the selenial series
Oct. 6th, 2024 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meikureerecent poems:
1. Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
by Galway Kinnell
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don't grow old,
don't die. Little Maud,
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the culture of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward truth north,
and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her
in the dark.
And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
3
In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.
Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,
your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old folk,
which once could call up the lost nouns.
4
And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,
and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,
and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.
5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,
and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come—to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
The still undanced cadence of vanishing.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
2. 大海停止之处（之一）/ Where the Sea Stands Still (Part One)
by Yang Lian (杨炼) (tr. Brian Holton)
1
大海 用一万枝蜡烛夺目地停止
blue is always higher just as your weariness has chosen
the sea just as a man's gaze compels the sea
to be twice as desolate
going back as ever
to that carved stone ear where drumbeats are destroyed
where tiny coral corpses fall in a snowstorm
gaudy speckles on dead fish
like the sky that holds all your lust
go back to the limit like limitlessness
going back to the cliffs stormheads all around
your pipes doomed to go on playing
after your death tunes of corruption deep in the flesh
as blue is recognised at last the wounded
sea a million candles stands dazzlingly still
last night I dreamed that I was sitting for one of my secondary school Chinese oral exams again, in a generic indoor basketball court, trying to tell the assessor sitting opposite about politics and the president and existentialist philosophy (not topics which would've come up in any actual exams to test the ability to verbally elaborate on one's 思维观点, [un]fortunately). I was getting frustrated in the dream because I was speaking Chinese just fine aside from all these terms which were just on the tip of my tongue, but I could only say them in English when I opened my mouth... when I woke up I was relieved I hadn't forgotten how to speak Chinese.
other odd and mundane stress dreams:
1. Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
by Galway Kinnell
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don't grow old,
don't die. Little Maud,
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the culture of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward truth north,
and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her
in the dark.
And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
3
In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.
Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,
your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old folk,
which once could call up the lost nouns.
4
And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,
and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,
and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.
5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,
and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come—to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
The still undanced cadence of vanishing.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
2. 大海停止之处（之一）/ Where the Sea Stands Still (Part One)
by Yang Lian (杨炼) (tr. Brian Holton)
1
蓝总是更高的 当你的厌倦选中了
海 当一个人以眺望迫使海
倍加荒凉
依旧在返回
这石刻的耳朵里鼓声毁灭之处
珊瑚的小小尸体 落下一场大雪之处
死鱼身上鲜艳的斑点
像保存你全部性欲的天空
返回一个界限 像无限
返回一座悬崖 四周风暴的头颅
你的管风琴注定在你死后
继续演奏 肉里深藏的腐烂的音乐
大海 用一万枝蜡烛夺目地停止
blue is always higher just as your weariness has chosen
the sea just as a man's gaze compels the sea
to be twice as desolate
going back as ever
to that carved stone ear where drumbeats are destroyed
where tiny coral corpses fall in a snowstorm
gaudy speckles on dead fish
like the sky that holds all your lust
go back to the limit like limitlessness
going back to the cliffs stormheads all around
your pipes doomed to go on playing
after your death tunes of corruption deep in the flesh
as blue is recognised at last the wounded
sea a million candles stands dazzlingly still
last night I dreamed that I was sitting for one of my secondary school Chinese oral exams again, in a generic indoor basketball court, trying to tell the assessor sitting opposite about politics and the president and existentialist philosophy (not topics which would've come up in any actual exams to test the ability to verbally elaborate on one's 思维观点, [un]fortunately). I was getting frustrated in the dream because I was speaking Chinese just fine aside from all these terms which were just on the tip of my tongue, but I could only say them in English when I opened my mouth... when I woke up I was relieved I hadn't forgotten how to speak Chinese.
other odd and mundane stress dreams:
- (CN: body horror-ish, stillbirth) a dream where someone...? a neighbour? gave birth to a "being", half eraserhead and half slug that ended up looking mostly like a weird Make A Creature entity from the Spore games. I was with the midwife and doctor in the room discussing what to do with it (???) because apparently they thought it was stillborn but it revived itself again and ran off to the woods to live out its life. they ran DNA tests and it was almost nearly (99%) human, so I was arguing that it ought to be considered the first progenitor of a new homo sapiens subspecies.
- partner was finishing up his thesis in the last 24 hours, and I was bustling about trying to help him through.
