Shadow Embrace

I like the way these elongated shadows embrace the tree like needy hooks or fantastic thorns. Aren't there great patterns and textures in the bark? Such an invitation to fingertips. And that March washed-blue sky shining in the background.

There is a blind niche in the azure:
in each blessed noon
one fateful star trembles,
hinting at the depth of night.
-- Osip Mandelstam, tr. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin

Mandelstam wrote a poem (#133) containing this deep and piercing stanza in 1922. It became part of Poems, published in 1928. I found it in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Brown and Merwin, New York Review Books, 2004, translation copyright 1973. (See page 43, third stanza.)

Mandelstam was arrested and exiled in 1934, after he read a work denouncing Stalin. I found it fascinating that his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his writing, so that it would be preserved even if his papers were lost or destroyed. When his exile ended in 1937, he returned to Moscow, but was arrested again and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. According to the book notes, he was "last seen in a transit camp near Vladivostok."

Here is Mandelstam's belief about the necessity of poetry:

The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.
-- Osip Mandelstam, tr. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin

(From the introduction, p. xiii.)

The photograph was taken on my hill, just the other afternoon. Click on image to enlarge.

Brittle Snap

When I first read “Life by Halves," a poem by Mexican poet Alberto Blanco, the ending gave me a corresponding brittle snap in the heart. On this rainy day, here it is, from his bilingual collection, A Cage of Transparent Words:

LIFE BY HALVES

We were in such a rush and it was raining …
a few rays of light filtered through
the dark branches of the trees.

The rusted chain was cold
and the padlock weighed like a heart
in the middle of the night.

You stuck the key into the lock
and began to force it.

A few minutes later
– and after a brittle snap –
you showed me the broken key.

The small stupidities
that seem to happen without warning
concentrated in a gesture of impatience.

Such is life:
a house locked up with chains,
one half of the key in our hand,
the other half in our chest.

– Alberto Blanco
– Translated by Elise Miller

A Cage of Transparent Words was published in 2007 by The Bitter Oleander Press. The pieces appear in both the original Spanish and, on facing pages, in English translations by Judith Infante, Joan Lindgren, Elise Miller, Edgardo Moctezuma, Gustavo V. Segade, Anthony Seidman, John Oliver Siimon, and Kathleen Snodgrass.

W.S. Merwin wrote one of the blurbs:

Alberto Blanco’s poems, over several decades, have revealed with precision and delicacy an original imaginative landscape, in language and imagery that are at once intimate, spacious, and rooted in the rich ground of Mexican poetry. There should certainly be a bilingual selection that represents his full range.

“Life by Halves” is reprinted here with the permission of Alberto Blanco and Bitter Oleander Press. I was honored to have my book, Stirring the Mirror, come out from BOP the same year as Alberto’s.

The photograph of a key that belonged to my grandmother was taken 10/26/08.