"Compass" by Jorge Luis Borges

[Original Spanish text]

UNA BRUJULA

A Esther Zemborain de Torres

Todas las cosas son palabras del

Idioma en que Alguien o Algo, noche y día,

Escribe esa infinita algarabía

Que es la historia del mundo.  En su tropel

Pasan Cartago y Roma, yo, tú, él,

Mi vida que no entiendo, esta agonía

De ser enigma, azar, criptografía

Y toda la discordia de Babel.

Detrás del nombre hay lo que no se nombra;

Hoy he sentido gravitar su sombra

En esta aguja azul, lúcida y leve,

Que hacia el confín de un mar tiende su empeño,

Con algo de reloj visto en un sueño

Y algo de ave dormida que se mueve.

[English translation by Richard Wilbur]

COMPASS

To Esther Zemborain de Torres

All things are words of some strange tongue, in thrall

To Someone, Something, who both day and night

Proceeds in endless gibberish to write

The history of the world.  In that dark scrawl

Rome is set down, and Carthage, I, you, all,

And this my being which escapes me quite,

My anguished life that’s cryptic, recondite,

And garbled as the tongues of Babel’s fall.

Beyond the name there lies what has no name;

Today I have felt its shadow stir the aim

Of this blue needle, light and keen, whose sweep

Homes to the utmost of the sea its love,

Suggestive of a watch in dreams, or of

Some bird, perhaps, who shifts a bit in sleep.

Source of the text - Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems 1923-1967, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. [New York]: Delacorte Press, 1972, pages 96-97.

TJB: This Italian sonnet, Neoplatonistic to the core, sees the fallenness of things, larger truth hiding beyond; & a compass as the metaphor to point us there.

"the rites for Cousin Vit" by Gwendolyn Brooks

the rites for Cousin Vit

Carried her unprotesting out the door.

Kicked back the casket-stand.  But it can't hold her,

That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,

The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.

Oh oh.  Too much.  Too much.  Even now, surmise,

She rises in the sunshine.  There she goes,

Back to the bars she knew and the repose

In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.

Too vital and too squeaking.  Must emerge.

Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,

Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks

Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks

In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge

Of happiness, haply hysterics.  Is.

Source of the text - Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems.  New York: Harper Perennial, 2006, page 58.

TJB: Lust for life. This envelope sonnet, of a woman so vital that death can’t contain her, finds its true spirit in rhyme, alliteration, & internal rhyme.

"I have a gentil cok," anonymous Middle English lyric

I have a gentil cok,
    Croweth me day;
He doth me risen erly,

    My matins for to say.

I have a gentil cok,

    Comen he is of gret;

His comb is of red corel,

    His tayel is of jet.

I have a gentil cok

    Comen he is of kinde;

His comb is of red corel,

    His tail is of inde.

His legges ben of asor,

    So gentil and so smale;

His spores arn of silver white,

    Into the worte-wale.

His eynen arn of cristal,

    Loken all in aumber;

And every night he percheth him

    In min ladyes chaumber.

Editors' Notes:

  gentil - noble

  Comen he is of gret - He comes of a great family.

  Comen he is of kinde - He is of good lineage.

  inde - indigo

  asor - azure

  spores - spurs

  worte-wale - root of cock's spur

  eynen - eyes

  loken - set

Source of the text - Middle English Lyrics: A Norton Critical Edition, selected and edited by Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974, page 77.

TJB: Gentle dick energy; double-entendre as a source of poetic power. In short iambics, the poem gives us a fabulous, near-deadpan blazon of a rooster.
  
  
  
 

"Obituary" by A.K. Ramanujan

OBITUARY

Father, when he passed on,

left dust

on a table full of papers,

left debts and daughters,

a bedwetting grandson

named by the toss

of a coin after him,

a house that leaned

slowly through our growing

years on a bent coconut

tree in the yard.

Being the burning type,

he burned properly

at the cremation

as before, easily

and at both ends,

left his eye coins

in the ashes that didn’t

look one bit different,

several spinal discs, rough,

some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly

and throw as the priest

said, facing east

where three rivers met

near the railway station;

no longstanding headstone

with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses

everything he didn’t quite

manage to do himself,

like his caesarian birth

in a brahmin ghetto

and his death by heart-

failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me

he got two lines

in an inside column

of a Madras newspaper

sold by the kilo

exactly four weeks later

to streethawkers

who sell it in turn

to the small groceries

where I buy salt,

coriander,

and jaggery

in newspaper cones

that I usually read

for fun, and lately

in the hope of finding

these obituary lines.

And he left us

a changed mother

and more than

one annual ritual.

Source of the text – Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarathy.  Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976, pages 106-107.

TJB: Reused elegy. An ode to a father’s incomplete life in 3 parts: what he left behind; the handling of his remains; & his obit, as used by spice merchants.
 
 
 
 

"I never saw a Moor" by Emily Dickinson

(1) [Poem as written by the poet on a fragment of stationery]

(2) [Text from Franklin's variorum edition]

I never saw a Moor.
I never saw the Sea -

Yet know I how the Heather looks

And what a Billow be - 

I never spoke with God

Nor visited in Heaven - 

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the Checks were given - 



Source of the text - (1) Emily Dickinson Archive: An Open Access Website for the Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, http://edickinson.org, Amherst Manuscript # A 237, page 1. (2) The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Volume II, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 756.

TJB: Billow-talk; epistemology in quatrains.  As a proof that God exists, this is wanting; as a verse-assertion of faith, well, fine. What is a billow?
 
 
 

from "Writing is an Aid to Memory" by Lyn Hejinian

I.

apple is shot nod

                         ness seen know it around saying

                                     think for a hundred years

   but and perhaps utter errors direct the point to a meadow

                                 rank fissure up on the pit

arts are several branches of life

                     little more science is brought where great

                         need is required

                           out becomes a bridge of that name

                in the painting is a great improvement

   bit ink up on the human race

and return if the foot goes back

              in the trunks of trees behoove a living thing

                                       wedge war common saw

           hard by that length of time the great demand is

                                    very dear

ashes in water

                                 that might be a slip of architecture

                                 think was reduced to an improper size

   blocks to interest who can visit

                                         variations on ideas are now full

                             problems

           from a point of increasing

at only as to four or we who nine

a little grace familiar with simple limbs and the sudden

                                reverse



Source of the text - Lyn Hejinian, Writing is an Aid to Memory.  Berkeley, CA: The Figures, 1978.

TJB:  High strung—composed at phrase-level, stripped of connective tissue, metaphors mixed, shot through with unresolved tension, & a tree-meadow motif.