to N. (readwritepoem#42)

Reading now: Jaime Saenz The Night (Almost Island) and from the Immanent Visitor

Translators: Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander

When I started to write again, in English this time, I had this big project in mind ;kind of a Philokalia ; a long, long poem about love and beauty that was supposed to carry the reader from Eros to Agape. Of course, half of it or more was so bad that I had to discard it, however I kept some fragments that had potential and I am now trying to revise them and re-write them into poems that could stand on their own. One of the fragments was the Waltz I used for the bare bone project; this will be another one –the last fragment- initially wrote as a farewell to a cherished friend.

The part were she bids her farewell (I bestow…)is not far from what I wrote originally but the poem needed desperately a first part –for balance. I had no idea how this first part will look like until I read Saenz , and here are a few lines that inspired me ;

"Come; I am nourished by your depiction/ and by your redolent melody,"[…] "come once ;I want to fulfill my passion for good-bye"

 

 

I see a shadow cover your eye

My love. Don't.

Hide not; you're my first quencher.

You are the pomegranate seed keeper;

Bestow me this sweet remembrance

tenderly painful;

for I too shall be departing

adrift in my lone dark night.

Come; you're the chalice bearer.

I bestow my load unto you:

Das Man, die Sorge

    to seek out in the one

    whom walks the sorrowful fields of Ash

    the answer.

 

Note:

Other "words' that inspired me here:

Martin Heidegger's: "Being and Time" – Das Man (the One) is the impersonal nature of the being (or prejudices, biases, social rules we abide by), while Die Sorge ( the Care, Worry) is one of most fundamental ways of the human being.

Saint John of the Cross: "One dark night,/fired with love's urgent longings[..]/I went out unseen,/my house being now all stilled."