[ Every child needs a Giant Peach ]

I woke up with the evening sky surrounding me, which was enormously comforting and serene. The crisp white rigging of the athletics stadium on one end and the bright concrete of the undergraduate dorms on the other. And I looked over to the Sears tower with it tiny blinking electric lights and wondered, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a peach were to get stuck in it?

I could live my life waking up under my coat, in train stations, airports, and big glass cages that look over Chicago. But yes, the peach. I think James and the Giant Peach was one of the best books ever written because it was so utterly believable. I remember exactly how James lost the magic green crystals the strange man gave him, I remember how neatly there was a Spider and a Silkworm who could provide bedding and ropes and all sorts of useful things. And I remember how simple it was to sail and fly away on a giant peach with perfectly benign giant insects, into shark infested waters (the sharks could do nothing, obviously, the peach was too big for them to eat and besides, their pointy noses got in the way of devouring it) and over cities of beautifully haunting cloud people. And how finally the peach powered by the magical, miraculous, ingenious and totally believable flock of a hundred seagulls deposited them neatly on top of the Empire State Building.

I could live like that forever, waking up under the great warm blanket of blue skies and falling in love with the way the sun sets the entire western surface of a tall tower ablaze. Forever being until it’s suddenly dark and cold and our hearts crave small things – familiar smells, warm food and soft brown hands. Forever being until I stumble upon moments of great joy and wish I had the courage to ask you to share them with me without being afraid of you saying “no.”

In large cities, miles and months away from home the sky can be a wonderfully comforting thing.

[ A "Thank You" Note ]

Wislawa Szymborska

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.
I don't wait for them
from window to door.

Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.
They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

Translated from Polish by: Joanna Maria Trzeciak

and for those we love,
Wislawa? rooms of
open books,
gnawing, unfinished poems
no peace
no relief
and endless waiting
by windows.

[ i do not know what it is ]

It's raining in Madison. Poetry is easier to get away with these days, it doesn't require explanations or evoke criticism in the same way that prose does. M read two passages from Kundera last night, I thought of Szymborska and worried about the recurrence of experience and realised that she was alseep.

The Premise.

At about the same time, he had the following experience: He had been meeting a young woman in a room that an old friend put at his disposal every day until midnight. After a month or two, she reminded him of one of their earlier encounters: they had made love on a rug under the window while it was thundering and lightning outside; they had made love for the length of the storm; it had been unforgettably beautiful!
Tomas was appalled. Yes, he remembered making love to her on the rug (his friend slept on a narrow couch that Tomas found uncomfortable), but he had completely forgotten the storm! It was odd. He could recall each of their times together; he had even kept close track of the ways they made love (she refused to be entered from behind); he remembered several of the things she had said during intercourse (she would ask him to squeeze her hips and stop looking at her all the time); he even remembered the cut of her lingerie; but the storm had left no trace.
Of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against. All else he excluded (almost pedantically) from his memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman, if that event occurred before his sexual offensive began.
The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
By the word “non-love” I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was him memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknownst to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.
Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women.

Finally,

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a (wo)man enters her first word into our poetic memory.

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

..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;

(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

Such small hands, in the rain, in thunderstorms, that experience. Of flesh, friendship, idiocy. Those mistake(s), the ones that gnaw deep inside your belly, hound you with shame and regret. And then I emerge from this dream, look at the piles of letters and articles and multiple regressions around me and remark that the rain has frozen, M, shouldn't we...
Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the intense fragile stupidity of love. Of children, lying in bed, tumbling naked and flushed with enough poetry that when he touches her, when her mouth whispers close to his neck she says the voice of your eyes is... of course, wonderful and stupid.

[ Frames ]

If ever you pass by
two oh nine you may hear
Rilke whispering.

Hand on hand
tall man, in
dark clothes mumbling
about birds
and grace
love and death

forsaking a verse
between spanish and
statistics,
one oh one.

Or if you were to walk
through galleries eight,
nine and
seventeen
you will see her lean

on stockinged feet
head aside
listening
for shouts and
sighs
tasting ink
bleed the canvas,
hushed leather
crossing
orators, minotaurs, shiva
and coughing,
slightly.

and if you care to brave
the heavy
cooked air in
hallway twelve,
you might find
german expressionists
pin the room
around their
frames,
great anchors
of human shame holding the building down.

only
the bold
carry Industriebauern like dark, heavy iron
in their heart.
stepping outside, the cold air usually dissolves any residues of guilt.


you and i
go in two fifty,
with the Monet
reprints and that
collection of frescoes donated by the
church,
the paper
only slightly worn
for use. it becomes
easier, every time i look and
these days
our laughter almost always
drowns
in tides of traffic
crashing on Michigan Avenue.

01-03-09