Chapter 18 - One Piece of Your Heart

When I select a poem for the title chapters, sometimes I already know which one I'll use. Other times I'll have a specific poet in mind. For example, with Jasper, I knew I'd be using Blake, Neruda, and especially Roethke at some point; for Edward, I knew I'd use some Dylan Thomas. For this chapter, Adrienne Rich seemed appropriate. There were actually several poems I thought would fit, and since I could only use one for the title, I thought I'd add two others I had considered. I hope you enjoy them! I doubt very many readers actually come over here to read the poetry, but for those who do, I love being able to share my love of poetry and some of my favorite poets with you!

Miracle Ice Cream by Adrienne Rich

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.

Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of year heart.


A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by Adrienne Rich

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.


In Those Years by Adrienne Rich

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

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Links:
I Wept Not - Chapter 18

Adrienne Rich - Wikipedia
Audio Recordings at Penn Sound
A Rich Life by Michael Klein, The Boston Phoenix Article
American Poems - Adrienne Rich
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Chapter 17 - The Multiplying Universe

Soneto XVI by Pablo Neruda

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres,
porque de las praderas planetarias
otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites
la multiplicación del universo.

Tus anchos ojos son la luz que tengo
de las constelaciones derrotadas,
tu piel palpita como los caminos
que recorre en la lluvia el meteoro.

De tanta luna fueron para mí tus caderas,
de todo el sol tu boca profunda y su delicia,
de tanta luz ardiente como miel en la sombra

tu corazón quemado por largos rayos rojos,
y así recorro el fuego de tu forma besándote,
pequeña y planetaria, paloma y geografía.

Sonnet XVI
Translation by Stephen Tapscott

I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you—compact and planentary, my dove, my globe.

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Links:
I Wept Not - Chapter 17

Pablo Neruda - Wikipedia
Pablo Neruda - Poems
Red Poppy: Pablo Neruda
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Chapter 16 - From the Rift

Clown in the Moon by Dylan Thomas

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.

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Links:
I Wept Not - Chapter 16

Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas - Wikipedia
Poems by Dylan Thomas
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