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More than twice in the last week I found myself curled up with a glass of wine and a book of poetry.  Not very twentieth century of me, but humbling and devastating.

Here are some golden nuggets, best read in the space between twilight and midnight after at least half a glass of something saucy.

“Drunk as Drunk”

by Pablo Neruda

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made out of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it–our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal–
Over the sky’s hot rim,
The day’s last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowzy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

_______________________________________

“The Rival”

by Syliva Plath

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for
cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abasses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisifactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

_______________________________

“Tonight I Can Write”

by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, “The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.”

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her.  To feel that I have
lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense
without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the
distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in
my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

In his diary he wrote this:  “…They [the Arawaks] willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.  They have no iron.  Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

And he did.

Celebrating Columbus is like celebrating Hitler.  The only difference between them is that Columbus did succeed in extinguishing an entire race of people.  It all happened under the guise of “progress.”  A holocaust that progressed us to Now.  And was it worth it?  Does the weight of all the advancements of Western Civilization equal that of mass genocide?  How does the tiny population of Native Americans feel when banks and schools close to celebrate the man who basically annihilated their entire culture?

On to happier trails…

The job at the zoo is stellar so far.  And so is being back in Birmingham.  I completely flip flopped my life.  Nearly every single aspect of my life has changed.  I feel like I jumped off a six hundred foot cliff and plunged into ice cold water and for the past 43 days I’ve been swimming slowly to the surface.  I still feel like I’m swimming to the surface.

Outside of metaphors, I’ve been hanging out with tv crews, snakes, bats, sea lions, rowdy birminghamians and my cat.

I have not…been writing.  There’s something suffocating about time and silence.  In the city it was too noisy, in the country it’s too quiet.  There is no reprieve in either extreme.  Like most things in life…the solution is in the compromise, it’s somewhere in the middle.

Oh.  And my new best friend is Rachel Maddow.  I love her.

Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness has been adapted for film and comes out today.  I cannot wait to see it. 

And Bill Maher’s Religulous is out today as well.  However, living in the Bilbe Belt still has it’s disadvantages.  It is not showing here.  If someone has a pirated copy I will trade you some ripe bananas, otherwise I might be making a trip to Atlanta or anxiously await the DVD release.

Lying In Bed One Evening as a Child

Pantoum

You were my father briefly.

In hindsight—as clear as sunlight—

on a Wednesday in September…

I heard you leaving the night before.

In hindsight—as clear as sunlight—

I distinctly remember…

I heard you leaving the night before.

…the thud of the door, heels clicking.

I distinctly remember.

An argument in the kitchen—then

the thud of the door, heels clicking.

I thought you might be crying.

An argument in the kitchen, then

that ghastly, awful silence.

I thought you might be crying.

Did you look in to see me sleeping?

That ghastly, awful silence!

I hate it still today.

Did you look in to see me sleeping

before you slipped away?

I hate it still today—

the thought of that night.

Before you slipped away

you were my father briefly.