Apontamento

A minha alma partiu-se como um vaso vazio.
Caiu pela escada excessivamente abaixo.
Caiu das mãos da criada descuidada.
Caiu, fez-se em mais pedaços do que havia loiça no vaso.

Asneira? Impossível? Sei lá!
Tenho mais sensações do que tinha quando me sentia eu.
Sou um espalhamento de cacos sobre um capacho por sacudir.

Fiz barulho na queda como um vaso que se partia.
Os deuses que há debruçam-se do parapeito da escada.
E fitam os cacos que a criada deles fez de mim.

Não se zanguem com ela.
São tolerantes com ela.
O que era eu um vaso vazio?

Olham os cacos absurdamente conscientes,
Mas conscientes de si mesmos, não conscientes deles.

Olham e sorriem.
Sorriem tolerantes à criada involuntária.

Alastra a grande escadaria atapetada de estrelas.
Um caco brilha, virado do exterior lustroso, entre os astros.
A minha obra? A minha alma principal? A minha vida?
Um caco.
E os deuses olham-no especialmente, pois não sabem por que ficou ali.

Álvaro de Campos

To Mark Anthony in Heaven

This quiet morning light
reflected, how many times
from grass and trees and clouds
enters my north room
touching the walls with
grass and clouds and trees.
Anthony,
trees and grass and clouds.
Why did you follow
that beloved body
with your ships at Actium?
I hope it was because
you knew her inch by inch
from slanting feet upward
to the roots of her hair
and down again and that
you saw her
above the battle's fury--
clouds and trees and grass--

For then you are
listening in heaven.

William Carlos Williams

Épitaphe

Il a vécu tantôt gai comme un sansonnet,
Tour à tour amoureux insoucieux et tendre,
Tantôt sombre et rêveur comme un triste Clitandre.
Un jour il entendit qu'à sa porte on sonnait.
　　
C'était la Mort! Alors il la pria d'attendre
Qu'il eut posé le point à son dernier sonnet;
Et puis sans s'émouvoir, il s'en alla s'étendre
Au fond du coffre froid où son corps frissonnait.
　　
Il était paresseux, à ce que dit l'histoire,
Il laissait trop sécher l'encre dans l'écritoire.
Il voulait tout savoir mais il n'a rien connu.
　　
Et quand vint le moment où, las de cette vie,
Un soir d'hiver, enfin l'âme lui fut ravie,
Il s'en alla disant : "Pourquoi suis-je venu?"

Gérard de Nerval

Fish Food

you drank deep as Thor, did you think of milk or wine?
Did you drink blood, while you drank the salt deep?
Or see through the film of light, that sharpened your rage with its stare,
a shark, dolphin, turtle ? Did you not see the Cat
who, when Thor lifted her, unbased the cubic ground?
You would drain fathomless flagons to be slaked with vacuum
The sea's teats have suckled you, and you are sunk far
in bubble-dreams, under swaying translucent vines
of thundering interior wonder. Eagles can never now
carry parts of your body, over cupped mountains
as emblems of their anger, embers to fire self-hate
to other wonders, unfolding white flaming vistas.
Fishes now look upon you, with eyes which do not gossip.
Fishes are never shocked. Fishes will kiss you, each
fish tweak you; every kiss takes bits of you away,
till your bones alone will roll, with the Gulf Stream's swell.
So has it been already, so have the carpers and puffers
nibbled your carcass of fame, each to his liking. Now
in tides of noon, the bones of your thought-suspended structures
gleam as you intended. Noon pulled your eyes with small
magnetic headaches; the will seeped from your blood. Seeds
of meaning popped from the pods of thought. And you fall. And the unseen
churn of Time changes the pearl-hued ocean;
like a pearl-shaped drop, in a huge water-clock
falling; from came to go, from come to went. And you fell.
Waters received you. Waters of our Birth in Death dissolve you.
Now you have willed it, may the Great Wash take you.
As the Mother-Lover takes your woe away, and cleansing
grief and you away, you sleep, you do not snore.
Lie still. Your rage is gone on a bright flood
away; as, when a bad friend held out his hand
you said, "Do not talk any more. I know you meant no harm."
What was the soil whence your anger sprang, who are deaf
as the stones to the whispering flight of the Mississippi's rivers?
What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?
Did it make you drunken with hearing?
I will not ask any more. You saw or heard no evil.

John Brooks Wheelwright

Legend

Enter with him
These legends, love;
For him assume
Each diverse form,
To legend native,
As legend queer;
That he may do
What these require,
Be,Love, like him
To legend true.

When he to ease
His heart's disease
Must cross in sorrow
Corrosive seas,
As dolphin go;
As cunning fox
Guide through the rocks,
Tell in his ear
The common phrase
The guardians there;
And when across
The livid marsh
Big birds pursue,
Again be true,
Between his thighs
As pony rise,
And swift as wind
Bear him away
Till cries and they
Are left behind.
But when at last,
These dangers passed,
His grown desire
Of legend tire,
Then, Love, standing
At legend's ending,
Claim your reward;
Submit your neck
To the ungrateful stroke
Of his reluctant sword,
That, starting back,
His eyes may look
Amazed on you,
Find what he wanted
Is faithful too
But disenchanted,
Love as love.

W. H. Auden

The Bight

[On my birthday]


At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

Elizabeth Bishop

_______________________
大主教百年诞辰

Rimbaud and Verlaine

from Preludes for Memnon

LVI

Rimbaud and Verlaine, precious pair of poets,
Genius in both (but what is genius?) playing
Chess on a marble table at an inn
With chestnut blossom falling in blond beer
And on their hair and between knight and bishop-
Sunlight squared between them on the chess-board
Cirrus in heaven, and a squeal of music
Blown from the leathern door of Ste. Sulpice-

Discussing, between moves, iamb and spondee
Anacoluthon and the open vowel
God the great peacock with his angel peacocks
And his dependent peacocks the bright stars:
Disputing too of fate as Plato loved it,
Or Sophocles, who hated and admired,
Or Socartes, who loved and was amused:

Velaine puts down his pawn upon a leaf
And closes his long eyes, which are dishonest,
And says "Rimbaud, there is one thing to do:
We must take rhetoric, and wring its neck!..."
Rimbaud considers gravely, moves his Queen;
And then removes himself to Timbuctoo

And Verlainde dead,-with all his jades and mauves;
And Rimbaud dead in Marseilles with a vision,
His leg cut off, as once before his heart;
And all reported by later lackey,
Whose virtue is his tardiness in time.

Let us describe the evening as it is:-
The stars disposed in heaven as they are:
Verlaine and Shakspere rotting, where they rot,
Rimbaud remembered, and too soon forgot;

Order in all things, logic in the dark;
Arrangement in the atom and the spark;
Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-

Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
And let us take godhead by the neck-

And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

Conrad Aiken

Coplas

from The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz
Sebastian Arrurruz: 1868 - 1922

i

'One cannot lose what one has not possessed.'
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.

ii

Oh my dear one, I shall grieve for you
For the rest of my life with slightly
Varying cadence, oh my dear one.

iii

Half-mocking the half-truth, I note
'The wild brevity of sensual love'.
I am shaken, even by that.

iv

It is to him I write, it is to her
I speak in contained silence. Will they be touched
By the unfamiliar passion between them?

Geoffrey Hill

细雪

细雪
Eternity and a Day

穿树皮靴的人，
把我带到深邃的胡同里，
小鸭子胡同，鸭雏胡同，
鸭蛋胡同，哪一个更像真的？
我们在小鸭子胡同里找小偷。
这些坏蛋，他们骗我，
你要把他们找出来。

我要把他们找出来。
这城里天天有人跳楼，
我哥哥说他要"自刎"，
他一边说一边笑。
他们一直跳，
从一栋跳到另一栋，
乘着雨夹雪的风，
趁着没有人抬头看，
他们滑翔。

我是坏人，
但现在不是。
现在我是楚楚可怜。
人人都应该站在我面前，
透过湿润的冷看我。
坏心眼在飞转。

这湿润的冷！
正在弥漫着不清晰的城。
穿树皮靴的人，
抽打着，抽打着。

这些坏人，穿过马路
在清寒中低着他们的头。

2002年冬
马雁
___________________________
2010最后一天，在叔叔家，翻开黑白本的诗集看到的第一首诗。
R. I. P.

Verlaine

La canción,
que nunca diré,
se ha dormido en mis labios.
La canción,
que nunca diré.

Sobre las madreselvas
había una luciérnaga,
y la luna picaba
con un rayo en el agua.

Entonces yo soñé,
la canción,
que nunca diré.

Canción llena de labios
y de cauces lejanos.

Canción llena de horas
perdidas en la sombra.

Canción de estrella viva
sobre un perpetuo día.

Federico Garcia Lorca