Chuang Tzu: pleasure in seeing leads to excessive pursuit of brilliant colours
Be a mensch about the concomitant pain
But make your mark - in reserved blue or lollipop pink -
There are people out there waiting for wondrous signs
A wondrous word, a brilliant colour
Or something yummy like a fig, which flourishes in fertile and sun drenched valleys
(oh simple life: keeping a pig, some goats, an orchard)
(burning the football coach in effigy)
The world waits like a brilliantly coloured egg whose goose has flown
Feasting, fasting, what’s to choose?
Desire at 3am, lonely as we are, or
Some other distracting device?
CT again: no grand design, choose your own
Or Janet, drunk on the train: How lost can you get? It’s all the same day, it’s all the
same time
Robbed of everything but your life, your limbs and the sky's colours
Which mime Bach wailing on an organ as the sun goes down
What was that Janet? (her face is lined, she speaks softly)
Shhhhh, she says … [silence] … (Suddenly sober eyes shiny with tears)
Excessive? Sure. They gave me a pinhole to look at the universe
A pinhole, and now I feast on light
They gave me an island, when I wanted the world
They gave me the world, when I wanted an island, when I forgot I’d be dead
And now I know what language the dead speak
And why the dancers wear gold and white
And how a perfect sentence is constructed
(Like a kiss) (you have a beautiful mouth)
Thank you Janet, your chariot awaits
(Now it’s back to the simple life, climbing the ladder)
Turn up your lamp, put water in your bathtub
Remember Goethe’s last words, which weren’t that pompous “More light!” but “Give
me your little paw”
And bathe in the memory of that orchard
The great rooted blossomers heavy, heavy, the little stream singing its name
Someone reciting a poem in a strange language
Someone saying, “At least that’s the theory”
Someone dividing the Real from the Illusory
Someone stripping the bark from a stick
The Book of Answers is full of questions
That only violins can ask
Through the smoke the brilliant colours loom
But the fire brings down the power lines
And fills our screens with dots and squiggles
Like the pages of an indecipherable script
A score by Sun Ra
Two days later, fire out, black stumps jut from the spines of every ridge
It's like a funeral pyre thinks Janet - but whose?
Don't give it a second thought, says CT
Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to decipher invisible ink
(oh simple life: strolling down the street)
When the sky disappears, a fragment of our world is lost.
Let effortless abandon accompany you through that fertile plain
Or not, “the demands / are entirely self-imposed” (that quote’s from Hollo’s Heavy
Jars)
Freak, panic, gibber, scream (oh simple life!): “river and stream work out their will” (that’s Yeats in Wind Among the Reeds)
A syllable of light speaks through a voice of colour
To Janet, though the view from the train is a patriarchal blur
Named Tuesday for a god of sky and war
Though this can’t be a train, she thinks, foot-deep in leaves as if walking cross a forest
floor
Where a sign says “Reserved”. “Oh”, she thinks “I'm just a visitor.
But that's OK, it's all here, in my notebook”
-Janet Kaplinski
[Note: Translated with the help of the author and Alan Baker]