Reflections of a Man's Heart

What will become of these

my many lives,

abandoned each morning abruptly to their own fates?

 

Of the fox who stopped to look at me,

bright death stippling her muzzle,

and announced -clearly, simply- "I was hungry"?

Of the engine left half-disassembled,

the unmendable roof leaks, the waiting packed bags?

 

Cloudbellies of horses drinking at sunset.

Fierce embraces remembered half a day if at all.

 

Even the bedside jar of minute and actual seashells

wavers and thins -

though each was lifted, chosen,

I no longer recall whether in joy or distraction,

in foreknowledge or false belief.

 

How much more elusive, these half-legible scribblings.

If souvenirs at all, they are someone else's.

As each of my memories,

it seems, is destined to be someone else's.

 

to belong to a woman who

looks faintly like me and whom I wish well,

as one would any stranger passed in a shop, on the street.

 

- Jane Hirshfield, Given sugar, given salt.

I believe you are more mine than my skin. When I seek

Within me, along my veins, in my blood, my mysterious

Circulatory branches of light that I tell over,

It is you I find, as if you were blood,

As if you were stone or a bite.

I stay outside late, reason, delirium, clothes.

I am of an old race of darkness and forests,

But while I bend down as in a well and enter

Feeling my way like a blind man in my own territory,

I find no railing to direct my steps,

But, instead, the growth of your rose in my own dwelling.

Deep in me you go on growing, unfathomable

In your origin, I cannot touch your eyes

Without burning my fingernails on their petals,

The flames of your form which burn in my thirst,

The leaves of your face which build your absence.

I ask, “Who is there? Who is there?” as if very late,

Very late, somebody knocked

On my door, and then in the middle

Of emptiness there was nothing but air,

Water, trees, the dying daily fire,

As if there was nothing there but everything which exists,

Nothing but all the earth which had rapped on my door.

So, nameless, vague as life, turbid

As the burgeoning mud and vegetation,

You awake in my breast whenever I shut my eyes.

When I lie on the earth you come into being

Like the flowing dust, the river deepening its bed,

Guarding a tangle of naked roots

Which grows as grows your presence in me,

Which accompanies their darkness as you accompany me.

So, here, blood or wheat, earth or fire, we live

Like a single plant which cannot explain its leaves.

 

- Pablo Neruda

To know the why we are

we have only this body

covering us.

I'm not a presence that can cover you.

 

- José Hierro

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

 

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

 

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

 

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

 

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

 

- e e cummings

The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.

We must get up and take that in,

that wind that lets us live.

Breathe, before it's gone.

- Rumi

- Even blue mold is

A map of dream,

Oh lunar park!

 

I waited in a map of dreams

and I found the town

was exactly as the map showed

a town covered with a thin seven colored membrane of oil

with a maze shaped like a big fluffy pliant cat

with transparent streets one on top of the other

on this side of the street along the beach

what does the unhurt dream once more melt into?

It melts into the map of the mesh  of the blood vessels

throughout the body.

into the town of the cat shaped maze

harbor, amphitheatre, park, restaurant,

then an eternal voyager who will never return

then an eternal surveyor who will come

then a hyena

 

(It was in those days that I had a job in a 

restaurant in a secluded alley at the base of

the cat's tail. A little ways away there was a

heart shaped park which the neighbors called

Cat's Balls Park but its polite name was Luna

Park I don't know why they called it that I

like the name Cat's Balls better. (Maybe

because there was such a marvelous view of

the moon from the park) Since he never came

back every day I broke a china beckoning-cat

into pieces throwing it on the floor of the

damp kitchen. (I agreed that they could

deduct the price of the cat from my pay) Each

time I did it the aged cook grinned and gave

me a donut. I picked up the pieces of cat and

ate the donut).

 

Over the faded park the sky drizzling rain lost the moon

from the spring showers to the monsoons

throw away the transparent sphere

it's only a childish ball game

nobody has ever survived

except as a fat ghost.

 

(So the old cook advised me out of his gentle wisdom)

 

In a white glass jar like an amphithreatre

my fingers scoop out cold cream

what is being torn off, my fingers or the cosmetics?

transparent grains conceal themselves in the essence of the cream

their small dull points make my blood spurt

and stream under the smooth hills of my fingers

a gush of magma of my scanty blood

my lips suck it up

dizziness for smallness

 

A mental compass constantly draws transparent circumferences

Sweeping up and down on the curved surface inside the sphere.

 

Its reality wears a sandal that is perhaps a full vision of the moon

The moon waning in the shape of a gentle inlet of  south sea island is his toenail

This is a land from which a sail hardly ever returns

 

Beware captain,

of the singing voices don't tie your body

to the goin insane masts

don't be enraptured by the beatific death

in the whirlpool of transparent fruit juice

or the tornado of sand that reveals death

at the end of its wandering voyage

don't look. Don't forget the restaurant here in this country.

 

(So the old cook filled with mild sadness advised again)

 

In a restaurant in a secluded alley at the base

of the tail, in the town of the cat shaped maze,

I waited for him to come back to me. In their

comfortable cage in the park the bears

wandered around in their trousers, and the

hyena having just arrived from the South ran

as hard as he could on the road of night and

bit me on the shoulder and I waited

drinking off the pale white milk. But he did not

come back. I waited in the town of the maze

shaped like the cat and the town became

more and more transparent, and the harbor

became a bay where a drop of the cat's tears

calmed itself.

 

- Kanai Mieko