Costa Rica 4

Yesterday after my evening pilates class with Angie (my new goddess) I pulled a card from the pile at the Healing Center desk at Fiorella's invitation. You believe in miracles, it read. Yes I do! I told Fio. I shouldnt even be here, but here I am!
I told her my situation and she fist bumped me in sisterly solidarity, her nose ring flashing in starry admiration. It was meant to be, we agreed.
I've found a sisterhood that I am not yet part of, but I fit. We share olive skin (though mine is yet to take on the full caramel hue) muscly short legs, hair that is both dark and gold at the same time, and a predisposition to pura vida.

So, still accepting miracles, this morning I went off with a real estate agent, Bram, to see a few properties in Playa Pelada that are going for a steal. Yes, I want the first one we see. But that would mean selling up everything in Cambridge, and making a fulltime move here with no promise of any income.
Bram also took me to the school he and other expats started on the hills over the beach - Del Mar Academy. A Montessori program from toddler to 6th grade, growing a grade each year, planning to go through high school. There I met his wife and two groms, beach-blond and sassy. How happy my own chickens would be in this small school, with resident sheep and pigs for tending, long stretches of green play space, nestled in rainforest. I ached for them to be there with me.
Then Bram took me to the desirable double-E section further around the hill, catching exquisite beach views if you have the right property. We passed a large house built by the inventor of the Wonder Bra. Is this the double-D section then, I asked. As dessert we there stopped into a property available for rent, owned by a hard-working Atlanta couple, currently empty. I stood by their pool and drowned in the bougainvillea framed vista - green forested hill against the cerulean sky; Playa Guiones and the Pacific strung as a white and emerald lace ribbon between. Oh to hell with the little house for a steal, plant me in this spot, eyes glued to the heady view of paradise!

Thunder, lightening cancelled my surf lesson. Angie called to say safety first. Yet after the storm hour, the sea was perfect. It's meant to be, I say to myself, and accept this loss with grace. And yes, with the energy not spent in waves, I make it to Angie's fitness class. There I meet my sisterhood - caramel and laughing, accepting me without question; we run together, a group of 5 chicas showing up the 4 guys who cannot keep up. And as I follow the instructions in Spanish, I forget for an hour that I am a gringa - no, I'm just one of the chicas, and feel at home. This, the most wondrous miracle so far...

Costa Rica 3

A rhythm has begun to emerge out of the hours and activities here - I am placing myself. Walks with Gix at either end of the day, taking advantage of long, figural shadows, light that allows abstraction. Surfing, at low tide only, slides down the day by an hour or so; the morning wait becomes longer. Drawing, walking the village, chatting with new "friends", finally surfing, siesta, evening. Pilates or yoga and meals of various types fit in there sometimes.

Everything goes well here but poetry. Besides the I Ching, I brought 2 books with me, picked up at the airport. T.S. Eliot The Wasteland and other poems, and The Best American Poetry, 2010. (There is a Keats in the hotel store I might pick up too.) I've never enjoyed reading poetry (!) but now these texts I study for technique - unable to get enough.
Poetry is battering me, but the lesson is to get to the take-off point with persistent work - with exhausted muscles I tip my craft safely over the waves, allowing them to drift us a little off course. The effort seems endless and would deter me, but for faith that I will get there and the easy, joyous ride will be an enormous payoff.

As I write, howler monkeys are filling the 4am darkness with a distant, ghostly wail. An unearthly sound - wind through a drafty old attic; dead spirits lamenting their fate. There has been not a moment of stress, anxiety, sadness, regret, anger since arriving here. This is the element for a gregarious loner. Art exercise study rest. Now, how to bring it home with me? Or, to make a home here...

Costa Rica 2

Sliding around on my small bag, perched on a raised level behind the front seat, this was heaven in a 40 year old VW bus, standing room only. The one-eyed driver confimed our destination, Nicoya, kindly showing me with coins from his cash box how much I was to pay. Less than a dollar fifty. Much better than the 150 shuttle cost - and infinitely more educational, fun, real.
Swaying softly next to women, men and school children, all clean and freshly groomed despite the humidity and heat (not me.) How does that woman keep her tight white capris so pristine?
At Filadelfia - a little U-turn of a village - I hop into the vacated front seat and my one-eyed driver shoots me an approving nod and faint smile. I am reminded, after years without practice, that a big grin goes a long way to bridge an inexcusable language gap.
A roadside fruit stand selling pineapples, bananas. Next to it a large mango tree, her golden-skinned fruit scattered at her feet, decaying.
10 minutes before Santa Cruz the bus hauls in a large group of women and small children. I return to my bag-seat for one of them, taking a precious caramel one-year old onto my lap. We have matching black pedicures. Balancing the slender wee weight on my knee, away from my body to keep her cool, nevertheless we are both a sweaty mess by the time we reach Santa Cruz.

Now I've really gone native I think to myself - small child on my knee, small gestures of conversation with the women... But what is native really? We all catch buses, flash our senior pass, hold our children tight, give up a seat for the elderly, pull out our cell phones at a certain point before our destination to let those at home know we're nearly there... "native" is all the same.
After Santa Cruz the flat landscape grows some hills. The lushness continues, but with more recognizable agriculture and less houses sitting on the road's edge.
We reach Nicoya. In Spitanglish I ask one-eye where to catch the bus to Nosara. Here apparently, in this empty dirt lot, apparently. Another big grin and a gracias as I leave and one-eye shoots me a look "something something muy linda" ooookkkkaaaaaay. He continues in his quiet shy voice, hand on heart "te gusto?" ummmmm "te enamor someething."

The bastard had left me at the wrong place. But all good - he was sweet and I found my way to Nicosa in good time... All the more exuberant in my dusty step at the thought that at least there was a one-eyed caramel man out there who found me appealing....

 

Costa Rica 1

First, on the 6am flight to Newark, a short draft of a poemito. Written to relieve the anxiety felt with travel. An immediately effective cure...

Echoes in Blue

Dawn arrives on eyelashes
Percussive morning lilt
Relieving the weight
Of night's lawless roaming.
The little one sleeps on
Unknowingly vulnerable
Camped in pirate jammies
Absorbing the morning light
To later reflect back at the world,
Radiate the practiced joy of a native Sufi.

Then I arrived in Liberia and the happiness of being *home* hit me. Home being wherever I am foreign, with few possessions, little language and generous time to drift.
My native tongue the spitanglish mixed in with Turkish and Persian, a poetic mix of its own, recalling the appropriateness of certain languages to certain parts of speech, and inflexed with the homophone words across the pure languages, words with vastly different meanings.

I wrote a ton today, scrawled in a notebook. This iPhone typing is impossible. More later.

Precedents: Li-Young Lee

Thank you Christina, for directing me to this work...

The City In Which I Loved You

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
andI mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you...

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain rining like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you...

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest...

a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.

but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,

and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street

beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse

lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:

that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.

And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are

my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don't survive,
whose names I do not know;

they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you.

The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.

If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.

You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-city-in-which-i-loved-you/ 05.17.12 

Dreaming Of Hair

Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
whose hair I've found in my mouth,
whose sleeping head I kiss,
wondering is it death?
beauty? this dark
star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.

My love's hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.
My fingers harvest the dark
vegtable of her body.
In the morning I remove it
from my tongue and
sleep again.

Hair spills
through my dream, sprouts
from my stomach, thickens my heart,
and tangles from the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb.
Hair ascends the tree
of my childhood--the willow
I climbed
one bare foot and hand at a time,
feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing
my father plead from his window, _Don't fall!_

In my dream I fly
past summers and moths,
to the thistle
caught in my mother's hair, the purple one
I touched and bled for,
to myself at three, sleeping
beside her, waking with her hair in my mouth.

Along a slippery twine of her black hair
my mother ties ko-tze knots for me:
fish and lion heads, chrysanthemum buds, the heads
of Chinamen, black-haired and frowning.

Li-En, my brother, frowns when he sleeps.
I push back his hair, stroke his brow.
His hairline is our father's, three peaks pointing down.

What sprouts from the body
and touches the body?
What filters sunlight
and drinks moonlight?
Where have I misplaced my heart?
What stops wheels and great machines?
What tangles in the bough
and snaps the loom?

Out of the grave
my father's hair
bursts. A strand
pierces my left sole, shoots
up bone, past ribs,
to the broken heart it stiches,
then down,
swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down,
through the right foot.

What binds me to this earth?
What remembers the dead
and grows towards them?

I'm tired of thinking.
I long to taste the world with a kiss.
I long to fly into hair with kisses and weeping,
remembering an afternoon
when, kissing my sleeping father, I saw for the first time
behind the thick swirl of his black hair,
the mole of wisdom,
a lone planet spinning slowly.

Sometimes my love is melancholy
and I hold her head in my hands.
Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death.
Then, I must grab handfuls
of her hair, and, I tell you, there
are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men
taking off their boots, their hearts breaking,
not knowing
which they love more, the water, or
their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dreaming-of-hair/

Life Traces - final(ish)

I dragged your dead body from a dream today -

rather a figment, an unbidden image.

But there you were, head hovering at my feet 

perspective projecting your limbs  

away. 

Upon inspection

your insides were empty

The onion skin thin shellac brown

a cicada's husk,

filigree of meticulously traced membranes.

Inside, the wind.

A precise negative of where you once were 

You: your organs bones  arteries intestines muscles cartilage blood bile nerves veins.

But also your soul -

these remained behind in the dream.

Before me, fleetingly intact, lay your epidermal mask, shed

Translucent

Veined like a dried ginkgo leaf or

the pleasurable pulled-off layer of glue

a child has let dry on her hand.

Then in the vacancy formed by this cask

I recognized faces.

My father's ghost took residence;

once large, now scaled down to fit the space of you in comfort.

His eyes closed as in his coffin

His arms crossed in front

Dressed in one of his beautiful suits, prepared for eternity.

Dancing on him were the fragment images of every man between.

Merging together

Disappearing appearing 

As do projections on smoke.

Gathered, they darted through apertures formed
by fissures or stretched openings in the translucent shellac of your case.
I asked them: how long have you been there?
Since we parted, they answered as one.

And only your spirit stayed away.

But of course -

You aren't dead yet.

Lying before me, this mold for you was the cicada shell of my desire.

So I attempted to lay it to rest, as you've ordered I should.

Goodbye undead.

Goodbye Baba.

Goodbye undead.

Before me now, my warm, stuffed,

sleep-breathing son. Long live life...

A Landscape to Inhabit

Take This Waltz

Cohen describes his translation of Lorca's "Pequeno Vals Vienes" as a gift to the great poet, whose work changed Cohen's life as an adolescent. The translation itself is a gift too, a great work that allows me to inhabit Lorca's landscape with Leonard Cohen, through his eyes and in his company. The words, set to a waltz, dance me through my day.

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's this tree where the doves love to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of a lily
In some hallway where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and death
Dragging its tail in the sea

There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's this bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
But who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it's been dying for years

There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its I'll never forget you, you know
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and death
Dragging its tail in the sea

And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It is yours now, it's all that there is

Leonard Cohen, translation of Frederico Garcia Lorca

"[A] translation I did of a very great poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who touched me very deeply, a poet who provided a landscape which I could inhabit..."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l9j6s

 

Pequeno Vals Vienes

En Viena hay diez muchachas,
un hombro donde solloza la muerte
y un bosque de palomas disecadas.
Hay un fragmento de la mañana
en el museo de la escarcha.
Hay un salón con mil ventanas.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals con la boca cerrada.

Este vals, este vals, este vals, este vals,
de sí, de muerte y de coñac
que moja su cola en el mar.

Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero,
con la butaca y el libro muerto,
por el melancólico pasillo,
en el oscuro desván del lirio,
en nuestra cama de la luna
y en la danza que sueña la tortuga.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals de quebrada cintura.

En Viena hay cuatro espejos
donde juegan tu boca y los ecos.
Hay una muerte para piano
que pinta de azul a los muchachos.
Hay mendigos por los tejados,
hay frescas guirnaldas de llanto.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals que se muere en mis brazos.

Porque te quiero, te quiero, amor mío,
en el desván donde juegan los niños,
soñando viejas luces de Hungría
por los rumores de la tarde tibia,
viendo ovejas y lirios de nieve
por el silencio oscuro de tu frente.

¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals, este vals del "Te quiero siempre".

En Viena bailaré contigo
con un disfraz que tenga
cabeza de río.
¡Mira qué orillas tengo de jacintos!
Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas,
mi alma en fotografías y azucenas,
y en las ondas oscuras de tu andar
quiero, amor mío, amor mío, dejar,
violín y sepulcro, las cintas del vals.


Frederico Garcia Lorca

Life Traces - second iteration (and some third...)

initial edits

I dragged your dead body from a dream today -

rather a picture, an unbidden image.

But there you were, head hovering near my feet 

perspective projecting the rest of you 

away. 

Upon inspection

your insides were empty

The onion skin thin shellac brown membrane

a cicada's husk,

each connecting line of you traced perfectly as filigree.

Inside, the wind.

The perfect negative of where you once were -

You: your organs bones intestines muscles cartilage blood bile nerves arteries veins.

But also your soul -

this too had stayed behind in my dream.

Before me, fleetingly intact, lay your epidermal mask

Translucent

Infinitely light.

Veined like a dried ginkgo leaf or

the pleasurable pulled-off layer of glue

a child has allowed to dry on her hand.

Infinitely thin.

But in the emptiness formed by this cask

I realized it wasn't just you - 

This trace of your skin held my father's ghost;

once large, now scaled down to fit in the space of you with comfort.

His eyes closed as in his casket

His arms crossed in front

Dressed in one of his beautiful suits, perfection in eternity.

Dancing on him were the fragment images of every man between.

Merging together

Appearing disappearing

As does a projection on smoke.

Gathered, they darted through apertures formed
by fissures or stretched openings in the translucent shellac of your case.

Only your spirit stayed away.

But of course -

You aren't dead yet.

Lying before me, this perfect replica of a mold for you was the cicada shell of my desire.

So I laid it to rest, as I knew I should.

Goodbye undead.

Goodbye Baba.

Goodbye undead.

Before me now, my warm, stuffed,

sleep-breathing son. Long live life...

Life traces - first word dump

Here's a start. This image had been playing in my head all yesterday afternoon. It grew more detailed as I interrogated it mentally. This 'poem' isn't yet about words - just a brain-dump collection i made last night, in bed, trying to describe the image, and capture a concept. The text below is completely unedited! 


I dragged your dead body from a dream today
More an image
A picture that comes unbidden.
There you were, your head hovering near my feet the rest of you projecting away with an exaggerated perspective
No feet - too far
upon inspection
Your insides were empty
The onion skin thin shellac brown cask
A cicadas husk transparent each line of you
Traced perfectly as filigree
Inside, the wind, the perfect negative of where you once were
You: your organs bones viscera intestines muscles cartilage blood bile nerves arteries veins.
But also your soul.
This too had stayed behind in my dream
Before me, intact, lay just your epidermal mask
Translucent
Infinitely light
Veined like a dried ginkgo leaf or
The pleasurable pulled off layer of glue
A child has allowed to dry on her hand
Infinitely thin
But in the emptiness formed by this cask
I realized it wasn't just you
This trace of your skin was holding my father's ghost
Larger than you, his ghost scaled down to fit in the space of you with comfort.
His eyes closed as in his casket
His arms crossed in front.
Dressed in one of his beautiful suits, perfection in eternity.

dancing on this were the projection memory images of every man between
Merging together
Appearing disappearing
As does a projection on smoke.
Only your spirit stayed away
But of course
You aren't dead yet
This perfect replica of a container for you
That lay before me
was the cicada husk of my desire

I laid it to rest, as i know i should.
Goodbye undead.
Goodbye Baba.
Goodbye undead.


Before me now, my pink, warm,
Sleep breathing son. Long live life

Today's Rumi

Another year, another spring.
The fragrance of love arrives.

So dancy, this new light on the ground,
and in the tree.

The one who heals us
lets whatever hurts the soul
dissolve to a listening intelligence,
where what we most deeply want, union with eternity,
grows up, around and inside us now.

trans. Coleman Barks