Ha llegado la hora de retirarse estoy agradecido de todos tanto de los amigos complacientes como de los enemigos frenéticos ¡inolvidables personajes sagrados! Miserable de mí si no hubiera logrado granjearme la antipatía casi general: ¡salve perros felices que salieron a ladrarme al camino! Me despido de ustedes con la mayor alegría del mundo.
Gracias, de nuevo, grazias reconozco que se me caen las lágrimas volveremos a vernos en el mar, en la tierra donde sea. Pórtense bien, escriban sigan haciendo pan continúen tejiendo telarañas les deseo toda clase de parabienes: entre los cucuruchos de esos árboles que llamanos cipreses los espero con dientes y muelas.
Concerning your letter in which you ask me to call a priest and in which you ask me to wear The Cross that you enclose; your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden, no thorns, this rose
I pray to its shadow, that gray place where it lies on your letter... deep, deep. I detest my sins and I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, its solid neck, its brown sleep.
True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
All morning long I have worn your cross, hung with package string around my throat. It tapped me lightly as a child's heart might, tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born. Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.
My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
Child, the current of your breath is six days long. You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed; lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first hunger is not wrong. The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded down starch halls with the other unnested throng in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong. But this is an institution bed. You will not know me very long.
The doctors are enamel. They want to know the facts. They guess about the man who left me, some pendulum soul, going the way men go and leave you full of child. But our case history stays blank. All I did was let you grow. Now we are here for all the ward to see. They thought I was strange, although I never spoke a word. I burst empty of you, letting you see how the air is so. The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me and I turn my head away. I do not know.
Yours is the only face I recognize. Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in. Six times a day I prize your need, the animals of your lips, your skin growing warm and plump. I see your eyes lifting their tents. They are blue stones, they begin to outgrow their moss. You blink in surprise and I wonder what you can see, my funny kin, as you trouble my silence. I am a shelter of lies. Should I learn to speak again, or hopeless in such sanity will I touch some face I recognize?
Down the hall the baskets start back. My arms fit you like a sleeve, they hold catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms of your nerves, each muscle and fold of your first days. Your old man's face disarms the nurses. But the doctors return to scold me. I speak. It is you my silence harms. I should have known; I should have told them something to write down. My voice alarms my throat. "Name of father--none. " I hold you and name you bastard in my arms.
And now that's that. There is nothing more that I can say or lose. Others have traded life before and could not speak. I tighten to refuse your owling eyes, my fragile visitor. I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise against me. We unlearn. I am a shore rocking off you. You break from me. I choose your only way, my small inheritor and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose. Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.
I am thirty this November. You are still small, in your fourth year. We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer, flapping in the winter rain. Falling flat and washed. And I remember mostly the three autumns you did not live here. They said I'd never get you back again. I tell you what you'll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
I, who chose two times to kill myself, had said your nickname the mewling mouths when you first came; until a fever rattled in your throat and I moved like a pantomine above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame, I heard them say, was mine. They tattled like green witches in my head, letting doom leak like a broken faucet; as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet, an old debt I must assume.
Death was simpler than I'd thought. The day life made you well and whole I let the witches take away my guilty soul. I pretended I was dead until the white men pumped the poison out, putting me armless and washed through the rigamarole of talking boxes and the electric bed. I laughed to see the private iron in that hotel. Today the yellow leaves go queer. You ask me where they go I say today believed in itself, or else it fell.
Today, my small child, Joyce, love your self's self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to; or if there is, why did I let you grow in another place. You did not know my voice when I came back to call. All the superlatives of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe will not help you know the holidays you had to miss. The time I did not love myself, I visited your shoveled walks; you held my glove. There was new snow after this.
They sent me letters with news of you and I made moccasins that I would never use. When I grew well enough to tolerate myself, I lived with my mother, the witches said. But I didn't leave. I had my portrait done instead.
Part way back from Bedlam I came to my mother's house in Gloucester, Massachusetts. And this is how I came to catch at her; and this is how I lost her. I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said. And she never could. She had my portrait done instead.
I lived like an angry guest, like a partly mended thing, an outgrown child. I remember my mother did her best. She took me to Boston and had my hair restyled. Your smile is like your mother's, the artist said. I didn't seem to care. I had my portrait done instead.
There was a church where I grew up with its white cupboards where they locked us up, row by row, like puritans or shipmates singing together. My father passed the plate. Too late to be forgiven now, the witches said. I wasn't exactly forgiven. They had my portrait done instead.
All that summer sprinklers arched over the seaside grass. We talked of drought while the salt-parched field grew sweet again. To help time pass I tried to mow the lawn and in the morning I had my portrait done, holding my smile in place, till it grew formal. Once I mailed you a picture of a rabbit and a postcard of Motif number one, as if it were normal to be a mother and be gone.
They hung my portrait in the chill north light, matching me to keep me well. Only my mother grew ill. She turned from me, as if death were catching, as if death transferred, as if my dying had eaten inside of her. That August you were two, by I timed my days with doubt. On the first of September she looked at me and said I gave her cancer. They carved her sweet hills out and still I couldn't answer.
That winter she came part way back from her sterile suite of doctors, the seasick cruise of the X-ray, the cells'arithmetic gone wild. Surgery incomplete, the fat arm, the prognosis poor, I heard them say.
During the sea blizzards she had here own portrait painted. A cave of mirror placed on the south wall; matching smile, matching contour. And you resembled me; unacquainted with my face, you wore it. But you were mine after all.
I wintered in Boston, childless bride, nothing sweet to spare with witches at my side. I missed your babyhood, tried a second suicide, tried the sealed hotel a second year. On April Fool you fooled me. We laughed and this was good.
I checked out for the last time on the first of May; graduate of the mental cases, with my analysts's okay, my complete book of rhymes, my typewriter and my suitcases.
All that summer I learned life back into my own seven rooms, visited the swan boats, the market, answered the phone, served cocktails as a wife should, made love among my petticoats
and August tan. And you came each weekend. But I lie. You seldom came. I just pretended you, small piglet, butterfly girl with jelly bean cheeks, disobedient three, my splendid
stranger. And I had to learn why I would rather die than love, how your innocence would hurt and how I gather guilt like a young intern his symptons, his certain evidence.
That October day we went to Gloucester the red hills reminded me of the dry red fur fox coat I played in as a child; stock still like a bear or a tent, like a great cave laughing or a red fur fox.
We drove past the hatchery, the hut that sells bait, past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall's Hill, to the house that waits still, on the top of the sea, and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.
In north light, my smile is held in place, the shadow marks my bone. What could I have been dreaming as I sat there, all of me waiting in the eyes, the zone of the smile, the young face, the foxes'snare.
In south light, her smile is held in place, her cheeks wilting like a dry orchid; my mocking mirror, my overthrown love, my first image. She eyes me from that face that stony head of death I had outgrown.
The artist caught us at the turning; we smiled in our canvas home before we chose our foreknown separate ways. The dry redfur fox coat was made for burning. I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
And this was the cave of the mirror, that double woman who stares at herself, as if she were petrified in time -- two ladies sitting in umber chairs. You kissed your grandmother and she cried.
I could not get you back except for weekends. You came each time, clutching the picture of a rabbit that I had sent you. For the last time I unpack your things. We touch from habit. The first visit you asked my name. Now you will stay for good. I will forget how we bumped away from each other like marionettes on strings. It wasn't the same as love, letting weekends contain us. You scrape your knee. You learn my name, wobbling up the sidewalk, calling and crying. You can call me mother and I remember my mother again, somewhere in greater Boston, dying.
I remember we named you Joyce so we could call you Joy. You came like an awkward guest that first time, all wrapped and moist and strange at my heavy breast. I needed you. I didn't want a boy, only a girl, a small milky mouse of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house of herself. We named you Joy. I, who was never quite sure about being a girl, needed another life, another image to remind me. And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure or soothe it. I made you to find me.
My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web, as doth the vine, twiggy and wooden, hold up grapes like eyeballs, as many angels dance on the head of a pin.
God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love. As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. So if you have only a thin wire, God does not mind. He will enter your hands as easily as ten cents used to bring forth a Coke.
Cupido, loser, eigenwilliger Knabe! Du batst mich um Quartier auf einige Stunden. Wie viele Tag'und Nächte bist du geblieben! Und bist nun herrisch und Meister im Hause geworden! Von meinem breiten Lager bin ich vertrieben; Nun sitz ich an der Erde, Nächte gequälet; Dein Mutwill schüret Flamm auf Flamme des Herdes, Verbrennet den Vorrat des Winters und senget mich Armen. Du hast mir mein Geräte verstellt und verschoben; Ich such und bin wie blind und irre geworden. Du lärmst so ungeschickt; ich fürchte das Seelchen Entflieht, um dir zu entfliehn, und räumet die Hütte. Cupido, monello testardo! Cupido, monello testardo! M'hai chiesto un riparo per poche ore, e quanti giorni e notti sei rimasto! Adesso il padrone in casa mia sei tu! Sono scacciato dal mio ampio letto; sto per terra, e di notte mi tormento; il tuo capriccio attizza fiamma su fiamma nel fuoco, brucia le scorte d'inverno e arde me misero. Hai spostato e scompigliato gli oggetti miei, io cerco, e sono come cieco e smarrito. Strepiti senza ritegno, e io temo che l'animula fugga via per sfuggire te, e abbandoni questa capanna.
Woher sind wir geboren? Aus Lieb. Wie wären wir verloren? Ohn Lieb. Was hilft uns überwinden? Die Lieb. Kann man auch Liebe finden? Durch Lieb. Was läßt nicht lange weinen? Die Lieb. Was soll uns stets vereinen? Die Lieb.
Da dove siamo nati?
Da dove siamo nati? Dall'amore. Come saremmo perduti? Senza amore. Cosa ci aiuta a superarci? L'amore. Si può trovare anche l'amore? Con amore. Cosa abbrevia il pianto? L'amore. Cosa deve unirci sempre? L'amore.
Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, Language-shapers on other shores, Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither, I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it), Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves, Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place with my own day here.
Here lands female and male, Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of materials, Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow'd, The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms, The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing, Yes here comes my mistress the soul.
O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! So sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life? [Answer] That you are here - that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. Ahimè, ahi vita! domande come queste mi perseguono, d'infiniti cortei d'infedeli, città gremite di stolti, io che sempre rimprovero me stesso, (perché chi più stolto di me, chi di me più infedele?) d'occhi che invano anelano la luce, scopi meschini, lotta rinnovata ognora, dagli infelici risultati di tutto, le sordide folle anfananti, che in giro mi vedo, degli anni inutili e vacui degli altri, e io che m'intreccio con gli altri, la domanda, ahimè, che così triste mi persegue, - Che v'è di buono in tutto questo, o Vita, ahimè? RISPOSTA Che tu sei qui - che esistono la vita e l'individuo, che il potente spettacolo continua, e che tu puoi contribuirvi con un tuo verso.
We two boys together clinging, One the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making, Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching, Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving, No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening, Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing, Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, freebleness chasing, Fulfilling our foray.