To you, in a sack from Briga

Found poem:

 

To you, in a sack from Briga (likewise to myself)

                 Account of wheat 
                 measured out from that which

                 I myself have put into the barrel:

to myself for bread, 5 pecks

to Felicius Victor 
                 on the order of Spectatus, 
                 26 provided as a loan

                 to the oxherds at the wood, 
8 pecks likewise to Amabilis
at the shrine September
to Crescens on the order of Firmus, 3

likewise to father

to Lu the beneficiary, 6

to Felicius Victor for twisted loaves
to you, 15

to legionary soldiers on the order of Firmus, 11

to Candidus, to you, in a sack from Briga

to you

to Lucco, in charge of the pigs, 3

to Primus, slave of Lucius, 7

to you

to Lucco, for his own use, 9

              likewise that which I have sent

              in the century of Voturius 
to father, in charge of the oxen

              likewise within the measure

              likewise to myself, for bread

Dyspepsia's Pangs

Bottles of Hostetter's Bitters were discovered in a recent excavation on the Bowery. Apparently they tend to find lots of these bottles when excavating around the locations of 19th Century saloons. It was 47% alcohol, (94 proof) and contained coriander and anise oils, vegetable bitters and lots of sugar. Looks like the stuff was marketed for about 100 years starting in the early 1850s. Below the bottle is the brilliant and gloomy text of an old ad for it.

Hostetter's Bitters
Dyspepsia's pangs, that rack and grind
The body, and depress the mind;
Slow constitutional decay,
That brings death nearer, day by day;
Nervous prostration, mental gloom,
Agues, that, as they go and come,
Make life a constant martyrdom;
Colics and dysenteric pains,
'Neath which the strong man's vigor wanes;
Bilious complaints, -- those tedious ills,
Ne'er conquered yet by drastic pills;
Dread Diarrhea, that cannot be
Cured by destructive Mercury;
Heralds of madness or the tomb;
For these, though Mineral nostrums fail,
Means of relief at last we hail,
HOSTETTER'S BITTERS medicine sure,
Not to prevent, alone, but cure.

Poem by Osip Mandelstam

Monument to Mandelstam in Russian city where he was exiled

Seamus Heaney called the wonderful Russian poet Osip Mandelstam "the Lazarus of modern poetry." His life's heartbreaking end in a Stalinist purge is something I think about frequently. The Soviets suppressed his work after about 1928, but the burial was premature; his wife Nadezhda, who wrote the inspiring and generous memoir, Hope Against Hope, hid some of it and memorized some of it and so it survived and is now appreciated, even in Russia, as some of the greatest of the 20th Century. Much of it is very difficult, even beyond comprehension for me, without notes. Sometimes whether I can get anything out of it depends on the translation, of course. But much of it is bright and filled with meaning expressed in concrete images. (By the way, Mandelstam wrote lively prose as well.)

This title-less poem (many were given only numbers, not titles, this one was #8), translated by James Greene, is one of the bright and beautiful ones. To me, anyway. I like the idea of uniqueness unto eternity. I especially like "I am gardener, flower too..."

[8]
What shall I do with the body I've been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?

For the calm happiness of breathing, being able
To be alive, tell me where I should be grateful?

I am gardener, flower too, and un-alone
In this vast dungeon.

My breath, my glow, you can already see
On the windowpanes of eternity.

A pattern is imprinted there,
Unknown till now.

Let this muddle die down, this sediment flow out.
The lovely pattern cannot be crossed out.
                 - Osip Mandelstam, 1909

Poem by Samuel Beckett

Beckett tends to go over my tiny head housing its small brain. But this one, run across frequently in John Montague's anthology The Book of Irish Verse, brings me pleasure, especially the notion of squandering courage, even as I am still figuring it out. Let me know if you can help.

Gnome
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through the world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning
                      - Samuel Beckett

Poem by Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew, British, 1869 - 1928

This one is in the vernacular so let me translate a little to get you started. The first line is saying "Some said because he wouldn't speak." The fourth line means "He must be bird-witted." In the second stanza, the fourth line means he would "sit and talk with his shadow." The sixth line means "And there ain't no memory on the place." The poem is easy to read if you go slow the first time and just go with the sound.

The poem like the poet, Mew, is beautiful (okay, maybe not physically, but give her a break, she was a great poet who killed herself by drinking Lysol) and sad. It stands out for me of course because of "the spider's lace" and the "whizzle and race of the dry, dead leaves." 

But mostly for its subject, old taciturn Dave, so obscure, an object of some scorn perhaps, who here is allowed to have been talented in his work and especially to have loved, even if the thing he loved, nature, Arracrombe Wood, wasn't inclined, or able, to love him back exactly. Maybe that was the point.

       Arracombe Wood
       Some said, because he wud'n spaik
       Any words to women but Yes and No,
Nor put out his hand for Parson to shake
       He mun be bird-witted. But I do go
       By the lie of the barley that he did sow,
And I wish no better thing than to hold a rake
      Like Dave, in his time, or to see him mow.

       Put up in a churchyard a month ago,
'A bitter old soul,' they said. but it wadn't so.
His heart were in Arracombe Wood where he'd used to go
To sit and talk wi' his shadder till sun went low,
Though what it was all about us'll never know.
       And there baint no mem'ry in the place
       Of th' old man's footmark, nor his face;
       Arracombe Wood do think more of a crow --
'Will be violets there in the Spring: in Summer time the spider's lace;
       And come the Fall, the whizzle and race
Of the dry, dead leaves when the wind gies chase;
       And on the Eve of Christmas, fallin' snow.
                                -Charlotte Mew (1921)

Mother's Day - a poem

Mother's Day

3 springs running the sisters

planted a dogwood in the yard

and 3 summers running it died barren

The 4th spring they gave her red

and white cut flowers meant to die

Today the koi have left L.A.

They are coming north in tanks

When they come they will have come to heal

her mind. 50 summers on 

the sisters truck solely in the perishable.

                                      - J. O'Brien 

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                 

Göran Rosenberg tells the truth about memory

It is still a time, although perhaps less so than it was 10 years ago, when new or young authors choose to write memoirs instead of novels based on their early lives. It has always struck me as a purely commercial decision, and probably a correct one, in this time of "reality" shows and embarrassment celebrity. These memoirs, sometimes by people too young to have done anything, or who the only thing they've done is get addicted to heroin or alcohol or sex, are right smack in that category of the scripted reality of humiliation and embarrassment. 

And because memory is unreliable, and perhaps also because they were drunk or high or fucking so much, they get things wrong and sometimes this gets them in trouble. Whereas if they had changed a few names and worked their imaginations a bit, there might have been come grumbling from the real-life models for their characters, but there'd be nothing much anyone could do about their dissatisfaction.

Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg has written a memoir of his father in which early on he explores the truth about memory. Through a series of coincidences, evil and otherwise, and questionable decisions by others overwhelmed with horrific responsibilities in the ghetto of Lodz, Rosenberg's father survived Auschwitz, was re-united with the woman he loved, who also survived the camp, and then re-located to a relatively welcoming Sweden. You might think he was lucky, but the heavy burden of what he lost, his history, culture and people, in the end proves too much for him.

It is a beautiful and painful book which I read while traveling in Turkey this spring. To me, it is restrained in the telling and the writing, as any book about the Holocaust, especially by one who did not experience it first hand, perhaps ought to be. The facts themselves can provide whatever emotion and drama you need.

All this is just an excuse for me to post a great passage from early in the book, about memory. A Brief Stop is beautiful, occasionally poetic, occasionally it reads like the script from an early experimental film, like that one with all the ants and the hand:

Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I'm not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I've put them together correctly. I'm not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven't yet named and therefore don't yet have a word for?

Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.

Other words may come later. Words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finally the words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feat, the lethal cold burning against their skin.

Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with shattered fragments of language.
                                                    -  Göran Rosenberg
                                                        From A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

The saddest poem I have ever read at 4 in the morning

Trees & ghost trees on the cover of the Russian anthology

Couldn't sleep last night. I did drift off once, but came back wide awake, so got up and went to the next room. Earlier I had been reading a biography of Chagall. It was 1920 and he'd been driven from Vitebsk by the machinations of his enemies in the art world there. The Civil War was raging. There was little food in Moscow. People were starving. The daughter of the great poet Marina Tsvetayeva starved to death. I fell asleep, woke up, grabbed an anthology of Russian poetry at 4 in the morning, I had to be up for good at 7. I found the section on Tsvetayeva and around 4:15 a.m. read the saddest poem I have ever read. I have no idea if it is about her lost daughter. But I imagine it is.

To Kiss a Forehead is to Erase Worry -- 
To kiss a forehead is to erase worry --
I kiss your forehead.
To kiss closed eyes is to bring sleep -- 
I kiss your eyes.
To kiss lips is to give water -- 
I kiss your lips.
To kiss a forehead is to erase memory -- 
I kiss your forehead.
                         - M. Tsvetayeva
                           Translated by John Glad

Bereft of purpose, void of use

Depressive poet James Thomson

Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can life still live on?..
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.

           From "The City of Dreadful Night"
                      Section II
                      1874

I wouldn't say this passage from Thomson's (perhaps better known as "B.V.") long poem "The City of Dreadful Night" describes the effects of depression as universally as Antonio's speech in The Merchant of Venice (See: Such a want-wit sadness makes of me); but...sometimes...  Born in Scotland, he was for a time a schoolmaster in England, where he did most of his writing. He suffered from what in those days was called "constitutional melancholia." He was addicted to opium. But he was an interesting poet, sometimes called a British Poe. He wrote a book about Walt Whitman. He may have influenced Melville. He died homeless, two years after "City of Dreadful Night" was published. (See also: Line from poet James Thomson, aka B.V.)                                                                              

Two spring poems by Jeffers

Last week, after spending an entire morning, a weekday morning, creating the preceding post, the one about Joan of Arc, so that 12 people would read it, I felt a potent combination of guilt and futility. It really is not something I should be doing, except maybe late at night instead of watching stupid TV before bedtime. ("Promising myself before bedtime to contend more urgently with the problem. From nothing, nothing comes..." - opening lines of a poem by R.S. Thomas.) 

An iris in my garden this morning

I think about that futility this morning as I type up these two poems by Jeffers and this little intro. I was going to post "Gale in April" because today it is still rather newly April and we have had a little storm or two, though nothing you would call a "gale." But the truth is, I have always liked "The Maid's Thought" because of its unexpected description of mating deer and for, of course, "it is time for us now/Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies..." Certainly it is a spring poem, full of calm and color and desirous life. I will put "Gale in April" below it. It might not look great on your phone because of those very long Jeffersian lines.

My creased Tamar, plain-looking but important

"The Maid's Thought" and "Gale in April" are from Jeffers' breakthrough collection from 1924, Tamar & other poems, his first collection in which he had found his voice, and the one a few critics discovered and soon he was famous for awhile. Jeffers paid for the publication of the book himself. There were 500 copies. Most of them ended up in storage at his home, called Tor House, in Carmel. Mine has a crease in the cover that makes me think it was at the top of a bundle of others and tied up with string, and so is one of those that sat in Tor House for a long time. I like to think that anyway.








The Maid's Thought

Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
The west wind is dead, the waves
Forget to hate the cliffs, in the upland canyons
Whole hillsides burst aglow
With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,
And every pool was rimmed
With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
Now tall and slender suddenly
The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,
The pencilled ones on the hill;
This deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulips
Blow out their silky bubbles,
But in the next glen bronze-bells nod, the does
Scalded by some hot longing
Can hardly set their pointed hoofs to expect
Love but they crush a flower;
Shells pair on the rock, birds mate, the moths fly double.
O it is time for us now
Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies
To make that burning flower.
                                            -Robinson Jeffers
                                             Tamar & other poems
                                             1924

Gale in April
Intense and terrible beauty, how has our race with the frail naked nerves,
So little a craft swum down from its far launching?
Why now, only because the northwest blows and the headed grass billows,
Great seas jagging the west on the granite
Blanching, the vessel is brimmed, this dancing play of the world is too much passion.
A gale in April so overfilling the spirit,
Though his ribs were thick as the earth's, arches of mountain, how shall one dare to live,
Though his blood were like the earth's rivers and his flesh iron,
How shall one dare to live? One is born strong, how do the weak endure it?
The strong lean upon death as on a rock,
After eighty years there is shelter and the naked nerves shall be covered with deep quietness,
O beauty of things go on, go on, O torture
Of intense joy I have lasted out my time, I have thanked God and finished,
Roots of millennial trees fold me in the darkness,
Northwest wind shake their tops, not to the root, not to the root, I have passed
From beauty to the other beauty, peace, the night splendor.

                                                    -Robinson Jeffers
                                                     from Tamar & other poems
                                                     1924