Myth of Arrival

The cafe I am at right now has been playing a Patsy Cline CD on their old-fashioned speakers. Her song, Walking After Midnight, keeps repeating itself in my head: "and as the skies turn gloomy/ night blooms will whisper to me/ I'm lonesome as I can be" … and I think about that strange muscle we call love and how strong and weak it can become depending on our health and vitality and still it is as necessary as blood.

Like Patsy Cline, the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik wandered as well. She, though, wandered through words, followed sentences helter-skelter everywhere; since for her love and self-respect, identity and desire, were all bound up in words combinations, in her sentences. In the end, as her words failed her (much like the German-French poet Paul Celan) she took her own life. Here is the title poem to her 1965 collection, Los Trabajos y Las Noches (the translation and all its errors are my own):

Los Trabajos y Las Noches

para reconocer en la sed mi emblema
para significar el único sueño
para no sustentarme nunca de nuevo en el amor

he sido toda ofrenda
un puro errar
de loba en el bosque
en la noche de los cuerpos

para decir la palabra inocente

Works and Nights

in order to recognize in my thirst this design
it means this single dream
will never sustain me in love again

I have been offering everything
a thing so pure
it will be mistaken
by the she-wolf in the forest
the night of the bodies

in order to say this innocent word

Innocent word. Innocent kiss. This brought me back to the Patsy Cline song that has now been played at least three times since I sat down this morning and the idea of how many kisses a person might actually possess in their bodies. The romantic in me says kisses are limitless, but the realist points out that if you were somehow able to keep track by the end of a person's life there would have been a finite number of kisses, an actual number we could write down, that a person gave out during their lifetime. If you knew you were only going to kiss 12,987 times while alive would you save them all for the end? Get them over in the beginning and save onto that very last kiss to stretch your lifespan out a little longer? And in the end, who would you give your last kiss to?

Playing havoc starts with the first cut. Deep
notes. Deep notes. A sound someone will mistake
as pure need. The way our brief hungers creep
from each other's lips pressed together. Ache
and a C-note in a horn's bell. Deep notes.
You can't tell the difference. A fine earthquake
that says, “come here, my darlin'.” In our throats
are all the kisses we will ever make.
Come now. Anguish, like Patsy Cline, walkin'
after midnight; an old movie that creeps
after us. I wish you, friend, that movie.
I wish you that road. Those willows, weepin'
for pure need. And our last kiss that sleeps
in our throat. Come now, darling friend, kiss me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.