J O S É K O Z E R
_____________________TWO POEMS
Translated by Mark Weiss
A Meeting at Cho-Fu-Sa
Listen, Guadalupe; indirectly I write for you this imitation of Pound imitating Li Po, honoring by imitation, now that
my energy (which now sustains all things) begins to flag: we are already old; some more than others, all three, contemporaries: three old pyramids, three ships pissing in the night; a river; Rapallo; a neighborhood in Havana eaten ounce by ounce by the worm called time, time's clock-chime ounces, here, in China, and from China to here, Pound Pound, pendulum and stroke the beat of time: the pen lacks ink, the pencil lead, Guadalupe, to call forth from the womb your form, long-since emptied but filled with fronds, with refuge, José's living ear: listen to Li Po listen to Pound hear them shifting parallel words, perfection passing beyond time: become its equal. What do I say to you (come to await me) they put it aside they continue, they already crown: they crowned it, and here they recount the moments like the merchant's young wife lamenting her lover's absence (you who conceive, Guadalupe, can you conceive of such nectar?) she was a girl, she grew to marriageable age, imagining lebanons, flagons of milk (she had to learn the matters of love from the books of others, matters, we say, well fit for the imagination of sensitive damsels seduced in all their senses by a calming hand) remember: they played together, accustomed (the poets tell us) since childhood to offering corollas clusters and splendors of yellow that the Emperor in his isolation didn't know, both, after the beloved's sixteenth year (and you, at eighteen), themselves become a splendor of yellow, all of nature for that moment reduced (remember) to four legs entwining, love's tendrils, solace beyond interpretation, not called for; something intervened. He left, she waited (and you will wait) and in the somnolence of waiting whispered to Li Po some words gathered by Pound (and here transcribed): in them, Guadalupe, he suggests to you the hope for a reunion; and José from his own geography (in the future) writes these words to you: take, for example, La Belle Dame Sans Merci between your hands, take as well She Walks in Beauty (and fair is fair) hold between your hands Marlowe (The Passionate Shepherd to His Love): arise and go, fear not, you are guided: an island, greenery (understand) blues and unutterable umbers (for you, who have loved more than anyone the word umbers, I utter this) (sanctified; sanctified) plunge in; cross thresholds; darkness is light, and puts aside that science of air that Elifaz would have pronounced while guiding Job, Job's Virgil, Job's Teresa or Juan or the boy Keats; for a moment let's call Lezama to the service of Julián, that other poet: all will serve you, they are guides, all call out, and I myself will cease my clamoring. Come to me. Time was not hidden from Sadday; out of time's irreversible splendor (look) the flower of the plumtree (it's in the poem: in Pound, in Li Po): the trace of his shadow follows his passage, you will arrive at a height (the bereft prairies scarcely symbolic): she contemplates; a city; a young man of 26, perhaps a marriageable merchant, will climb through deltas and countercurrents towards foreign towns to negotiate the endless business of dailiness (to die): now this young man this maker of wands (he's 16, we are you); his skin caked with stains capillaries branches and hardenings is the flesh of the right hand of a Perfect Being: look at it. Only look at it. Enter, breath. To comfort, Guadalupe, is your nature. Impart it to whoever you await between two shores between two puffs of air, a little form a little breath, impart a little of your right side (your nature) tell him so as to hear it, speak to him so as to listen, and from him (José) will come again (Pound) the rain (Li Po): you and I we aren't separate. It's here; here: this place has a name like an unnameable name that has your nature: here we will call it a dirge (what difference does it make); we know that to escape this pass you must follow my pace, that it rains lightly (rains well) and that the flowery meadows of the word of themselves inflate.
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