The Layers

The Layers

by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz (1905- 2006) was American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet noted for his subtle craftsmanship and his treatment of complex themes. He held the post of  the Poet Laureate of America twice, first in 1974 and later in 2000.

In this wonderful poem, the poet is meditating on how to reconcile all the losses of life. His griefs (“the slow fire trailing from abandoned campsites”) and banquet table of losses must have included friends and family members and other traumatic experiences. The poet penned this poem at a time when he was about to pull the curtain on a significant phase of his life and was aware that there were fewer milestones ahead.  As he roamed through the wreckage of his life, “a nimbus-clouded voice” guided him to “live in layers, not on the litter”. 

How are we going to live in the layers during our darkest nights of isolation and loneliness? How are we going to appreciate that “every stone on the road” is precious when our sight is obscured by pain and regrets?

“Live in layers, not on the litter” is a striking line in this poem. All of us have gone through tough and turbulent times in our life. Just like an old tree or rock leaves different rings or layers on its trunk or structure, these layers are embedded in our psyche. The bark and surface debris in a tree or rock (litter) always are meant to be shed and they are not the spots of our true existence. That is why the poet pleads us to navigate our life around layers and shove away the superficial parts of our life. Layers are the true marks that shape and strengthen our life. If we peel through our litters, we will find what is important to us; the layers that affirm our journey. These layers could be defining moments in our profession or personal life or the interactions that directed our destiny.

We become whole by having the courage to revisit and embrace all the layers of our lives, denying none of them, so that we're finally able to say, "Yes, all of this is me, and all of this has helped make me who I am." When we get to that point, amazingly, we can look at all the layers together and see the beauty of the whole. In every realm of our lives, we need to have passionate desire to experience the depths, to live in layers.

Realistic optimism with a tinge of fatalism (“I lack the art to decipher it”) linger in the last stanza. 

Source:Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2002)

The Bagel

The Bagel

David Ignatow (American Poet)

I stopped to pick up the bagel 

rolling away in the wind, 

annoyed with myself 

for having dropped it 

as if it were a portent. 

Faster and faster it rolled, 

with me running after it 

bent low, gritting my teeth, 

and I found myself doubled over 

and rolling down the street 

head over heels, one complete somersault 

after another like a bagel 

and strangely happy with myself.

David Ignatow, (born Feb. 7, 1914, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 17, 1997, East Hampton, N.Y.) was an  American poet whose works address social as well as personal issues in meditative, vernacular free verse. Ignatow worked for a time as a journalist with the WPA Federal Writers’ Project. His first book of poetry, entitled Poems (1948), was followed by The Gentle Weight Lifter (1955). Many of the pieces in the latter collection, as well as many in Say Pardon (1961) and Figures of the Human (1964), are written in the form of parables. From the 1960s Ignatow taught poetry at several American colleges. For over half a century, David Ignatow crafted spare, plain, haunting poetry pf working life, urban images, and dark humor. The poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ignatow is characteristically concerned with human mortality and human alienation in the world: the world as it is, defined by suffering and despair, yet at crucial times redeemed by cosmic vision and shared lives.

Very often in your life, you are  so stiff and stressed out that you forget the essential that you were once a child. When was the last time you did something unabashedly silly? When did you run down the street, skipping, or scream on a roller coaster, climbed a tree and jumped down with puerile joy, or trip and fall in a public place? Most of the time we're buttoned up, trying to do everything we can to remain poised, but this poem removes us from all the formality a bit and reminds us of those rare moments when you realize you're in the midst of a potentially embarrassing moment but choose to laugh instead of burrow away. “And strangely happily with myself” is the way Ignatow ends the poem to change the meaning of the whole poem. Unwind and have fun with yourself.

Bar Mitzvah for My Son

Untitled Poem

By Yehuda Amichai 

Translated by Ted Hughes 

My son, in whose face there is already a sign
of eagle—
like a daring prefix to your life.
let me kiss you once again while you still love it,
softly, like this.
Before you become a hairy Esau of open fields
be for a little while
soft-skinned Jacob for my hands.

Your brain is well packed in your skull,
efficiently folded for life. Had it stayed
spread out you might have been happier,
a large sheet of happiness without memory.

I’m on my way from believing in God
and you’re on your way toward it: This too
is a meeting point of a father and a son.

It’s evening now. The earthball is cooling,
clouds that have never lain with a woman
pass overhead in the sky, the desert
starts breathing into our ears,
and all the generations
squeeze a bar mitzvah for you.

This poem by Yehuda Amichai, the greatest Israeli poet of last century, is apt for Father's day

The poem  fuses best the passionate tenderness and warmth between a father and son. Though the poem may have been written addressed to a son of age 12 or 13, I find its affection more appropriate than age. After all , our children never grow old for us. It’s a bar-mitzvah poem, a blessing (Bar mitzvah is Jewish rite of confirmation for a boy). Amichai begs to kiss his son once more, “while you still love it,” while the boy is still a soft-skinned Jacob and before he becomes “a hairy Esau of open fields.” (Esau and Jacob were sons of Isaac as per the book of genesis. The elder Esau was of hairy features and was a hunter, a man of fields. Amichai’s poems are always full of religious allusions).

The folded brain in the second stanza refers to the convolutions of the human brain, which are part of the cortex, the outer part that enables the higher functions. The folding is what lets us have such a large surface area packed into our heads. A simpler creature's brain isn't so deeply folded; it's more like a sheet. So the poet is suggesting that the same brain that enables our intelligence and consciousness also gives us the ability to be unhappy.

In the final verse, the most beautiful in this poem, he offers his formal blessing, which turns into a universal one: evening falls, and the land is cooling, and “clouds that have never lain with a woman / pass overhead in the sky”; the desert is breathing, “and all the generations / squeeze a bar mitzvah for you.” Lucky son! So many of Amichai’s qualities gather here: passionate tenderness and earnest warmth, sweet possessiveness—the eros of fatherhood—and that delicious, playful metaphorical reach, those clouds that have never lain with a woman. What would those clouds look like? The metaphor can’t be a visual similitude (although white, gauzy clouds could look somehow more virginal than heavy ones pregnant with rain). The metaphor—as similitude—almost “fails,” but it is blazingly successful in the context of the poem’s address to a young man who has not yet “lain with a woman.” And, of course, the diction gently picks up the Biblical thread of the reference to Jacob and Esau, a story that begins with a father’s blessing.

Song

Song

by Rafael Alberti

translated by Charles Guenther and Hardie St Martin

I want to sing: to be a flower
in my village.

A cow of my village
to wear me in his ear.

The moon of my village
to wear me in his ear.

The rivers and seas
of my village to drench me.

A girl from my village
to pick me.

The earth of the heart
of my village to bury me.

For, you see, I'm alone
without my village.
(Though not without my people.)

(From the anthology 'Roots & Wings')

Born in 1902 , he belongs to the famous "Generation of '27” poets and is considered one of the greatest Spanish poets of the so-called "Silver Age." Recipient of many honours he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War because of his Marxist beliefs and didn't return to Spain until Franco's death. Alberti died in 1999.

I loved this poem (reminded me of the psyche of the displaced Palestinian and Syrian people ) and it captivates us from the beginning (I want to sing: to be a flower in my village) and slowly intensifies our nostalgia for the land of our beginnings by constant repetition of the word ‘village’ in each stanza.

Weathering

Weathering

by Fleur Adcock

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a Pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and lake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.

The contemporary New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock is renowned for her poems dwelling on themes of place, human relationships and everyday activities, but frequently with a dark twist given to the mundane events she writes about. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships.

The poem starts with the sudden onset of a blush on an otherwise aging face when a snowy cold wind caresses her face and the resultant momentary gush of youthfulness. The poet is aware that it is not going to sustain and her wish to preserve physical beauty is a futile exercise. The progressive, but inevitable, decline of her corporeal charm is an irreversible reality. The poet is so enamoured by the beauty of the places she visits that she is least concerned about her eroding physical beauty. She concludes that the enthralling view of nature from her window makes her indifferent to mirror as it is this enduring beauty outside that adds a new complexion to her soul.

Fleur Adcock teaches us something about true beauty and grace in this poem. Our vanity often conspires against our authenticity and blocks the Inner light in us. For the poet, it is the beauty of the place that awakens the Inner light and offers a remedy for her regressive charm. She thereby portrays an astonishing picture of a life that is possible, a life of wholeness, in which we can truly be what we are. The grace that Adcock unlocks is overwhelmingly appealing to the cosmetically driven man or woman exuding metropolitan vanity. Beauty around us has the power to flood our being and uplift us to the transcendent realm.

Like the poet, we can become “indifferent to mirrors”, to what our souls wear to the outside. Maybe we should forget what we cannot control and find that grace to live a life that is nourishing and fulfilling.

 ( Credits: Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock (Bloodaxe Books, 2000)

Poppies

Poppies

By Attilio Bertolucci

Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

This is a year of poppies: our land

was brimming with them as May burned

into June and I returned—

a sweet dark wine that made me drunk.

From clouds of mulberry to grains to grasses

ripeness was all, in the fitting

heat, in the slow drowsiness spreading

through the universe of green.

My life half over I saw grown sons

setting off alone and vanishing from sight

beyond the prison the flight

of the swallow makes in the spent

glow of a stormy evening, but the pain

gave way humanely to the light

coming on inside the house for another meal

in air made cooler by hail

letting off steam in the distance.

Attilio Bertolucci was one of the greatest poets of Italy. Born in 1911, Attilio Bertolucci published his first book of poems at the age of 18. His second, published in 1934, was recognised and favourably reviewed by Eugenio Montale, the Nobel Laureate. There followed a period of silence, broken in 1951 by The Indian Wigwam, which won the Viareggio Prize. He has also published two bestselling volumes of a novel in verse, La camera da letto, a kind of family history about his parents and childhood, and his love for Ninetta, the mother of Giuseppe and Bernardo Bertolucci, his two famous film-director sons. A frequent cause of pleasure and also disquiet in Bertolucci's poetry is his sense of time, the calm fire of the days. The critic Paolo Lagazzi speaks of Bertolucci, although slowly bleeding to death because wounded by time, as also drawing from time 'all the gifts, colours, sweetnesses still possible - while darkness and winter advance without truce'. Attilio Bertolucci won the Montale Prize in 1989, and in 1992 the most prestigious of all Italian prizes, that of the Accademia del Lincei.

This poem can be considered as the poet’s midlife musings. It is a stage where you are mature and your children depart from your life one after another seeking their shores of contentment. The line ‘Ripeness was all" is an echo of a line in Shakespeare's King Lear: "Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all." It speaks to being ready for inevitable death, but also, savoring your life and making the most of every moment until the end. While the line (spoken by Edgar to Gloucester in King Lear) comes from a play about fathers and their children, there’s nothing in the poem to suggest the paternal agonies that are the stuff of Lear. Rather, the subject of this mid-year, mid-life poem is the painful but proper experience of seeing one’s children leave home and make their way into the wider world. (Where, by the way, they seem to have done pretty well as Bertolucci’s sons are both highly regarded filmmakers.)

The word “humanely” in line fourteen (the pain gave way humanely to the light) seems almost to impart personification to the entity of “pain.” It would be such a different poem were it not for that light coming on when it does—showing that, though the sons have set out alone, they haven’t left the speaker alone: the light is the sign of some ongoing companionship, which seems to ease his losses. And the storm passes, having actually improved the quality of the evening (‘air made cooler by hail’) . “Poppies” strikes the reader as a rare poem in which the bitter and the sweet find a nearly perfect balance.

Biography of Sleep

Biography of Sleep


by Aleš Debeljak

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

1.

 Shadows are thickening‚ the long backs of hills plunge 
 into the ocean’s waves‚ the drone of a trumpet solo 
 is heard. Perhaps it comes from a transistor.—
 Somewhere at the edge of the visible world the hidden

 power of melancholy is lost in the quicksand of Maghreb.
 —Noon throbs metallic. Veterans sleep in wicker rocking 
 chairs. Their shoes’ soft leather smells perhaps of resin
 and of punitive journeys. —Ripe fruit lies in the burnt 

 grass of the garden. The white walls of small houses 
 shiver from the heat‚ lethargy corrodes the officer’s liver. 
 And turns it into a catalog of plants. —One of them 
 recites Dante. Many deaths slowly gather in him.

 2.

 Clock hands have been still for years. Young roe deer 
 are frozen in lithographs. —Reports continue. —And 
 fermented fruit goes to the head: in weightless dizziness
 there is a mirage. Which multiplies with recent encounters 

 with the theory of poison. Many times. No surprise: memory 
 melts like wax. The magnetic circle of crime is now stronger
 than gravity. Nothing unusual. If pigeons flutter in dreams‚
 they retreat at once into oblivion. —This instant‚ when the air

 trembles with fervor: all places trick the memory on times 
 passed‚ variations of murder‚ the symmetry of slow deaths.
 All of these. And the human trace is tattooed with a green snake 
 head‚ burning with a wish to break through the sound barrier.

3.

 This poem is for you‚ anonymous. Irritable and ill from 
 monotonous waiting for some cry still wandering through 
 seasons. And you don’t write a diary. No one has‚ no one 
 like you. You’re left to yourself. And to nostalgia for the future. 

 In your own way you will endure refugee camps and part from 
 beautiful ornaments in secessionist architecture. On titmouse 
 feathers you might lay eyes on the brief glimmering of weapons. 
 And your solitary whistle. Which lasts. Long. It will harden into elegy. 

 You can do nothing about this. So it must happen. Then despair 
 murmuring softly in us. That’s the point. You can drink six bottles‚ 
 but you will not revive your own face in the mirror of a stranger’s 
 memory. You will be single and alone until the end. Surely.

4.

 Banks‚ flags‚ ships‚ holidays‚ cock fights‚ epaulets‚ 
 copper engravings of English horses‚ dead guards
 and elite divisions. All this slides by. Disappears 
 like talk during an afternoon slumber. —

 Face it. Arrival and a desolate scene are the same thing. 
 Instead of a planted tree and pages of a will only a name 
 remains‚ which someone entered in a dictionary. Nothing 
 more. Oh‚ perhaps someone for a moment remembers 

 the metamorphosis from pale to purple: like in old times with 
 lords. Otherwise it is really nothing. —Rip the crumpled
 carnation off the chest‚ lean over the geometric granite
 cubes‚ exhale. Now. Like those in the Stammheim prison.


5.

 At the border of lip and tongue‚ someone is counting days 
 to a strong earthquake‚ which Halley’s comet did not predict. 
 And bird catchers are emptying full traps and family
 homes sink into the mud. As from afar‚ grape leaves 

 scorched with Peronospora gently fall off the fronts 
 of houses. And the spears of white hunters unerringly
 find the softness of loins and bellies: I would like to place
 the last period. Listen‚ there is no rhetorical figure

 of eternity. Behind a closed window some long vowel foretells 
 an influx of sorrow‚ which laps meekly in anguished people.
 A thick haze settles on all sides and the room expands.
 Under a railway embankment the two of you are lost in a slow fuck.

 6.

 To survive all that persists in evident harmony.
 To be snow on a warm palm‚ which will freeze from 
 the weight of silvery crystals. To be a letter in Sanskrit.
 Buckwheat honey. To be less than eternity and confidential

 documents. To become poppies‚ tobacco leaves‚ a flat
 landscape. A word which no one can repeat properly. 
 To rustle to someone like a rhyme from a sonnet
 and instantly sink into disorder. To be absurd bird

 chatter echoing in all the rooms like a melody. To be vast 
 fields‚ blues in forty-year-olds’ memories. To survive 
 the anguish of a space that constricts like an animal’s pupil.
 That attacks with dreadful force and settles its belated debt.

7.

 Under horizons of wet flocks it could have been otherwise.
 Perhaps neighbors would leave him in the room for at least 
 three days. So that the air might lie heavily on his eyes‚ open 
 wide to the hunt and flight. And to nostalgia‚ which no one 

 among them can shake off. So that death’s thin song would echo 
 in his ear. And the casual droning of bees would close the circle. 
 But I don’t believe it. In the people endlessly wandering‚ some 
 map is always rioting beyond the edges of these lines. 

 And it borders on the unbearable. So that the premonition 
 of a cuckoo’s muffled singing clearly breathes in them.
 And in their liver burns brute strength‚ which in the presence 
 of a woman turns into yearning. With it comes the smell of cinnamon.

When Aleš Debeljak, one of the most renowned Slovenian poets and essayists of the past three decades, died in a car accident on 28th January 2016, the world lost a great postmodern poet who endeavored to capture the complexity of our living planet with commanding historical sense and emotional intensity.

Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1961, the poet, editor, translator, and professor Ales Debeljak graduated in comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana and later received his Ph.D. in Social Thought at Syracuse University, New York. He was a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest.

A leading Central European poet, Debeljak has published five books of poems and eight books of essays in his native Slovenian. His books in English translation include Anxious Moments as well as Dictionary of Silence and The City and the Child and Without Anesthesia: New & Selected Poems. 

As the American critic Kathy Crown rightly mentions,"Each of Ales Debeljak's hallucinatory poems is lit by wonder, as the poetic voice strives for a pure state of incandescence. Pushed beyond language into the body's shadow zone, the human voice threatens to disintegrate into inarticulate cries piercing screams, soft chimes, vocal tremors, and the high C of Ella Fitzgerald. Yet the poet who is "running out of words" does not succumb to silence; instead, he begins to enter new names in its dictionary. Deeply grounded in an awareness of social and political concerns, Debeljak's poems wander restlessly "on the border between east and west," in a surreal landscape of refugee camps, barren fields, and deserted city streets. His work more ontology than confession exists where Rilke's gleaming visions meet the dark edge of the millennium. In Sonja Kravanja's splendid translations, which deftly capture the music and melancholy that infuse Debeljak's work, we have a significant document on the effects of exile, wandering, and survival on language." 

 Debeljak is a postmodern Spinx and his poems often carry a detailed mapping of lives-of-the-moment and they are intellectually sharp and penetrating affecting our psyche. Seemingly simple and prosaic at first glance, his poetry gains power, magic and momentum as it treads into the historical, topographical and human landscape, from which no exit seems possible. 

This gripping quality makes his poems intense, cohesive and articulate. Memory, melancholy and moist silence pervade much of his poetry. Aleš Debeljak is a universal poet and his encyclopedic style carries the command of a Renaissance master, continuously combining artistic sensibility and scientific reflection with social responsibility. 

His poetry is a wonderful combo of passion, emotion, pathos, sensuality meditation, warmth, reflection, beauty and rich engagement even the minutia around him. This can be experienced in the above poem too.