Wally Swist
Wally Swist (Nacido en 1953) es un poeta americano y escritor. Es más conocido por sus poemas sobre la naturaleza. Una espiritualidad sin trabas a ninguna religión específica impregna gran parte de su obra. Es también un erudito independiente.
Swist nació el 26 de abril 1953 en New Haven, Connecticut. Estudió en la Universidad de Yale comunidad 1973 hasta 1980. Actualmente tiene su hogar en el sur de Amherst, Massachusetts.
Libros de poesía:
Invocation, Beaumont, Texas: Lamar University Literary Press, 2015.
Velocity, Chicago, IL: Virtual Artists Collective, 2013.
Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
Winding Paths Worn through Grass, Chicago, IL: Virtual Artists Collective, 2012.
Luminous Dream, Cave Spring, GA: FutureCycle Press, 2010.
Veils of the Divine, Newtown, CT: Hanover Press, 2003.
The New Life, Hartford, CT: Plinth Books, 1998; Second Edition, 2003.
For the Dance, Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1991.
New Haven Poems, Hamden, CT: Connecticut Fireside Press, 1977.
ELEGÍA
Esos pensamientos
en medio de la noche
que te llevaron a la muerte
persisten en la oscuridad
como los rastros
de un arma humeante.
Si nuestras penas pudieran
llevar una tonada, la oscuridad
zumbaría con ella.
MANOS AMIGAS
Algunos días valen la pena.
Te apretás a besos
con tu esposa.
Hasta el jefe sonríe.
Agarrás el jarrón de cristal
justo antes de que caiga al suelo.
El problema con tu carro
es una faja de ventilación suelta
no el motor.
El dolor en tu pecho
se ha ido inexplicablemente.
Los rostros de la gente brillan
cuando ven a tu perro
asomándose
por la ventana del asiento trasero,
sus orejas agitadas
por el viento.
Por primera vez, escuchás
una voz interior.
Te incita a andar
el largo camino de vuelta a casa.
La canción del jilguero
suena desde un árbol cercano.
Dejás que tu imaginación
te lleve a lugares,
como si manos amigas
de pronto se volvieran alas.
SOPHIE
se arrastra por la sala
en sus chancletas.
Habla sola
en polaco y en inglés.
Te pregunta la hora,
y qué hay de desayuno,
de almuerzo, de cenar.
Te pregunta cómo estás,
y rara vez sale afuera.
Años de drogas psiquiátricas
han hecho que su lengua le cuelgue.
Incluso después de su única mastectomía
aún guarda su dinero
amarrándolo alrededor de su cuello
en un rollo bajo su bata,
en el surco entre sus pechos.
Ella le halla un sentido al mundo.
A veces incluso canta.
HERENCIA
Simplemente, lo que mis padres enseñaron
desde los primeros
trazos del alfabeto
practicados sobre tablas para escribir,
adornos ejemplares
del método Palmer,
una ética de clase trabajadora,
y libros—
que me han llevado
en largas caminatas
al lugar donde las hojas
están rociadas
de luz.
(Tomados del libro The New Life, Plinth Books, 1998. Traducción de G. A. Chaves.)
My Friends, the Bees
for John Maziarz
The winter night you helped me
untie the mattress from the top of the car,
and we carried it upstairs, all you said was:
We will find a river. With that I was alerted
to the currents that flowed inside you.
Then into spring and through fall, you held
ladders, while I painted tall Victorian peaks
and gripped the shutters you handed to me;
more than just the stickiness of paint between us.
You began stories with Well, yass,
and I followed you coon hunting over expanses
of swamp abundant with pussy willow.
You would punch the time clock the next morning
at the factory, spent, but full of the river
you had found. That next spring at dusk,
when the smell of damp earth rises, you led me
to the abandoned servants’ quarters, only days
before a doctor’s diagnosis of cancer, and there,
where a broken water pipe made a right angle
over the blossoming hawthorne, came the dripping
from the hive, that first covered your index finger,
then flowed over your entire hand with a buzzing
that matched the quiver in your voice,
when you declared, My friends, the bees.
Revisiting Haskins’s Flats
The land is not exactly unchanged,
since the woods have grown in where there was a back meadow.
However, the brook is still visible,
if not more so, since the trees have been taken down along the banks,
with a significant beaver lodge
near the bridge that crosses the road. Wild turkeys come down into
the back meadow for feed,
and I understand deer come for the salt lick that has been placed there.
I was magnetized by the pull that
still exists for me of the aura of the paradisal green space of the land,
which is that hallowed glade.
The sign for the meadow, where I would walk is weathered and illegible;
although the significant thing
is that the land exists at all, especially with the amount of thoughtless
development in town. Just driving
by, was traveling back in time for me. My yellow Labrador and me
sauntering the meadows and the fields,
beside the curves and meanders of the brook, the woods on the knoll
and the ridge. For an hour this afternoon,
that time in my life revolved right before my eyes. Only less than nine
miles from Haskins’ Flats to where
I live now in the farmhouse in South Amherst: all those years, and just
fifteen minutes fill in the decades
in between. However, in experiencing the present moment, I feel more
grounded in having made my visit,
as if time, and my life, has broadened and deepened, cut into the earth
like Cushman Brook’s
doglegs guiding the rush of the water through its course over the land.
Panegyric
From one Taurean to another,
I know well about being drawn to the earth.
Yes, there is a gravity found in those born
under the sign of Taurus, grounded in
their stubbornness. What has been
fortuitous is the serendipity of your voice
that has delighted me every morning.
I will miss you—and your essence: always
the dance, that chaconne of celebration,
the broad sweep of Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Scherazade. May the graces always buoy
you, and carry you through your life
out of any strife—from one incandescence
to another; and may you continuously rise
above any discord by
moving about, as you do, so harmoniously.
Rogue Robin
The banging half-awakens me enough
to check the clock on the stand to
verify my intuition that it is 5:00 a.m.
Then moments later there is another
louder muffled rap on the glass of
the window closest to my bed where
the territorial robin attacks the image
of himself reflected in the clear glass.
An hour later, he is at it again, with
the increased fluttering of his wings
beating against the window; and in
yet another hour, I am fully awake
and rise to greet the day, the thorny
irritant of the rogue robin providing
an initial challenge. Sometimes he
will have seen me dress, and will fly
into the Norway spruce in front of
the window, turn around, then dive
into the glass, where I will have
placed my hand on the other side
of the window, which he responds
to by opening his beak, the feathers
on the top of his head ruffling
in anger, as the bird slides down
the glass to the porch floor,
not at all defeated but reinvigorated
by the human confrontation he has
elicited, undaunted in his attempts
at protecting what he has assumed
to be his turf from any other robin,
which then insures his right to breed
with any female that passes into his
particular apparently limitless glen.
Mostly, nature, and its flora and fauna,
offer us the beneficence of what is our
discovery of the perennial wonder
of what it opens within
ourselves, and in doing
so, the awe it inspires in us leads
to our experience what
it is to be more fully
conscious; however, when what we
see in nature expresses itself
as despicable, which reflects our most
deplorable characteristics as humans,
it is nothing less than provoking
in that it reveals the lowest chakras
and their power over us, when their
energy is misused, especially in
injuring others. This morning, as I
walked onto the porch, with the intent
of swatting the robin away
from the window by using the bristle-end
of the broom, the bird flew off warily,
only to then zero in on another
male robin in his district, and to viciously
fly into that bird, mid-flight, the way
he practices diving into the window
glass, with such force, the other robin
was nearly knocked to the ground,
when it gathered itself,
mid-air, to fly on, with
the avian drone of the rogue robin,
persecutor and projectile, pursuing
its own image, while driving it
into another part of the farm yard.
On the Wings of Angels
Charley, the younger brother, washed the dishes, and Yiffey
was the pot washer and the kitchen’s rudimentary prep person.
They were what are now called developmentally-challenged,
but they were not always on time for work but they also never
missed a day. Charley, the tall one, cigar in mouth, crew cut
standing up on the back of his bald pate, although quiet, once
told the waitress, Ruth, that he could see through the skirt
of her white uniform when the sun shone through the rear
window a certain way when she was standing at the front
of the dishwashing station, where the trays were unloaded
and broken down from the tables in the lounge. She was Joe’s
girl, although a decade older, and he was First Cook, behind
Pinky Lee, the Danish Chef, known for his humor, charm,
and the piquant richness of his excellent sauce Hollandaise.
Charley frightened her, as he put a scare into everyone, and she
later told Joe that since that day she always wore a slip to work.
Yiffey often washed the heavy-laden metal pots in the large
sink beside the ovens toward the rear of the kitchen, or where
he would be given relatively simple food preparation, such as
shucking oysters, or peeling shrimp, where there was a window
just above his work station, which he would often gaze upwards
to, and where he would often fold his arms up at the elbows,
as a crane might, and beat his hands rapidly, then begin
to croon the gospel song made famous by the Stanley Brothers,
his eyes shining with an otherworldly a light, flying heavenward,
while singing, On the wings of angels headed home.
A Mystical Unfoldment
You suggested that I read the excerpt
of this chapter, and even knew
the page numbers, 254-255, in which
Franklin Merrell-Wolf describes,
with specificity, how he manifested
higher consciousness.
When I opened my copy of the book
upon returning home, I saw that
I had those pages bookmarked with
the image of the painting, Summer,
from the series, The Seasons, by
Edward Burne-Jones, who epitomized
late 19th century romantic style.
The bookmark is more a statement
of myself, and the cosmology
of Merrell-Wolf certainly your own
philosophical credo;
but what synchronicity to have found
the passage bookmarked, and that it
had sung to me enough that I intuited
a need to indicate what I possessed
as the foresight to know I would not
remember it, even though I believed
I thought it was what I understood
and that I would never forget it. These
words are closer to your mathematical
mind, although they do hold resonance
for me, especially since it is Zhuangzi
who intimated that any degree
of breakthrough into the transcendent
toward the eternal, in which
you became one with everything, did
require bringing this within one’s heart.
My old mentor, Joseph Campbell,
spoke about that in regard to the fourth
chakra as the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
which is effectual a raison d’être as there
is, appears as facetious in this irreverent
world. Although it was Carl Jung that
said, after a long life of seeking
the eternal, that he thought he might
have reached the fourth chakra, what is
only emblematic of the paradigm of love.
Merrell-Wolff is the one who actualizes
the breakthrough in writing about what
he has experienced, but if you want to
live in that constancy, such a breakthrough
necessitates nourishing the day-to-day life
of the heart, of accepting the implausibilities,
such as living in the world
and being able to tend to the discomfort
of ourselves, and of others, with nothing
but the grace of what you describe as
the kernel of light, that agility within us
regenerating what is unresponsive
that expands our hearts in forgiveness.
In Memory of Galway Kinnell
Opening the door
this morning, I hear the rush of traffic beyond the tree line
of gold-yellow oaks and crimson maples, the glass
of the door beaded with the melted late October frost—
remnants of what those of us in the world have shed
in your passing.
Nearly forty years ago, I remember you sitting at a round
table of a Chinese restaurant, named Blessings,
in New Haven, with myself and others for a poetry reading
you were to give, and as it came to my turn to request
a poem that you might read later that spring evening—
the trees dropping blossoms across the sidewalks along
Linden Street—I asked for “The River that Is East,”
the one you wrote that regards Hart Crane.
You read that poem, among others, that evening,
the all-so-familiar shock of hair falling onto your forehead
that you would push back with the fingers of one hand,
to the delight of your audience,
Galway, always handsome as your poems were perennially
sturdy with their resonant humanity.
The question now remains is
that how can the fires of your loss staunch
the ensuing darkness other than
the words you bequeathed to us and that burn within us—
the trail of which is laced with drops of melt
that we brush on the branches of the winterberry tree,
of which we shake from our dampened
sleeves, reminding us of just how a branch snaps back
on a sunny afternoon after heavy
snow, leaving a whitened ghost hovering in the air, or
when we bend down to
notice a single glove lost by someone hurrying through
the storm, and recognize our own losses,
those ragged flags that blow as do the curtains drawn
out in the gale through the open windows of the heart,
alerting us to the lightning flash
of our very being that also
marks your death, not dissembling into the incorporeal,
beyond the gold-yellow and crimson trees
and that white line the horizon holds, then relinquishes.
My Better Angels
I will need to be satisfied with knowing
you from afar, which only makes seeing
you today more of a delight than
I can adequately express. Please excuse
my candor: but if you should ever be
possessed with the not-so-wild notion to
want to see me, then it is my hope that
you may allow yourself to be carried
away by such an incandescent idea
as that, and to act on it, with, I may add,
any amount of abandon. You are just
someone that I am unable to help being
drawn toward, and to the encrusted
honeyed nature of the hive that is your
soul. I am not asking you to understand,
but I am appealing to your capacity
for possibly not passing judgment on me,
especially since the angels of my better
nature appear to be holding me back, but
apparently I am giving them quite a struggle
in wresting away their magnificent hands.
.
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