Habitus

by David Gutherz · 07/12/10

“Soccer,” our friend Alexander Hemon recently observed, “is like literature. It provides access to a country. No one reads books just from their own country.” Certainly an “un-American” sentiment if I’ve ever heard one, but one that caught our attention. And so we thought: what better way to honor Spain’s long-awaited World Cup victory than with some classic Sephardi poetry, translated by the great Peter Cole?! Moshe Ibn Ezra’s  ”The World” seems particularly apropos:

The World

Men of the world have the world in their heart,
God set it in them when they were born—
it’s a flowing stream that won’t suffice
though the sea becomes its source,

as if its water turned to salt
when a parched heart called out to them—
they pour it from buckets into their mouths
but their thirst is never quenched.

Or, for the morning after, Ezra’s “Weak With Wine.”

Weak with Wine

We woke, weak with wine from the party,
barely able to get up and walk
to the meadow wafting its spices—
the scents of cassia and cloves:

and the sun had embroidered its surface with blossoms
and across it spread a deep blue robe.

And finally, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, here is contemporary Dutch poetess Judith Herzberg (translated by Shirley Kaufman in conjunction with the author) reflecting on a sound that was repeated (no doubt too many times) throughout the yellow-card flooded game.

OW!

Could there be such a thing, a law
for the conservation of pain,
so that if we fight it here,
someone somewhere will be hurt
worse than the sound of ow?

Or does pain, like energy
(sorry, analogy), transform itself
not into heat, but somehow
into a kind of freeze
worse than the sound of ow?

Or could it be the pain we drive out
takes on a different form,
unlaughed, unsung, disavowed,
stiffens our pain-thirsty bodies
aching for the sound of ow?

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by Olga Zondberg · 01/21/10

[This is the shortest day of the year in our neck of the woods.]

The divergence of animals, said Khlebnikov
is the result of their ability
to see God in many different ways.

If the Universe, said Hawking
was different, we still
would not notice.

From Chanel to Escape (remembered
one pretty fashion magazine)
in every year death has a different scent.

There are these people, writers
who have everything written down
the tics and the tacs
in place of numerical facsimiles

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by Joshua Ellison · 09/02/09

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

From poets.org

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by Andrei Codrescu · 09/23/08

The Mold Song

it was one of a kind
the earliest map of the united states
it was hanging right here on the wall
the mold ate it all
in one gulp the mold ate it all
and these books the only copies
of newton franklin galileo
and this shakespeare folio
the mold ate them like they were candy
look at the satisfied grinning mold
stretching from floor to floor
like a fifties horror movie mold
not to speak of this stack of cash
I shoulda never kept around
not a zero left in the whole stack
look at me I’m growing old
I’m giving myself to the mold
it’s some kind of lesson
it’s some kind of horror story
keep collecting paper things
I knew that one day I’d be sorry
I’m not wearing a mask
I’m not wearing any gloves
I feel stupid I feel cold
I’m giving myself to the mold
halloween and suicide rolled in one
I shoulda sold I shoulda sold
only in new orleans only in new orleans
halloween and suicide all in one
a man of means

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