Category: Quotable

Below
is a longer poem than I generally put in my blog. But it's in a
slightly different category, too. I was unable to find this poem online.
I can't even find the author online. But I met the actual author, David
Brennan, in Boston in the Summer of 1982. I have a signed copy of this
poem, published by Illeagle Press of Cambridge in 1981 as tiny 14 page
pamphlet with staple binding but high quality paper. Above is an image
of the cover, and at right are images of his autograph on the title page
and the edition page with facing first page.

I
have a vague recollection of spending an evening talking and carousing
with this author, whom I met through a close friend of mine from that
epoch, Quinn-of-Redbank (Stephen from New Jersey) who later disappeared
off the face of the earth after having lived furiously for some period
of time. Stephen was a companion of mine in my creative writing class at
the Harvard Summer School I attended that year.
<digression>Incidentally, for the curious, my conclusion was:
Harvard was fun but way overrated, academically. Note that although
accepted, I did not attend Harvard. My Korean acquaintances find this
fact to be the absolutely most scandalous thing in my entire life
history. This is why my Korean friends don't understand
me.</digression>

It
was at about the same time that I first read this poem, between my
junior and senior years in high school, that I decided I was a poet.
Erhm… "Poet."

Thirty
years later, I still believe that I'm a poet, although I've downgraded
my quality-of-poet substantially. I do what I do. I am what I am. I
write poetry. Sometimes. Occasionally. How about once-a-month?

On the edition page of this booklet is provided a translation of the cover:

Seals:

W A Y

Like leisurely clouds
and wild cranes
my home can be anywhere
in the universe

Calligraphy by Bob Kopacz.

Typesetting by Rick Schwartz.

The
cover is supposedly the Chinese character "dao" (道, which in Korean is
read 도 [do]) but if that is so, I have some scepticism as to the reading
(from my current cultural perspective), as the calligraphy distorts the
logograph to unrecognizability – not that that's an impossibility, as
different calligraphic styles tend to do weird things. I will continue
to believe that the main glyph on the cover means "dao" (Way) unless I
can find evidence to the contrary. The reason is that it is my name. I mean, at that time, I read it as such. My family name is, after all, Way. The booklet seemed to be addressed to me. Perhaps this had more to do with cannabis than semantics? It was a strange summer.

Since
I was unable to find this poem online, and since it meant so much to me
at one point in my life, I have decided that I will transcribe it here.
I hope that if the author (or his inheritor) runs across it, he will
allow me this luxury to reproduce the poem. As stated in other places, I
will always respect a take-down notice in This Here Blog Thingy™ –
although to date, I have never received one.

Here is David Brennan's poem.

Translations of the Fall

being an experiment in translation across the centuries

and sensibilities (or, a severe mauling, if you prefer)

based on a poem cycle by the Chinese poet Han Yu.

1.

Out this window the iron balcony

holds plants dying in greyed wooden boxes

Clotheslines dance, gulls gyre

Night soundless on the old bricks

The lamp lights my tangled bed

where rhymes of sleep lap my ear

a lake of undone poems shored

by breaths of sex and childhood

I struggle up

in the dawn's oily light

and look at my face

(different each time)

The day begins, ticks on like a clock

I sit at my table – my kingdom, my ocean

with a pen

            daylight roaring over me

2.

Dew on the geometry of rooftops

Sea-clouds tasting high glass buildings

The maples burst, leaves blood lanes

hedges become skeletons, a fly narcotized

by the cold drums the drunken window

I am watching from my rooftop

The world, unstopping, turns

Each of us, unique in kind

plows some round, bears some music

3.

Men's designs move in jerky flights

My interests turn to other times

Unhappy vets talk of lost wars in lost nights

but I've even given up wine

I go about, with my laziness and freedom

walking roads nobody wants

The lanes that leave my gate

bare star-trails seen by few

Home again I swim the texts

words oceanlike and limitless

Who rows these ancient waters but me

Dark ships, drowned suns, the recurrent mysteries

4.

Now the adrenalin fall moves me

What excitement in this blood melancholy

Still I'm vainly unprepared

no scarf and only one glove

Here the flaring of the season's bones

burns the marrow of August

At dawn I close my books and walk

streets between glass and brick

down to the harbor after a night's rain

Grey battleships on a grey harbor

Dragons soaked in grey sleep

5.

In the insect world November's a scourge

For us it invigorates

Yet insect guilt does not die, things

undone and the old sorrows stay

common and pointed as pines

Keep to the kitchen, dream by the hearth

drawn inward by the fire

What happened to the tranquil path?

My fevered connection

to ancients, friends, and poets still at work

has to suit me. I'm working

within a new silence, it is my

                                 hidden retreat

6.

Difficult to get out of bed

Worries bite like fleas, hidden and bloodfed

Noon turns to afternoon

My heart is lost in some other age

or far within some maze of habit

Past loves jab like pricks, a thousand

ideas dagger round me like smashed glass

Fruitless these spinning words

Senseless turnings, impossible rounds

7.

The talons of November

claw through my coat, cold

through to the innards, new season's bloodprints

Damned early falcon of winter

I can barely keep up with my life

drowning in wreckage, wrecked and drowning

Take the flute, finger the keys

play the mood that strikes, strike

the mood as you play, bring some lyric

to this mess, draw the June voice

out of the locked frost

8.

In a battered book of photographs

I discovered a shot of Thelonius Monk

hat on, head back, puffing a halo of smoke

Eyes shut in an ecstasy serene

that magician of notes lights

the film with a shamanic sheen

a brilliance, a stillpoint, the

bloom of the being authentic

And there it all was: brought me

to tears in the dull basement

of that bookstore, illumination

from the cellar of living

And there it all was: life's

passion for life leaping mind to mind

9.

Words, pizza, cigarettes shared

The common din is a tonic

Ideas crackle electric, star-edged

Then guests go and night

wraps me in fulness and loss

The cold sculpts mee

Far within a cave in secret chambers

bison dance on the deep rock

while initiates carry song and flame

Ten thousand years swallowed in a ceremony

Ceremonies of self:

the birth

and the burial

and the birth again

10.

The white rose after

the first frost. A beauty so late, yet stern

with browning petals: a shock

a lament, a triumphing sign

One glyph of whiteness

dies, another comes

Snow and the western wind

offer their extinctions, their beginnings