalamus of dreams.
Suddenly a ray emerges
with two eyes of pure forget-me-not,
with nose of ivory or apple,
and they show you the path
to the soft sheets
like clear white-lily banners
through which we slip
toward a bond.
Then domes to the bed
death with its rusty hands
and its iodine tongue
and raises its finger
long like a road
showing us the sand,
 |
|
Federico Zandomeneghi, A letto (In Bed), 1878 |
the door of the latest pain.
Ode to Bees (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
Multitude of bees!
in and out of the
crimson, the blue,
the yellow,
of the softest
softness in the world;
you tumble
headlong
into a corolla
to conduct your business,
and emerge
wearing a golden suit
and quantities of
yellow boots.
The waist,
perfect,
the abdomen striped
with dark bars,
the tiny,
ever-busy
head,
the
wings,
newly made of water;
you enter
every sweet-scented window,
open
silken doors,
penetrate the bridal chamber
of the most fragrant
love,
discover
a
drop
of diamond
dew,
and from every house
you visit
you remove
honey,
mysterious,
rich and heavy
honey, thick aroma,
liquid, guttering light,
until you return
to your
communal
palace
and on its gothic parapets
deposit
the product
of flower and flight,
the seraphic and secret nuptial sun!
Multitude of bees!
Sacred
elevation
of unity,
seething
schoolhouse.
Buzzing,
noisy
workers
process
the nectar,
swiftly
exchanging
drops
of ambrosia;
it is summer
siesta in the green
solitudes
of Osorno. High above,
the sun casts its spears
into the snow,
volcanoes glisten,
land
stretches
endless
as the sea,
space is blue,
but
something
trembles, it is
the fiery,
heart
of summer,
the honeyed heart
multiplied,
the buzzing
bee,
the crackling
honeycomb
 |
of flight and gold!
Bees,
purest laborers,
ogival
workers
fine, flashing
proletariat,
perfect,
daring militia
that in combat attack
with suicidal sting;
buzz,
buzz above
the earth's endowments,
family of gold,
multitude of the wind,
shake the fire
from the flowers,
thirst from the stamens,
the sharp,
aromatic
thread
that stitches together the days,
and propagate
honey,
passing over
humid continents, the most
distant islands of the
western sky.
Yes:
let the wax erect
green statues,
let honey
spill in
infinite
tongues,
let the ocean be
a
beehive,
the earth
tower and tunic
of flowers,
and the world
a waterfall,
a comet's tail, a
never-ending
wealth
of honeycombs!
Ode to Bicycles (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
I was walking
down
a sizzling road:
the sun popped like
a field of blazing maize,
the
earth
was hot,
an infinite circle
with an empty
blue sky overhead.
A few bicycles
passed
me by,
the only
insects
in
that dry
moment of summer,
silent,
swift,
translucent;
they
barely stirred
the air.
Workers and girls
were riding to their
factories,
giving
their eyes
to summer,
their heads to the sky,
sitting on the
hard
beetle backs
of the whirling
bicycles
that whirred
as they rode by
bridges, rosebushes, brambles
and midday.
I thought about evening when
the boys
wash up,
sing, eat, raise
a cup
of wine
in honor
of love
and life,
and waiting
at the door,
the bicycle,
stilled,
because
only moving
does it have a soul,
and fallen there
it isn't
a translucent insect
humming
through summer
but
a cold
skeleton
that will return to
life
only
when it's needed,
when it's light,
that is,
with
the
resurrection
of each day.
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