Nightfall of the Iguana, 2017

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #PabloNeruda, Canadian poet, Canto General, Elaine Stirling, medieval Spanish fixed verse, narrative poetry, New Year's poem 2017, seasonal poetry, Waldeen

~~a trilogy of glosas, concluded~~

The jaguar brushed leaves
with his phosphorescent absence,
the puma speeds through bracken
like devouring fire.

—from “Some Beasts”, Pablo Neruda,
in his epic Canto General,
translation by Waldeen

~~~

Not long ago, I found a strange map
in the ruins of a Maracaibo mansion,
the corners held down with rough-cut rubies
round and plump as duck eggs. Palimpsests
throbbed like blue-black veins across the chart—
illegible, unscarred by zealots and thieves.
I was told by the raggedy viejo who sleeps
underneath that the map and her routes
can be viewed by whoever believes
the jaguar brushed leaves

with her tail and the weasely dictator fell.
Claims such as these, they never sit well
with the rushed and the rational. Being neither
that day, I asked the old man to explain.
Once a year, he said, when defenses
deflate, humankind’s natural omniscience
is recalled and recorded upon this map
by shades of the recently departed who’ve
dropped all pretence of sorrow and vehemence.
With his phosphorescent absence

of political skews and racial miscues,
he hovered over the map, and with a finger
gnarled as ebony burl, he cruised along
routes I’d been known to frequent and
rubbed them all out, pronouncing every one
irrelevant. Time to accept there’s no fact in
the past with the power to deplete or subvert
your future. Take a page from the wild. When
the cayman’s not hungry, he’s loath to attack, and
the puma speeds through bracken.

Likewise, in the seam between moments—and
years—that appear to engender and justify
fear, you will find a clear trail laid out by the good
that is you and your boundaryless kin. You are
timely, well compassed. Walk on, begin.
And now it is time for this Job to expire.
He dropped the fat rubies into a sack.
He rolled up the mansion and with it the map,
spinning all he had shown me into a gyre
like devouring fire…

Wishing you a happy and magical New Year!

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

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Nightfall of the Iguana, Part 2

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #Neruda, blacklisting, Canadian poet, Cold War, Elaine Stirling, poetry translations, Spanish medieval fixed verse, Waldeen

~~a trilogy of glosas~~

Someone who waited for me among violins
uncovered a world like a buried tower,
its spiral sunk beneath all
the hoarse, sulphur-covered leaves.

—from “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”, Pablo Neruda,
in his epic, Canto General; translation by Waldeen

~~~

Welcome to the board game, Self Creation.
I am Spartacus—like you, a former slave.
I’m here to walk you through the spaces
and the rules. First, you choose a playing piece:
preacher, prisoner, jailer, free. I heard you right?
You’ve chosen free? I am surprised, since
all I’ve heard about you says you feel oppressed
by governments, economy has jailed you, and
you’ve smothered happiness to combat violence.
Someone who waited for me among violins

gave me your name, suggesting you were ready
for Self Creation. Hell, who am I to disagree?
All right, you’re free! That means you move
around, above, and through whatever contradicts
freedom. Confront, you lose 100 chips. Complain
(the hamster wheel), forfeit a turn. Smell a flower,
go again. Overstating what you think, demanding
others say they’re sorry flips you into preacher
mode…oh, look! You’ve won a super power,
uncovered a world like a buried tower.

Now, we’re into deeper levels. See those cogs
and screws? Play them wrong, you’ll drop
into this oubliette, forget we ever met, until
you see Kirk Douglas playing me. You’ll
scratch your head, think, what the heck?!
At this stage, every rise and every fall
is measured by emotion of the here and now.
Focus toward the joy, momentum must ensue.
Despair will do the same, except the game
will spit you out. A dizzied slug, you’ll crawl,
its spiral sunk beneath all

the free and moving parts you built
and played so well. At this point, I will
be what you have chosen to believe—a heel
poised to squash you. My creator, Howard Fast,
blacklisted as a red, he got the royal squash, but
flattened, grabbed the BE FREE card. Reprieves
lie under every tragedy, you see. Howie moved to
Hollywood, grew rich as shit. McCarthy, playing
jailer, to this very day, haunts and heaves
the hoarse, sulphur-covered leaves.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016
Author’s Note: I noticed, post-posting, that there’s an extra line in the 3rd stanza, which the handful of glosa writers will undoubtedly notice. I’m going to leave it…because I’m pretty sure that some glosa in my past was short one line, and these things even out.

Nightfall of the Iguana

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #CantoGeneral, #PabloNeruda, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Spanish medieval fixed verse, Waldeen

Photo by Will Baxter/for The Wall Street Journal

~~a trilogy of glosas~~

The American-born dancer and choreographer known as Waldeen (1913-1993) was among the first—and, in my opinion, best—translators of Pablo Neruda’s epic, Canto General. When Neruda arrived in Mexico in 1940 as Chile’s consul general, Waldeen was already well established as the director of her own dance school in Mexico City. Poet and dancer became lifelong friends.

Both the Canto and Waldeen’s translations remained virtually unread for decades in North America, thanks to the Cold War and fear of all things leftish. Happily, the complete 1950 chapbook, Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems, is now available online as a pdf, for those who’d like to read and know more.

Here, at Oceantics, I’ve developed an inadvertent tradition of closing the old year and opening the new with glosas, a medieval Spanish form with homage to a greater poet at its center. Over the next few days, I will post three glosas, with lines borrowed from Neruda’s Canto, all translations by Waldeen. The title of the trilogy comes from a poem within the Canto, “Some Beasts”.

I hope you enjoy “Nightfall of the Iguana”.

~~~

Give me your voice and the strength of your buried breast,
Walt Whitman, and the solemn roots that are your face
so as to sing of these reconstructions!
Together we will pay homage to what arises…

—from “Let the Rail Splitter Awake”, Pablo Neruda
Translation by Waldeen

~~~

A tattered deck of fifty-two lies scattered
in an alley behind the Government House.
Peer close, you’ll see. Face cards are scrubbed clean,
suits obliterated, numbers bleed, too thin
to read. I’m told they are apologies, not weeks,
shuffled and dealt routinely to the poorly dressed
committed activists each morning gather
them, assess the hands that cut and undercut
and from the bloodiest, demand arrest.
Give me your voice and the strength of your buried breast,

for if you don’t, if you, the partial deaf
continue to parlay in tonal motion ranges
of the one-note flute, I will fall away.
I must, for each of us, is pied and born
to play toward vast significance, adjusting
turn by turn through private grace
to seeds and shoots we placed ahead of us
in pre-born times, I didn’t question. Now
I choose deliberately condition, person, place,
Walt Whitman, and the solemn roots that are your face.

Come on, is it so hard to comprehend
that ease of mind and spirit are the wiser lead?
I have, by flabby habit, held a stopwatch to your
pace and watched for stumbles, cracks and
proofs of inconsistency. Looking back, I turn
myself to salt, am peppered by obstructions.
Ceilings made of trash are worse than glass.
They obfuscate, rain sticks and stones I can’t
recall as thrown by me. We need new instructions
so as to sing of these reconstructions!

For the building’s going on all around me—boom to
boom, regroup, I pause but never bust, when learning
to be serious regarding us as one magnanimous
and upward thrust, salubrious, percentages up-end,
odds even, then surpass. A rubber duck in mighty seas,
she’s surface prone or floating, has no terror of surprises.
Tankers in the Bosphorus collide, the whale informs
the stork who rides the dreaming tides, disclosing
from the future what our never-ending prize is.
Together we will pay homage to what arises…

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

We are family, Dytiscidae…

Tags

#AlainCDexter, #bringingbacktheglosa, #thistooshallpass, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, glosa, Spanish medieval fixed verse

~~a glosa~~

Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle
skating across still water in any direction
we choose, and soon to be swallowed
suddenly from beneath.

—“Night”, Robert Bly

~~~

Have you lost count of your senses?
Someone who loves you long ago made certain
you had five on each hand
and five, wiggling, on each prehensile
pinkening foot. Symbolic and prime
you burst from cramped and pensive foetal
with a joyful cry—I am arrived!
And not just to mark time or fulfill
biology. You and I intended joy, full
alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle.

Surface creature, you can smell the deep
and dip your skinny feet wherever taste
and fancies send you, yet a surfeit
skim, some oily practicality, pollutes,
lopping like a fisher’s scaling knife
permitted from forbidden. Vivisection
of the vastness of the sparkling neural
universe within has become the gauge
by which we sniff another’s misattention,
skating across still water in any direction,

frantic, fearing too much clamour and
the probability that all accelerates
toward more of better, more of worse. Appetites
of yesterday, I eschew, convinced through
dimming, wrongly disavowed sixth sense that
someone’s making off with mine & ours. Hollowed
by the scummy years of digging in & digging up,
asphyxiating from de-oxygenated history,
desire, healthy-gilled, moves on. Hallowed
we choose, and soon to be swallowed

this moment and the next, we entertain
dread for sake of conversation. Final breath
the switch that flips dusk to dawn, you and I
enter, one by one, the ark, the mothership.
We all must board that skiff eventually.
Why should I care if the pH of your belief
is pond sludge to my frisky brine? Some
silver, shiny, passing school that’s learned
to count past five will snatch both joy & grief
suddenly from beneath.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Dytiscadae: predaceous water beetles
The gorgeous image of a pond surface comes
from http://www.miriadna.com.

Inversions

Tags

#AlainCDexter, #bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, medieval Spanish fixed verse

~~a glosa~~

I’ve been chewing darkness for so long
that I don’t know how to relearn joy;
I’ve been walking on lava for so many years
that my feet have lost all memory of fleece.

—Gabriela Mistral, “Nocturne of Consummation”

~~~

I made away today to the blue green
waters, slipping through crevasses of
musty inattention, past the trawling clusters
of opinionates despairing of their worlds
to reach this remnant of an iron age. I used to wait
on people I adored who saw in everything a wrong.
I danced my favourite red shoes off to prove the right
and bled in endless causes. Nearly lost my head
yearning, fruitless, where I never could belong.
I’ve been chewing darkness for so long

the fife bands of the mind with their penny
whistle tweedling, their tinpot repercussion
of past victimhoods march at my heels, wanting
me to swallow pain as good for me, agree to being
ground to ash until my joints and sinews ache.
Nothing tastes the way it did when I enjoyed
life, which qualifies my joining the insipid who bash
their heads against the walls of Plato’s cave. Their aim
is group concussion, so torpid and pointless a ploy
that I don’t know how to relearn joy.

And yet, now that I’m here
with only forward as my guide
and no convincing evidence that death
like the dusty fly-bit reign of Ozymandias
is worse or better than anything else,
I can turn to the cantankerous my deaf ears,
leave one-trick ponies to their sad politics,
appreciate the strides humanity has made,
has yet to make beyond the vale of fears.
I’ve been walking on lava for so many years

they know my name in Pompeii;
Popocatepetl is my winter home.
But for all the pumice I’ve endured,
the present me sees fresh at every turn
and boredom as the only borderlands.
Prosperous, sans alms or palms to grease,
I welcome the agora surrounding me
whose wares and wherewithals are
so abundant, true, intent on peace
that my feet have lost all memory of fleece.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

As you sneak on (pretending to be blind)

Tags

#AlainCDexter, #bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Ray Bradbury

~~a glosa~~

Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
to detonate the hidden seeds with stealth,
so in your wake a weltering of wealth
springs up unseen, ignored and left behind.

—Ray Bradbury, “Go Panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep”

~~~

Get out ahead, Ray said. He whispered
in my ear from the second tier of theatre seats
where season ticket holders gather to escape.
Your former audience stopped listening years ago,
so why are you still heeding bitter voices
in your head? Imagination does not keep.
It’s manna, fresh dispensed among the tribes
you’re meant to leave, so you can fathom
where the motherlodes of Sheba’s gold run deep.
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep.

Debunkers have their charm. They seem
like hammer-headed moths of vast intelligence.
They flit from mindset to vain hope of possibility,
only to wilt—another failed experiment,
I knew it! Knew what? You would be wise
to ask, but only to and of yourself.
You knew that you would find exactly
what you sought, and hope some future scientist
will prove it? Leave them to their questionable health
to detonate the hidden seeds with stealth…

…and magnify each crystal-studded vein
where economy of thought originates. Think twice:
One. For this I came. Two. For this I surely have
the means. An inch worm dreams of forests,
then, grown wings, discards old measurements.
But what of all those sickly trees you felleth,
gypsy moth? What of them? She will not rue
cocoon or larval path. Shame’s the slimy capital,
concocted and collective. Fly! Propel yourself
so in your wake a weltering of wealth

accumulates, surrounds, and in your seeing
shows itself both spendable and true.
The good you do and will from heights
of first imagined, then believed prosperity
must needs befriend the equally envisioned.
The fallen cannot help the felled to rise. Mind
you, it is true that misery loves company,
but why would you such membership desire?
Expansion is and ever will. That, not of its kind
springs up unseen, ignored and left behind.

~~~

The title of this glosa comes from the sixth line of Ray Bradbury’s poem. Parentheses are my addition.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Studio of the Mind

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Hope Mirrlees, narrative poetry, Spanish medieval fixed verse

Yesterday, while sketching rough lines for the poem you’re about to read, I was pondering the strange nature of blogs. Oceantics has been up and running since September 2012. I’ve posted 476 poems, more or less. What began as something like a dare, then a showcase, has settled into my favourite phase yet, a studio. I post poems here. I try stuff out. The most grindingly awful, I have the freedom to delete. Most, though, have stayed. I’m more in love than ever with the craft of poetry, particularly the privilege of the glosa. Someday, in the ethers, wherever we go after this, I want to bear hug the Spanish courtier who developed this awesome form. I kid you not—the glosa transcends time/space and lets you party with any poet who ever lived.

In the following glosa, I have refracted the poet’s lines to create new end words. Hope Mirrlees won’t mind; she was a great rule breaker. Scarcely known now, Hope was the author of Lud o’ the Mist, a book that inspired some of today’s most successful fantasy novelists, including Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett. Fyfield Books has published her collected poems, from which the following quatrain has been borrowed.
~~~
…a weight of glory so immense / as to appal and freeze
the mortal sense is true in poetry as well
as true in fact. / It can occur both after
and before / the one unchangeable and strict event.

—from “A Portrait of the Second Eve Painted in Pompeian Red” by Hope Mirrlees

What have you seen today?
The blind man at the caravanserai inquires.
Murder, theft, I say, endless dunes,
monotony. A date pit cracks my tooth.
I wake. It was a dream, though I still feel
the grit behind my lids. My world, by degrees,
creeps in: laptop, tablet, ipod, phone. I can’t
leave well enough alone. Popping time-released
gel caps, my shoulders ache with strange dis-ease,
a weight of glory so immense as to appal and freeze.

He reappears in scrubs, pushing
a mop outside the ICU. What have you
seen today? A kind soul, I say, paid this
forward, a venti low-fat caramel latte…
unexpected funds. Guess I’m sort of shallow.
He shakes his head. There is a smell
to presence that you mask and hold at bay,
a musk enticing as a wedding night you chase
and lose and crave what you could once foretell.
The mortal sense is true in poetry as well.

Where deepest violence now blinds, imagination,
fierce desire rise and skip ahead. They’re carving
beyond tragedy new sites. The never searched,
no precedent or archives, is where those angels
of great scholarship assemble to assist, whispering,
Exchange your weary vehemence for rapture.
We’ll provide the evidence both spendable
and luscious. Let darker realms be as they are.
The ultra-rational cannot abide our laughter
as true in fact. It can occur both after

and the during, as your friend, whose Stage IV
illness took her, came to know in final breaths.
Grief angered and engulfed me, but worse,
I also saw, as if I’d grown a multitude of eyes,
more of rage’s like and weight rush in,
barbaric, howling, overwhelming, hell-sent—
until I heard her voice. Not so. You do not have to
breathe your last to know the only destination’s love.
Everyone is light refracted, pretending death, bent
and before the one unchangeable and strict event.

~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2016
A note about the image: I don’t know which Pompeian red painting captured Hope Mirrlees’s imagination, but I like to think it might have been this one. A caption, borrowed from Mauricio Naya’s “Muralis” on Pinterest, states: A new study by Italy’s National Science Foundation (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) has determined that the famous “Pompeian red,” the brilliant red coloring many of the famous frescoed walls of Pompeii, was actually ochre/yellow. According to the study, the yellow color was rendered intense red by the hot gasses emitted during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

2016, the first 720 minutes

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #HappyNewYear, Canadian poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elaine Stirling, glosa, Spanish medieval fixed verse

~~a glosa~~

But then it does not matter. Strange how few,
after all’s said and done, the things that are
of moment. Few indeed! When I can make
of ten small words a rope to hang the world!

—from “Interim”, Edna St. Vincent Millay

The year is new. I have not found
a meme or dubious quotation yet to press
upon the friends I mostly haven’t met.
There’s been no sunset at this longitude,
only rise through which I slept and dreamed
of small regrets. I should get out and do,
but what? One friend is on a plane,
another has six horses to attend. The one
who’s dieting thinks she must lose a size or two,
but then it does not matter. Strange how few

the options seem when the calendar
is fresh, and life and death do not hang
in the balance. I could be content,
pursue new lines of thought, imagine
worlds that might have been, and could be still.
If I’m unfed, one day, by images of war,
infernos, floods, and raging politics,
would I be less a worthy citizen? Would my
withdrawal wound the Senate, leave a scar?
After all’s said and done, the things that are

would be such anyway, or could it be—
strange brew—that my continued
observation seeps like mustard gas
into habitual, low-lying banks of thought
where greenery and possibility once
flourished? Oh, give my head a shake!
Go play outside. Fresh air will do you good.
Inspiration didn’t come back then—I swam
in it, a dolphin, flippered, finned, with no mistake
of moment. Few indeed! When I can make

of this day a borderless idea that the planet
will outlive my worry, longevity’s irrelevant,
that those in little boots with flashing lights,
absorbed in making snowmen, are more
worthy of my admiration than the crumbling
antiquated systems that confused and whirled
me from frivolity to lockstep, then perhaps
I will have made some worthy contribution,
after all, an original pattern knit and purled
of ten small words, a rope to hang the world—

a bright infinity scarf to warm this good New Year!

Happy 2016!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Lovers & Clairvoyants, Despairers & Thieves, 2015

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, glosa, narrative poem, New Year's Eve prophecies, Silvina Ocampo, Spanish medieval fixed verse

Last year on this day, December 31, I danced a glosa, “there are no lost amigos”, with Jack Kerouac from his Book of Sketches. The poem still reads well, and much of it came true—as poems ought to, on this most prophetic occasion. This year, two female poets blend their say with mine. The first is Silvina Ocampo, an Argentine contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges. “The range of her spirit is much greater than my own,” says Borges generously of his friend in a preface to her short story collection, Thus Were Their Faces. Ocampo was also a clairvoyant, which makes the writing of this New Year’s Eve glosa all the more enchanting.

~~~

I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue
well when it has rained.

—from “Song” by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Jason Weiss

I wonder if you’ve noticed, says the tall
thin man to me at the bar, that far less
oxygen is breathed globally on New Year’s
Eve than any other night—until the sex,
of course. They’ve measured it. We
suspend respiration from a fear of time
passing. Brain cells die from forced inebriation.
We greet the new year stupider. That’s why
I only drink soda and thousand dollar red wine.
I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.

He doesn’t know I came with you. You’re mingling
somewhere so I listen to his hypotheses.
They ramble from a scorched dead Earth
to why his mother shelled her peas
to Patsy Cline and BBC, no other.
He grabs my arm. Oh, look, the flake
is here! Comes every year, tells fortunes
by your posture. Snap! I straighten,
nearly wrench a shoulder. Great.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake,

deep, and only vaguely fascinating. I sidle
over, do not catch her name. She’s Kola Sami,
Lapp, born on some Arctic fjord. You’re bored
too easily, she says. All that you once could see,
that saw you back, you’ve stopped believing.
Wait around for others to establish what is true,
and then you preach it, divide yourselves
between the ones who drink and screw and those
who wish they could. If you don’t dissolve the glue
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue

mood, nothing will ever arrive to improve.
She vanishes into the crowd with a whiff
of salt spray and spruce. A Canada goose
calls to her mate from the head of a V
in the moment you appear. Let’s get out of here!
We drive through empty streets until nothing remains
of old anxieties. Above the lake stir Northern Lights,
phosphorescent green. You are lovers, I hear the Sami
say. Be that, no other, as an overflowing, unrestrained
well, when it has rained.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

New Habitants

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #CanadianPoet, Elaine Stirling, glosa, medieval Spanish fixed verse, PM Justin Trudeau, poetry

~~a glosa~~

Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker
on this earth in which life blazes inside all things?
Your liberty does what it wishes with the power it controls,
but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there.

—from “Golden Lines”, Gérard de Nerval, 1854,
translated by Robert Bly

~~~

I have a shelf in a quiet corner
of my house where books appear,
where spines with startling titles
wink like coin upon a beach
you think, at first, is crumpled foil.
I move in close. You little stinker,
where’d you come from? Didn’t I just
dust here yesterday? Three Bly collections,
now there’s four! Best not to blink or—
free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker?

Laughter of the cynical sounds hardy
like a whack across the shoulder blades.
Well met, friend! One scarcely hears
the swallowed—gullible—or feels
the poisoned tip of reason penetrate.
The spy pretends to care. He brings
his little eye of mean intelligence,
then shrinks. He’s leather in the rain.
I know him well. I know he stings
on this earth in which life blazes inside all things.

Meanwhile, this new-found book,
the fourth or maybe fifth this year
falls open as do all things freshly
manifest, and from its novel pages
pour like immigrants through Ellis
and old Halifax onto these shoals
new habitants, thoughts never known.
Tides reverse. My salty backward-facing pillars
burble, angry, smash their begging bowls.
Your liberty does what it wishes with the power it controls,

The pale brittle shell of politics is broken.
Newborn patriots stand blinking in a sun
that’s never shone like this till now.
The rush of sea, the boats well laden
with supplies will dry all eyes
once sorrowful. You who swear
the age of miracles is dead, you’ll find your proofs.
Who negates life for afterlife, division
as your goal, we too will meet somewhere.
But when you gather to plan, the Universe is not there.

~~~

It’s been a while since I’ve written a glosa, but even longer since I’ve felt proud of my nation and government down to the cellular level. There’s been a sea change in Canada since the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I see young people politically engaged for the first time. American friends post videos of our PM greeting new arrivals and say they feel the shift too, even through all their media clamour.

If glosas and form poetry appeal to you, please visit my website where you can learn more–and perhaps buy a book or two.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Robert Bly’s scintillating translation of Nerval comes from News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness, published in 1980.