quinta-feira, 2 de fevereiro de 2012




PIRAQUARA AT MIDNIGHT

at midnight, hardly holding hands
barely touching, we climb
into this misty corner of the world
up the stony hill
where the neighborhood grocery doubles as bar,
where a smiling grandmother wipes beer off the counter,
   sells cigarettes to a boy in a baseball cap-

we cut an odd figure here,
old gringa and Indian flute player,
making our way through the midnight
bairro, a clumsy fit, two different puzzles
whose pieces can´t fall into place,
me squeezing through the barbed wire fence,
you plying the strands apart for me with your
eloquent hands until startled by the softness
that grazes my flesh, i lose my breath -

this, you tell me, is a place where you could be afraid
where you could be caught
unsuspecting-
even with the yellow dogs to warn you,
even with your stubborn bond to a gentle god,
your buddha who has taught you and
your sweet Catholic incense.

trying all kinds of music,
we move into the night
you rolling the gentle leaves into fine white paper,
me searching for that which defies translation,
you searching for that which needs none,
but i - alas!- am a failed chameleon, lacking your grace
in scampering up and down the walls,
stuck as i am  to my origins, to  my concepts

simply waiting for that perfect moment
when nothing matters anymore, just this time,
and then what is time but the stories we tell
and what is time but the stories we choose to remember
and then what is this life but the fears that we neither choose to have
nor to bury

-- Miriam Adelman

quinta-feira, 5 de janeiro de 2012

Keep trying...


 Keep trying


you give yourself to someone this way -
full of midnight light and the gold dust of the road
but he  finds you other, amidst the ruins
that could be Egypt, could be Greece,
could be Bikini Atoll
after they duped the natives

you have given him the wheel
 and slid over to the side,
the humming motor still running on last chance Texaco,
and summer burning all around, turning the red cactus flowers
into dried brown fingers,
and he promises to take the curves gently,
to not turn on the radio,
to drive just till the top of the mountain,
to let you take over -
just where the clouds are gathering,
just where the lurking storm has shifted with summer fickle -
as if for the first time,
as if for the last try

-  Miriam Adelman

segunda-feira, 26 de dezembro de 2011

Happening (counterculture)


Oh such are these delusions of grandeur-
the dancing boys, the fire eaters!
the little gnome at the podium
nuns as mad as the Hatter chasing
little white rabbits across the pasture,
the one with the torn skirt riding her tractor over the hill
and Prima Donna who glides along in her sylph-like solo
and jessie,who has almost
forgotten all, concentrates still
with fingertips and sunburnt lips
on the reeds and buttons of her fairy flute
and there's even me in this one weedy corner
sitting, banging on my toy tambourine
on and on and on till someone pricks an ear-
and the sisters and brothers gathered at the far end
of this wheat field, jamming on
into the full round belly of the moon.

- Miriam Adelman

segunda-feira, 12 de dezembro de 2011

ANIMAIS: um poema de Frank O'Hara

Será que você esqueceu como éramos naqueles tempos
quando ainda éramos de primeira
e o dia nascia rechonchudo carregando uma maçã na boca

Inútil é se preocupar com o Tempo
mas nós tínhamos umas cartas na manga
e um jeito de virar direto nas esquinas

O pasto inteiro parecia refeição
o velocímetro era desnecessário
inventávamos coquetéis só com água e gelo

eu não desejaria ser mais veloz
ou mais verde que hoje se você estivesse comigo Oh você
era o melhor de todos os meus dias


versão: Miriam Adelman

segunda-feira, 21 de novembro de 2011

Fragmento traduzido: Diane pensando sobre seu tempo.

De Diane di Prima, RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN “Certos tempos, certas épocas, vivem na nossa imaginação como maiores do que ‘realmente’ tenham sido, e sempre há um preço a pagar por isso. São, se você olhar de perto, tempos em que a fronteira que separa a mitologia e a vida cotidiana se borra. É como se os arquétipos emergissem do seu aprisionamento, e por algum tipo de consenso coletivo nós, ou muitos entre nós, simplesmente escolhemos um mito e o vivemos, ignorando as restrições do chamado ‘mundo real’. Ou talvez fomos de certa forma escolhidos pelo mito que fomos destinados a viver. Por vezes com uma velocidade fatal. Este encontro de mundo e mito é para onde todos pensávamos estarmos encaminhados. Onde queríamos estar, era tão belo. Colorido, luminoso e mortal, como flores tropicais. Mas não tinha escala humana. Não estava feito às nossas medidas. Mas nós não conseguíamos enxergar isso. Pensávamos que éramos deuses. Refere-se muito aos ‘Anos 60’ como um tempo deste tipo, embora geralmente isto se remeta apenas ao ‘Verão do Amor’ e aquilo que o seguiu, 1967 e 1968. A ponta do iceberg, na minha opinião. Para mim, a maior parte da década de 1960 e o que veio na seqüência, até mais ou menos 1976, banhava-se nos ares do mítico. Era um tempo em que os arquétipos perambulavam as ruas de Manhattan, misteriosos e por vezes mortais, em que os anjos, maus espíritos e outros sonhos daquilo que poderia ser repousavam no nosso cabelo e se recusavam a ser afastados. Um tempo em que as criaturas que viviam nos mundos nevoentos de San Francisco nos pareciam tão cotidianas quanto o verdureiro da esquina. Tínhamos lutado tanto tempo e tão furiosamente para encontrar, para poder fuçar o mundo dos nossos sentimentos, nosso conhecimento secreto, nossas intuições, que era como se Algo nos tivesse pego, pegasse uma mão nossa enquanto nos deslizávamos por alguma brecha, e agora esse Algo nos puxasse. Para baixo. Por que tão seguramente como a gente sabia que atrás das fachadas que nossos pais habitavam, havia um mundo de sentimento humano, atrás desse mundo havia outro que procurava tomar posse de nós. O que eu chamo o Mundo dos Arquétipos. Feixes inexoráveis de sentidos da alma, que por vezes se vestiam de formas humanas ou humanóides, por vezes andavam entre nós. Sem consciência e sem remorso. E tão belo! Agora eu os posso dizer, atrás dos Arquétipos descansam padrões ou texturas impessoais de energias que podemos chamar Orisha. Ou Yidam. E atrás disso, talvez dance o Vazio, nem preto, frio e oco com o imaginávamos, mas dançando na luz, relâmpagos difusos que se estendem como uma serie de superfícies por cima do nada. Movimentando-se com mais velocidade do que o olho possa registrar. Mesmo o olho da mente. Nossa queda foi – foi tão bela! E nós, que substituíamos religião, família, sociedade e ética com a Beleza, que nos enxergávamos ao serviço da Beleza, não compreendíamos nenhuma advertência, não antecipávamos nenhuma armadilha. Cair, ao serviço de Aquilo – isso era a graça última. Mas os arquétipos têm sua própria drama: um vasto ciclo não mapeado de Comedia dell’ Arte, e fazem seu jogo através de nós, sem nosso consentimento informal. E sem, finalmente, nenhuma preocupação pelos desejos humanos. E não é sem motivo que a ciência de nosso tempo nos entrega a imagem, o fato ou a metáfora das placas tectônicas. Continentes da terra boiando sobre um miolo de magma fundida. Como nós também boiamos, derretendo-nos um pouco, mudando de forma. Chocando uns contra outros, levantados por, dependendo de, em total troca química com aquele material fundido que aqui chamo de Arquétipos. Que parece irromper na superfície onde quer que as placas são finas. As placas eram muito finas em 1964." versão: Miriam Adelman

domingo, 20 de novembro de 2011

From Diane di Prima, RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN

Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were, and there is always a price to pay for them. They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred. The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called ‘real world’. Or we were somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live. Sometimes with deadly rapidity. This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going. Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful. Vivid, bright and deadly, like some tropical flowers. Not human. Not cut to our measure. But we – we couldn’t see that. Thought we were gods. ‘The 60s’ are often referred to as such a time, though what is usually meant by the term is merely ‘The Summer of Love’ and its aftermath, 1967 and 1968. Tip of the iceberg, if you ask me. For me most of the 1960s, and on to about 1976, was a time bathed in the mythic. It was a time when the archetypes stalked the streets of Manhattan, numinous and often deadly. When angels, incubi and other dreams of what could be settled in your hair and refused to be brushed aside. When we saw the creatures that lived in the fog worlds of San Francisco as casually as you see your corner grocer. We had struggled so long and so furiously to find, reach into, the world of our feelings, our secret knowledges, and intuitions, and it was as if Something had caught us up, caught the hand as we slipped through some gap, and that Something was now pulling us in. Pulling us under. For as certainly as we knew that behind the facades our parents had lived there was the world of human feeling, behind that world was yet another that sought to claim us. What I have called the World of Archetypes. Inexorable bundles of soul purpose, often wearing human or humanoid form, sometimes walking among us. Without conscience and without regret. And so beautiful! As I can tell you now, behind the Archetypes are vast impersonal patterns or textures of energies we might call Orisha. Or Yidam. And behind that, perhaps the Void dances, not black, cold, or empty as we have believed, but dancing with light, sheet lightnings spread as a series of surfaces over nothing. And moving faster than the eye can register. Even the eye of the mind. Our downfall was – it was so beautiful. For us, who had replaced religion, family, society, ethics with Beauty, who saw ourselves as in the service of Beauty, no warnings were understood, no traps anticipated. To go down, in the service of That – that was the ultimate grace. But archetypes have their own drama: a vast uncharted cycle of Comedia dell’Arte, which they play out through us, without our informal consent. And with, ultimately, no concern for human purpose. And it is not without reason that we have been handed by the science of our time the image, the fact or metaphor, of tectonic plates. Earth continents floating on a core of molten magma. As we ourselves float, melting a little, changing shape. Bumping against each other, lifted by, dependent on, in total chemical exchange with, the molten stuff I have here called Archetypes. That seeks to break through the surface wherever the plates are thin. The plates were very thin in 1964.

sexta-feira, 11 de novembro de 2011

Where are all the men?

Where are all the men?

He’s still driving his flatbed rig
across the highways of America
while Rosa wheels her cleaning ladies’ cart
room to room at the Best Western
in Minneapolis.
She still goes to church on Friday evenings
and on Saturday ice cold on the way to Safeway
with the food stamps stuffed in her back pocket,
  the girls at home huddled under the covers.

Clara, though , married her girl friend.
They went to Canada.
And Mary’s got a new job
in the old narrative order, she's
  keeping the foot soldiers quiet.
Manny, now, is glad to have gotten a girl`s job
he is so sweet to the clients and so beautiful in his beige leggings
And then there’s Felicia
speeding her black horse madly around the barrels
and dreaming of how she would ride the broncs
if only the West were still wild

Dois poemas curtos do livro mais recente de Mosab Abu Toha

 Do livro  FOREST OF NOISE.                    de Mosab Abu Toha                      versões:  Miriam Adelman Aldeia Palestina. Na colina d...