Spring Sleep (a reverie in springtime by Bai Juyi)

Spring takes us right to the edge of a great awakening.  That, at least, is the way I read this poem by the Tang poet Bai Juyi.  The poet lays down in springtime in perfect repose and finds himself transported.  This poem is the record of his journey.

Freshly bathed

Loose of limb

Alone I lay down

In peaceful contentment

By virtue of the night

Deeply enfolded in rest

After day’s long commotion

Sleep finally attends me

Oh spring

Sometimes wan and chill

But also by warmth blessed

When dawn enters the casement

I’m slumbering still

Withdrawn far from

The world of humanity

Sunk in the pillow’s depth

To the immortal realm ascending

Where I arrive as only seems fit

No longer dreaming

But overwhelmed and

Of speech completely bereft

As in a moment of triumph

To stumble drunkenly

All desire ends up over matched

In the pure stream of Chan

What cry then awakens me

A passing shrike

Outside the window

That breaks the reverie

Rising to my family

Wife and children laughing

A lifetime of spring gaiety

Yet a vaster realm

Has slipped away

春眠

白居易

新浴肢体畅     独寝神魂安

况因夜深坐     遂成日高眠

春被薄亦暖     朝窗深更闲

却忘人间事     似得枕上仙

至适无梦想     大和难名言

全胜彭泽醉     欲敌曹溪禅

何物呼我觉     伯劳声关关

起来妻子笑     生计春茫然

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Spring Comes Alive (by Bai Juyi)

This is a Tang poem about spring written by Bai Juyi that I translated this morning.  It shows the sympathetic fallacy at work in reverse, with the poet drawn into a springtime reverie through which he experiences his own renewal.  It just goes to prove we are transparent to nature, forward and back - and we have been that way for a very long time.

Spring comes alive in the darkness

That everywhere abounds

To the far ends of the earth

Everything revives from its rest

First a gentle breeze

Imparts the news

Encouraging the birds to share

Their innermost thoughts

The grasses open and expatiate  

Color stretches along the riverbank

Flowers adorn the houses

And small flowering shrubs

It’s as if I had been transported

Back to my childhood home

As if my story too had returned

To its humble start in Jiang Zhou

Photo by M. Bridge

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春生

春生何处暗周游

海角天涯遍始休

先遣和风报消息

续教啼鸟说来由

展张草色长河畔

点缀花房小树头

若到故园应觅我

为传沦落在江州

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Friday Night in the Parrish, January 2017 (People's State of the Union)

This January I had a chance to participate in an event at the Parrish Art Museum called The People's State of the Union.  About 100 East End residents came together at the Museum that night to sit in small circles and tell their personal stories.  Similar gatherings were held in hundreds of communities around the country -  in schools and churches and even private homes.  The idea is for these thousands of stories to be recorded, shared and reflected upon in order to form a collective narrative, built from the bottom up, which can be presented as an alternative to the top-down State of the Union address delivered in Washington.  Poets are invited to participate in the these story circles and write about the experience.  A poet is then selected to deliver a Poetic Address to the Nation.  (You can read more about the PSU and the organization behind it here.)


Poetry for me is a very solitary pursuit so it's pretty unusual for me to participate in an event like this.  Yet I found the whole experience deeply and strangely moving.  Usually when one writes and reads poetry in public you tend to think of it as being a performance art.  But joining together with my neighbors in these circles, our voices mingled as we shared our stories and poems; what emerges from the process is something altogether different in quality, more ceremonial than performance oriented.  Perhaps another way to express the same idea: these stories and poems are more a celebration of what brings us together than a performance that sets any one of us apart.

Tonight I'll be joining ten other poets in reading our State of the Nation poems at the Parrish.  The reading starts at 6 pm so please come by and join us if you are able to.  This is one of the two poems I'll be reading tonight.

Friday Night in the Parrish, January 2017

If Long Island had tilted

A little bit further forward

We would all have been the first

To tumble into the chill Atlantic

My friends -- that’s how we perched

In our chairs that night

Right on the edge of

The eastern extremity

And I wouldn’t have wanted it

Any other way

We’ve always been

Staunchly inclined

In these environs

Buffeted by bad weather

And sometimes self-styled as

Sons and Daughters of Liberty

But now who can say

Which is worse

To feel so estranged

In the land of our birth

Or to be an immigrant

In an immigrant’s land

Scorned and cursed

Not always without fault

But always least inclined

To find fault with

Our fellow humankind

Circles within circles

Like mind with like mind

It’s at times like these

We rediscover our art

Our voices steady

Our vision clears

We reach for pencil and paper

Even as the world around us

Seems to fall apart

It would be treasonous

If it were otherwise

Is what the veteran

Said in the second circle

Sitting right beside me

Let it also be said we felt

Incandescent

Though dizzied  

And fearful

And that much better bonded

As sisters and brothers together

Possessed of the means to thrive   

Even amidst such volatile times

  

Ode to My Smultronställe

There's been a long-running debate between the members of my innermost artistic circle (by which I mean my wife and me) about whether there are ever circumstances in which it is appropriate to weigh a poem down with an overly abstruse or foreign word reference.  For the most part I believe it's important for poems to be readily apprehensible but nonetheless think it is not only appropriate but sometimes necessary to use a recondite word or two (like a Yiddishism) when alternative phrasings simply won't do.  My wife is adamant in the view that there should be no exceptions to the general rule.

The Swedish word smultronställe provides a good example of why I find an obscure word is sometimes essential to a poem.  It means a secret spot or place of hidden delight. If you're Swedish, I suppose, it's the way you describe a clearing in the forest where you find a trove of lingonberries. As far as I know there is no single word in any other language to convey this very beautiful idea.  The obscurity of the word is really part of its meaning because it describes a beauty that no one else (except for the birds and bears) is ever likely to fully share.   I often feel that way about my home on Long Island's east end - a location that is filled with a plenitude of hidden and ephemeral beauty - My sense of this hidden beauty goes back to the very first summer I spent on Fire Island where I discovered a vast cache of blueberries right in the backyard.  Ah the fish-shaped Paumonok, mighty Long Island, home to Levittown, Amy Fisher and the Walt Whitman Mall in Melville, for me it's been a sun-drenched smultronställe all the same.


This poem was written for a group reading at the Parrish Art Museum that I will be participating in this coming Friday - April 7th.  You can read more about the Parrish reading here.

Ode to My Smultronställe 

Bastienne

Take your pictures

Star collect your memes

We’re battered not broken

Still made whole

By our dreams

My story

Your story

Our story

Spoken in circles

What the echoes make clear

Is that we’re not exactly concentric

As the sound waves propagate forth

Into the cool evening air

Every molecule has

Its distinctive spin

We all sense the epoch’s passage

In the deviation from

Our accustomed means

But now it’s the circumference

That’s not holding and

The center turns out

To be far more diffuse 

Than it otherwise seemed

There are no gates

No barbarians

Only two crows sitting

In the upper branches

Of a denuded red oak

Calling out to each other

Oh where is my secret garden?
Blanketed in straw today
Soon to be covered in a net
All the berries I've yearned for

In the season upcoming

A bounteous windfall 

 May surprise us yet

   

The Meaning of the Spring Beds Revealed

For backyard gardeners this week is pretty much the holiest time of year. It's when we first get down on our hands and knees and commence removing the straw in order to uncover the beds.  I can't tell just how thrilling it is to catch that first sight of the strawberry shoots and vines unfurling, with the small weeds trembling in their midst.  At the very moment of uncovering this bed, it is already teeming with life, just like a mosh pit, it's impossible to make even the slightest move for fear of trampling on some still pre-nascent leaflet that is not quite ready for daylight.

So here is a new poem I've written in honor of the moment this year's unfurling of the strawberry patch -

There is a deeper meaning

Found in those things embedded

Which is only revealed

To us once we get down

On our hands and knees

To inspect spring's first growth

There in the plush locus

We find the source

Of all our comforts

To be given and received  

In the vines and weeds entwined

And the strawberry leaves

Unfurling in vernal light

Announcing the race

Back to life

Just as well we might 

Disport ourselves one day soon

On the divan or couch

Gradually spreading out 

And ready to proliferate

Poem Inspired by Marissa's Photo

So we sojourned there

For many happy seasons

Leeward of the rising sun

The waves led us on 

Like a stairway ascending

From Good Ground to

The blue gray horizon

And then up into the beyond

Through the layers of stratus

Piled all the way to high heaven

Into the clairvoyant light above

Ode for the Balm of Gilead (#心心)

The deeper and deeper

Into the moment you get

The more de-personified

Your awareness grows

Almost disembodied

As if it had transcended

The bicameral mind

And now lodged itself 

In a third hemisphere yet 

Unnamed and unflagged

But unflagging in its

Determination to maintain

A peaceful disposition

This is what

It means to

Think with

Your heart

Instead of
Your brain

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With this poem I am pleased to announce the introduction of a new hashtag into my vernacular.  The hashtag is #心心.  It is the first time I have used a hashtag composed of a Chinese character - 心 - which is the Chinese word for heart.  A secondary meaning is to think or feel.  It is one of the distinguishing features of the Chinese language, which is central to the Daoist and Chan Buddhist traditions, that you associate thinking with your heart.  Thus this hashtag literally translated into English means: to think with your heart - #心心. Use it well and wisely!