marginalia

Someone hands you an English thriller,
highly recommended.
You don’t read English.

You’ve worked up a thirst
for something you can’t afford.

You have deep insights,
brand new, and they sound
like an academic glossing Holderlin.

You hear the waves at night
ramping against the shore
and you think: that’s what waves do.

Worse: you’re asked out
when at home you get better coffee,
silence, and you don’t expect to be amused.

Awful: not to die in summer
under a bright sky
when the rich dirt
falls easily from the shovel.

—Gottfied Benn, This is Bad
    Picture from Out of the Past

Each of us is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.

—Salvatore Quasimodo, And Suddenly It’s Evening
    Photo by Kenneth Traynor

I walk on the bridge in my white suit that I bought in Dakar
On my feet my rope sandals bought at Villa Garcia
In my hand my Basque cap brought back from Biarritz
My pockets are full of Caporals Ordinaires
From time to time I sniff my little wooden box from Russia
I jingle the small change in my pocket and a pound sterling in gold
I have my big Calabrian hankerchief and these wax matches of a
      size you don’t find anywhere but in London
I am clean washed scrubbed more than the deck
Happy as a king
Rich as a millionaire
Free as a man

—Blaise Cendrars, White Suit
    Picture from Casablanca

Placing a book in my hands, the angel said, “It holds all you would
wish to know.”  And he vanished.
    So I opened the book, which wasn’t thick.
    It was written in an unknown alphabet.
    Scholars translated it, but produced very different versions.
    They disagreed even about their own readings, agreeing neither
upon the tops or bottoms of them, nor the beginnings, nor the ends.
    Toward the close of this vision, it seemed to me that the book
melted, until it could no longer be told apart from the world that surrounds us.

—Paul Valery, The Angel Handed Me a Book
    Photograph by Ralph Gibson

I am not a poet but I can describe
your glance, your voice,
the way you walk in the garden
before coming to bed,
even each separate pebble
on the path that runs
the twenty steps from here to there.

— Han Youngwun, from The Artist
    Picture from Chungking Express

Thank you walls
the great invisible photographs of my life thank you air
for the patient imprints of my loneliness

—Anna Kamienska, from Thanking
    Martinique by Andre Kertesz

Past one o’clock.  You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits.  Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history and all creation.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Past One O’Clock
    Painting by Anselm Kiefer

Don’t leave now that you’re here—
Stay.  So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from Before You Came