Too Many Names (by Pablo Neruda)
(“Demasiados Nombres” translation Heidi Fischbach)
Monday tangles up with Tuesday
and a week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
all the names of the days
are washed away by the night.
No one can be called Pedro,
no one is Rosa, nor María.
All of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain within rain.
I’ve been told of Venezuelas,
of Paraguays and of Chiles,
and I don’t know of what they speak:
I know the skin of the earth
and it has no last name.
When I lived among roots
they pleased me more than flowers,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang out like a bell.
Springtime is so long
when it lasts all winter:
time has lost his shoes,
a year contains four centuries.
Every night when I sleep,
what am I called or not called?
And when I awake, who am I
if I was not myself while I slept?
What this means is that just
as we are stepping foot in life,
just as we are newly being born,
let us not fill our mouths
with so many insecure names,
so many sad labels,
so many pompous letters,
so much yours and so much mine,
with so much signing of papers.
I intend to confuse things,
to join them and newly birth them,
mix them up and undress them,
until the light of the world
has the wholeness of the ocean,
a generous vast oneness,
a fragrance that crackles.
I ask for silence (Pablo Neruda)
(Translation by Heidi Fischbach. Read Neruda’s original “Pido Silencio” here)
Now if you’d leave me in peace.
Now if you’d get on without me.
I am going to close my eyes
And I only want five things,
five favorite roots.
One is love without end.
Second is to see autumn.
I cannot be without leaves
flying away and returning to the earth.
Third is grave winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of a fire in a wilderness of cold.
In fourth place is summertime
round like a watermelon.
The fifth thing is your eyes,
Matilde, my love, my beloved,
I don’t want to sleep without your eyes,
I don’t want to be without your seeing me:
I’d trade springtime
for your gaze still upon me.
My friends, all of that is what I want.
It’s nearly nothing and almost everything.
And now if you wish you may leave.
So much have I lived that one day
you’ll have to make yourselves forget me,
erasing me from the blackboard:
my heart was endless.
But just because I ask for silence
don’t go thinking I’m about to die:
au contraire:
it so happens I’m about to be lived.
It just so happens that I am and I keep being.
I will not be dying for within me
grains will grow,
first the kernels that break through
the earth to see light,
but mother earth is dark:
and inside me I am dark:
I am like a well in whose waters
the night sky leaves her stars
and goes on alone through the fields.
This is about my having lived so much
that I want to live another much.
Never have I felt such resonance,
never have I had so many kisses.
Now, as always, it is early.
The light takes flight with her bees.
Leave me alone with this day.
I ask permission to be born.
The hour is striking (Rainer Maria Rilke)
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All my becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”
-Rilke’s Book of Hours
(translated by Johanna Macy & Anita Barrows)
Me and Billy Collins
It’s not for not having people that love me. Not at all. And it’s not for not loving people, including a number whose side I would pick up and fly around the world to be at in a moment’s notice if ever they said the word.
And it’s not for not having a dear who I have no doubt would hide me in his basement or attic in the likes of a WWII occupied Europe. And I the same for him. And probably many more like him, both ways.
So no, it’s not for a lack of love. At all.
But sometimes I feel alone in all the world. Sometimes alone wakes me up. Sometimes it cries me to sleep. Sometimes it sits on my chest with no intention of leaving anytime soon and it’s hard to catch my breath.
OK, before you go feeling sorry for me, let me just say there are plenty of times I don’t feel alone and plenty of other times alone is just fine. After all, I love my space and my time and my books and my many-a-gazillion things, like the weathered wood ladders that I found yesterday on the curb and lugged home and washed and put in my bedroom and living room to hold all manner of scarves and cool fabrics and Humlum and more.
I am a girl who can get endlessly curious which means I am not likely ever bored. And I am a girl who gets off on eavesdropping in cafes. (There, I admitted it). And on buses and subways. (Watch out!) And I can look at practically any person I pass on the street and find at least one, if not ten, ways I relate.
All that to say sometimes I don’t give alone a second thought. But last night was not one of those kinds.
Last night was of a lonely variety. Last night was an alone in all the world alone.
Last night was an I am completely on my own alone. Like push comes to shove it’s just me over here alone. In moments like that it’s good no one around me is desperate for an eye because I’m quite sure I’d hawk my left one to feel connected.
But I’m picky on top of that, because not just any old connection will do. I notice I’m not sleeping with the drunk at People’s Republik. I notice I don’t say yes to anyone and everyone. In fact, I don’t say yes to many things.
And I notice this isn’t really much about sleeping. Or sex. Not necessarily, at least, though of course those would be nice too because sometimes a a girl just hankers for body. You know?
OK, who’m I kidding: sometimes a body, and skin, and a neck to nuzzle into, are missed so much my molars ache! And maybe I would hawk my other eye. So yes, that would make me blind right about now.
But all this to say it’s about connection. It’s about feeling gotten. It’s about someone saying, I feel you sistah! Wanting someone to really get me.
Now comes the cool part. Ready?
So in all this alone, Billy Collins comes by with his poem Marginalia and I absolutely love Billy Collins. (And no, not Billy Collins in person, silly! It’s called figurative. Or so-to-speak. But come to think, I’d hawk my nose right about now for Billy in person!)
Like his name, Billy Collins is an everyday kind of guy: like you, like me. He talks about things like, say, egg salad stains on paper. He’s a disarmingly down-to-earth poet, self-deprecating in the kindest and gentlest of ways.
But most of all I love Billy Collins because he’s so breathtakingly honest. And last night this is the poem that touched my alone. And while alone didn’t leave, I notice that alone fell asleep in good company and today I woke up to write it down, and maybe you will say that you understand and, maybe even, “I get you, Heidi! I soooo get you!” or “Heidi, wanna go get a drink?”
(I met Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 – 2003, at a reading a few years ago. You can read about that evening here if you’d like.)
Everybody Knows
Leonard Cohen, songwriter for songwriters, brilliant humble genius, the man who takes the shame out of our secrets, who shines a light into our human closets and gives us a chuckle over what otherwise might make us weep…, has a million lines that I adore, and “Everybody Knows” is full of them. This one feels especially apropos of this administration and the financial mess we’re in:
“…everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows that the captain lied, everybody’s got this sinking feeling like their father or their dog just died…”
Rufus Wainwright, cheeky as ever, hams it up and nails it. If you want to skip to the song, skip to 1:50. But if you’re a fellow Cohen-lover, start at 0:00. I hope you enjoy!
Click here to watch
Sometimes I want to be…
Sometimes I want to be my niece Caroline who’s cool and groovy, an awesome swimmer with a butterfly stroke that makes you jump up and down with joy (she’s 8!) and a growing leaf collection. Caroline loves girly things AND earthworms. She thinks slugs are a bit disgusting, but that doesn’t stop her from examining them up close and personal and telling me that I should make a new massage kind of crème from the clay she’s found on the Whidbey Island beach, plus slug guts, ginger-ale (to make it more liquidy) and cinnamon—she only added cinnamon when I said my clients might not want to leave a massage smelling like slug guts. Always creative, Caroline takes things in stride and can sit back quietly. She takes her time to answer a question that she doesn’t know the answer to off the top of her head. She won’t say just anything to make the asker happy.
Sometimes I want to be my quiet writer friend who’s taught himself to play guitar. At home he will sit down on his awesome antique art nouveau couch and just make up songs. He says things succinctly if he says them at all and when he says something it sits there strong and tall like a mountain, sometimes even for days. Or weeks. It is enough to drive an impatient Mexican jumping bean girl crazy but there you have it. Sometimes I wish I could be more like him.
Remember the laps that were comfortable to sit on when you were a kid? Sometimes I want to be like my friend Barbara’s big lap. Figurative big lap, people, figurative. What I mean is that when you talk to Barbara you feel so at ease — she doesn’t have an agenda for you because she knows that you, somewhere inside yourself, know what’s best. People who love you and don’t have an agenda are amazing people to have in your life and hands-down the best listeners. They aren’t just nodding their heads and pretending either. Neither are they playing devils advocate to every thing you mention that sounds the least bit “negative”, neither are they thinking of what they will say next. They don’t freak out if you cry and quickly smother you with Kleenexes. They aren’t afraid of snot. No. They are really just right there with you. Even a half hour of presence like that can turn a whole day around. I can be that way with my clients. And sometimes I am that way with my friends too. I like that.
Sometimes I want to be my stuffed bear Humlum because he never ever tries to change anyone. That doesn’t mean he hangs out with people he doesn’t like for very long, mind you, and I have seen him roll his eyes on occasion, but still. Point made. Humlum does not even try to fix my obsessive habits, like refreshing my email or facebook page to see who loves me. Or who doesn’t. He knows that when I finally have had enough I wil sit still and write or cry or go to the park. He never says I told you so, Heidi. He is endlessly patient. He knows I’m creative and persistent and that in my time I will figure how to wear myself with ease.
Adage (Billy Collins)
When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter
of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.
A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.
Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.
No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.
You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,
but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.
(from Ballistics by Billy Collins 2008 Random House)
Check out my blog entries related to Billy Collins: Me and Billy Collins and Laughing with Billy Collins
August moon
I fell asleep with a full moon
beaming on my leg
and I could not sleep
without putting moon on paper
so I wrote this in the dark
by light of said moon
while a fan whirled moon-air
onto moon-beamed leg
and I said to myself:
it is good to be alive.
——————
© Heidi Fischbach, 2007
