If You Forget Me

I want you to know

one thing. 

You know how this is: 

if I look 

at the crystal moon, at the red branch 

of the slow autumn at my window, 

if I touch 

near the fire 

the impalpable ash 

or the wrinkled body of the log, 

everything carries me to you, 

as if everything that exists, 

aromas, light, metals, 

were little boats 

that sail 

toward those isles of yours that wait for me. 

Well, now, 

if little by little you stop loving me 

I shall stop loving you little by little. 

If suddenly 

you forget me 

do not look for me, 

for I shall already have forgotten you. 

If you think it long and mad, 

the wind of banners 

that passes through my life, 

and you decide 

to leave me at the shore 

of the heart where I have roots, 

remember 

that on that day, 

at that hour, 

I shall lift my arms 

and my roots will set off 

to seek another land. 

But 

if each day, 

each hour, 

you feel that you are destined for me 

with implacable sweetness, 

if each day a flower 

climbs up to your lips to seek me, 

ah my love, ah my own, 

in me all that fire is repeated, 

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, 

my love feeds on your love, beloved, 

and as long as you live it will be in your arms 

without leaving mine.

~ Pablo Neruda

Comes the Dawn

After some time you learn the difference,

The subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul.

And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning,

And company doesn't always mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts,

And presents aren't promises.

And you begin to accept your defeats,

With your head up and your eyes ahead,

With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.

And you learn to build all your roads on today,

Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans,

And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn,

That even the sun burns if you get too much,

And learn that it doesn't matter how much you do care about,

Some people simply don’t care at all.

And you accept that it doesn't matter how good a person is,

She will hurt you once in a while,

And you need to forgive her for that.

You learn that talking can relieve emotional pain.

You discover that it takes several years to build a relationship based on confidence,

And just a few seconds to destroy it.

And that you can do something just in an instant,

And which you will regret for the rest of your life.

You learn that the true friendships,

Continue to grow even from miles away.

And that what matters isn't what you have in your life,

But who you have in your life.

And that good friends are the family,

Which allows us to choose.

You learn that we don’t have to switch our friends,

If we understand that friends can also change.

You realize that you are your best friend,

And that you can do do anything, or nothing,

And have good moments together.

You discover that the people who you most care about in your life,

Are taken from you so quickly,

So we must always leave the people who we care about with lovely words,

It may be the last time we see them.

You learn that the circumstances and the environment have influence upon us,

But we are responsible for ourselves.

You start to learn that you should not compare yourself with others,

But with the best you can be.

You discover that it takes a long time to become the person you wish to be,

And that the time is short.

You learn that it doesn't matter where you have reached,

But where you are going to.

But if you don’t know where you are going to,

Anywhere will do.

You learn that either you control your acts,

Or they shall control you.

And that to be flexible doesn't mean to be weak or not to have personality,

Because it doesn't matter how delicate and fragile the situation is,

There are always two sides.

You learn that heroes are those who did what was necessary to be done,

Facing the consequences.

You learn that patience demands a lot of practice.

You discover that sometimes,

The person who you most expect to be kicked by when you fall,

Is one of the few who will help you to stand up.

You learn that maturity has more to do with the kinds of experiences you had

And what you have learned from them,

Than how many birthdays you have celebrated.

You learn that there are more from your parents inside you than you thought.

You learn that we shall never tell a child that dreams are silly,

Very few things are so humiliating,

And it would be a tragedy if she believed in it.

You learn that when you are angry,

You have the right to be angry,

But this doesn't give you the right to be cruel.

You discover that only because someone doesn't love you the way you would like her to,

It doesn't mean that this person doesn't love you the most she can,

Because there are people who love us,

But just don’t know how to show or live that.

You learn that sometimes it isn't enough being forgiven by someone,

Sometimes you have to learn how to forgive yourself.

You learn that with the same harshness you judge,

Some day you will be condemned.

You learn that it doesn't matter in how many pieces your heart has been broken,

The world doesn't stop for you to fix it.

You learn that time isn't something you can turn back,

Therefore you must plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,

Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure.

You really are strong .

And you can go so farther than you thought you could go.

And that life really has a value.

And you have value within the life.

And that our gifts are betrayers,

And make us lose

The good we could conquer,

If it wasn't for the fear of trying.

~ Jose Luis Borges [translated by Veronica Shoffstall]

Enough

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.

I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her

And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.

Now surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows

To describe her private sufferings
The more distantly she can perceive them.

I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.

What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given?
To act well the part that’s been cast for us?

Wind. Light. Fire. Time.
 A train whistles through the far hills.

One day I plan to be riding it.

～　Suzanne Buffam

Do Not Make Things Too Easy

Do not make things too easy.
There are rocks and abysses in the mind
As well as meadows.
There are things knotty and hard: intractable.
Do not talk to me of love and understanding.
I am sick of blandishments.
I want the rock to be met by a rock.
If I am vile, and behave hideously,
Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.

~ Martha Baird

Late Night

Late night and rain wakes me, a downpour,
wind thrashing in the leaves, huge
ears, huge feathers,
like some chased animal, a giant
dog or wild boar. Thunder & shivering
windows; from the tin roof
the rush of water.

I lie askew under the net,
Tangled in damp cloth, salt in my hair.
When this clears there will be fireflies
& stars, brighter than anywhere,
which I could contemplate at times
of panic. Lightyears, think of it.

Screw poetry, it’s you I want,
your taste, rain
on you, mouth on your skin.

~ Margaret Atwood

In this world
love has no color
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours

Shikibu Izumi ~ Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

~Raymond Carver

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

~ William Ernest Henley

To Risk

To laugh is to risk appearing a fool,
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement,
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow,
But he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live.
Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
The pessimist complains about the wind;The optimist expects it to change;
And the realist adjusts the sails.

~William Arthur Ward

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5.a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

~ Fleur Adcock

I Get a Kick Out of You

I get no kick from Champagne;
Mere alcohol
Doesn't thrill me at all,
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you.

Some get a kick from cocaine;
I'm sure that if
I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrifically too.

Yet I get a kick out of you.

I get a kick every time I see you standing there before me -
I get a kick though it's patently clear that you obviously don't adore me.

I get no kick in a plane;
Flying too high
With some bird in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do.

Yet I get a kick out of you.

~ Cole Porter

The Mutes

Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,

knows it's a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they'd pass her in silence:

so it's not only to say she's
a warm hole. It's a word

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can't,

it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors

spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding

keeps on translating:
'Life after life after life goes by

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.'

~Denise Levertov

Rather than stay behind to languish,
I will come and overtake you—
Tie at each turn of your road
A guide-knot, my lord!

The Man'yōshū, 28 ~ The Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation

Like the hidden stream
trickling beneath the trees
down the autumn mountainside,
so does my love increase
more than yours, my Lord.

The Man'yōshū ii.92, Translated by I.H.Levy

Of Love

He wills and loves right
who wills and loves naught:
Who loves what he wills,
loves not what he ought.

The Cherubinic Wanderer, II.60 ~ Angelus Silesius, translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch

The Ecclesiast

"Worse than the sunflower," she had said.
But the new dimension of truth had only recently
Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned.
And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten.
In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed.
Tired housewives begat it some decades ago,
A small piece of truth that is it was honey to the lips
Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.
You see how honey crumbles your universe
Which seems like an institution – how many walls?

Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged
And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end
And no attitude which, in the end, would save you.
The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped
in death's capacious claw
But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper –
There was a key to everything in that oak forest
But a sad one. Ever since childhood there
Has been this special meaning to everything.
You smile at your friend's joke, but only later, through tears.

For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.
Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the
world’s ailments and troubles.
There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.
Once the harvest is in and the animals put away for the winter
To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert
With salt tears which will never do anyone any good.
My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows.
Perfume my head with forgetting all around me.

For some day these projects will return.
The funereal voyage over ice-strewn seas is ended.
You wake up forgetting. Already
Daylight shakes you in the yard.
The hands remain empty. They are constructing an osier basket
Just now, and across the sunlight darkness is taking root anew
In intense activity. You shall never have seen it just this way
And that is to be your one reward.

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.
The night is cold and delicate and full of angels
Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,
The chime goes unheard.
We are together at last, though far apart.

~ John Ashbery

Don't Go Far Off

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

~ Pablo Neruda

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~ Robert Frost

People

I like people quite well
at a little distance.
I like to see them passing and passing
and going their own way,
especially if I see their aloneness alive in them.
Yet I don't want them to come near.
If they will only leave me alone
I can still have the illusion that there is room enough in the world.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Visitor

He knocks at the door
and listens to his heart approaching.

~ Les Murray