maybe three adjectives

writing some new pieces. *excited* having loads of fun with a rather epic piece for the creative final assignment in hybrid ids. kinda getting into my classes now. in mid-april. oh well. i'm having fun.


"he has maybe three adjectives."
"beautiful."
"beautiful."
"old..."
"old..."
"and what else?"
"oh let's say sunny or something dry like that."

~polina & i discussing c.p. cavafy

went to polina barskova's poetry gathering (what else to call it, really...) tonight in FPH. there were only four of us! alas. i love that polina brought up 20th century greek poet c.p. cavafy. "he has his own website," was my brilliant contribution (i.e. http://www.cavafy.com/). also i read a cavafy poem to everyone (see below: "Pictured"). i have a bilingual edition greek/english of cavafy back home--one of my favorite procrastination items. his poems are sexy too.

well i've been toying with a cavafy-inspired piece for ages. i wrote some fragments towards that during the little get-together. maybe those fragments will turn into something...oh and i find it fascinating how cavafy has become 'canonized' into gay male poetry in the U.S. (and perhaps in other places, too). the most prominent example/most famous contemporary lover/appropriator of cavafy would be mark doty...in particular with his 1993 collection, My Alexandria.

for now, some of my favorite poems by cavafy (classic translations by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard):

Pictured [this is the one i read to the group tonight]

I love my work and I am careful with it. But to-day
the slowness of the composition has disheartened me.
I am influenced by the aspect of the day. Darker it gets
and darker. And ever and anon the rain falls, the wind frets.
I am more minded now to see things than to write. I gaze
upon the picture of a boy lying down beside a spring:
in those green woods beyond he must have tired himself at play.
How beautiful the boy! What glorious noon is silencing
the atmosphere and lowering his eyelids drowsily?...
I sit and gaze a long time... And it is art again that stays
my weariness of the toil in my own art of rendering.

[and actually this translation is by john cavafy...here's the edmund keeley/phillip sherrard version]

*

He had come there to read.

He had come there to read. Two or three books lie open,
books by historians, by poets.
But he read for barely ten minutes,
then gave it up, falling half asleep on the sofa.
He’s completely devoted to books—
but he’s twenty-three, and very good-looking;
and this afternoon Eros entered
his ideal flesh, his lips.
An erotic warmth entered
his completely lovely flesh—
with no ridiculous shame about the form the pleasure took....

*

Days of 1901

The exceptional thing about him was
that in spite of all his loose living,
his vast sexual experience,
and the fact that usually
his attitude matched his age,
in spite of this there were moments—
extremely rare, of course—when he gave the impression
that his flesh was almost virginal.

His twenty-nine-year-old beauty,
so tested by sensual pleasure,
would sometimes strangely remind one
of a boy who, somewhat awkwardly, gives
his pure body to love for the first time.

*

Come Back

Come back often and take hold of me,
sensation that I love come back and take hold of me—
when the body’s memory awakens
and an old longing again moves into the blood,
when lips and skin remember
and hands feel as though they touch again.

Come back often, take hold of me in the night
when lips and skin remember...

*

As Much As You Can

And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.

Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social events and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

*

The Same Space [mark doty riffs on this poem in one of his books...]

The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.

*

Long Ago

I’d like to speak of this memory...
but it’s so faded now... as though nothing is left—
because it was so long ago, in my early adolescent years.

A skin as though of jasmine...
that August evening—was it August?—
I can still just recall the eyes: blue, I think they were...
Ah yes, blue: a sapphire blue.

*

so of course i pick all the sexy ones
but here's one that breaks my heart every time i read it:

Hidden Things

From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there that changed the pattern
of my actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I’d begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing—
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.

**

i also read to the group Midsummer by louise glück (if anyone knows me at all, they know that glück is one of my all time favorite contemporary poets...though her influence on me lately has waned considerably). one person at the get-together was apparently at the reading glück gave last fall (the one at amherst that k.w. and i went to). i read "Midsummer" because it reminds me of cavafy, tonally and thematically -- the dry, plainspoken sensual landscape & the nostalgic melancholy. btw, glück's new book A Village Life is coming out this september. i told the person who had apparently also been to the reading about this...good news, since we had heard glück at that reading say that she wouldn't publish the new manuscript for a while (she doesn't like to be too obviously prolific, although A Village Life will be her eleventh book of poetry).

plus:
~the New York Times article on Cavafy that Polina clipped and saved
~a nice article by langdon hammer on glück's new book: Louise Glück's Italy of the Mind: On a classical stage peopled by workers, wives, and lovers.


And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.