#tr. robert bly

[apoemaday]

Untitled

by Bashō tr. Robert Bly

The temple bell stops -- but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.

[apoemaday]

Sunset

by Rainer Maria Rilke tr. Robert Bly

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either, not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent, not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs --

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads) your own life, timid and standing high and growing, so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out, one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

[apoemaday]

Some People

by Rolf Jacobsen tr. Robert Bly

Some people ascend out of our life, some people enter our life, uninvited and sit down, some people calmly walk by, some people give you a rose, or buy you a new car, some people stand so close to you, some people, you've entirely forgotten some people, some people are actually you, some people you've never seen at all, some people eat asparagus, some people are children, some people climb up on the roof, sit down at table, lie around in hammocks, take walks with their red umbrella, some people look at you, some people have never noticed you at all, some people want to take your hand, some people die during the night, some people are other people, some people are you, some people don't exist, some people do.

[apoemaday]

Gacela of the Dark Death

by Federico García Lorca tr. Robert Bly

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples, I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries. I want to sleep the sleep of that child who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood, how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water. I’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second, a second, a minute, a century, but I want everyone to know that I am still alive, that I have a golden manger inside my lips, that I am the little friend of the west wind, that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me, and pour a little hard water over my shoes so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples, and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me, because I want to live with that shadowy child who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

[apoemaday]

I Am Too Alone in the World, and Not Alone Enough

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action, and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to be a mirror for your whole body, and I never want to be blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. And I want my grasp of things true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that took me safely through the wildest storm of all.

[poetrypository]

XXXI, from Forty Poems Chosen from "Moral Proverbs and Folk Song", Antonio Machado

  Pay attention now: a heart that's all by itself is not a heart.