Necessary Things

Yesterday I became a single drop of water.

At first I was nothing but
A part of swirling grayness,
A part of some person’s gray humid day.
And then I felt sharp pains.
I was pulled inward, and knew the arched confusion of
Becoming.
I slowly came to a point and then
We all began to fall.
Slow
But to the gradual call of wind
And earth
I and a billion other brightly silent beads
Were the culmination
Of life, the solidarity of the pact.
We fell,
Necessary things,
Annoying things
Causes for laughter and for
Umbrellas.

I helped give birth to trees.

Momentary Froth

The geese rise from the lacquered edge.

The inexpressive top has abandoned itself to momentary froth and from the car window

The white churning bleeds its whiteness into spread feathers white and gray; stillness and soaring,

their wings pluck air, they plunge, and though I cannot see it,

The water beats beneath their picturesque fervor.

It cannot be an easy thing to rise up without a compass and live

Always on the edge of worlds

Between the blue and black, flickering feathers staving off the

cold, eyes calculating the light, wings holding down the ground.

Their biographies a slim

testimony

to a life perpetually in flight. But I give them some of my own

otium¹;

Terroris sentio sensum, sensu terroris² I quaver at such an extreme existence.

I dip my wings with fury. I grant the geese the calm I feel

Upon seeing them rise. Sapient suddenly, as if always a human face summoning the forces of

Identity –

Who were their mothers, what were their fathers like, did they stutter when angry? –

each defeathered, each apperceptive in delight.

But they are soaring away.

I know only the direction,

I do not know the way to hold them down, or to maintain the strength of my wings.

Perhaps it is an extreme anthropocentrism to say they do not have

A home:

The freedom of these wings is not the freedom of action,

And the loneliness of these wings is not the quest for solace.

Above the ground I am not free for distraction. The wing is my task.

But now the water no longer reflects their balanced

Dance,

And they have moved to some other tightrope point in time.

1 From Latin: Leisure time; comfort time; the time for doing one’s own private things, apart from the larger demands of the proper, officially functioning world of business and obligation.

2 I feel the sense of terror, with a sense of terror

Dandeliondeath

“Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The ‘far away,’

languages of desert, languages of ocean, language of sky,

as of the unfathomable worlds that lie

between the apple and the eye,

these are the only words we learn to say.

Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day

We find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,

A sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.”

• Conrad Aiken, “A Letter from Li Po”

I

Winter is the season of exile.

Locked in our mortal cages, penned in by snow, by cold,

We drift incommunicado. Christmas is just a brief reprieve. Memory is

our constant companion.

We lay low, huddle, make plans for the days of summer. Remember the sun. Remember the heat, volleyball, lemonade, the beach.

Time has broken off, taken shape, crystalized. Months, weeks, days, hours and hours, minutes and minutes. Count them.

White. Gray. Black. We will never touch the open plateau of shining Divine eternity: winter the dandeliondeath sheaths us in; and after it, the seasons that follow.

II

Winter is a closed eternity of loss. Cold October winds recall cross-country races:

Autumn before the break,

Stinging air,  mist chaffing like sandpaper my arms and legs.

My legs moved without my telling them, sun setting amid the golden hills

And I ran, a flood of feet over the leaves and wilted trampled grass,

short of breath and wishing I had gloves to cover my red raw hands.

I never came in first. But the overwhelming burn of defeat isn’t the only feeling October winds call back from fields of stiffening hay, from halcyon edges of cool beaches.

After the races the runners would walk slow and stiff to their families, who held blankets and thermoses for them, chairs were set out, buckets of apples, boxes of dunkin donuts laid out for them and their friends.

I alone would take a book from my backpack and read, waiting for the bus to come.

And then winter. No running. No races. Family all around, books, cards, cocoa.

Outside: silence in the morning, clumps of snow from wind-twisted fir branches, deer tracks

Where warmth and hoof-hardness, bone and fur pushed back the soft

Invasion

My thoughts spreading out like my breath. I have lost everything lush,

Everything free, everything fast and joyous; I am condemned, but I am innocent. Winter reduces us to a shameful nudity; painful; ugly; maintained at the cost of death. So we accept defeat and

Bundle up.

III

The snow, the purity, the loss: they exile us to our mortality, to internality.

But it is from the inside, from here, the point of remembering, of reconvening,

That we conceive the seeds of rebirth. I remember spring: the crab apple tree

Heavy with soft clinging fragrance, glimmering white of a thousand

Perfect petals. I remember summer:

The rise of dandelions,

The mercurial eternity of victory.

Untitled Poem by Rudaki

    

     Below is my translation of an untitled "New Persian" poem by the 9th century poet Rudaki, whose name in Persian simply means "one from Rudak". His full name was Abu 'Abd Allah Ja'far Ibn Muhammad and he was born in 858 AD in Rudak, a village in what is now Tajikistan and what was then part of the Samanid empire. Though rumored for a long time to be blind from birth (much like the Greek Homer), based on a number of his verses it seems unlikely that he was blind. A talented lutist and singer, Rudaki gained great fame for his poetry and performances by his early twenties and was patronized by the Samanid ruler of Transoxiana and Khorasan, Nasr Ibn Muhammad. However, due to an anti-Ismali revolt, Rudaki fell out of favor and died in abject poverty in his hometown of Rudak in the mid-940's AD. 

    An interesting fact about Rudaki's poetry is that he was one of the first poets to achieve renown using the new arabicized script to write his poetry. He did not use the older Pahlavi script, which is a more difficult and scholarly script that presents significantly greater challenges for reading, comprehension, and pronunciation. It is likely that Rudaki's choices as a poet made it possible for many great Persian poets, such as Sana'i, Hafez, and Rumi, to raise Persian literature to the sublime and rich heights it has achieved today. Rudaki is also considered by many the father of Iranian literature, much the way Homer and Pushkin are respectively considered the fathers of their culture's literatures.

I provide the Persian original, with hemistiches preserved, below my translation. For a more scholarly discussion of Rudaki's influence and life, click on this link.

    

Oh he afflicted and worthy of seldom and secret tears so oft,
he arrived, that one came and went, that one left;
he was, that one was: confused what sorrow do you hold?
Made worthy would you want the world? The world is, how did he receive its worth?
Concealed confusion that bewildered he did not see, hidden lament that lamenting he did not hear,
Go until your resurrection comes, make lament; how, having come with tears do you them return?
You see much grief from heaven but for the sake of face are untroubled.
It is as though calamity has set himself against each thing you have set your heart upon.
Clouded, neither clear nor eclipsed,
the moon is eclipsed and the world grows dark,
You give command or you do not, I fear; over oneself you do not once hold victory.

Within affliction harsh emerge magnificence, virtue, and greatness.

ای انکه غمگنی و سزاواری          واندر نهان سرشک همی باری
رفت آنکه رفت و آمد آنک آمد        بود آنچه بود، خیره چه غم داری؟
هموار کرد خواهی گیتی را؟          گیتیست، کی پذیرد همواری؟
مستی مکن که نشنود او مستی         زاری مکن که نشنود او زاری
شو تا قیامت اید زاری کن              کی رفته را به زاری باز آری؟
آزار بیش بینی زین گردون            گر تو بهر بهانه بیآزاری
گوئی گماشتست بلائی او               بر هر که تو بر او دل بگماری
ابری پدید نی و کسوفی نی            بگرفت ماه و گشت جهان تاری
فرمان کنی ویا نکنی، ترسم           بر خویشتن ظفر ندهی باری
اندر بلای سخت پدید اید               فر و بزرگمردی و سالاری

*Final note: There are several lines in this poem about which I am not confident of my translation. I have been unable to find any scholarly commentaries on this poem to help me translate the passages in question, and I would welcome the help and comments of any fluent Persian speakers and or the comments of a Persian scholar.

Circling the Window Sill: An Ode

Outside my window screen the insects gather.

The familiarity of their shapes – the moth wings I’ve known as long as I’ve known

Night lights,

The bulbous browns and blacks, dull beetle brows, hovering hornet wings,

The tiny footless legs – scurry or still, flicker or beat –

Never ceases to divulge a bizarre and eerie underside:

they never stop encroaching, never tire of

Staring

And hoping, even after I have burned them or squished them,

Pulled off their wings or stuffed them under glass jars

Where I watched them slowly suffocate.

Their being – matter of collected debris, form of malformed limbs –

Ignores time, our symphonic bricolage of crumbling causes and cacophonous effects.

There is no collective memory; they cannot learn to be afraid.

They still blithely eat our wheat and raid our pantries long after we laid our first traps and poured forth our poisons. If not for nights like these,

Reproduction and hunger would seem their only realities, and

I could grasp their insignificance.

But their windowshapes are not visions of hunger, unless their hunger is metaphorical

and they hunger for the flesh of metaphorical light.

Here the human movement of light over darkness collapses into

Their black over the light. Here their familiarity does nothing to lessen their harshness,

the outright otherness of their frenzied patience.

I don’t know what they want or why they wait.

Science is not profound enough for this;

it is too impersonal a system to shift off my perturbation at the

pointless manque moth-strikes, the endless gyrations of

The unknown insect squad circling the window sill.

They do not seek salvation like humans moving

Towards the light,

Nor do they seek freezing death, like so many lemmings tumbling

To the ocean’s door.

No heroics outside the screen, no reason, no pride; no pity inside.

But still I wonder and I fear:

When they crawl into my brain, will they still belong to un-nostalgia,

To a mute and -free night, to a past with only a mythical claim upon me,

(Born of Hesiodic chaos as I am)

To viscera without intestines,

To probings without a cerebellum;

Or will there be a shadow in their darkness?