More Poetry/Fav. Quotes, Part Three, by:
Wolf Britain, Poet and Activist
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Prescript: I'm looking for someone to go 50/50 with me and move to either Ecuador, Costa Rica, Belize, Guatemala, or Mexico where we can make a very low income go much further with a lower cost, and higher standard, of living (than living in the States on such a low income). This includes an only income of Social Security Disability (SSDI) and/or Retirement benefits. The Social Security Administration most definitely DOES allow SSDI and/or Retirement benefits, but not Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits, to be sent to recipients in most other countries! There are many books about moving and living abroad available at the public library and/or at Amazon.com . Naturally, I realize we would probably have to spend some time getting to know eachother, and finding out if we're compatible, before moving abroad together. We could even have our own separate "spaces" by choosing to rent or purchase a house or apartment with separate quarters, and still save considerable money in monthly costs compared to living in the States on the same income. If you might be interested, want to ask me some questions, and/or want to discuss it, please e-mail me at the address below.
CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE
(Click on the link to go to that part of the page):
Selected Poems Of Pablo Neruda
(A Great Book by the Nobel Prize Winning Chilean Poet)
"Ars Poetica"
"Poets Celestial"
"Cristobal Miranda"
"The Poet"
"Diver"
"Poet Grown Old"
Extravagaria
(Another Book of Wonderful Poems by Pablo Neruda)
"Parthenogenesis"
"We Are Many"
THE FOLLOWING POEMS OF THE GREAT NOBEL PRIZE WINNING POET, PABLO NERUDA, WERE ADDED TO THE SITE ON 11-4-01:
Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
[(The Chilean Poet) 1904-1973;
Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc.;
Copyright © 1961 by Ben Belitt,
Editor and Translator.]
"Those who shun the 'bad taste' of things will fall on their face(s) in the snow." [Id., "Toward An Impure Poetry" (Preface written by Pablo Neruda), page 40.]
"ARS POETICA"
"Between dark and the void, between virgins and garrisons,
with my singular heart and my mournful conceits
for my portion, my forehead despoiled, overtaken by pallors,
a grief-maddened widower bereft of a lifetime;
for every invisible drop that I taste in a stupor, alas,
for each intonation I concentrate, shuddering,
I keep the identical thirst of an absence, the identical chill
of a fever; sounds, coming to be; a devious anguish
as of thieves, and chimeras approaching;
so, in the shell of extension, profound and unaltering,
demeaned as a kitchen-drudge, like a bell sounding hoarsely,
like a tarnishing mirror, or the smell of a house's abandonment
where the guests stagger homeward, blind drunk, in the night, and
the reek of their clothes rises out of the floor, an absence of flowers
---could it be differently put, a littlee less ruefully, possibly?---
All the truth blurted out: wind strikes at my breast like a blow,
the ineffable body of night, fallen into my bedroom,
the roar of a morning ablaze with some sacrifice,
that begs my prophetical utterance, mournfully;
an impact of objects that call and encounter no answer,
unrest without respite, an anomalous name."
[Id., Residence on Earth (Grouping/Chapter),
Series 1 {1925-1931} (Subgrouping/Subchapter),
page 57.]
"POETS CELESTIAL"
"What has it come to, you Gideans,
Rilkeans, intellect-mongers,
obscurantists, false
existential witch doctors, surrealist
butterflies ablaze
on the carrion, you up-to-the-minute
continental cadavers,
green grubs in the cheeses
of Capital---what did you do
in the kingdoms of agony,
in sight of a nameless humanity
and their vexed acquiescence,
heads drowned
in the offal, the harrowed
quintessence of life trampled under?
"Flight and escape: nothing more. You peddled
the rinds of the midden-heap,
probed for a heaven of hair,
pusillanimous plants, fingernail parings:
'pure beauty,' 'sorcery'---
all that wretched device of the fainthearted
averting their gazes, looking askance,
disengaging their delicate
eyeballs, to root in a
platter of rinsings and garbage
flung down to you there by the lordlings,
blind to the agony that works in the stone,
disclaiming all quarrels, undefended:
blinder by far than the funeral
wreath in the rain of the graveyard,
that falls on the motionless
compost of flowers, on the mounds."
[Id., General Song (1950), page 143.]
"CRISTOBAL MIRANDA
(Stevedore, Tocopilla)"
"I knew you in the big bay boats, Cristobal,
on a day when the niter
came down to the sea's edge, in November's
scalding investiture.
I remember some ravished serenity,
the summits of metal and the unmoving water;
and a man wetted down in his sweat,
moving a cargo of snow, whose trade is with boats.
For nitrate moved with the snow, shed
on the harrowing shoulders, blind in
the boatholds, and falling:
for the stevedores, the heroes of morning,
bitten with acids, death's
imminent timeservers, taking
the prodigal niter, unshaken.
Cristobal: this keepsake's for you---
a shoveler's fellowship, hearts
tumid with strain; the unascending eagles
into whose breathing the acids
and homicide gases have entered:
for all good men brought down in the street,
who wheel
toward the broken cross of their pampa.
Cristobal: no more of that now.
This paper commends you to all,
all mariners, men
blackened with boats in the bay. My eyes
go with yours in this stint,
my force in the heft of your shovel,
in a desert's substance---standing near to you,
loading the blood and the snow and unloading it."
[Id., Id. (Id.), page 171.]
"THE POET"
"That time when I moved among happenings
in the midst of my mournful devotions; that time
when I cherished a leaflet of quartz,
at gaze in a lifetime's vocation.
I ranged in the markets of avarice
where goodness is bought for a price, breathed
the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman
contention of masks and existences.
I endured in the bog-dweller's element; the lily
that breaks on the water in a sudden
disturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me.
Whatever the foot sought, the spirit deflected,
or sheered toward the fang of the pit.
So my poems took being, in travail
retrieved from the thorn, like a penance,
wrenched by a seizure of hands, out of solitude;
or they parted for burial
their secretest flower in immodesty's garden.
Estranged to myself, like (a) shadow on water,
that moves through a corridor's fathoms,
I sped through the exile of each man's existence,
this way and that, and so, to habitual loathing;
for I saw that their being was this: to stifle
one half of existence’s fullness like fish
in an alien limit of ocean. And there,
in immensity's mire, I encountered death;
Death grazing the barriers,
Death opening roadways and doorways."
[Id., Id. (Id.), page 177.]
"DIVER"
"The rubber man
rose from the sea.
"Seated,
he seemed
like a globular
king
of the waters,
a bulbous
and secretive
cuttlefish,
the truncated
device
of invisible algae.
"From their boats, in mid-ocean,
the fishermen
sink
in their rags
blue
with the night
of the ocean:
around them arise
the great fish of phosphor,
a voltage
of fire,
they go under:
around them, the sea urchins
tumble, piling
the silt
with the splintering spite
of their hackles.
"The underseas
man
thrashes the breadth of his legs;
languidly
reels
in the horror of fish gut:
gulls
slash
the limitless air
with their hurrying scissors;
the diver
toils
through the sand
like a drunkard,
swarthy
and comatose,
locked
into his clothing, cetacean,
half-earthen,
half-ocean,
going nowhere,
inept
in the rubbery bulk
of his feet.
"He goes on to his birth-throes.
The ocean
gives way
like a womb
to this innocent:
he floats sullen
and strengthless
and barbarous,
like
the
newly born.
"Time after time
he takes hold of the water, the sand,
and is
born again.
Submerging
each day
to the hold
of the pitiless
current,
Pacific and
Chilean
cold,
the diver
must practice
his
birth again,
make himself
monstrous
and tentative,
displace himself
fearfully,
grow wise
in his slothful
mobility, like
an underseas
moon.
Even
his thinking
must merge
with the water:
he harvests
inimical
fruits, stalactites,
treasures,
in the pit of solitude
drenched
with the wash
of those graveyards---
as others
would turn up a cauliflower,
he comes up
to the light---
black air in a bubble---
to Mercedes,
Clara, Rosaura.
It is painful
to walk like a man again,
to think as a man thinks, to eat
again.
All
is beginning again
for
the bulking,
ambiguous man
staggering still
in the dark
of two different abysses.
This I know---
do I not?---
as I know my existence: all
things I have seen and considered.
The way of the diver
is hazardous? The vocation
is
infinite."
[Id., Elemental Odes (1954-1957),
Third Book of Odes. (1957),
pages 227-233.]
"POET GROWN OLD"
"He gave me his hand
like an old tree
that lengthens the fork
of its branches,
leafless
and fruitless.
His
hand
that unbound, while it wrote,
the fiber and weave
of
a destiny,
now rayed
with the hairline
striations:
the days and the months and the years.
Time
scribbled
its drouth
in his face,
wayward
and meager,
as if
to dispose
all the lines and the signs
of his birth,
until, little by little,
the air would erect what it saw
and establish it there.
"Long lines where the depths were,
compendious chapters
for the years of his face,
querulous symbols,
and equivocal fables,
asterisks---
whatever the sirens forgot
in an old
isolation of spirit,
or dropped
from the sky and the stars,
was scored
in his face.
Olden
and bardic,
his pen
never fixed
on the obdurate page
the river that spills
through our life
or the anonymous god
that attended his verses.
[Continued below.]
Continued below:
Continued:
THE FOLLOWING ARE A CONTINUATION OF EXCERPTS OF POEMS BY PABLO NERUDA, WHICH WERE ADDED TO THE SITE ON 11-5-01:
Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
[(The Chilean Poet) 1904-1973;
Copyright © 1961 by Grove Press, Inc.;
Copyright © 1961 by Ben Belitt,
Editor and Translator.]
[Continued.]
"POET GROWN OLD"
[Continued from above.]
"Now
on his cheekbones
the whole of
the mystery
charted
its algebra
in cold
revelations:
the little,
unvarying
slights
of the underprized,
cut hard
on the page of his
forehead;
and
starved
as the beak
of the wandering cormorant,
journeys and waters
had shored
on the dearth
of his
nose
their bluest
calligraphy.
"Two chips
of intractable flint,
two watery
agates:
only that.
His eyes lived
embattled;
only there
could I summon
the blaze
in the cinder,
a rose
in the hands of
the poet.
"Now
his clothing
outnumbered him,
he lived
in the void
of his clothes,
like a house.
All the bones
of his
body
drew close to
his skin
and faulted him upward:
a bone man
displayed, a bony
prefigurement,
a lessening tree
gone to bone, in the end,
a poet
put out
by the scrawl
of the rain
in the unquenchable
downpour of time.
"I left him there,
nimble with dying,
walking toward death
as one who awaited a presence
stripped to the bone, like himself,
in a darkening park;
each by the other,
they moved
toward a
bedroom's dishevelment,
toward the sleep
we shall sleep out together,
whosoever
we are: a man
with
a withering
rose
in
his
hand, dustily
fallen
to dust."
[Elemental Odes (1954-1957),
Third Book of Odes. (1957),
Pages 265-273.]
Extravagaria,
by the Chilean Poet, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
[Translation copyright © 1969, 1970, 1972, 1974 by Alastair Reid
Second University of Texas Press printing, 1994.]
"PARTHENOGENESIS"
"All those who used to give me advice
are crazier every day.
Luckily I ignored them
and they went to another city
where they all live together
constantly swapping sombreros.
"They were worthy subjects,
politically thoughtful,
and every fault I committed
caused them such suffering
that they turned grey and wrinkled,
gave up eating chestnuts,
and an autumnal melancholy
finally left them delirious.
"Now I don't know what to be,
forgetful or respectful;
to continue to give them counsel
or reproach them for their madness.
I cannot claim independence.
I am lost in so much foliage---
should I leave, or enter,
travel or linger,
buy cats or tomatoes?
"I will try to understand
what I mustn't do, then do it,
and so be able to justify
the ways which might escape me,
for if I don't make mistakes,
who will believe in my errors?
If I go on being wise,
no one will notice me.
"But I will try to change,
offer greetings with great care
and look to appearances
with dedication and zeal
until I am all that they wish,
as one might be and another might not,
till I exist only in others.
"And then, if they leave me in peace,
I am going to change completely,
and differ with my skin;
and when I have another mouth,
other shoes, other eyes;
when it is all different,
and no one can recognize me,
since anything else is beyond me,
I shall go on doing the same."
(Id., pages 83-85.)
"WE ARE MANY"
"Of the many men who I am, who we are,
I can't find a single one;
they disappear among my clothes,
they've left for another city.
"When everything seems to be set
to show me off as intelligent,
the fool I always keep hidden
takes over all that I say.
"At other times, I'm asleep
among distinguished people,
and when I look for my brave self,
a coward unknown to me
rushes to cover my skeleton
with a thousand fine excuses.
"When a decent house catches fire,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and that's me. What can I do?
What can I do to distinguish myself?
How can I pull myself together?
"All the books I read
are full of dazzling heroes,
always sure of themselves.
I die with envy of them;
and in films full of wind and bullets,
I goggle at the cowboys,
I even admire the horses.
"But when I call for a hero,
out comes my lazy old self;
so I never know who I am,
nor how many I am or will be.
I'd love to be able to touch a bell
and summon the real me,
because if I really need myself,
I mustn't disappear.
"While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.
I would like to know if others
go through the same things that I do,
have as many selves as I have,
and see themselves similarly;
and when I've exhausted this problem,
I'm going to study so hard
that when I explain myself,
I'll be talking geography."
(Id., pages 99-101.)
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Postscript: I'm looking for someone to go 50/50 with me and move to either Ecuador, Costa Rica, Belize, Guatemala, or Mexico where we can make a very low income go much further with a lower cost, and higher standard, of living (than living in the States on such a low income). This includes an only income of Social Security Disability (SSDI) and/or Retirement benefits. The Social Security Administration most definitely DOES allow SSDI and/or Retirement benefits, but not Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits, to be sent to recipients in most other countries! There are many books about moving and living abroad available at the public library and/or at Amazon.com . Naturally, I realize we would probably have to spend some time getting to know eachother, and finding out if we're compatible, before moving abroad together. We could even have our own separate "spaces" by choosing to rent or purchase a house or apartment with separate quarters, and still save considerable money in monthly costs compared to living in the States on the same income. If you might be interested, want to ask me some questions, and/or want to discuss it, please e-mail me at the address below.
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