You don’t even notice it as you step into the foyer, with a fake Chinese rubber plant and an old cigarette machine to greet you. . .To the right, a big calendar with numbers surrounded by Chinese characters and a feeling of otherworldly claustrophobia.
Argentinian author/philosopher Jorge Luis Borges examined why people hold certain beliefs, how those beliefs effect life choices, and how, occasionally, those tightly held and committed stances can be quite humorous.
A world is no less itself when upside down / reflected in the pool, as if dangled from its heels / like a prisoner already confessing his innocence / or his guilt by his journey through condition.
As a boy in Nowhere, Illinois, I came across / The Ratline: Notorious Nazis on the Lam, a book / about death-camp goons snaking / through the high grass of Paraguay / with Vatican papers and fake optical frames.
I plunged just as deep into myself / as into the swaying sea / and freed the dolphin sleeping / there under chains of memory. / But I sensed I was mere fathoms / away from some lordlier creature / that kept the key to endless breath.
It all begins here with an utterance, a scrambled item of speech requiring brain time to reconstruct: “Two metres.” Grumbled and garbled, the words issue from a mask. A figure cocks its head autistically sideways. The manner resembles that of a bird, the way it jerks its little skull to look at you with just one eye. Picture that gull eyeing you as you take your lunch on a park bench, the way it indirectly sidles in your direction while you eat. Picture Norman Bates.
Gary Snyder’s lively translations of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), along with their fictional account in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, have since inspired numerous poets and translators to mimic Hanshan’s raw poetic style. Most are unaware, however, of their participation in a millennium-old tradition of composing Cold Mountain verses.
Bring me the sunflower so I can plant / it in my salt-scorched patch of earth, so it can throw / back to the day’s reflecting blue / the anguish of its upturned, yellow face.
We were seduced, Madame, by /
mutual machinations, duped, /
you and I, by summer’s mayhem /
pounding on our overheated craniums.
Incandescent, gold and red, / the world vibrates and hums / with the last of the autumn. / Carmel and rust, / sable, tan and chocolate leaves ornament the ground, / while necklaces of green and gold / twist down off the sturdy trees.
