It will protect you

Knowing I'd be away for the first week or more of April, I didn't consider joining Na(or in my case Int)PoWrimo. But when I got home I was delighted and inspired by the daily poems my friends Ivy, Maria and Beth were writing: two fine published poets and another fine published writer, and publisher of poetry, whose own writing is more often in other genres (or is it? All good writing distills words and gives attention to cadence). 

I'm surprised, to say the least, to have managed a week of little daily poems, aided no doubt by unwonted post-retreat spaciousness of mind. That's fading, of course, and I've no idea if I can continue. All of these were, ahem, spontaneous and without any forethought for subject or, apart from the haiku, for form - rather obviously, I fear, but you have to start somewhere, and this exercise too has value. If I do continue I probably should challenge myself to write to a form.

Inspired by Dave, I've been reading some poetry too, both well-loved and new to me.  I took down the Collected Poems of a favourite poet, Elaine Feinstein, and it fell open at this one. Oh!

The Muse
by Elaine Feinstein

'Write something every day', she said,
'even if it's only a line,
it will protect you.'

How should this be?
Poetry opens no cell,
heals no hurt body,

brings back no lover,
altogether, poetry is
powerless as grass. 

How then should it defend us?
Only by strengthening
our fierce and obstinate centres.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Links:
Mortal by Ivy Alvarez
Mapmaker of Absences by Maria Benet 
Going to Heaven by Elizabeth Adams
Phoenicia Publishing 
Collected Poems and Translations by Elaine Feinstein

The tree outside my house

The tree outside my house

(municipal planting)

is a frail jewel in flat suburbia.

Its bark is shiny white

and it blossoms

and strikes me daily

as unlikely.

What if we banned bureaucracy?

How would it be if we banned bureaucracy in the university? You could come here if you felt able, sign up for whatever you love, study when the spirit moved you and rest when commitment flagged. Your programme - self directed - might be Physics, Chemistry and Poetry; Education, Mediation and Magic; Practical Alchemy with a minor in Psychology of Hope. You might take one year or twenty and in order to graduate, with a title of your own choosing (Bachelor of Awareness, Master of Pattern-making, Doctor of Compassion), you would bring your work before a jury of your peers and elders and convince them it was time, you'd flowered, been fruitful, grown into your wisdom.

2 am

Silence pumps in my ears.
A child's thin wail
through the party wall.
Press my hands into
the cushion of my belly.
Float.

The Trentham Lady

Sweet stone sweet-faced lady

from Ancient Greece via a graveyard in Italy

and a stately garden in Shropshire

sweetly standing in your corner of the gallery

small, eloquent stone hands under your flimsy drapery

your aura sweetens my morning

your frank, modest demeanour offering hope

that something sweet in human nature endures

as well as all the horror. 

British Museum: Greek and Roman Sculpture Gallery
'The Trentham Lady', Greek, about 130 to 100 BC

"The original context of this statue is uncertain, but it may have been made in Greece and taken to Italy at a later date, where it was reused as a funerary statue for Publia Maximina, wife of Sextilius Clemens, whose name is inscribed on the plinth. The statue was formally in the Duke of Sutherland’s collection at Trentham Hall, Shropshire."

Mirror symmetry

Mirror me, clear spring light on clear water

Curve with the curve of my long neck and audacious tail

Mirror me, faithful acolyte swimming in my wake

But face your own way always, make your own pattern on the pond

Mirror me, stalker on the bank with your magic box

Play with my picture, frame me as you wish, as long as my shape and shadow remain.

Spring sitting

While we sat zazen

spring finally birthed itself

all in a rush

as it does unfailingly.

Hard, though, for each to believe

it wasn't our personal labour,

breathing through the contractions

of our minds and hearts.

Dark and cool inside

while the red camellia

burns, drops its petals.

Seas

The day before I went away, Dave Bonta posted at Via Negativa, together with a magical small video, a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Mares (Seas), and his own translation. Here they are.

Mares

by Juan Ramón Jiménez 

Siento que el barco mío
ha tropezado, allá en el fondo,
con algo grande.

¡Y nada
sucede! Nada…Quietud…Olas….
—¿Nada sucede; o es que ha sucedido todo,
y estamos ya, tranquilos, en lo nuevo?—

Seas

I sense that my boat
has struck, deep down,
against some massive thing.

And nothing happens!
Nothing… silence… waves…
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are already resting in the new life?

I loved this brief but infinitely evocative poem and also Dave's translation, as I often do. His approach to translating poetry, I think, is to go deep but not wide, to keep it simple and add as little as possible, just occasionally changing the order of words or phrases to keep or recreate the shape and pattern of the original. This approach, carried out with his own, both deep and wide, poetic sensibility, works very well for me.  This poem, I saw, was easy in a way and in a way very difficult to translate - a short poem of few and simple words, but infinitely subtle words. While I liked Dave's translation a lot, the more I pondered the poem the more I thought I might do it differently. I took it with me on the next day's train journey and came up with my own version. The spare words struck me, in Spanish, as studiedly laconic. So I tried to recreate that shockingly casual feeling by stretching out the words into colloquial phrases. I've almost never translated poetry and I think only poets can do so worthily. This was an enjoyable little exercise, though, in close reading, plunging into and playing with words.

Seas

I have a feeling this boat of mine

has run into something, down there in the depths,

something big.
                        And nothing's happening!
Nothing but this quiet... the waves...

Nothing, is it, or has everything happened already,

and here we are, calm as you like, on the new shore?

 

Form is emptiness

A couple of hours ago I arrived home from a week on retreat. Well, something of me is back home and something is perhaps still refilling, re-emptying, re-forming. This was different, perhaps, from any of the retreats I have sat before, mostly at Gaia House. And perhaps I would do better to resist the temptation to define it verbally.  Words can only react, play on the edges. But return to the world of words I must. If only, most pressingly, because I must spend tomorrow and Sunday on a translation I was earlier disorganised and tired enought to leave until now. This is an attempt, then, to help the transition.

I appreciate and admire both Martine and Stephen Batchelor a great deal. They are probably the best teachers there are for me right now. I'd like and I hope to spend more time with them in the  months and years to come.  The Korean Zen retreat which they have offered every, or close to every, year since they left the monastery in Korea some 25 years ago, as a tribute to their teachers and a sharing of their practice there, is for me the best form and structure of meditation retreat that I've ever experienced, the best balance of gentle holding and real challenge, the most conducive it has ever been for me to 'do it'. It's much modified, of course, for us lay westerners:  more like 9 than the 16 or 18 hours of daily practice in Korean monasteries. But it is challenging enough to give the unaccustomed but committed a taste, a real experience, of the focused and contained alternation of 30 minutes sitting, 15 minutes walking round the meditation hall, of keeping silence, of not reading or writing or doing anything much for a week but the practice - eating, sleeping, an hour's work a day...  quite intense.

So, as close as it gets to the perfect form and structure for me. But also, a couple of years having passed since I last sat an organised group retreat of more than a single day, as chaotic and difficult and tumultuous as I have ever known it. The familiar unwillingness and distraction many times multiplied. Tough. Tougher still was the great change encountered in the texture and tone of my own mind, in what had come, after a decade or so, to be a familiar inner/outer/present place that I went to on retreat. And now it is somewhere different, harsher, which is sobering and a little frightening. 

For all the predominant experience was distracted and sometimes upsetting, though, just doing it, 'just sitting', was more powerful than that. Just being there and being a lot more there at the end of the week than I was at the beginning. Just my huge gratitude that I found in middle age this way through buddhist practice back towards being present in the life I started shutting off from when I was a tiny kid: close my eyes and pretend I'm not here, not here, not here, hardly here at all for years and years. I can sit and close my eyes (or not close my eyes if following Zen meditation instruction) and know being. There is this.

Words are indeed inadequate.  I don't know why I do this or what it is, but I'm glad I do.