Category: Poetry

the moon on a leash

november 18

Cloudy, dark and windy.

Walking by flashlight
at six in the morning,
my circle of light on the gravel
swinging side to side,
coyote, raccoon, field mouse, sparrow,
each watching from darkness
this man with the moon on a leash.

It’s April, National Poetry Month (the sweetest or cruelest month, or maybe both, depending on one’s relationship to Chaucer and Eliot). And though poetry ought to be celebrated every month, calling out April to notice verse can’t be a bad thing.

I was reminded that it’s April by this NPR story about Maria Schneider and Dawn Upshaw collaborating on an album of settings of Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks. The poem highlighted in the story, which turns a flashlight into the moon on a leash watched by wary crepuscular creatures, is just the sort of quiet magic spell that good poetry can accomplish. Later this month I’ll be camping and hiking with my Boy Scout troop, and I’m sure that this image of the moon on a leash will come back and make setting up tents in the dark a little less tedious and little more wonderful.

Sneachta – Snow

Sneachta

le Máire Nic a’Daird

Nach deas í an tuath
lena cota bog ban
ina codladh go sáimh
sa sneachta geal glan.

Snow

by Máire Nic a’Daird

How lovely is the world
with its soft white coat,
sleeping snugly
in the bright, clean snow.

It’s not the first snow of the season–we had an icy shot across the bow a couple weeks ago that left a sleety, slushy mess on the roads for a few days–but this morning’s dusting has a nicer feel to it. The weather forecast calls for cold and colder temperatures, so perhaps this dusting will stick around for a while. I need to get the studded tires on my bicycle this weekend.

“Sneachta” by Máire Nic a’Daird was the first Irish poem I learned. It was in an early Irish lesson in the basement of the Irish Well, with the late and much-missed Sean T. Kelley, and I think it was meant to demonstrate that modifiers come after the noun in Irish–”cota bog ban” is “coat soft white,” “sneachta geal glan” is “snow bright clean”. But I remembered it because it has some lovely sounds packed into a little space: those “s” sounds and “b” sounds, all the broad vowels (“a”, “o”, “u” are broad in Irish, “i” and “e” are slender, with much import all around–Irish orthography is too big a topic to tackle this morning). It sounds like a quiet, softly-dusted winter morning to me.

Gan do Chuid Éadaigh – Without Your Clothes

A Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all! I have to admit that this isn’t actually my favorite day of the year; downtown St. Paul, where I work, is hub of St. Pat’s festivities in the Twin Cities, and Rice Park was awash in all manner of green tchotchke and inebriated revelry. I went to the parade, of course, but just long enough to see the Brian Ború pipe band and scout for in-laws (none spotted, mission accomplished).

Instead, I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by sitting down with some Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Here’s my attempt at translating “Gan do Chuid Éadaigh.”

Gan do Chuid Éadaigh

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Is fearr liom tú
gan do chuid éadaigh ort,
do léine shíoda
is do charabhat,
do scáth fearthainne faoi t’ascaill
is do chulaith
trí phíosa faiseanta
le barr feabhais táilliúrachta,

do bhróga ar a mbíonn
i gcónaí snas,
do lámhainní craiceann eilite
ar do bhois,
do hata crombie
feircthe ar fhaobhar na cluaise–
ní chuireann siad aon ruainne
le do thuairisc,

mar thíos fúthu
i ngan fhios don slua
tá corp gan mhaisle, mháchail
nó míbhua
lúfaireacht ainmhí allta,
cat mór a bhíonn amuigh
san oíche
is fhágann sceimhle ina mharbhshruth.

Do ghuailne leathan fairsing
is do thaobh
chomh slim le sneachta séidte
ar an sliabh;
do dhrom, do bhásta singil
is do ghabhal
an rúta
go bhfuil barr pléisiúrtha ann.

Do chraiceann atá chomh dorcha
is slim
le síoda go mbeadhg na habhann
go ndeirtear faoi
go bhfuil suathadh fear is ban ann.

Mar sin is dá bhrí sin
is tú ag rince liom anocht
cé go mb’fhearr liom tú
gan do chuid éadaigh ort,
b’fhéidir nárbh aon díobhail duit
gléasadh anois ar an dtoirt
an ionad leath ban Éireann
a mhilleadh is a lot.

Without Your Clothes

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

I would rather see you
without your clothes on,
your silk shirt
and your necktie,
your umbrella under your arm
and your smart
three piece suit
of excellent tailoring,

your shoes
freshly polished,
your doe-skinned gloves
on your hands,
your crombie hat
cocked toward your ear–
none of these things
add up to you,

for underneath
and unknown to the world
is a body without scar, blemish,
or defect,
lithe as a wild beast,
a lion that is out
in the night
leaving terror in its wake.

Your broad shoulders
and your flank
are smooth as drifted snow
on the mountain;
your back, your slender waist,
and at your crotch
the root
of highest pleasure.

Your skin is so dark
and smooth
like silk and velvet
spun together
smelling of meadowsweet
and watermead
that can drive
both men and women mad.

And that is why
when you are dancing with me tonight
though of course I would rather
see you without your clothes on,
it would probably be best
that you cover yourself quickly
rather than drive half
the women of Ireland mad.

My translation notes: As always, I’ve tried to land somewhere between literal and interpretive. My edition of Pharaoh's Daughter has a translation by Paul Muldoon, who also did the translation for The Language Question. His translation is far more interpretive than mine, particularly in adding a rather arch tone (“your snazzy loafers/and, la-di-da,/a pair of gloves”) that I don’t quite hear in this poem.

Muldoon also, to my surprise, rendered the … er … uncomfortable-to-English readers stanza in language just on the edge of florid romance novel euphemism. “the root that is the very seat/of pleasure, the pleasure source” is how he does the lines that for me came out “and at your crotch/the root/of highest pleasure.” Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a way to render “is i do gabhal” as anything except “and at your crotch,” and I’ve got a pretty big dictionary. My trepidation was undone by Ní Dhomhnaill’s own words:

It is almost impossible to be “rude” or “vulgar” in Irish. The body, with its orifices and excretions, is not treated in a prudish manner but is accepted as “an naduir,” or “nature,” and becomes a source of repartee and laughter rather than anything to be ashamed of.

My favorite lines in this poem are “chomh slim le sneachta séidte/ar an sliabh;”–”smooth as drifted snow on the mountain”–for all the “sh” sounds (“slim”, “sneachta”, “séidte”, and “sliabh” all have the slender “s” sound, which is like a slightly breathier English “sh”). That “shush” sound whispers just like the snow that Ní Dhomnaill is describing.

Faoileán – Seagull

According to my site stats, I pretty regularly get visitors here looking for a translation of this poem. I’m not sure if it’s a testament to the popularity of this poem, certainly Michael Davitt‘s best-known, or to the fact that it’s part of the curriculum in Irish language classes. I tend to suspect the latter is a big part of it: the searches tend to cluster around the beginning of the school year, and originate mostly from Dublin and its suburbs.

So in the interest of both helping out some scoláirí and giving Michael Davitt a wider (though not much) audience in the English-speaking world, here’s my rendering of “Faoileán”:

Faoileán

le Michael Davitt

Thíos ar an trá,
Is an mhaidin ag pléascadh sa chuan,
Braithim an bás,
An púca im thimpeall go buan.

Féach an faoileán uaibhreach,
Mar bhrúscar ar charraig dhudh,
Cloisim amhrán uaigneach,
I saoirse na farraige.

Bhíodh sé ar snámh,
Go hard os cionn tonntracha bán’
Leath a sciatháin
Ó Bheanntraí go Dún na nGall.

Ach tháinig an bád ola seo,
Trasna na farraige,
Is lion sé an cuan gleoite seo,
Le fual lucht an airgid.

Féach an faoileán uaibhreach,
Mar bhrúscar ar charraig dhubh
Cloisim amhrán uaigneach,
I saoirse na farraige.

Seagull

by Michael Davitt

Down the beach,
with morning exploding in the harbor,
I feel death,
that constant hobgoblin companion.

I see the proud seagull,
wrecked on a black rock,
I hear its lonely song,
the freedom of the seas.

It was swimming,
high on the white waves’ crown,
spreading its wings
from Bantry to Donegal.

But then came the oil tanker,
across the seas,
and caught the tidy bay,
and pissed out its moneyed cargo.

I see the proud seagull,
wrecked on a black rock,
I hear its lonely song,
the freedom of the seas.

The Conservation of Memory #poem

The universe stuffs each in its unruly attic,
ready to dole out in some other form
like a grandmother’s wigs for Mardi Gras.

The Conservation of Memory by Bethany Reid

Dún – Stronghold

Dún

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Id ghéaga daingne
ní bhfaighfidh mé bás choiche
ní thiocfaidh orm aon sceimhle,
ní líonfaidh orm anbhá.
Ní chloisfidh mé
ag gíoscán ins an oíche
fearsad na cairte fuafaire
a ghluaiseann trí pháirc an áir.

Is dún nó daingean iad
do ghéaga i mo thimpeall
do ghuailne leathana
am chosaint ar a lán.
Ag cuardach fothaine dom
ó gharbhshíon na cinniúna
tá gairdín foscaidh le fáilt
idir do dhá shlinneán.

Is sa ghairdín sin
tá beacha is ológa
ta mil ar luachair ann
is na crainn go léir faoi bhláth
i dtús an fhomhair
mar ní thagann aon gheimhridh
is gaoth an tseaca
ní luíonn air anáil.

Is lasmuigh dínn
tá críocha is ciníocha
ag bruíon is ag bunú sibhialtachta
ag puililiú ar an gclár.
Dá mbeadh ceithre creasa
na cruinne in aon chaor lasrach
dá n-imeodih an cosmos
in aon mheall craorag amháin.

Ba chuma liom, do ghéaga
a bheith im thimpeall
níorbh ann do scáth nó eagla
níorbh ann don ocras riamh.
Nuair a fhilleann tú mé
go cneasta isteach id bhaclainn
táim chomh slán sábháilte
leis an gcathair ard úd ar shliabh.

Coinnigh go daingean mé
laistigh den gciorcal draíochta
le teas do cholainne
le teasargan do chabhaile.
Do chneas lem chneas
do bhéal go dlúth lem béalaibh
ní chluinfead na madraí allta
ag uallfairt ar an má.

Ach níl in aon ní ach seal:
i gcionn leathuaire
pógfaidhh tú mé ar bharr m’éadain
is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom
is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin
don leaba dhúbailte
ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne
ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

Stronghold

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

In your arms’ fortress
I will face neither eternal death
nor terror,
panic will not fill me.
I will not hear
the grinding in the night
of the war carriages’ axles
rolling through the battlefields.

You arms are a fortress
around me,
your broad shoulders
completely protecting me.
I seek my shelter
from fate’s storm
in the shaded garden ring
between your shoulder blades.

And in that garden
are bees and olives
with honey on the rushes there,
the trees in full bloom
even at the start of Autumn;
winter never comes there,
the frosty winds
never blow there.

Beyond the fortress
walls are people
struggling and building civilizations,
a mad hullabaloo.
If the four corners of the globe
were one flaming berry
if the cosmos were rolled
into one crimson ball

It wouldn’t matter to me, your limbs
still around me;
no room for shadow or fear,
no room there for hunger.
When you fold me
gently inside the bend of your arm
I am safer than
the city high on a mountain.

The fortress keeps me
within the magic circle
with the body’s heat
with the body’s deliverance
skin on skin
mouth on mouth
I will not hear the wild beasts
howling on the plain.

But nothing outlasts its time:
in a half an hour
you will kiss the top of my forehead
and turn from me on your back
in the double bed
and I will think about your shoulders’ shadow
and not that death is always approaching me.

Last month, a reader wrote to request some help with this poem; they were dissatisfied with the translation by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, which appears in Pharaoh's Daughter, and had some questions about a few of the trickier lines.

I’ve noted before that I consider Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill far beyond my translation skills, in either Irish or English, but I decided to give it a shot. I don’t think my translation is as good as Ní Chuilleanáin’s (an accomplished poet in her own right; here’s an example); it’s a bit more literal, though, which is what I think my reader was looking for in the kinds of questions in the e-mail.

Any translation is an interpretation; some things are harder to write in English than in Irish, and vice versa, and some things that make perfect sense in one language are pure nonsense in another. Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of this poem is certainly more interpretive than mine, and takes some liberties that I, surely far less familiar than Ní Chuilleanáin with Irish idiom, dare not take.

This poem is a good companion piece to the other Ní Dhomhnaill poem, “Oileán”, that I’ve tried to translate. Like “Oileán,” “Dún” is a sensuous poem, but the sensuousness is undercut by some of its recurring images. “Oileán” posits love in the midst of loneliness; “Dún” places love in a bleak landscape of destruction. Safety, protection, and certainty are contrasted with images of war and tumult and wild beasts; but at the same time, the safety is represented by a fortress, a martial image that echoes the war carriages and battlefield of the first stanza.

My favorite word in this poem is “puililiú”; my dictionary sent me to “fuilibiliú”, which gave me “hullabaloo; halloo, yell.” Ní Chuilleanáin doesn’t translate this line directly–she gives “multiplying on the globe” for what the people beyond the stronghold’s charmed circle are up to–but I simply had to use it, even if it clashes a bit with the rest of the poem.

I also love the internal echoes of “le teas do cholainne / le teasargan do chabhaile.” I can’t render it very well in English. “Teas” is “heat”; “teasargan” is “deliverance” or “rescue”. Both “colainn” and “cabhail” are words for “body”; I’m sure there are subtle distinctions between them of which I’m not aware, and that further enhance that lovely balance between “teas” and “teasargan.”

“Dún” should probably be translated as “Fortress”–it appears in many Irish place names associated with ancient forts–but I like the title Ní Chuilleanáin chose because it echoes the holding arms and strong back that are the poem’s central images.

the Poetic Clearing-house Association

Henry Clews, via the Library of CongressI love this hare-brained scheme for a poetry bank, delivered generously by C. Dale Young’s Avoiding the Muse, as expounded by The Idiot (a character of John Kendrick Bangs’ invention) in Harper’s at the turn of the last century:

What I’d like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing I opened up an office in Wall Street – a Bank for Poets in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them, just as they do in ordinary banks with their money.

The Poetic Clearning-house Association works a bit like a futures market cum agent, seeking to “dispose of [the deposited poem] to a magazine” to fund the poet’s withdrawals. It has a gate-keeper, “an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits” and reject poetry that isn’t up to snuff, thus keeping the deposits high in quality. (We all know how well those high-quality banking instruments have worked out in recent history…)

I’ve actually given half-serious thought to a similar idea, while floating on my back in the deep end of the pool during the boys’ swimming lessons, a sort of Slush Pile 2.0; like any such exchange, of course, it depends on the participation of buyers and sellers who agree on the value of the products in the exchange. A sonnet bubble or irrational exuberance around creative non-fiction could doom the entire affair (cf. the collapse of the memoir market after the fraudulence of the last decade), but more likely there would be vaults stuffed to overflowing with quatrains and villanelles, their value depreciating by the day.

A few years ago I published a story in the late lamented Lily Lit Review about a poet who wanted to be a banker (a sort of mirror image of T.S. Eliot, the banker who wanted to be a poet). You can read the story here, or in my collection (just two bucks in e-book format!). (Don’t search for “Lily Lit Review” on the web; the domain is in squatters’ hands.) I don’t think my poor poet would have made a very good banker; he was far more interested in wearing a suit and having an office with a credenza than in the actual banking part of the job. (Much like our contemporary bankers are much more interested in the power and prestige than in the trust and thrift that banking implies.) I suspect, though, that he would have loved to take The Idiot’s Clearing-house idea and made it into a spectacular failure.

And if one must fail, one ought to do it spectacularly.

Ambulocetus considers the sea

Someday it will be ours,
that wide expanse of empty sea,
and we will be gods
in its secret abyss;
unfettered by gravity,
we will grow immense
and fill the oceans
with our rumbling calls.

I can feel my legs
in the deep dark dissolve,
swept away by waves
as my tail becomes
a mighty fluke
to drive me to new depths,
new heights,
a propulsion impossible
on this awkward airy land.

We will nudge our young
deeper into these lagoons,
chase them far from land
and make them swim,
demand that they conquer
for us
deep kingdoms.

Inspired by an “In Our Times” broadcast about the evolution of whales; ambulocetus, “the walking whale,” lived on the shores of the Tethys Sea 50 million years ago.

Hats

When I was eight,
I kept a picture on my wall
of my father, another man,
and a sea of smiling children.
Behind them was a helicopter
(black in my picture, green in Asia)
and in front of them
(though not in my picture)
were little homes of straw and mud.
In my picture,
he was not much older than I am now.

Not much older,
as I walk along Caille Duarte,
stepping over goat shit and mango pits,
greeted by four little boys
yelling, “Hola, Miguel! Miguel!”
I lose my straw hat to them,
I juggle stones and mangoes for them,
I chase them over cracked pavement
and past rusted barbed wire
covered with wet clothes.
They chatter at me,
as they must have chattered at him,
and I am powerless against their talk
and their tugs and their laughter.

Little Juan took me home one day–
grabbed my hand and my hat after Mass
and led me from the church to the river
on the edge of town, where his mother
kept a tin-roofed shack.
How proud he was of his, pig, his puppy,
his swing made of a stick and a rope!
He climbed into trees for fruit to give me,
and he threw round stones to knock mangoes loose
then led me back to the pastor’s house
and I gave away all my mangoes
walking back to Caille Duarte.

My hat always disappeared during Mass,
as though it crept stealthily
from under my seat and then flitted
from head to tiny head like a yellow-brown parrot.
I always retrieved it from a little cabellero
who wore it nearer his chin than his ears.
Now it’s torn and cracked in places
where small fingers plucked it roughly
like a hard yellow mango.

When I was eight,
I asked my father what had happened
to those children who hung on his arms,
and passed his green hat from head to head.
When I was eight,
he told me that they had to lock him in a room
when that village was burned,
and that he still feels rage at that fire.
If they had lived,
they would be not much older than me.

When I was in the Dominican Republic, I was a favorite of the little kids, who stole my hat and gave me fruit; I could juggle, sing silly songs, and was always up for a game of tag. Kids are great: fearless, funny, and resilient.

My father loved kids, too, and I had a picture of him, snapped for the Stars & Stripes newspaper, playing with a bunch of kids in Vietnam. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that many of those kids were later killed by the Viet Cong, because the village had been too friendly to the Americans. Of course, a good many kids were also killed by the ARVN or American bombs because their villages were too friendly to the VC. One of the many horrors of war is that friendliness can kill you.

I suppose I have a somewhat rosy view of American soldiers because of my father (and my grandfather, who passed out chocolate and gum to kids in Belgium and Germany during the Second World War); at their best, they’re overgrown kids themselves, even though they’re often called upon to do things horribly un-kid-like. The soldiers in the Dominican Republic were a different breed entirely: they swaggered around, swinging their rifles, buoyed by their unquestionable power, bullies every one. Thuggery in arms is a terrifying thing to see.

Of all my leftover poems of twenty years ago, I like this one the best, and I think I’ll end the series with it.

Haiti

From the border hill,
surrounded on three sides by Haitian mountains,
I can see the prison, the old mansion,
the market on my side of the island.
On the other side, nearly invisible in the dust,
is a twin prison, a twin market town.

Our rain and our sugar can cutters
come together from Haiti,
twin black clouds bringing the French island’s
wealth to eastern Hispañola.
And Haiti becomes dry and lonely,
like an old tin cup turned over
until all its blood has dripped out.

Haiti’s colors explode in Santo Domingo’s streets,
purple-skinned boys asking,
in patois-tinted voices,
“Tengo dinero? Tengo dinero?”
Purple-painted canvases declaring,
with their sharp shapes and rounded lines,
that life was vibrant in the twin market.

He brought his gray horse down through the trees
to drink at the stream we were swimming,
two miles into Haiti, unknown to swaggering soldiers.
His rough patois was strange
to my high school French,
but together we learned that he hadn’t eat in two days,
that work restrictions on the rich half of the island
were harsher than ever before,
that a nickel-a-day on Dominican fields
was still shinier than hunger in Haiti.

Old blood still clogs the streams
running north and south across Hispañola,
clotted into a bridge for bare feet
looking for rain and sugar.

The relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic has been strained and often bloody. In 1937, the Parsley Massacre killed 17,000 to 35,000 Haitians living in the borderlands. (The Dominican soldiers used parsley–perejil to the Dominicans, pèsi to the Haitians–as a shibbeloth to identify their victims).

When I was in the Dominican Republic, we often saw Haitians in the town market, and in the cane fields. One day we ventured a little ways into Haiti, and it was clear that though the Dominican Republic was impoverished, it was a city of gold compared to Haiti.

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