Ya no soy un caballo/ Now that I am no longer a horse

 

Ya no soy un caballo/ Now that I am no longer a horse

    Germaine Calderón      English translation:  Miriam Adelman

There are signs
 duels of despair
hobos who wander
and grow with the night
with the aromas of the world,
boys like birds
in their shyness

The mountains, blue clad sailors
and we in our silence
seeking some flatland
some little town that is more
than this one that
limps on its three legs,
a shadow the size of water
and wine, incessant
at the hour of memory
when we collapse on the hillsides
where there is laughter
like a strange grimace
in the face of our obscene
exposure.
 
Today I have turned
My dreams inside out like a glove,
I have hung myself out to dry
my heart puzzled
by its own seams
its own flanks
its imminent size
and I am puzzled
to find myself looking
   so much
like a human.
 
I always thought I was a horse
people called me by my name
and I came
by gentle instinct
 
I loved the damp bark

the grains as tender as a gift
and I believed
in simple muscles
in the swiftness of air
in the impatient, runaway
phrase
 
In those days
trees were like
warriors
and greenness shot up
from the roots
and roots were fixed
nowhere
 
On those long rambles
days made their debut
and there was no other language
    for living
except in a way that was harsh
almost brutal
from the start
 
I knew that to be
was to give in -
to discipline
not to hunger
that these were the days of tales
of charmers and their flutes
 

Fire was the measure
to be well meant becoming
suddenly
from mane to nerves
a rebel
but always with the wide
rounded eyes of the docile
 
Today however
I discover myself
so much like all others 
so bounded in ideas
in labor
and just watching 
simply watching.

Hay signos
desesperanzas en duelo
algunos vagabundos
en crecimiento con la noche
con el olor del mundo
muchachos
como pájaros tímidos

Los montes marineros azules
nosotros silenciosos
buscando algún rellano
un pueblo más que este
insignificante en tres patas
una sombra del tamaño del agua
y un vino incesante
a la hora de la memoria
para caer tumbados en las lindes
donde se rie
com una extraña mueca
por nuestra desnudez obcena

Hoy he volteado
mi sueño como un guante
yo mismo
me he puesto a secar por el reverso
y el corazón se extraña
de su doblez
de su flanco
de su tamaño inminente
y yo me extraño
de ser tan parecido
a un hombre

Siempre pensé que era un caballo
las gentes me llamaban por mi nombre
y yo acudia
con un instinto manso

 Amaba la corteza llovida

el grano tierno como dádiva

y creia 

en los músculos simples

en la rapidez del aire

en la oración impaciente

desbocada

Entonces
los árboles
semejaban guerreros
lo verde venia de las raíces
y las raíces no tenian
un lugar fijo

 En esas largas caminatas

se estrenaban los dias
y no habia outro lenguaje que vivir
de uma manera recia
desde el origen
casi brutalmente

Sabia que estar
era doblegarse
por disciplina
no por hambre
que era el tiempo de los mitos
de los encantadores
con sus flautass

La medida era el fuego
el bienestar residia
en ser
de pronto
de la crin a los nervios
rebelde
y sin embargo,
el ojo siempre
agrandado
por la mansedumbre

Pero hoy me descubro
tan igualmente a todos
limitado en ideas
en trabajo
y tan sólo
y tan sólo mirando

  

Mekong

 

                for Marguerite Duras

In the dry season of the Mekong

It is up to us to carry the buckets,

Douse the cabin with water, make our

Own river to sluice away dust and scorpions.

We stack the chairs. Build a bridge

With the tables. Bathe the floors in

Yellow-foaming soap.  It is time to rejoice

Our mother tells us. We can dance barefoot, sing

And she will play her piano again

The only tune she knows

The only one we’ll keep

Forever.

Visitation

 

 

What I love most about my favorite poems

Is the way they are always calling me 

Back,  breezing in through another window or even

A crevice never before noticed, or a new crack

In the wall where just enough light sashays in,

And I can see it flickering in a darkened room,

A new dance, a sideward surprise.  Most faithful

Of friends, these poems, like the only ones who

Never commit you to oblivion, even if they occasionally

Forget your birthday or lose you amidst the crowd.

And each is perfect for a precise movement of mind

Or limb or loss:  you can call out their names –

Pablo, Sandra, Sylvia,  Fernando, Margaret… 

From an ember or a bookshelf they return

To cradle you in their words, or push you out again,

Into the world.

Philosophers and wolves (prosimetrum in progress!).

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n4it5CAOAJ6H-PgLO3VUajUjLQqhVayh/view?usp=sharing

Just starting to practice with new forms and formats.  Hope you like it!

Aviator Barbie (work in progress!)

 

When Erica Jong wrote Fear of Flying, 

Grandmother Barbie, then only 14,

took the title literally.  Grandma was

 already a toughie, and determined

not to end up like all those fifties housewives

at least not the ones in commercials who never climbed

      out of their aprons,

who ran off shrieking when little grey mice popped up

 in the kitchen at midnight

-        suddenly forgetting how to pick up a broom  -

or who toted the boys from game to game   but

never dreamt of learning to pitch.  When this Barbie

assured her best friend Ken she was ready to meet

whatever the challenge, his elder brother – he’d flown

fighter planes over Mekong Delta,   crawled home

to live out his days on the streets of Oakland -

said that girls who wanted to fly could serve coffee or tea

on TWA or Panam, land an executive hubby

or at least a half-decent pension plan,  

Grandma got so pissed that  she stomped off

 swearing she’d show those old boys

 - and the new ones too -

never to underestimate a girl who was born

 in 1959.   Not made of plastic, she’d

step down off the shelves after store hours,

 always waiting to first hear the clatter

 when the last employee pulled down the folding  gate,

and switched off the lights.  Steady with a flashlight, 

she’d sit till morning, studying flight manuals and the history 

of aviation, obsessing  over lives like Amelia’s and Bessie’s

or the novel she was currently reading. 

It was about Marx’s bastard daughter

who becomes a pilot, vanishing

into the fogs of a world that reneged on any

real revolution.  There were other stories too

and legends like one about a Mexican lady

who escaped the dungeon by flying

 out the window of her cell.  But my grandma

 Barbie, being no sorceress, concluded

she’d have to fight the system with

its own tools.   When she realized she’d

better not wait for the southern states to ok

the ERA, she decided once again

to take matters into her own hands.

She’d pull on her overalls, sneak

   out onto the airfields

while the others were still stone drunk

 or snoring, flying her planes

to some off-the-map island.  There were

 no h-bombs in hiding, nor tourists

tucked happily away in the brilliant steel belly

 of her dream machine, as she headed out

 into the deep of a night

where no Club Med and no World War III 

could ever be possible.

 

Poem & image:  

©️2022miriamadelman

 

 

 

 

Another mother's son (work in progress)

(The anti-war theme comes back to me again and again, as I watch films, read novels or follow the news. Yes, human beings have a hard time learning from the past, and the powers that be are blinded by an insane logic that they are not willing to break with.  So here we go, again...)

i.

 

Privilege of the women and children, to carve their way to

the border, through snowbanks or alongside the cars stopped out

along the freezing highways. They trudge on, too tired and hungry

to let the memory of home blaze a hole through their hearts. Some

have left behind husbands, fathers, or sons of sixteen still

meant to be carrying schoolbooks, sneaking first kisses

behind broken-down sheds,   or under the yielding windows of

abandoned warehouses.   

 

In the springtime,  tearful mothers

will be gathering flowers.

 

ii.

The walls have come down, so we see right straight through,

to hallways, to stairwells, to busted wiring,

 the apocalyptic version of an architect’s model:  

inner workings, the plan,  guts to reveal.

Before our very eyes,  an interrupted logic –

 that which was once the tender or lively nest where

a family gathered, where neighbors broke bread, where

one spouse was tired and the other, wanting, 

 where siblings bickered over whose turn it was

 to do the dishes.

Now, a reporter carves her way through the rubble:

this here was a bicycle, that, a dashboard,

 and there, in a pile,  lies a broken camera,

a bullet-riddled backpack

one half of a helmet.

 

In the springtime, tearful sisters

will be gathering flowers.

 

 

iii.

a couple heads out onto the road.  they head for the border

with no baggage but a little mutt with the name of a girlchild

  bundled into a shawl, curled  into the arms of the young man, almost

a boy. his girlfriend tells us: the soldiers came knocking three times.

each time they told us, you keep your mouths shut, don’t tell we were here,

pointing their guns to her temples, pushing him to the ground, mortifying

the elders, making off with the last loaf of  bread.

 

In the springtime, tearful brothers

will be gathering flowers.

 

 

iv.

sometimes bad news travels quickly.  but it can – also - not come, or drag along

on its own wretched time, crawling on its belly like a wounded puppy

or lost at sea like a message in a bottle.   airwaves interrupted.  telegraph  down.

in tenuous silence. you might also open the wrong letter, or take the wrong phone call. 

or stubbornly insist that void is nothing more than a sputtering battery.

a heart gone missing can sometimes return.

 

in the springtime,  tearful mothers will be gathering flowers.

 

© 2022miriam adelman

Horse Fever Barbie

                                    for Ruth Handler

Though born into 50s Amerika

Barbie never really liked fashion dolls.

She preferred her Friend Flicka or

the Breyer herd, their dappled hindquarters

and molded manes, her debt to plastic coming

in Paint and Appaloosa, and something

she could buy with her petty cash

from babysitting.  The neighborhood kids  

rarely threw tantrums.  They ate her popcorn by

the handful and listened to her stories, 

 though she  sometimes had a hard time

 making the human characters

 believable.

 

When her mom tried to drag her to Gimbel’s

for shopping, this Barbie went bananas, 

recalcitrance born of odd preference for

trotting the paths of the park with her

sheepdog.  She was willing to give up the

department store luncheon, opting instead

for the corner drugstore, the lime cokes

       and catchup-doused fries

 served by savvy waitresses who

 were already into tattoos and bad attitudes.

For years she forewent the cute dresses and pumps, or

 the hippie frocks, or the fish-net stockings and

psychedelic miniskirts she was kind of

         starting to like.

Although not trying to make a statement,  

she despised wasting time on the picky details,

or worrying about nails on a trip to the barn

where real horses nibbled on her hair, warmed

her shoulders with their breath, pressed velvety

muzzles against her cheeks.

 

When Barbie started to grow real boobs her

friend Steffi’s dad said  beware of riding.  You could

pop your cherry on an old mare and then no real Stallone would ever

give you more than a temporary canter. And there was the doctor who

thought himself privy to her secrets, prying for details

on equitation and its orgasms

Poem & image:  Miriam Adelman.