16-4-2005

ELAINE FEINSTEIN

(b. 1930)

 

 

Her site

Contemporary writers

 

 

INDEX:

Anniversary

Blue Snow

Coastline

Dad 

Dignity

England

Getting older

Green

Home

Muse

PARK PARADE, CAMBRIDGE

Patience

A Pebble on Your Grave

Regret

SNOWY LANDSCAPES

SOME UNEASE AND ANGELS

Strong doesn't mate with strong

The Feast of Eurydice

The magic apple tree

The Medium

THE ONLY GOOD LIFE IS LIVED

Urban Lyric

Elaine Feinstein

 

 

 

Coastline

 

 

This is the landscape of the Cambrian age:
       shale, blue quartz, planes of slate streaked with
iron and lead; soapstone, spars of calcite;
       in these pools, fish are the colour of sand,
velvet crabs like weeds, prawns transparent as water.

 

This shore was here before man. Every tide
       the sea returns, and floats the bladderwrack.
The flower animals swell and close over creatures
       rolled-in, nerveless, sea-food, fixed and forgotten.

 

My two thin boys balance on Elvan stone
       bent-backed, intent, crouched with their string and pins,
their wet feet white, lips salt, and skin wind-brown,
       watching with curiosity and compassion:
further out, Time and Chance are waiting to happen.

 

 

Litoral

 

Esta é a paisagem da idade câmbrica:

xisto, quartzo azul, placas de ardósia estriadas

de ferro e chumbo; pedra-sabão, formações de calcite;

nas poças há peixes cor de areia, caranguejos

aveludados como algas, camarões transparentes como água.

 

Esta praia estava aqui antes do homem. Com as marés

regressa o mar, flutua o sargaço,

os animais-flor incham e curvam-se sobre seres

arrastados. inertes, alimento apenas: arcaicos e esquecidos.

 

Meus dois filhos franzinos equilibram-se no rochedo de Elvan,

atentos, debruçados sobre os seus alfinetes e cordéis,

com os pés molhados e brancos, lábios salgados, pele queimada pelo vento

e observam com curiosidade e compaixão:

ao largo, o Tempo e o Acaso esperam.

 

 

 

Getting older

The Author reads the poem, video     

 

The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not.

I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.

Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same darkness
which for me is silence.

Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say

as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration
.   

 

ENVELHECER

 

 

 

 

 

A primeira surpresa: agrada-me.

Agora, haja o que houver, algumas coisas

que eram assustadoras deixaram de o ser:

 

por exemplo, não morri cedo. Nem perdi

o meu único amor. Nenhum dos meus três filhos

se viu forçado a abandonar ninguém.

 

Não me digam que esta gratidão é complacente.

Todos nos aproximamos da mesma escuridão

que para mim é o silêncio.

 

Saber isto torna ainda mais vivo

o meu deleite pelas frésias de Janeiro,

pelo café quente e o sol de Inverno. Assim

 

dizemos, juntos, num momento de ternura:

cada dia que for ganho à escuridão

é tudo o que podemos celebrar.

 

 

 

 

 

Patience

The Author reads the poem     

In water nothing is mean. The fugitive
enters the river, she is washed free;
her thoughts unravel like weeds of
green silk: she moves downstream
as easily as any cold-water creature

can swim between furred stones, brown
fronds, boots and tins the river holds equally.
The trees hiss overhead. She feels their shadows.
She imagines herself clean as a fish,
evasive, solitary, dumb. Her prayer:
to make peace with her own monstrous nature.

 

PACIÊNCIA

 

 

 

Na água nada é banal. A fugitiva

entra no rio que a lava e a liberta;

os pensamentos desenredam-se como algas

de seda verde: avança pela corrente

tão à vontade como as criaturas da água fria

 

nadam por entre pedras musgosas, ramagens

escuras, botas e latas que o rio também leva.

As árvores sussurram. Ela sente as suas sombras.

Imagina-se limpa como um peixe,

fugidia, solitária, muda. Eis a sua prece:

celebrar a paz com a sua natureza monstruosa.

 

 

 

 

Anniversary

The Author reads the poem     

 

Suppose I took out a slender ketch from

under the spokes of Palace pier tonight to

catch a sea going fish for you

 

or dressed in antique goggles and wings and

flew down through sycamore leaves into the park

 

or luminescent through some planetary strike

put one delicate flamingo leg over the sill of your lab

 

Could I surprise you?    or would you insist on

keeping a pattern to link every transfiguration?

 

Listen, I shall have to whisper it

into your heart directly:     we are all

supernatural   /     every day

we rise new creatures  /  cannon be predicted

 

Aniversário

 

Se eu pegasse num pequeno barco esguio

atado ao cais e esta noite

te oferecesse um peixe do alto mar

 

ou se pusesse óculos de aviador e asas

e descesse entre as folhas do sicómoro até ao jardim

 

ou se, iridiscente pela força dos planetas,

pousasse uma perna de flamingo na janela do teu laboratório

 

ficarias surpreendido? ou insistirias em que

tem de haver um modelo para todas as transfigurações?

 

Ouve, terei de segredar

ao teu próprio coração: todos somos

sobrenaturais / e em cada dia

erguemo-nos como novos seres / imprevisíveis

 
 

 

 

 

The Medium

 

My answer would have to be music

which is always deniable, since in my

silence, which you question, is only a landscape

 

of water, old trees and a few irresolute

birds. The weather is also inconstant.

Sometimes the light is golden, the leaves unseasonable.

 

And sometimes the ice is red, and the moon

hangs over it, peeled, like a Chinese fruit.

I am sorry not to be more articulate.

 

When I try, the words turn ugly as rats and

disorder everything, I cannot be quiet,

I want so much to be quiet and loving

 

If only you wanted that. My sharpest thoughts

wait like assassins always in the dry wheat. They

chat and grin. Perhaps you should talk to them?

 

 O Medium

 

A minha resposta deveria ser música,

o que é sempre discutível, visto que ao pores em dúvida

o meu silêncio esqueces como ele é só uma paisagem

 

de água, velhas árvores e alguns pássaros

indecisos. Também o tempo é inconstante.

Doura-se por vezes a luz e as folhas nascem fora de época.

 

Por vezes o gelo é vermelho e um fruto

sem casca parece-se com a lua suspensa.

Perdoa-me por não me explicar melhor.

 

Quando o tento, as palavras parecem ratazanas

e tudo estragam; não consigo estar calada,

queria tanto ser meiga e conservar-me em silêncio

 

se assim o quisesses. Os meus pensamentos mais cortantes

aguardam como assassinos nas searas secas. Sussurram,

com esgares. Não será com eles que te deves entender?

 

 

 

From The Feast of Eurydice

      1.

 

    The dead are strong.

That winter as you wandered,

    the cold continued, still

the brightness cut

    my shape into the snow:

I would have let you go!

 

    Your mother blew

my dust into your lips

    a powder white as cocaine,

my name, runs to your nerves

    and now I move again in your song.

You will not let me go.

 

    The dead are strong.

Although in darkness I was lost:

    and had forgotten all pain

long ago: in your song

    my lit face remains

and so we go

 

    over pools that crack

like glass, through forests shining

    black with twigs that wait

for you to wake them, I return

    in your praise, as Eurydice’s

ghost I light the trees.

 

    The dead are strong.

 

 

3

 

A path of cinders, I remember,

    and limping upward

not yet uprooted from

    my dream, a ghost

 

with matted eyes, air-sacs

    rasping, white

brain, I staggered

    after you

 

Orpheus, when you first

    called, I pushed

the sweet earth from my mouth

    and sucked in

 

all the powders of volcanic ash

    to follow you

obedient      up

    that crumbling slope

 

to the very last ridge –

    where I saw clumps of

yellow camomile in the dunes

    and heard the applause

 

of your wild mother

    great Calliope

crying good, my son, good

    in the fumes of the crater.

 

When the wiring sputtered

    at my wedding feast

she was hectic, glittering;

    her Arabian glass

 

burst into darkness

    and her flesh shimmered.

She was still laughing, there,

    on that pumice edge

 

with all Apollo’s day behing her

    as I saw your heavy

shoulders turn. Your lips move.

    Then your eyes.

 

and I lay choking     Orpheus

    what hurt    most then    was

your stunned face

    lost

 

cruel    never to be touched

    again, and watching

a blown leaf in your

    murderous eye

  

shrivel…

 

   7.

 

And the curse of all future

   poets to die by

rope or stake or fire falls there

   on these mindless creatures

 

no longer human their toes

   grow roots and their knees are

gnarled – their arms branch leaves:

   who will release them?

 

Their flesh is wood.

 

 

8

 

   As dreamers now together

we forget Apollo’s day

   that cruel light in which at last

all men become shadows;

   and we forgive even those

dead gods, who sleep among us.

   For all their gifts, not one

of them has power to summon us.

   In this green silence

we conceal our one true marriage.

 

 

ALGUMAS DAS CANÇÕES PARA EURÍDICE:

UMA SEQUÊNCIA

 

1.

 

Os mortos são poderosos.

Nesse Inverno enquanto vagueavas

o frio persistia, e o brilho

recortava ainda

a minha forma na neve:

por mim deixar-te-ia livre.

 

A tua mãe soprou

as minhas cinzas nos teus lábios,

pó branco como cocaína,

meu nome, que percorre os teus nervos

e de novo caminho na tua canção:

tu não me deixas livre.

 

Os mortos são poderosos.

Embora nas trevas me perdesse

e tivesse esquecido há muito

a dor, na tua canção

fica o meu rosto iluminado

e assim vamos

 

sobre charcos que estalam

como vidro, pelas florestas que brilham

negras, nos seus rebentos à espera

de ti para os despertar, regressando

no teu hino e, como espectro

de Eurídice, incendeio as árvores.

 

Os mortos são poderosos.

 

 

3.

 

Recordo um caminho de cinzas

que subi trôpega,

ainda não desenraizada

do meu sonho, fantasma

 

com olhos sujos, sacos de ar

ofegantes, cérebro

embranquecido. Cambaleei

atrás de ti,

 

Orfeu, quando primeiro

me chamaste, cuspi

a doce terra da minha boca

e suguei

 

as poeiras da cinza vulcânica

para te seguir

obediente

pela encosta a esboroar-se

 

até ao último socalco

onde encontrei tufos

de camomila amarela nas dunas

e ouvi os aplausos

 

da tua indomável mãe,

a poderosa Calíope,

gritando é assim, ó meu filho,

entre os vapores da cratera.

 

Quando os fusíveis crepitaram

na festa da minha boda

ela ficou agitada, faiscante;

a sua taça da Arábia

 

explodiu como a noite

e toda a sua carne cintilou.

Continuava ali, a rir,

na vertente de pedra-pomes

 

com o dia de Apolo atrás de si

e vi os teus ombros pesados

voltarem-se. Os lábios estremeceram.

Depois os olhos

 

e eu ali sufocada. Orfeu:

o que mais me feriu então

foi o teu rosto assombrado,

perdido,

 

para sempre cruel,

intocável, e ver

como uma folha levada pelo vento

nos teus olhos assassinos

 

secava…

 

 

7.

 

E a maldição de todos

os poetas juntos que vão ser enforcados

ou queimados há-de descer

sobre os que estão desatentos;

 

já não humanos, pelos seus pés

nascem raízes e são os joelhos

e braços como ramos ou folhas:

quem os vem libertar?

 

É de madeira a sua carne.

 

  

8.

 

Adormecidos, agora juntos,

esquecemos ambos o dia de Apolo,

aquela cruel luz em que todos os homens

finalmente se tornaram sombras;

e perdoamos mesmo àqueles

deuses mortos que repousam ao nosso lado.

Apesar de todos os seus dons, nenhum

deles poderá sequer chamar-nos,

porque neste verde silêncio

escondemos a nossa única, verdadeira união.

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

ENGLAND

 

Forgotten, shabby and long time abandoned

   in stubbled fur, with broken

teeth like toggles, the old gods are leaving.

   They will no longer crack the

tarmac of the language, open generous

  rivers, heal our scoured thoughts.

They will only blink, and we move on, and

  tomorrow no one will remember their songs

 

 

unless they rise in warning, as when

   sudden planes speed overhead

crossing the sky with harsh accelerating

   screams. You may shiver then

to hear the music of the gods leaving.

    This generation

is waiting for the boy Octavius.

   They don’t like losers.

And the gods are leaving us.

 

INGLATERRA 

 

Esquecidos, andrajosos e há muito abandonados,

cobertos de roupas de pele gastas, com os dentes partidos

e manchados, os velhos deuses partem.

Nunca mais irão fender

o alcatrão da linguagem, nem abrir generosos

rios, ou curar os nossos pensamentos descarnados.

E passam sem pestanejar; amanhã

ninguém recordará o seu canto

 

 

a não ser que se ergam advertindo-nos, como

súbitos aviões que nos sobrevoem velozes,

cruzando o céu com gritos cada vez

mais agudos. Então podeis tremer

ao ouvir a música dos deuses que partem.

Esta geração

que espera o jovem Octávio

não gosta de vencidos.

E os deuses estão a abandonar-nos.

 

 

 

 

PARK PARADE, CAMBRIDGE

 

                        in memory of Elizabeth Bishop

 

Your thoughts in later years must, sometimes,

have visited this one-time lodging house,

the wood then chocolate brown, the plaster

veined, this bedroom floating over

spongy grass down to a shallow river.

 

As a mild ghost, then, look with me tonight

under this slant roof out to where

the great oak lies, its foliage disguised

with flakes of light. Above us, clouds

in these wide skies remain as still as sandbars.

 

Sleeplessly, together, we can listen

to the quiet song of water, hidden

at the lock, and wait up for the first

hiss of cycle tyres and whistling builders.

Fellow asthmatics, we won’t even cough

 

because for once my lungs are clean,

and you no longer need to fight for breath.

And though it is by chance now I inherit

this room, I shall draw both tenderness and strength

from the friendly toughness of your spirit.

 

PARK PARADE, CAMBRIDGE  

 

                            Em memória de Elizabeth Bishop

 

 

Nos últimos anos os teus pensamentos

devem ter visitado esta antiga pensão:

as madeiras, então da cor de chocolate,

o estuque já fendido, o quarto a flutuar

sobre a erva molhada até ao rio.

 

Esta noite, como um espectro suave, olha comigo,

sob este tecto esconso, para onde se ergue

o grande carvalho com a ramagem velada

por flocos de luz. No vasto céu, as nuvens

estão imóveis como bancos de areia.

 

Despertas, podemos as duas ouvir

a tranquila canção da água oculta

na represa, e aguardar o primeiro

silvo dos pneus, o assobio dos pedreiros.

Ambas asmáticas, nem sequer tossimos

 

porque desta vez tenho os pulmões limpos

e tu não precisas sequer de respirar.

E embora por acaso herde o teu quarto,

encher-me-ei de força e de bondade

colhidas na terna firmeza do teu espírito.

 

 

 

 

 
 

BLUE SNOW

 

It was a winter evening

on quiet streets, a young girl

running in broken shoes

 

over the snow. She goes

hurrying to a lover,

to heal their quarrel.

 

Her hot face is wet

with a fever of 102º.

Next week, in the hospital,

 

she whispers again and again:

“your lips are salt” and

“the snow is blue”

 

 

 

 

A NEVE AZUL

 

Lembro-me que numa tarde de Inverno,

pelas ruas calmas, há uma jovem

que corre com sapatos velhos

 

sobre a neve. Vai apressada

ao encontro de um amante,

para que tudo comece de novo.

 

O seu rosto está húmido,

ardente, cheio de febre.

Na semana seguinte, no hospital,

 

murmura repetidas vezes:

“Os teus lábios são salgados”, e

“a neve é azul”.

 

“Os teus lábios são salgados”, e

“a neve é azul”.

 

 

 

 

HOME

 

Where is that I wonder?

Is it the book-packed house we plan to sell

with the pale green room above the river,

the shelves of icons, agate, Eilat stone

the Kathe Kollwitz and the Samuel Palmer?

 

Or my huge childhood house

oak-floored, the rugs of Autumn colours, slabs of coal

in an open heart, high-windowed rooms,

outside, the sunken garden, lavender, herbs

and trees of Victoria plum.

 

Last night I dreamed of

my dead father, white-faced, papery-skinned

and frailer than he died. I asked him:

- Doesn’t all this belong to us? He shook his head,

bewildered. I was disappointed,

 

but thought I woke with salt on my lips then

and a hoarse throat, somewhere between

the ocean and the desert, in an immense

Mexico of the spirit, I remembered

with joy and love my other ties of blood.

 

 

LAR 

 

Onde fica isso, pergunto a mim própria.

E a casa cheia de livros, que pensamos vender,

com a sala verde-pálido sobre o rio,

as prateleiras com ícones, ágata, pedra de Elath,

a Kathe Kollwith e o Samuel Palmer?

 

Ou a minha enorme casa de infância

de soalho de carvalho, tapetes com cores outonais, pedaços de carvão

na lareira aberta, quartos com altas janelas,

lá fora, o jardim fundo, alfazema, ervas

e ameixieira de frutos vermelhos.

 

Na noite passada sonhei

com o meu falecido pai, de rosto branco e pele ressequida,

mais débil do que no instante em que morreu. Perguntei-lhe:

- Isto tudo não nos pertence? Abanou a cabeça,

desorientado. Fiquei desapontada,

 

mas embora acordasse  com sal nos lábios

e a garganta áspera, algures entre

o oceano e o deserto, num imenso

México do espírito, lembrei-me

com alegria e amor de que existem ainda outros laços de sangue.

 

 

 

 

 
 

REGRET

 

Do not look backward, children.

A sticky burning sea still lies below.

The harsh air stings like sand

 

and here among these salty pillars

the unforgiving stand. Take

the mountain ledge, even though

 

it crumbles into dust. Walk or crawl,

you must let the rocks cut into your feet without pity.

And forget the smoking city. God punishes regret.

 

 

ARREPENDIMENTO  

 

Não olhem para trás, meus filhos.

Um mar viscoso e ardente fica lá em baixo.

O ar áspero fere como se fosse areia

 

 

e aqui, por entre estes pilares salgados,

estão os que não perdoam. Segurem-se

ao rebordo da montanha, mesmo que

 

 

se desfaça em pó. Caminhem ou rastejem,

deixem que as rochas firam os pés sem piedade.

E esqueçam a cidade fumegante. Deus castiga os que se arrependem.

 

 

 

 

SNOWY LANDSCAPES

 

Yesterday, I flew in over the landscape

my grandfather tried to farm near Montreal.

There was ice in the stubble, hard snow

and flat spaces that made me flinch

to imagine the winter below.

 

Now in mountain country in Colorado

the snow’s whiteness has us catching our breath,

rejoicing at the violence of sunlight here;

and even at night when so many storms gather

enjoying the flash on the snow.

 

Why do mountains soothe us? They should alarm.

Instead, their snows seem to induce in us

a queer spirit of compassionate calm:

as if their beauty lit our thought so sharply

we become equal to the threat of harm.

 

CAMPOS DE NEVE

 

Ontem voei sobre os campos

que, perto de Montreal, meu avô tentou cultivar.

Havia gelo pelo restolho, neve dura,

e extensões planas: senti-me tremer

ao imaginar, lá em baixo, o Inverno.

 

Agora no Colorado, ao longo das montanhas,

toda esta brancura faz-nos suster a respiração,

regozijamo-nos aqui com a violência da luz solar;

e mesmo à noite quando se aproximam as tempestades

sentimos o prazer da luz intensa sobre a neve.

 

Por que nos acalmam as montanhas? Deviam assustar-nos.

As neves parecem originar em nós

um estranho espírito de compassiva calma,

como se, intensa, a sua beleza iluminasse o pensamento

e a qualquer ameaça nos tornasse indiferentes.

 

 

 

 
 

SOME UNEASE AND ANGELS

 

Even in May now with so many yellows:

   falling burberry, broom, birds with

feathers like wild tobacco, hot sun;

   some unease disturbed me, some

 

music of notes pitched too high even for

   dogs or prisoners, or the sick, as if there

were messengers asleep in the grass like pollen

   waiting to rise up in sudden flower

 

angels or darker sentinels, closing in on us

   all year, unkillable presences, they are

waiting to shrivel us even now, if we dare to

   lift their hoods and confront them without fear.

 

 

ALGUM DESCONFORTO E ANJOS 

 

Mesmo agora, em Maio, ao calor do sol,

com todo o amarelo do tojo, da giesta,

e das aves cujas penas são como a flor do tabaco;

algum desconforto me invadiu, algumas

 

notas de música estridentes, mesmo para

cães ou prisioneiros ou doentes, como se houvesse

mensageiros a dormir na erva, pólen

à espera de se erguer numa flor súbita,

 

anjos ou sentinelas negras, envolvendo-nos

sempre, indestrutíveis presenças à espera

de nos fazer murchar se um dia ousarmos

desvendar o seu rosto, e enfrentá-los sem medo.

 

 

 

 

URBAN LYRIC

 

The gaunt lady of the service wash

stands on the threshold and blinks in the sunlight.

 

Her face is yellow in its frizz of hair

and yet she smiles as if she were fortunate.

 

She listens to the hum of cars passing

as if she were on a country lane in summer,

 

or as if the tall trees edging this

busy street scattered blessings on her.

 

Last month they cut a cancer out of her throat.

This morning she tastes sunshine in the dusty air.

 

And she is made alert to the day’s beauty,

as if her terror had wakened poetry.

 

LÍRICA URBANA  

 

A mulher pálida e magra da lavandaria

está à porta e pestaneja com a luz do sol.

 

Com o rosto amarelo e o frisado do cabelo,

ela ainda sorri, como se estivesse feliz.

 

Ouve o zunido dos carros que passam

como se estivesse no campo em pleno Verão,

 

ou como se as grandes árvores que ladeiam esta

rua agitada lhe derramassem bênçãos.

 

No mês passado tiraram-lhe um cancro da garganta.

Esta manhã ela saboreia o sol na poeira do ar.

 

E ali fica atenta a tudo que é belo,

como se no seu terror despertasse a poesia.

 

 

 

 
 

GREEN

 

In the resonance of that

lizard colour, mottled like stone from

Eilat, with blue fruit and patches

of mud in it: my thoughts scatter

 

over Europe where there is water

and sunlight in collision, and green is

the flesh of Holbein’s coffined Christ, and

also the liturgical colour of heaven.

 

In England: green is innocent as grass.

 

VERDE 

 

Na ressonância desta

cor de lagarto, manchada como uma pedra

de Eilat, com o azul dos frutos e nódoas

de lama: os meus pensamentos derramam-se

 

sobre a Europa onde o sol

embate na água; é o verde

de Holbein na carne de Cristo morto

e também a cor litúrgica do céu.

 

Na Inglaterra o verde é inocente como a erva.

 

 

 

THE ONLY GOOD LIFE IS LIVED WITHOUT MIRACLES”

 (N. Mandelstam)

 

Under hot white skies, if we could,

in this city of bridges and pink stone live gratefully

here is a lacework of wooden ghosts from New Guinea

Etruscan jewels, beetles with scales of blue mineral.

 

Bad news follow us, however. I wonder if

anyone walks sanely in middle age. Isn’t there

always some desperation for the taste of one last

miraculous fruit, that has to be pulled from the air?

 

 

“A ÚNICA VIDA BOA É VIVIDA SEM MILAGRES”

(N. Mandelsatm)

 

Pudéssemos viver com gratidão nesta cidade

de pontes e pedra rósea, sob céus quentes e brancos:

aqui os fantasmas da Nova Guiné em renda de madeira, as jóias

etruscas, os escaravelhos com escamas de mineral azul.

 

Más notícias nos perseguem, todavia, Pergunto-me

se podemos ser sensatos na meia-idade. Não haverá

sempre uma ânsia de provar um último

fruto milagroso, que tem de se arrancar do ar?

 

 

 

 

THE MAGIC APPLE TREE

 

Sealed in rainlight one

November sleepwalking afternoon streets

I remembered Samuel Palmer’s garden

Waterhouse in Shoreham, and at once

I knew: that the chill of wet

brown streets was no more liberal

than the yellow he laid there against

his unnatural blue               because

together they worked upon me like

an icon              infantine

 

he called his vision        so it was

with the early makers of icons, who

worked humbly, choosing wood without resin.

They stilled their spirits before using the gold

and while the brightness held under the kvass

their colours too induced

the peculiar joy of abandoning restlessness

 

and now in streets where only white

mac or car metal catches the failing

light, if we sing of

the red and the blue and the texture of goat hair,

there is no deceit in our prophecy:

for even now our brackish waters can

be sweetened by a strange tree.

 

 

A MACIEIRA MÁGICA  

 

Envolta em luz de chuva ao caminhar

sonâmbula pelas ruas numa tarde de Novembro,

lembrei-me do jardim de Samuel Palmer,

Waterhouse ou Shoreham, e de repente

soube que o frio das ruas

húmidas e pardas não era mais literal

do que o amarelo por ele sobreposto em contraste

com o seu azul irreal, porque

em conjunto essas cores me impressionaram

como um ícone; pueril

 

- chamou ele à sua visão; era assim

para os antigos artífices de ícones,

que humildes trabalhavam a madeira sem resina.

Apaziguavam o espírito antes de usar o ouro

e enquanto o brilho perdurava sob o kvass

também as suas cores transmitiam

a singular alegria de abandonar a inquietação

 

e se agora, nas ruas onde só branco

das gabardinas ou o metal dos carros recebem

a luz ao cair, cantarmos

o vermelho, o azul e a textura do pêlo de cabra,

não há qualquer ludíbrio na nossa profecia:

podem ainda hoje as nossas águas salobras

ser purificadas por uma estranha árvore.

 

 

 
 

Traduções para Português: Médium e outros poemas. Elaine Feinstein; tradução colectiva (a) (Mateus, Abril-Maio 1994), revista, completada e apresentada por Fernando Guimarães e Maria de Lourdes Guimarães. Quetzal, Lisboa, 1995.  37 pp.

ISBN: 972-564-225-2

 

(a)

Fernando Pinto do Amaral

Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão

António Manuel Pires Cabral

Fernando Guimarães

Maria de Lourdes Guimarães

Ana Hatherly

Nuno Júdice

Suzette Macedo

Fernando Mascarenhas

Laureano Silveira

Pedro Támen

   

 

 

Dad 

The Author reads the poem     

 

Your old hat hurts me, and those black

    fat raisins you liked to press into

my palm from your soft heavy hand:

    I see you staggering back up the path

with sacks of potatoes from some local farm,

    fresh eggs, flowers. Every day I grieve

 

for your great heart heart broken and you gone.

    You loved to watch the trees. This year

you did not see their Spring.

    The sky was freezing over the fen

as on that somewhere secretly appointed day

    you beached: cold, white-faced, shivering.

 

What happened, old bull, my loyal

    hoarse-voiced warrior? The hammer

blow that stopped you in your track

    and brought you to a hospital monitor

could not destroy your courage

    to the end you were

uncowed and unconcerned with pleasing anyone.

 

I think of you now as once again safely

    at my mother’s side, the earth as

chosen as a bed, and feel most sorrow for

    all that was gentle in

my childhood buried there

    already forfeit, now forever lost.

  
 

 

  

MUSE

 

         for E.T.

 

 

“Write something every day, she said”,

“even if it’s only a line,

it will protect you”.

 

How should this be?

Poetry opens no cell,

heals no hurt body,

 

brings back no lover,

altogether, poetry is

powerless as grass.

 

How then should it defend us?

Only by strengthening

our fierce and obstinate centres.

 

 
 

 

 

 

DIGNITY

 

And old poet has come to the Festival,

his books lie over the table, we all

 

marvel at him. He is already sure

of his place in the history of literature.

 

I watch his weariness, the way

his eyes flicker without envy

 

over the students with everything still to do.

Against probabilities, I should like to

 

believe in the perfection of his life

yet I observe: he has a young wife.

 
 

 

 

 

A Pebble on Your Grave

 

It’s easy to love the dead.

Their voices are mild. They don’t argue.

Once in the earth, they belong to us faithfully.

 

But do they forgive us?

Our crabby failure to understand

their complaints, our manifest indignation

 

as words of blame. Once, I remember

you broke off some angry

exchange to say unhappily:

 

“I don’t want your silly grief

after I’m dead, it’s now

I need your pity.”

 

From: The TLS n.º 5358,   DECEMBER 9, 2005

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Не суждено, чтобы сильный с сильным
Соединились бы в мире сем.
Так разминулись Зигфрид с Брунгильдой,
Брачное дело решив мечом.

В братственной ненависти союзной
- Буйволами! - на скалу - скала.
С брачного ложа ушел, неузнан,
И неопознанною - спала.

Порознь! - даже на ложе брачном -
Порознь! - даже сцепясь в кулак -
Порознь! - на языке двузначном -
Поздно и порознь - вот наш брак!

Но и постарше еще обида
Есть: амазонку подмяв как лев -
Так разминулися: сын Фетиды
С дщерью Аресовой: Ахиллес

С Пенфезилеей.
                            О вспомни - снизу
Взгляд ее! сбитого седока
Взгляд! не с Олимпа уже, - из жижи
Взгляд ее - все ж еще свысока!

Что ж из того, что отсель одна в нем
Ревность: женою урвать у тьмы.
Не суждено, чтобы равный - с равным...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Так разминовываемся - мы.

3 июля 1924

 

                  МАРИНА ЦВЕТАЕВА

 

 

Strong doesn’t mate with strong.

It’s not allowed in this world.

So Siegfried missed Brunhilde,

in marriage fixed by a sword.

 

Like buffaloes, stone on stone,

in brotherly hatred joined,

he left their marriage bed, unknown,

she slept, unrecognised.

 

Apart, in the marriage bed.

Apart, in ambiguous language.

Apart, and clutched like a fist.

Too late.     And apart.        That’s marriage.

 

More ancient evil yet:

Achilles, Thetis’ son

crushing the Amazon

like a lion, missed Penthesilea.

 

Think of her glance, when felled

from her house in the mud,

she looked up at him then

and not down from Olympus.

 

And afterwards, his passion was

to snatch his wife back from darkness?

But equal never mates with equal.

 

And so, we missed each other.

 

 

1924

 

                       MARINA TSVETAYEVA

 

Translation by Elaine Feinstein

 

 

 

HAARETZ.com

 

 

27-06-2003

Poetry: It's the ultimate selfishness

Between giving a workshop for poets who write in English, visiting friends and giving a reading of her work, poet Elaine Feinstein pauses to reflect on her poems and her identities

By Vivian Eden


Elaine Feinstein is a British writer, in the most expansive sense of the word "writer" - poetry, fiction, biography, plays and screenplays, journalism - and in a somewhat restricted sense of the word "British." But more about that anon.

Last week she was visiting Israel, "for the fourth or fifth time." This time, she came under the auspices of the British Council, gave a workshop for poets writing in English at Kibbutz Shefayim and spent most of her time in Tel Aviv, visiting old friends, among them Natan Zach. Other poets who were her friends here are now gone - Yehuda Amichai, T. Carmi, Aryeh Sachs.

Mostly, the talk was of her "Collected Poems and Translations" (Carcanet, 2002, 370 pages, 14.95 pounds sterling), a selection from about 40 years of poetry, from which she gave a reading in the garden of the British Council in Jerusalem last Wednesday.

Perhaps the best way to understand what Feinstein thinks about all kinds of things is through the poems themselves. But first - clarification of how to read this poetry. A key tenet of one of her professors of literature at Cambridge, F.R. Leavis, who was very influential from the 1930s to the `70s, is that while poetry must be about life, it does not explain a specific life.

Another truism of academic literary criticism is that a distinction must be made between the poet himself - or herself - and the "speaker" who is the "I" of the poem. In the case of the poems in this collection, however, it seemed absolutely transparent that - apart from certain long, narrative poems - the poet and the speaker are one, and the poems are about the poet's life. It was necessary to ask, though, as a courtesy, whether this poetry can be read as autobiographical.

Feinstein: "Definitely. I don't use personae, except when declared."

The writer as poet
 

Muse
(from "City Music," 1990)

For E.T.

"Write something every day," she said,
"even if it's only a line,
it will protect you."
How should this be?
Poetry opens no cell,
heals no hurt body,

brings back no lover,
altogether poetry
is as powerless as grass.

How then should it defend us?
Only by strengthening
our fierce and obstinate centers.


"I wrote this at a difficult time of life. I suppose I've had lots of difficult times, though not by certain standards. I was about to go off to California and a very good friend of mine (writer Emma Tennant) gave me that bit of advice. I asked myself - what does writing offer? You could be shot in Russia," said Feinstein, and no amount of writing could save you or get you out of prison.

"That poetry is `as powerless as grass' is almost literal," she continued. "Grass, like poetry, is offered. It is there to be consumed. It has the strength of renewing, and no - I didn't have Walt Whitman in mind. After I thought the advice over, I realized that writing itself strengthens your eye."

In this poem, there are two verbs that are almost synonymous - "protect" and "defend" - yet the first of them seems like a feminine activity and the second seems like a masculine activity.

Feinstein: "Yes, poetry is a defense that's almost an attack. It helps the poet most, but also readers. Reading also gives resilience. The evidence for this is Russia, in the camps, where people learned poetry by heart. It helps people survive."


The First Wriggle

(From "Daylight," 1997)

Going to buy milk from the corner shop
on a Tuesday in August with the warm rain
tasting of roses, I suddenly felt an
illicit moment of good fortune: a freedom

in which poems could happen.
It's rather like the grander forms of creation.
Worms on Mars should surprise nobody;
life will form, wherever there's opportunity.


"Poems arise. I can't say I'm going to write a poem now. I always have four or five on the go, a phrase or a sentence with richness. Unlike with a novel, or a biography, where the story carries me along, in a poem you must be more passive. Anna Akhmatova talked about waiting for the Muse to come, but for me it's not so grand. The poem just rises. I catch a few words and write them down in a little notebook when I travel, and on the computer, at home, but in the end I always write poems by hand. I can do it anywhere, in trains, or traveling.

"How do I know a poem is alive and good? It's like jazz - you always know."

Like this last poem, many of Feinstein's lyrics are, in a very British way, set in precise meteorological conditions, which take on metaphorical force: "mysterious as April," "Sealed in rainlight one / November," and in a poem entitled "In Praise of Flair": "That whole wet summer I listened to Louis Armstrong."

Why "illicit"?

"Poetry is the ultimate selfishness. A novel or a biography earns money, but poetry is only for me."

Another recurring feature of Feinstein's work is thought about scientific matters as reflected through the poet's mind. Her late husband, Arnold Feinstein, an eminent Cambridge immunologist and chemist, died last November after a long illness. Of "The First Wriggle," she relates: "After my husband retired, we talked a lot about science. We had more time. I thought about how life happens. All you need is some carbon atoms and some water at the bottom of the sea ..."

Also characteristic of Feinstein's poetry is the movement between indoors and outdoors. In "In Praise of Flair," as in the following poem and others, the moment of poetic possibility seems to occur on this cusp.


Muse
(from "Daylight," 1997)

Dissolute, undressed, indoors, we argue
about the old days, how once there was
a time for such pursuits

and how the tender words were spiced
with garlic and rosemary, like
the flesh of a young lamb.

- Is poetry something between
cookery and sacrifice? I murmur
as we pack the goods for market.

- Be quiet. Look. The beech trees are golden,
the air has autumn in it, and the street
lies rain-washed and clean in October sun.



"I also wrote this poem at a very difficult time. The discomfort came from a sense of being trapped. "Dissolute" here is in the sense of not fully alive, not in the sense of corruption. Here, I'm arguing with the Muse, about why I am unable to write. There's a subliminal sense of someone else being there, but it's really the Muse."

You seem to have many poems that evoke food. Do you cook?
"I like cooking, especially for friends."
"Do you sacrifice?"
"It's a kind of dedication, putting poetry first. One sacrifices attention to other people. Writing poetry is so selfish."
Yet your poetry so often builds up to a kind of tenderness and forgiveness, as in "Freedom" (from "Gold," 2000):
 

When you are out, I wander round the flat,
eat fruit, read newspapers and do
surprisingly less work. No doubt of that.

So what am I missing? Are you right to claim
a blown up effigy, sitting in a chair
would be the same?

Not quite. The poem's space may
seem to offer its own escape, but I still need
the goad of words that find their mark.

When I look down through glass
to see you getting out of a black cab,
frazzled, hair wild, and raincoat open,

fumbling for change, and know that
you are neither lost nor hurt - it's brief,
but what I feel is passionate relief.



"The people around me don't always forgive. My children did though, and my husband encouraged me."


The poet as mother

Mother Love
(from "In a Green Eye," 1966)

You eat me, your
nights eat me ...

I kiss your
soft feet mindless:
delicately

your shit slides out
yellow and
smelling of curd cheese.
 


Feinstein has three grown sons, a mathematician, a journalist and a musician, but they used to be small children and, like her husband, other members of her extended family and her friends, they have always peopled her work. Speaking about this poem to Michael Schmidt in an interview for Poetry Nation Review, she said: "It used to embarrass audiences. At first I minded the discomfort because the poem wasn't written to shock. It was an important poem for me, a way of yoking two disparate parts of myself together."

In Jerusalem, she added: "Yes, this was the first time I wrote without inhibition. Now there's no linguistic taboo, but then, in the late 1950s, `shit' was an unusable word. I wasn't shocked when I found myself using that word - I was happy. I was a very loving mother, if not particularly well-organized. I couldn't always find their gym kit - I should have known where their shoes were, but I never doubted they love me. I've written many poems about my children. One of them attracted more poems than the others, but he has forgiven me."


The poet as translator
 

Debts to Marina Tsvetayeva
(from "City Music," 1990)

Tough as canvas, Marina, your soul
Was stretched out once against the gale
And now your words have become sails.
You travel far into a darkness
I don't plead for since I can't aspire
to join your spirit on that Christian
star whose fire is green and cool
in your imagination of heaven.

Mothers, Marina, yours and mine, would
have recognized a bleak and dutiful spirit
in each other: we were supposed to
conquer the worlds they had renounced.
Instead, we served poetry, neither of us
prepared either for marriage or the solitary life.
Yours was the lyric voice of abandon
only sobered by poverty and homesickness.
Once or twice I felt the same loneliness,
but I can never learn from you, Marina,
since poetry is always a question of language,
though I have often turned to you in thought as if
your certainties could teach me how to bear
the littleness of what we are on our own
without books, or music, or even a pen;
or as if your stern assurance of the spirit
could preserve us on that ocean we sail alone.
 


In 1971, Feinstein published "The Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva" (Oxford University Press). In 1987, the third edition (Dutton's) was chosen as The New York Times Book of the Year.

Feinstein has said that Tsvetayeva enabled her to write openly, because she doesn't feel embarrassed about sounding undignified, a quality that she has related to, being somewhat of an outsider to British reticence. All four of Feinstein's grandparents were Russian Jews from Odessa. She grew up in the north of England and won an "Exhibition" - "a poor man's scholarship" - to Newnham College at Cambridge University, where she read (or as Americans would say, majored in) English.

"Key phrases," she has said of Yiddish, "remain. Shrugs. Insults, Jokes. I'm not a good linguist. I'm not a Russianist, for instance. I'm a very nervous Russian speaker."

How did you first encounter the poetry of Tsvetayeva, which seems to have had such a great impact on you, and how did you decide to translate it?

"By accident. I was lecturing at the University of Essex and I was looking for a way into a certain lecture. I picked up Boris Pasternak's `Safe Conduct' and he talked about a woman poet he regards as soaring above all of us - and he wasn't a modest man. I couldn't find her poems in translation so I asked my friend Angela Livingston to make literal translations of three lyrics from `Poem of the End.' I took risks - she gave risks, and took a different path. I sent the poems in to a little magazine, with a circulation of maybe 100, and I got back two letters, one from Penguin and one from Oxford University Press, inviting me to do a volume of versions. I put aside my doctoral thesis, which would have been about Olsen and the Black Mountain poets, but hundreds of people were doing that. I never did write a thesis."

Your translations of Russian poetry have been criticized because you ignore rhyme.

"I took great liberties. I had a long argument with Brodsky about rhyming, but in the end he quite liked my translations. And they've been in print for more than 30 years."


The friend as biographer

Poet
(from "Gold," 2000)

The last days of October were dark and wet ...

The weather got into our dreams in the figure
Of Ted Hughes. One of us, asleep in a chair,
spent the night wandering around his
Devon house, staring through
picture windows in the storm,
unable to find a way outside.

In my mind he was standing in our old
Cambridge kitchen, his face like mountain stone,
his presence solemn and kind. He bestowed
a gift of abalone shells, without ceremony.
This morning, on the telephone,
His sister called to tell us he had died.

It was almost as if his spirit
in its passing, had casually touched
a synapse. He never needed to stir
to draw attention in a room, the magnet
of his being pulled everyone to him;
now his after-image flashed within us ...
 


Feinstein's most recent book is a biography of Ted Hughes: "Ted Hughes - The Life of a Poet" (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2001). She has written other biographies, of Bessie Smith, Tsvetayeva, D.H. Lawrence and Pushkin, and is now working on a biography of Anna Akhmatova. The biography of Hughes, who died on October 28, 1998, must have been a substantially different kind of project as he was someone she knew and liked.

"Ted was a good and loyal friend. His sister Olwyn was my agent for a time. I didn't need to be nasty to Ted. Everyone else was. There was a story to tell and he never told it himself until `Birthday Letters.'"

"Birthday Letters" (1998) was Hughes' last book. In the poems, Hughes for the first time addressed his marriage to American poet Sylvia Plath who committed suicide in 1963 by gassing herself in her kitchen after Hughes had left her for a German-born Jewish woman, Assia Wevill, who spent part of her childhood in Tel Aviv. In March, 1969, Wevill also committed suicide by gassing herself, along with their young daughter, Shura.

Feinstein: "A friend rang me about three weeks after Ted died and asked whether I would be interested in writing [a book about him] for Norton's. I said I'd think about it - I was in the middle of another biography, and I knew it would be an absolute mine field. But there is a story - Ted's story, from a little Yorkshire village boy to poet laureate and good friend of the Queen Mother - an extraordinary progress.

"I enjoyed doing it. There's a large archive at Emory University in Atlanta, and I know all his friends. People spoke freely and spoke out. Some people spoke out more fully. And some people spoke out and I didn't use their words."

Did you also have dreams about him when you were writing the biography?

"It's strange that we both had dreams about him when he died, but I didn't dream about him while I was doing the writing. I'm not clairvoyant."
 

The poet as Jew

Allegiance
(from "Daylight," 1997)

We like to eat looking at boats. At night
in Jaffa Harbor, the whole sea is alight
with glow worms of the local fishermen's floats.

My English friend has blue flirtatious eyes
and feels no danger. Her intrepid forbears
first explored, then colonized the planet.

Now over Yemenite eggplant and fried dough
we talk about the Roman exploitation
of Caesarea two thousand years ago

and find the history easy to agree.
Politics here and now are another matter.
The scared, open faces of the soldiers

look like oppressors to her, while my inheritance

- Kovno, Odessa, packing and running away -
makes me fear for them, as if they were sons.

So I can't share the privilege of guilt. Nor could
she taste the Hebrew of Adam in
the red earth here: the iron, salt and blood.

 


"This is an important poem for me. I never wanted to be labeled a Jewish poet and I realize that I am one when I come to Israel with the British Council with an English poet, who is guilty. Colonial guilt, so she sees Palestinians as victims. Because of that she saw soldiers as oppressors. I looked at them - and they looked like my sons. We couldn't feel the same."

In the poems in the collection that touch upon Judaism - there's a seder poem, and a Rosh Hashanah poem and lots of poems about relatives - it seems that your Judaism is more a matter of identity than of faith, a kind of extension backward and forward in time. In an early poem, "Song of Power," which begins: "For the baiting / children in my / son's school class who / say I'm a witch," you write:
 

If any supernatural power
my strangeness earns me
I now invoke, for
all Gods are

anarchic even the Jews'
outside his own laws, with
his old name confirms me, and I
call out for the
strange ones with wild hair

all the earth over to
make their own coherence,
a fire their children
may learn to bear at last
and not burn in.
 


"Yes, for me being Jewish is familial. Tribal, I suppose, an extended family."

In response to a question from a member of the audience in the garden of the British Council as to whether she would be writing about what is happening here, Elaine Feinstein replied: "I'm writing about the Diaspora, about the movement of the liberal intelligentsia, especially in France. I see it as my responsibility to address this issue rather than problems here - which are many."

Two of Elaine Feinstein's novels have been translated into Hebrew: "Loving Brecht" (Ma'ariv Publishers, 1999) and "Lady Chatterley's Confession" (Hed Artzi, 1999).

 

Published: 11 September 2012

 

“The Refugee”

 

by Elaine Feinstein; introduced by Kate Miller

 

laine Feinstein, poet, novelist, biographer, editor and translator, was in mid-career when “The Refugee” was printed in the TLS in 1982. Later, it appeared as the second in a nine-part poem sequence, “Nine Songs for Dido and Aeneas” in Badlands (1986), a collection reflecting on the experience of exile, ideas of home and displacement in foreign cities.

Born in Bootle in 1930, Feinstein is sometimes claimed as a Liverpool poet, though she grew up in Leicester and has spent years in Cambridge and London. Family stories and the Russian-Jewish traditions of her grandparents, all from Odessa, fed her imagination with tales of places beyond Britain and the inter-war years. This world is glimpsed in “The Refugee”, in which Aeneas conjures for Dido “our squares and streets, the glass / like falls of water”, the gilding and scents of a cosmopolitan, perhaps composite, native city. Even on “dark afternoons / the trams grinding on wet rails”, the poet’s short, rich lines convey an impression of bustling activity, aural and tactile in detail, evoking café life and the rush-hour. There is, however, always a tendency towards resignation and loss: “such a babble of Empire / now extinguished, we can / never go home, Dido, / only ghosts remain”.

Seeking models for her poetry, Feinstein explored the speech-patterning of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson and translated Russian women poets, particularly Maria Tsvetayeva, who “enabled me to write openly. Because she doesn’t feel embarrassed about sounding undignified”. Feinstein uses the stanza as a framing device, containing episodes; she permits lulls in the rhythm within and between lines, while her diction suggests the sighs and gestures of a lament, the song of the exiled.



The Refugee


After Europe, all winter 
the days rushed through me 
as if I were dead, the 
brown sea pouring into the cities 
at night, the rain-smell of fish,

 

and when you ask for my story, how 
we came to be blown along your 
dock-streets, pocked and scuffed, 
in rags, I remember only the last
hot light, at the railside.

 

How to make you imagine 
our squares and streets, the glass 
like falls of water, the gold-leaf 
in the opera houses, there were 
summer birds golden as weeds,

 

the scent of coffee and halva 
rising from marble tables, 
and on dark afternoons 
the trams grinding on wet rails 
round the corners of plaster palaces

 

such a babble of Empire 
now extinguished, we can 
never go home, Dido, 
only ghosts remain 
to know that we exist.


ELAINE FEINSTEIN (1982)

 

 

April 3 2015

 

The Medium’

 

by Elaine Feinstein; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

 

Since the poet Elaine Feinstein was born into a family of Jewish immigrants from Odessa “and moreover a woman” it is hardly surprising, she says, that she began her career by looking for a tradition “that could accommodate the voice of an outsider”. She found this in the lyricism of American Modernists such as William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson and also, crucially, in the candour and passion of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, translations of whose work she began to publish in 1971. This unadorned directness also chimed well with “the gibing lilt of the Liverpool voice” that filled her childhood and to which she attributes “a sceptical dislike of the pretentious” and an abiding distrust of any music “that drowns the pressure of what has been felt”. It is to these qualities that critics and fellow poets have responded in the course of her long career as a poet, translator, biographer and novelist. Ted Hughes, of whom Feinstein wrote a biography in 2001, said that “her simple, clean language follows the track of the nerves. There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing fake. Reading her poems one feels cleansed and sharpened”. For Michael Schmidt, “her metonomies are not literary gestures, her images are literal and laden”.

 

This is especially true of “The Medium”, from her fourth collection The Celebrants (1973), in which Feinstein addresses the deep question of poetic inspiration in a series of almost throwaway ruminative remarks. Here, the apprehensions of the poet are like the powerful feelings by which the medium is gripped when she lets in whatever clamours for utterance from beyond – the beautiful, “irresolute” images whose life is threatened by translation into words. But although the poem rejects the easy articulateness of her “sharpest thoughts” (“perhaps you should talk to them?”, she suggests, if you want that kind of meaning), it moves with a kind of firmness through its own “always deniable . . . landscapes”, mediating between what we can name and what we can’t.



The Medium


My answer would have to be music
which is always deniable, since in my
silence, which you question, is only a landscape.

 

of water, old trees and a few irresolute
birds. The weather is also inconstant.
Sometimes the light is golden, the leaves unseasonable.

 

And sometimes the ice is red, and the moon
hangs over it, peeled, like a chinese fruit.
I am sorry not to be more articulate.

 

When I try, the words turn ugly as rats and
disorder everything, I cannot be quiet,
I want so much to be quiet and loving.

 

If only you wanted that. My sharpest thoughts
wait like assassins always in the dry wheat. They
chat and grin. Perhaps you should talk to them?


Elaine Feinstein (1972)