Breyten Breytenbach, “to empty the mountain (for wang wei)”

Halfway through life’s journey I discover the Way
Wind fleet-footed, heavens still, long-armed monkeys crying.
Now that I’m old I live near green mountains,
Water so clear and sand so white,
Backwards the birds fly
I wander alone there
And with no mouth-companion enjoy unfolded silence.
The endless river rolls its waves hour upon hour

But cannot bring to heel the moon;
After my long illness I scale the heights;
Loitering to where the stream sinks in moss
I rest and watch how clouds appear;
Passing on, I meet the old neighbor
And forget to return and chatter above and below
In one moving sand of words: Oh, we live in desperate times
And mourn our hair of snow
Squeezed by poverty, we even give up the wine!

From Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems 1964-2006. The poem “today I went down” is also available online, as are PDFs of poems published in Harper’s. I first discovered Breytenbach’s work through a profile in Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful book Calamities of Exile, which underscored the essentialness of social justice in Breytenbach’s writing and his personal activism. (He was jailed in his native South Africa for seven years for his political activities, after illegally reentering the country after more than 15 years of exile.) See, also, Breytenbach’s open letter about contemporary Africa, and another open letter to Ariel Sharon published in The Nation.

And what about Wang Wei? One of the finest poets of the Tang Dynasty, who has been repeatedly translated into English; see, for example, several versions of “Deer Park Hermitage” spanning most of the 20th century (and one from David Hinton’s excellent 2006 renditions).

4 January 2008 | poetry |

Nickole Brown, “What I Did, II”

In the squealing creak
of a yellow school bus
I made baby feet
in the morning fog windows,
the side of my fists and ten
thumbprints down.

I wiped them away, breathed on the glass,
made others

with higher arches, rounder heels,
perfect going-to-market toes.
I wiped those away, breathed on the glass,
tried again, then wiped, breathed,
tried again,
tried again.

From Sister, a “novel-in-poems” that’s also a debut collection. I first met Nickole in her capacity as the marketing director for Sarabande Books, but of course this is a completely different side to her creative passions. It’s a cliché to saw that poems dealing with an emotionally traumatic past are “raw,” and in this case it would be particularly inappropriate—this burst of expression has clearly been burning within Nickole for some time, and we’re the ones who are lucky that she’s brought it out of the kiln.

2 January 2008 | poetry |