and the beloved dead

Calavera

Ahi viene el agua
Por la ladera,
Y se me moja
Mi calavera.

La muerte calaca,
Ni gorda, ni flaca.
La muerte casera,
Pegada con cera.

The Celts celebrated their Day of the Dead on what is now All Hallow's Eve; the Mexicans do so in early November; to each culture its day and ways. It's not marked by any tradition, but the end of the year often sees many people walking with their dead. The year is exhaling its final breath. It's a good time to explore the dead.

I don't know who wrote the above piece or the translation that follows. If you do, then please write and tell me. As far as I know, it's a traditional piece.

Skulls

Here comes the water
Down the slope,
And my skull
Is getting wet.

Death, a skeleton,
Neither fat, nor skinny.
A homemade skeleton,
Stuck together with wax.

At times, the dead are more real to us than are the living, a memory more than the present. Sometimes, the right marker is not a stone, or the stone cannot be found (graves can hide themselves). For some, death takes a mother's form. For others, it's a story. Death and the beloved dead are always with us, another proof that love outlasts the final breath.

After a Death
Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.


Rock and Hawk
Robinson Jeffers

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.



Death is a woman
Ulrike Gerbig

In the face without masks
Death is a woman
In the moment you know yourself
Death is a woman
At the end of all questions
Death is a woman
As the well of all answers
Death is a woman
At the end of all regrets
Death is a woman
In the liberation through tears
Death is a woman
As the relief from battle
Death is a woman
In the loving embrace
Death is a woman
As the end of all pain
Death is a woman
As the return to the source
Death is a woman
In the dreamless sleep
Death is a woman
In the endless peace
Death is a woman


Red String
Minnie Bruce Pratt

At first she thought the lump in the road
was clay thrown up by a trucker's wheel.
Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers.


Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring
at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats.
Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed
their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing.

It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowed
and turned to winter. It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn,
creatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land.


Beatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passed
as spirits. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded
themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock.
Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power
to split the earth open to release them. White-robed, faceless
horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water,
saying, We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight!


Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice
or limp or mended boots but said nothing, let the marchers
pass on. Then they ran their skinny hounds to hunt other
lives down ravines, to save their skins another night
from the carrion beetles, spotted with red darker than blood,
who wait by the grave for the body's return to the earth.

Some years the men killed scores, treed them in the sweetgums,
watched a beast face flicker in the starry green leaves.
Then they burned the tree.


Smoke from their fires
still lay over the land where Beatrice travelled.


Out of this cloud the dead of the field spoke to her,
voices from a place where women's voices never stop:


They took my boy down by Sucarnochee creek.
He said, "Gentlemen, what have I done?"
They says, "Never mind what you have done.
We just want your damned heart." After they
killed him, I built up a little fire and laid out
by him all night until the neighbors came
in the morning. I was standing there when
they killed him, down by Sucarnochee creek.

I am a mighty brave woman, but I was getting
scared the way they were treating me, throwing rocks
on my house, coming in disguise. They come to my bed
where I was laying, and whipped me. They dragged me
out into the field so that the blood strung across
the house, and the fence, and the cotton patch,
in the road, and they ravished me. Then they went
back into my house and ate the food on the stove.
They have drove me from my home. It is over
by DeSotoville, on the other side in Choctaw.

I had informed of persons whom I saw
dressing in Ku-Klux disguise;
had named the parties. At the time
I was divorced from Dr. Randall
and had a school near Fredonia.
About one month before the election
some young men about the county
came in the night-time; they said
I was not a decent woman; also
I was teaching radical politics.
They whipped me with hickory withes.
The gashes cut through my thin dress,
through the abdominal wall.
I was thrown into a ravine
in a helpless condition. The school
closed after my death.


From the fog above the bloody entrails of the bird, the dead flew
toward Beatrice like the night crow whose one wing rests on the evening
while the other dusts off the morning star. They gave her such a look:


Child, what have you been up to while we
were trying to keep body and soul together?

But never mind that now. Here's what you must do:

Tie a red flannel string around your waist.
Plant your roots when the moon is dark. Remember
your past, and ours. Always remember who you are.
Don`t let those men fool you about the ways of life
even if blood must sign your name.

Open Water

Syros

In Syros' harbor abandoned merchant ships lay idle.
Stem by stem by stem. Moored for many years:
CAPE RION, Monrovia.
KRITOS, Andros.
SCOTIA, Panama.

Dark paintings on the water, they have been hung aside.

Like playthings from our childhood, grown gigantic,
that remind us
of what we never became.

XELATROS, Piraeus.
CASSIOPEIA, Monrovia.
The ocean scans them no more.

But when we first came to Syros, it was at night,
we saw stem by stem by stem in moonlight and thought:
what a powerful fleet, what splendid connections!

That, by Tomas Tranströmer, was translated from the Swedish by May Swenson and Leif Sjöberg. (The Scandinavians are nourishing me.)

I am of several minds about this poem.

Is the putting aside of childish things (so not my favourite of the apostles) an ill thing?

Can we -- a separate question in terms of more than spacing -- not choose to set aside certain dreams, recognising that they no longer serve us or that we, in serving them, do nobody and nothing good?

And yet . . . I remember a story (although I do not recall who wrote it) . . . There is something of Dan Millman about it in my memory. Whoever the writer, he went to a wise (Quaker, as I recall) old woman (It's always a wise old someone or something, isn't it, in any proper tale?) to ask about choices. She said that she had never seen doors opening before her, but had often found her choices being constrained by doors that closed behind.

At the time, the questioner did not find satisfaction in the answer. (That, too, is often the way.)

We can choose to leave our ships. We can choose to leave our ships docked, in which case, we are still attached to them, as a dock to a boat by a line. We can choose to let them float away, perhaps (Who can know it?) to find other homes.

We can choose to remember, with great love or tenderness, the outlines of our earlier or not-chosen selves, viewing their outlines against the current sky of our day.

'The ocean scans them no more . . . '

Ah, yes.

Much could be said about Tranströmer's short verse. And isn't that an ultimate praise of poets, that they can take little and fill it with more than much?

Much -- to pick up on the alpha and omega of the preceding paragraph -- is affected by the translator, as seen with these three shapings of one poem, with which I shall (for this day's time) leave you:


Breathing Room: July

Lying on his back under tall trees
he is also up there. He rills into thousands of twigs and branches,
is swayed back and forth,
as if in a catapult seat outflung in slow motion.

Standing down by the jetties he squints across the waters.
The docks ages sooner than men.
Made of splintered silver gray planks, and with stones in their
bellies.
The blinding light rips its way straight through.

Sailing all day in an open boat
over the glittering bights,
he will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while islands like great nocturnal moths creep over the glass.

Translation by May Swenson


Breathing Space July

The man lying on his back under the high trees
is up there too. He rills out in thousandfold twigs,
sways to and fro,
sits in an ejector seat that releases in slow motion.

The man down by the jetties narrows his eyes at the water.
The jetties grow old more quickly than people.
They have silver grey timber and stones in their stomachs.
The blinding light beats right in.

The man traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering straits

Will sleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands creep like large moths across the glass.

Translation by Robert Fulton


Breathing Space July

The man who lies on his back under huge trees
is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.
He sways back and forth,
he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.

The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against the water.
Docks get older faster than men.
They have silver-gray posts and boulders in their gut.
The dazzling light drives straight in.

The man who spends the whole day in an open boat
moving over the luminous bays
will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp
as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.

Translation by Robert Bly