eli-neumann

[eli-neumann]

One remembers the smell of warm paint: Bread and butter left on the wood step of the porch.

Round clouds above; Between, Everything very brightly Not there.

– George Oppen

[eli-neumann]

Ode to What I Do Not Know

TWO ANIMALS, doe-eyed, slick across the road into the femur of the night. Their feet learn the reptile skin of earth, dark roots, and the tethering of dream. I wake up away from myself. The fast animals of my eyes crouch through thickets into a sky-colored beach where I suddenly look up and see that my tongue is a country of birds. This water twists like a snake to taste itself. Water says, you know, I have never tasted of myself. I do not know myself. On a morning radio show about lines and colors, a man phoned in. There was a    child howling in the house of his mouth. He said, Please listen to me. Please. I’m prejudiced. His voice cracked. I need help. What spilled out of the stereo lay on my floor. Breathing. It had furs. Dark. Lord. The fizz of it. Some nights I wake up panting, knowing that I’m a stranger—with accent, homeless— in the childhood country of my body. Some nights I clench my fist, my teeth. I try hard to not turn on my bed. I fear what    lives in me might spill out and darken the floor. A knife. Not silence. Slice through us. What is loss, if not your body refusing to give you back to yourself.

-- Gbenga Adesina

[eli-neumann]

I Carried My Father Across the Sea

1. I Carried My Father Across the Sea

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia. He was a forest

of bruise. He wore a door on his face. He wore the black suit

of his wedding. The square pocket was still full of his vows.

He was light to carry, his burdens and vows had bled out of him.

He was heavy with the responsibility of the dead.

What sort of a son leaves his father

chained to fatherhood? I lifted and propped him up with my frame.

I measured the length of him with my length. The feet stuck in sea sand, his weak knees,

his arms gripped my sides. As the currents rose, the collar on his broken neck

flared into a float. The gash the surgeon’s knife left on his head

became a halo, it signaled in the dark. I put my nose to his nose.

I put my finger in his mouth. I tied his IV tubes, now a human gill, around our waists

and swam in the vein of the water.

“Look,” a sphinx in the waves said, “A son carries a father.”

Death is not silence. It is where I hear you most clearly.

What sort of a son leaves his father’s body

chained to the dark grievance inside the earth? I carried my father on my back.

I felt the bracing inside his afterlife heart on the skin of my spine.

He wore his face as a door he promised to open to me.

He bled out his vows.

2. Vows

When my father fell

into himself and the waters

within him broke their vows                                                    She

wilted to half of her carp. She wrapped herself in a black shawl. She,

my mother, crawled to his side, put her

ear to his chest. Said: if a body is yours, you

can hear where silence throats in its skin. She,

my mother, put her mouth to my father’s ear,

said I’ll call your body, which is mine, by name,

you’ll come back to me. How can a body the whole length

of which you once traveled with your tongue close itself to you.

When he, my father, closed his eyes and breath and his body became

a bridge he had left behind on a journey and they wheeled him down the stairs,

she sprang after them. She cried out:

My name is inside his tongue.      I need to get it back.

3. Thirteen Ways of Naming My Father’s Body

My father’s body knew pleasure. It tasted like thorn on his flesh.

Once on a bus, a child smiled at me, and I knew it was my father’s body

On some days, the morning is my father’s body. I wear it like loneliness.

When I’m dancing and twisting alone in the dark, my father’s body joins me. He brings in night as his dance partner.

Once, on a street in New York, afraid for my life I shouted at my father to stay back indoors. I told him not to come out of my body.

I’m the light of the world. My father’s body is the world.

Sometimes when I’m singing, a door opens and gives my father’s body back to the night he was born.

Fela Kuti dancing on the stage is my father’s body.

I sat beside a man a while ago at a garden; his hum was my father’s body.

I love the magpie. It has my father’s body.

The man sitting beside you is my father. He’s dead. His body is a sigh.                 Where I come from, rain leads home the father’s body.

Once, at a rock concert, I asked for a dirty martini, my hand wanted to find a way to hold the night. The purr of the electric guitar was my father’s body.

In the beginning God made heaven and my father’s body

-- Gbenga Adesina

[eli-neumann]

Across the Sea: A Sequence

1. Across the Sea

The bottom of the sea is cruel. — Hart Crane.

i On the sea, your prayer is not to the whorl scarf of waves. Your prayer is to the fitful sleep of the dead. Look at them, their bodies curve darkly without intention and arrow down into the water. What do you call a body of water made of death and silence? The sea murmurs on the pages of this book. There are bones buried in the water under these lines. Do you hear them, do you smell them?

ii In the panic of drowning, there are hands lifting babies up in the air, out of the water, for breath. A chorus of still pictures brought this news to me, to us. Because we do not see the bodies sinking, because we do not see their mouths already touching water, the hands lifting up the babies look almost ordinary. Like the Greeks lifting their newborns unto the sky. What is the failure of dead? That they sink? Or that they sink with what is in their hands?

The children of God are upon frightened waters, And God being hunger, God being the secret grief of salt moves among his people and does not spare them. The children of God are upon frightened waters.

iii There is a child whose protest is of eyes. She has crossed the water with her mother, they are shivering, waiting for her father, two days now, they are    waiting, shivering for a father the mother knows would never arrive. The mother holds the child, she says to her, gently: “It’s a brief death. Your father has gone on a brief death. He’ll soon be back.”

v A man is bent on his knees, wailing at the waters. He slaps his hand on the wet sand and rough-cut stones the way one might fight a brother. He grabs the shirt of the sand as though they are in a tussle. The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief. They say the man was a newlywed. Now his vows are inside the water. He claws at the sand. He wails: “Ocean, you owe me a body. Ocean, give me back my lover.”

vi Think of the boats. The timber comes from Egypt. They are cut into diagonals and made pretty. They are polished by hands. Their saplings are watered by the Nile. The White Nile flows through Khartoum before it puts its teeth into the Mediterranean. The waters and the trees eat bodies.

The children of God are upon frightened waters, And God being hunger, God being the secret grief of salt moves among his people and does not spare them. The children of God are upon frightened waters.

2. Coma

The silence is a prairie country. The silence is the silence of hospital sheets. The silence is of IV tubes, veins, quiet siren of ghosts. The silence is the silence of what is dappled invisibly by a body that is no longer human but not yet a ghost. The silence in your    body has lodged in my throat. Silence, can you hear me? The silence is of lime, and kraal stones. The silence is not shadow but the light of a body buried under a mound of rough stones. The silence is the silence of hands. Hands, wire-vine hands, can you hear me? The silence is the silence of broken ribs. The silence is the silence of the head, shorn and shaven. The silence is silence of a bandage wrapped tight around what is sunken, what is fallen in the gait of the head.    Head, can you hear me? The silence is silence of blood, seething through filament of bandage. Blood, can you hear me? Father, blood, Father can you hear me?

-- Gbenge Adesina

[eli-neumann]

Story

There was the day: the forsythia at your fence a conflagration of yellow, the sun, a more obvious conflagration of yellow, and spring

just finding us, there in the full bore of the day, the flowers, the sun, my belly full, and you, dear friend, temperate as the breeze. I want to call you, to sound

the distance like my grandfather, who, as a child, stood on his front porch, hollered through the woods to his friend a mile, he says, away, who would call back, echoing in the pine.

He’s an exaggeration, my grandpa, but you and I, we put in the hours on my sadness, fall leaching into winter,            the winter, the winter,

twin poles of my desire, to be or not, opening into a field where I walked all the snares, found them full and wriggling, some bone broken by the rope, some bit bleeding

from the knife. I’d call, standing out by the shed, kicking the ground gone hard with cold, the dogs rooting about, that skunk gone in for the season— and you, rarely one for calls, answered

as if we were the same kind of bird. Who set the snare and with what bait, we never knew, but you helped loose what was trapped, bandage and bind what was cut or broken. This year—

the winter the winter the winter trails its gray blanket into the fringe of May, I think of you, in the spring soon come. Friend, should you give a holler from your porch,

know that I’ll call back, voice travailing the pine, no matter how deep the wood.

-- Donika Kelly

[eli-neumann]

He, Too

Returning to the US, he asks my occupation. Teacher.

What do you teach? Poetry.

I hate poetry, the officer says, I only like writing where you can make an argument.

Anything he asks, I must answer. This he likes, too.

I don’t tell him he will be in a poem where the argument will be

anti-American.

I place him here, puffy, pink, ringed in plexi, pleased

with his own wit and spittle. Saving the argument I am let in

I am let in until

[eli-neumann]

love’s function is to fabricate unkownness (known being wishless;but love,all of wishing) though life’s lived wrongsideout,sameness chokes oneness truth is confused with fact,fish boast of fishing

and men are caught by worms(love may not care if time totters,light droops,all measures bend nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star —dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)

how lucky lovers are(whose selves abide under whatever shall discovered be) whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see

(who laugh and cry)who dream,create and kill while the whole moves;and every part stands still:

- ee cummings

[eli-neumann]

all nearness pauses,while a star can grow all distance breathes a final dream of bells; perfectly outlined against afterglow are all amazing the and peaceful hills (not where not here but neither’s blue most both) and history immeasurably is wealthier by a single sweet day’s death: as not imagined secrecies comprise goldenly huge whole the upfloating moon. Time’s a strange fellow;                                       more he gives than takes (and he takes all)nor any marvel finds quite disappearance but some keener makes losing,gaining                       —love! if a world ends more than all worlds begin to(see?)begin

- ee cummings

[eli-neumann]

love is a place & through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skilfully curled) all worlds

- ee cummings

[eli-neumann]

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world

my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers.     Don’t cry –the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other:then laugh,leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- ee cummings

[eli-neumann]

          My hand that destroys           The heap of ants Must seem to them of divine origin, But I don’t consider myself divine.           Likewise the gods           Perhaps do not see Themselves as gods, being gods in our eyes Only because they’re greater than us.           Whatever the case,           Let’s not commit Completely to a faith, perhaps unfounded, In those we believe to be gods.

-- Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #ricardo reis #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poet #poets

[eli-neumann]

We’ve always had the confident vision That other beings, angels or gods,           Reign above us           And move us to act. Just as in the fields our actions On the cattle, which they don’t understand,           Coerce and compel them           Without them knowing why, So too our human will and mind Are the hands by which others lead us           To wherever they want us           To desire to go.

-- Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #ricardo reis #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poet #poets

[eli-neumann]

Each thing, in its time, has its time. The trees do not blossom in winter,           Nor does the white cold           Cover the fields in spring. The heat that the day required of us Belongs not to the night that’s falling, Lydia.           Let’s love with greater calm           Our uncertain life. Sitting by the fire, weary not from our work But because it’s the hour for weariness,           Let’s not force our voice           To be more than a secret. And may our words of reminiscence (Which is all the sun’s black departure brings us)           Be spoken at intervals,           Haphazardly. Let’s remember the past by degrees, And may the stories told back then,           Now twice-told stories,           Speak to us Of the flowers that in our distant childhood We picked with another kind of pleasure           And another consciousness           As we gazed at the world. And so, Lydia, sitting there by the fire As if there forever, like household gods,           Let’s mend the past          As if mending clothes In the disquiet that repose must bring to our lives When all we do is think of what           We were, and outside           There’s just night.

-- Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #ricardo reis #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poet #poets

[eli-neumann]

When it’s cold in the season for cold, to me it feels pleasant, Since, suited as I am to how things exist, What’s natural is what’s pleasant just because it’s natural.

I accept life’s hardships because they’re destiny, As I accept the harsh cold in the dead of winter-- Calmly and without complaint, as one who simply accepts, And finds joy in the fact of accepting, In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the      inevitably natural.

Aren’t the illnesses I have and the adversity I experience Just the winter of my life and person? An erratic winter, whose laws of appearing are unknown to me But that exists for me by the same sublime fatality, The same inevitable fact of being outside me, As the earth’s heat in high summer And the earth’s cold in the depths of winter.

I accept because it’s my nature to accept. Like everyone, I was born subject to errors and defects, But not to the error of wanting to understand too much, Not to the error of wanting to understand only with the      intelligence, Not to the defect of requiring the world To be something other than the world.

-- Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #alberto caeiro #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poet #poets

[eli-neumann]

You speak of civilization and how it shouldn’t exist, At least not as it is. You say that everyone, or almost everyone, suffers From human life being organized in this way. You say that if things were different, people would suffer less. You say things would be better if they were how you want them. I hear you and don’t listen. Why would I want to listen to you? I’d learn nothing by listening to you. If things were different, they’d be different: that’s all. If things were how you want them, they’d be how you want them,      fine. Too bad for you and for all who spend life Trying to invent the machine for producing happiness!

- Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #alberto caeiro #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poet #poets

[eli-neumann]

If, after I die, someone wants to write my biography, There’s nothing simpler. It has just two dates - the day I was born and the day I died. Between the two, all the days are mine.

I’m easy to define. I saw as if damned to see. I loved things without any sentimentality. I never had a desire I couldn’t satisfy, because I was never blind. Even hearing was never more for me than an accompaniment to      seeing. I understood that things are real and all of them different from      each other. I understood this with my eyes, never with my mind. To understand this with my mind would be to find them all alike.

One day, like a child, I suddenly got tired. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

Besides all that, I was the only poet of Nature.

- Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #alberto caeiro #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poets #poet

[eli-neumann]

To clean and tidy up Matter ... To put back all the things people cluttered up Because they didn’t understand what they were for ... To straighten, like a diligent housekeeper of Reality, The curtains on the windows of Feeling And the mats before the doors of Perception ... To sweep the rooms of observation And to dust off simple ideas ... That’s my life, verse by verse.

- Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), tr. Richard Zenith

#poetry #poem #fernando pessoa #alberto caeiro #lit #literature #writing #creative writing #poet #poets