Ken's (Pro)posterous Posts

This is a book I picked up with my uncle, who I loved deeply, in Ecuador in the 1990's.  He took me to the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana and, after talking to some folks, and based on my very superficial, as an adolescent, knowledge of Rimbaud...Pound...Whitman...they said "you might like this woman".

Of all my voyages

what is loved most and remembered is that aroma

imprecise from afar, foreign

a loneliness

a dream

and what I miss the most

This is the Kimon Friar translation of Doxology.

Doxology

He was standing at the far end of the street

like a bare and dusty tree

like a tree burned by the sun

glorifying the sun that can not be burned

Women

Women are very distant. Their bedsheets smell of good-night.

They leave bread on the table so we won't feel they've gone.

Then we understand we were to blame. We get up from the chair and say:

"You've overtired yourself today" or "Don't bother, I'll light the lamp myself"

When we strike a match, she turns slowly and goes

toward the kitchen with an inexplicable concentration. Her back

is a sad, small mountain laden with many dead -

the family dead, her dead, and your own death.

You hear the old floorboards creaking under her footsteps,

you hear the dishes weeping in the dishracks, and then that train

is heard taking soldiers to the front.

-trans by Kimon Friar

Succession

The sun does not consider any of your hesitations -

naked it wants you and naked it takes you,

until night comes to dress you.

After the sun, there is repentance.

After repentance, the sun again.

-trans by Kimon Friar

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

This is a poem by Jose Gorostiza called, Water, don't flee from thirst, pause...

Water, don't flee from thirst, pause!
Pause, oh clear insomniac, in the vastness
of this uninterrupted dream which hurries
the febrile language of the current.

The simulacrum of your mind lies to you,
between rumors, live; immature,
the deep tension loves thirst,
with which dodged your arrow from the fountain.

Pause, water, you rush, why in so much
i blinded you and strangled the song,
you should dictate to the dead zones;

that by your own calculated death,
all you leave me is hardened skin
oh movement! brute which you abandon.

These are always more difficult than I believe when I start...so many subtleties and the use of reflexive verbs is something I can't really do in English...wow, i was going to write that in spanish...as inglish...like ingles...