STEVE KOWIT [19.198]

Steve Kowit

30 de junio de 1938, Brooklyn, Nueva York, Estados Unidos - 2 de abril de 2015, Potrero, California, Estados Unidos.

Educación: College de Brooklyn de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York.

Steve Kowit fue el autor de In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop y siete poemarios. 

Un poeta aclamado por la crítica, que murió en abril de 2015 a la edad de setenta y seis.

NOTICIA

Esta tarde, los resistentes Levis
Que usé a diario durante tantos años,
Y que parecían en perfectas condiciones, hasta el final,
De repente se rompieron.
Cómo o por qué eso no lo sé,
Pero pasó – un enorme desgarrón en la entrepierna.
Hace un mes, mi amigo Nick,
Salía de una cancha de tenis,
Duchado,
Después de vestirse con su ropa de calle,
Y en mitad del camino hacia su casa, se derrumbó y murió.
Presten atención a esto mis lectores,
Y caigan de rodillas enseguida
Como el poeta Christophen Smart y besen la tierra,
Y sean felices y aprovechen el tiempo,
Y sean amables con todo el mundo,
Aún con aquellos que no lo merecen.
Porque aunque no crean que esto va a sucederles,
Ustedes también algún día se irán.
Yo, a quien se le desgarraron los Levis en la entrepierna
Sin ninguna razón,
Aseguro que esto es así.

Rueden la noticia.

Traducción:  Bernardo Gómez

CUANDO ÉL ESTRECHÓ SUS LABIOS

Cuando él estrechó sus labios contra mi boca

El nudo se deshizo por sí mismo.

Cuando él estrechó sus labios contra mi garganta,

El vestido se deslizó hasta mis pies.

Es tanto lo que sé—pero

Cuando sus labios tocaron mi pecho

Todo, lo juro

Por su mismo nombre,

Se volvió tan confuso,

Que todavía soy, amigos,

Incapaz de expresar

(como me gustaría)

Qué delicias y, por quién

Enseguida me fueron otorgadas.

Traducción:  Bernardo Gómez

A few of Steve Kowit’s poems

Lurid Confessions

One fine morning they move in for the pinch

& snap on the cuffs— just like that.

Turns out they’ve known all about you for years,

have a file the length of a paddy-wagon

with everything- tapes, prints, film …

the whole shmear.  Don’t ask me how but

they’ve managed to plug a mike into one of your molars

& know every felonious move & transgression

back to the very beginning, with ektachromes

of your least indiscretion & peccadillo.

Needless to say, you are thrilled,

tho sitting there in the docket

you bogart it, tough as an old tooth—

your jaw set, your sleeves rolled

& three days of stubble … Only,

when they play it back it looks different:

a life common & loathsome as gum stuck to a chair. 

Tedious hours of you picking your nose,

scratching, eating, clipping your toenails …

Alone, you look stupid; in public, your rapier

wit is slimy & limp as an old bandaid.

They have thousands of pictures of people around you

stifling yawns. As for sex—a bit

of pathetic groping among the unlovely & luckless:

a dance with everyone making steamy love in the dark

& you alone in a corner eating a pretzel.

You leap to your feet protesting

that’s not how it was, they have it all wrong. 

But nobody hears you. The bailiff

is snoring, the judge is cleaning his teeth,

the jurors are all wearing glasses with eyes painted open.

The flies have folded their wings & stopped buzzing.

in the end, after huge doses of coffee,

the jury is polled. One after another

they manage to rise to their feet

like narcoleptics in August, sealing your fate:

Innocent… innocent… innocent… Right down the line.

You are carried out screaming.

CUTTING OUR LOSSES

In a downtown San Jose hotel,

exhausted & uptight & almost broke,

we blew 16 colones & got stewed on rum.

You lounged in bed

reading Hermelinda Linda comics

while I stumbled drunk around the room

complaining

& reciting poems out of an old anthology.

I read that Easter elegy of Yeats’

which moved you,

bringing back that friend of yours,

Bob Fishman, who was dead.

You wept. I felt terrible.

We killed the bottle, made a blithered

kind of love & fell asleep.

Out in the Costa Rican night

the weasels of the dark held a fiesta

celebrating our safe arrival in their city

& our sound sleep.

We found our Ford Econoline next

morning where we’d left it,

on a side street, but ripped

apart like a piñata,

like a tortured bird, wing

window busted in, a door

sprung open on its pins like an astonished beak.

Beloved, everything we lost— our old blues

tapes, the telephoto lens, the Mayan priest,

that ancient Royal Portable I loved,

awoke me to how tentative & delicate

& brief & precious it all is, & was

for that a sort of aphrodisiac— tho bitter

to swallow. That evening,

drunk on loss, I loved you

wildly, with a crazy passion, knowing

as I did, at last, the secret

of your own quietly voluptuous heart— you

who have loved always with a desperation

born as much of sorrow as of lust,

being, I suppose, at once unluckier,

& that much wiser to begin with.

THE GARDEN

Years ago we owned two cats who hated each other.

When I said we had better give one away

you wouldn’t hear of it— you

were adamant, outraged …

relenting only weeks later when it was clear

they were going to tear each other to shreds.

 I remember the speech you made:

if it came to that we would give away Sluggo,

our loveable calico,

who could purr his way into anyone’s heart.

For in less tolerant hands, Mphahlele,

our difficult, misanthropic gray

might be abused, or abandoned … or worse— whereas

if he lived with us he would be loved always.

& of course you were right,

tho God knows you have paid dearly

for a compassion as absolute

& unyielding

as the copper sheet of the Mexican sky

rising each morning over that house

high in the hills of Chiapas

that you loved so

with its eleven rooms,

those great hanging bells of datura,

that courtyard, tangle

of wild vines

that you would never let me weed

to begin a garden,

insisting in that quiet way of yours

that every creature

had as much right to live as we had,

& that it was a garden.

FRAGMENT OF ANCIENT SKULL

A young man, told to die for his country,

politely declines,

preferring, he mutters, to suck his toes

in his own room.

The civil guard, delighted to practice,

take him outside & shoot him.

His hat blows over the wall.

A piece of his head is found in the brush

centuries later

by entomologists looking for beetles.

Scrubbed down at the local museum

it is stuffed in a jar & labeled:

fragment of ancient skull

culture unknown

But not a word about the fate of his calico,

or the anguish of his father,

or the whereabouts of his hat.

CROSSING THE RIVER

I am translating a poem by Domingo Alfonso

called Crossing the River.

When I lift my head from the page it is night.

I walk thru the rooms aware of the shapes

that loom in the silence.

In the bedroom Mary has fallen asleep.

I stand in the doorway & watch her breathing

& wonder what it will be like

when one of us dies.

In 8 years

we have not been apart for more than a few days.

The cat drops to my feet & sashays past me.

I open the side door. Outside

there is no sound whatsoever. If things

call to each other at this hour of night

I do not hear them. Vega alone

gleams overhead, thousands of light years

off in the region of Lyra.

The great harp is still.

JOY TO THE FISHES

I hiked out to the end of Sunset Cliffs

& climbed the breakwater,

sneakers strung over my shoulder

& a small collection of zen

poems in my fist.

A minnow

that had sloshed out of someone’s baitbucket,

& that I came within an inch of stepping on,

convulsed in agony.

Delighted to assist,

I tossed it back into its ocean:

swirling eddies sucked about the rocks,

white pythagorean sailboats

in the middle distance.

Kids raced the surf,

a labrador brought down a frisbee,

& the sun sank pendulously

over the Pacific shelf.

I shivered & descended,

slipping the unopened book

into my pocket

& walked south

along the southern California coastline—

all the hills of Ocean Beach

glowing

in the rouged light

of midwinter sunset.

Even now

it pleases me to think

that somewhere

in the western coastal waters off America

that minnow is still swimming.

LAST WILL

If I am ever

unlucky enough to die

(God forbid!)

I would like to be propped up

in my orange overstuffed chair

with my legs crossed

dressed in a cashmere sweater & jeans

& embalmed

in a permanent glaze

like a donut

or Lenin

a small bronze plaque

on the door of my study

showing the dates

of my incarnation & death.

& leave the room as it was!

Let nothing be touched in the house!

My underpants stuck on the doorknob

just where I left them.

My dental floss

lying on top of the Bhagavad Gita

next to my socks.

Let the whole of Ebers Street

be roped off

& planted with yews

from Narragansett to Cape May

& left as a monument to my passing.

The street?

No— the city itself?

Henceforth

Let it be known

as the Steve M. Kowit

Memorial Park & Museum.

Better yet

if the thing can be done

without too much fuss

put the whole planet to sleep.

Let the pigeons & busses

& lawyers & ladies

hanging out wash

freeze in their tracks.

Let the whole thing

be preserved under ice

just as it looked

when the last bit of drool

trickled over my chin.

Let the last of the galaxies

sizzle out

like a match in the wind

& the cosmic balloon

shrink down to a noodle

& screech to a halt.

Let time clot

like a pinprick of blood

& the great solar flame

flicker down

to the size of a yertzite candle

leaving the universe dark

but for one tiny spotlight

trained on the figure of me

propped in my chair—

for after my death

what possible reason could life

in any form

care to exist?

—Don’t you see

it would be utterly pointless!

I would be gone!

Look, try to conceive it,

a world without me! Me

entirely absent—

nobody here with these eyes,

this name,

these teeth!

Nothing but vacant space

a dry sucking wind

where I walked

where I sat— where

you used to see me

you would see nothing at all—

I tell you

it dwarfs the imagination…

Oh yes, one last thing:

the right leg

is to be crossed over the left

— I prefer it that way —

& poised on the knee .

Prop the left elbow up

on the arm of the chair

with a pen

in my right hand—

let my left

be characteristically

scratching my skull

or pulling my hair.

If you wish

close the lids of my eyes

but whatever you do

the mouth must remain open

just as it was in life—

yes

open forever!

On that I absolutely insist!

Abuelita

At the Paso Picacho Campground just after dusk, I walk past a big Mexican

family picnic: everyone chatting & laughing around a long plank table littered

with paper plates & plastic cups & half-empty bottles of Fanta.

Two little girls off to one side collecting the prettiest stones,

& a slew of bigger kids racing around playing tag, wrestling & giggling;

& farther away, in a world of her own, a white-haired grandma

in a long green skirt is dancing ecstatically by herself, barefoot under

the stars, dancing with that invisible someone, her wide hips rocking

to music from an old Chevrolet’s staticky speakers, the driver’s door swung

open — the Dixie Chicks: If I could only hold you now . . . Is it stupid

to guess she is dancing again as they danced when he was alive & both

of them young, that husband of hers, gone now, what — twenty, thirty years?

I walk through the campground toward where my own car is parked

this early November evening, the Pleiades gleaming above us, Stonewall Peak

darkening to the northeast, & a sliver of moon through the pines.

The others, chatting & laughing, pay her no mind as she sways there, eyes shut,

barefoot, lost in that old dream: a girl in her twenties, dancing again here in

Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, in her long green beautiful skirt,

with that boy whom she loves still, that boy she is going to marry.

Taedong River Bridge

In memory of Jerry Greenberg

Retreating, Walker’s 8th Army torched whatever lay in its path, 

battered Pyongyang with rockets & mortars till the whole 

besieged city crumbled in flame. Blew up the granaries, too, 

& the bridges & roads, so that those who didn’t freeze to death 

would be sure to die of starvation — vengeance against the Chinese

Red Army & the peasant armies of North Korea for pushing them 

back to Inchon. The U.S. command shelling that city till nothing 

remained but that one standing bridge: tangle of girders with hardly 

a place to find footing & nothing to grasp as it swayed in the wind-

driven sleet over those waters — Taedong River Bridge, the only 

way left, short of death, to cross out of Pyongyang. Ten 

thousand terrified souls swarming over its splintered ribs. 

On their backs, in their arms, whatever they owned or could carry. 

Women cradled their infants. Men strapped what they could 

to their shoulders. The crippled & dying & blind inching their way, 

for to slip — & hundreds of those fleeing slipped — was to vanish 

into the icy hell of that river. Then the ones who watched, horrified, 

would clutch one another & wail in that other language of theirs 

while they kept moving. What else could they do? For what 

it was worth, those who fell through saved the lives of those 

inching behind them, letting them know where not to step next. 

                                                                 

                                       Jerry, you saved my life

in much the same way. Now & again, in my mind, that awful black limo 

pulls up at the curb in front of our house back in Flatbush, 

& Henrietta, your mother, steps out, gaunt as death in that black 

cotton shawl, while I watch from an upstairs window. At which moment

my own beloved mother slips into the room, lays a hand on my arm, 

& tells me quietly, lest I say the wrong thing when her dearest friend 

steps through the door, what she had hoped never 

to have to tell me at all: that you had been killed at the front. 

I was twelve. Forty years later I remain stunned. Now & again, 

something triggers it back & I drift out to Kelly Park 

& watch you fast-break downcourt — that long, floating jump 

from the corner. The swish of the net.

                                       Jerry, I don’t know you’d care, 

but when my number came up for the next imperial blood bath, 

I gave my draft board the finger — for us both. And for every last 

terrified soul on both sides. I can’t tell you how grieved I am still 

that you’re gone. Or thank you enough for the warning: your death 

letting me know where I stand, who my real enemies are, 

what the heavy money had in store for me too. 

In a way, then, I owe you my life: more than anyone else, you 

were the one who showed me where not to step next 

— the one up ahead, in the bitter wind of the past, who fell through.

.