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TURN A DEAF EYE Dichos in and out of love
Translated by RICHARD BRODERICK
Kraken Press, St. Paul 2014
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1. You thought you were just helping to set her free but ended up knocking down the cage you didn’t know you were trapped inside. Turns out, touching her sandy bottom was just the first step toward sounding your own depths.
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2. Your highest loyalty has always been to your own unhappiness, the promise you made to yourself that your promise would never be fulfilled. Here’s the moon, here’s the sea, the sunrise, some birdsong, maybe a field of wildflowers to take your eye off something – the here and now? The joyous crowd? Where were you when I needed you? you ask me silently before I get the chance to shout the same question at you a dozen times.
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With any luck, by the time we look again we’ll both be gone.
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3. I like hearing the rain on the roof this afternoon. Now, there’s no good reason to go outside. I see you’ve just stepped out of the bath. Your skin glows, your limbs are warm and just a little bit damp. Sounds like a plan to me! We’ll just have to tell our friends when they call, No, we’re not really invalids. But the next few days we are going to be bed-ridden!
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4. I went to bed empty but woke up full of you. It keeps happening over and over no matter how many hours I spend each day baling out and patching up my brain’s leaky hull. How can I even call them “my dreams” when every dream I have has only one real star and that star’s real name is really you? I close my eyes. I drift off to sleep, but it just turns out to be the nightly lull before the curtain goes up 9
and the show begins. Once more, I'm sure you'll be pleased to know, I went to bed empty but woke up full of you.
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5. The berries with the shortest stems are the ones you want to pick. Even a rainbow has to fade, but gracefully, one color bleeding into the next. Rest your wrinkled hand in mine. Lie with me on the hillside and we’ll flow downstream. Leave it to the camp jay to brag about the scrap of bacon he stole from the griddle. It’s almost noon, love, and you are all the wings I’ll ever need.
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6. It’s all right to celebrate so long as it’s a private joy. What breaks a heart can’t be shared. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be heartbreaking. The words that once connected us separate us now. “I loved you,” doesn’t mean I love you anymore. The wind blows outside the bedroom window. The sea goes on pounding the sandy coastline even though the last time I looked the beaches were empty.
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7. Bid my touch enter your presence. Issue a pass to my breath to come and play with yours like sister and brother. Permit my eyes to behold what is withheld from others. Let me warm myself by your light, taking your hand in mine one flame of a finger at a time. Drop by drop our lives mingle and the colors run together, until, heated gently, we begin to flow.
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8. At this moment, my hand on the small of your back. my leg lying across yours. At this moment, your thigh and the slow moon rise of your pelvis cresting my horizon line. At this moment, my fingers trickling down the rill of your spine. At this moment your eyes, your hair, the faint luster of your shoulder. At this moment, your smile, your lips lifting to meet mine. At this moment, the earth turning over, the garden, the bud, the flower, the fragrance, the evening hour. 14
At this moment, before the moment just after the moment when moments paused for a moment, at this moment before all the moments still to come.
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9. Love sleeps here. Love rises and goes about its loving tasks without ever rising, without ever leaving my arms, changing everything, making sure that everything remains the same. Love is laughter in the courtyard, the expectant knock on the door, sunlight married to grass, the blush of the rose blossom when a honeybee whispers in its ear, the humility of water embracing everything, the fire’s appetite, the weight of waiting growing weightier by the minute, 16
every hour until love, which is also you, arrives, for you are love and you are you and you are me and together we are one, and love sleeps here with us, rising without ever rising to go about its loving tasks.
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10. A little pressure behind one eye – that’s all it takes – shatters everything in my line of sight into dazzling fragments of a scattered life. My night your day, your day my night, half a world away. I dream of you when I’m sleeping and wake up to the vision of you lying beside me in bed. This pain we feel when we’re apart -what more proof do we need of how much we need to be together? Two halves of one heart mended by the sight of one another!
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11. After all this time, love is simply this – turning the light low so it doesn’t bother our eyes. Those young people in the photo on the wall offer us two smiles that, even now, still look like ours. Tonight’s rain foiled by the roof ’s tongue-in-grove construction. And once the light’s turned off, two bodies that seek each other out and begin to glow.
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12. While I don’t wish to offend any who choose to believe, what use do I have for mangers, when I have thee, my love, to kneel down before and Adoramus with no need to proselytize? This is a miracle that reveals itself time and time again. Every night with you is Christmas Eve. Each day I wake up holding you is another Christmas morning, a stack of presents waiting for me beneath the tree.
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13. This romance is like a discount department store. It’s got everything you want but nothing you really need. Bubble-head statues, water rifles, marked-down DVD’s, lots of stuff with beads with no purpose at all except gathering dust or tripping you up if they fall on the floor. But no nails or first-aid kits or stapling guns or twine or tape or glue to patch things up when they’re falling apart. No legal pads for jotting down what we’ve begun to forget. No aspirin, no antacid, no cough medicine to help you stop clearing 21
your throat when I talk, no herb supplements to relieve a heavy heart, no hammers, no bolts, no screwdrivers, not even a set of cables to jump start an old engine that now refuses to turn over in the morning.
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14. You lean forward, bumping heads, then give one another butterfly kisses on the cheek, your eyelashes fluttering like overheated hearts, like muscles straining into flight before crash landing in laughter. Why carry on this way? You don’t know. Maybe just to prove the two of you together are still something light despite all of life’s frailty. Not gods, exactly. Or stars. Just a burst of color. A sunny day wrapped in silk. 23
15. You ask and ask again but all you get is evasion. Her silence is deadening. You feel like a deaf man who can't hear the phone ringing inside his head. Time to hit the street. Time to take a flying leap. Tomorrow will dawn under new skies. Pessimism is the best refuge for a hopeless optimist who’s lost all hope -the place where self-delusion goes to die. But go ahead. Keep up the show. Maybe there's some way
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of lying her loathing for you into a love that’s really true.
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16. True north, my pole star, the compass who turned me away from false starts, now you point me directly toward heaven!
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17. Her pool has no shallow end. No wonder you keep jumping in‌
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18. I could not become myself until I loved you. I could not love you until I became myself. The outside world – the sky, the sun, the wind, rain, birds and trees – floods the world inside. How can I go back home when I’m already here?
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19. She’s been dead how long now? Four years? An old lady before her time, but when she was young, well, she tore out your liver and ate it in the marketplace. The memory still hurts. How does she do that from beyond the grave? It’s like the time when, your older brother took that toy monkey of yours and tossed it into the middle of a briar patch so big the only thing you’d ever be able to find in there would be a porcupine’s worth of thorns quivering in your side.
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For years afterward – remember this? – every time you went past that spot at the edge of the field, you’d swear you could hear a faint chattering in there, a pinched voice calling and calling your name.
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20. Once you met her you finally understood that strange use of the verb “surrender.� In the game of love, two of a kind is always a winning hand.
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21. Can I be a part of you? Not your shoulders, your hips or your feet, though that would be all right. Not your head, your chest or your elbows, your knees, your pelvis or your neck but one of your hands, that’s what I want. I want to wipe your brow and shield your eyes. I want to hide your mouth when you yawn and cup your ear when you’re trying to hear the music. I want to ride the waves rising from your heart and touch the hunger 32
in your stomach. If I were your hand then even when I was hiding I’d be near at hand, touching your back with my back, or sliding into your pocket and lying at your side.
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22. Shipwrecked, I was blessed to wash up on your shore. Now each day while the sea breeze makes the palm trees sway, I get to explore every inch of this island.
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23. It’s the way the river keeps emptying itself over and over without anybody asking, or how the sky shows up every day even if nobody wants it to. Sure it’s cold this morning – the smoke from the chimney doesn’t want to get out of bed. But warm air rises and finds its way into every corner. Snuggle down with me again beneath the covers. Despite the icy crusts and hard edges, the world can be awfully tender.
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24. Is it any wonder people cringe when they hear thunder? The sky shows up to work each day dressed in a blue shirt or a gray frock, and then Whack! it sounds like it’s going to crack, then rushes down and gives you a smack in the ear. Which brings up another point. How can you get a grip when she’s touching you all over? This can only lead in one direction -skyward, up the stairs, to a night filled with lightning.
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25. Worlds are always in collision – at least the one’s we occupy – that’s what’s hard to keep in mind. Planets hurtling toward each other or, having collided, hurtling away from each other, vectors of scorched fragments, rocky globes too small to sustain anything like a real life. What’s left of last night’s crescent moon is a half-breath of mist fogging the impossibly bright blue window of the morning sky. We stop and look, standing side-by-side, not speaking at all, but each of us wondering
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how long it will be before something comes flying past, and shatters the glass.
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26. We arrive again at the solstice only on different ends of world. I am here, but we are gone, separate as night and day, married like dusk and dawn. There can be no joining together, not really, unless we are free to come and go. Did you see how I fell to my knees without even noticing it? Steel and glass and a wary heart cannot protect us, but sunlight arranges the valley floor into a puzzle of bright and shadowy pieces. Don’t be fooled by the tomcat’s stillness. He has the mid-day heat trapped beneath his paws. 39
27. Not all cornucopias are green or brown or gold like braided loaves of bread or woven basketry shaped like drinking gourds. The honeybee lands in the thick red wine left in the bottom of the glass. Buzzing and buzzed she succumbs to the flavor of this strange ruby-shaded flower and decides to graze there forever. Yes, that’s what you are, my bread, my basket, my endless repose of stolen hours, my love, my sweet horn of plenty.
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28. You’re not blaming me. You’re just saying it’s all my fault. After all, somebody left the earth on spin cycle. Somebody slipped the owl a piece of paper with your name on it. There are only so many ways to skin a cat and every one of them is messy. And think about what it does to the cat! Whoever told you belligerent self-pity is a good combination? I’ve had enough ink from your poison pen 41
spilled on me for today. I think I’ll go out tonight and get thoroughly blottered.
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29. No. What I want to write about cannot be written. It cannot even be spoken. It cannot even be thought because there are no words to serve as a magic lantern for these thoughts. It’s like the blissful emptiness that fills the soul when we empty out the soul. It’s about you and me, of course. About all the things we don’t need to say to each other about the funny way we want so much to say to each other the very things that don’t need to be said. Because it’s me. Because it’s you. Because somehow we each lost our way and found our way into each other’s arms where we lie all night, 43
night after night, barely uttering a word, far beyond the need to say anything at all.
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30. My rain, my moon, my forest, my river, my hillside at dusk, my harvest, my garden, my first snowfall of the season, my song, my soft voice calming me in the darkness, my hope, my morning walk, my fresh breeze, my prayer, my quiet hour spent reading before I turn off the light, my glimpse of the sea on the horizon, my warm meal waiting for me on the kitchen table at the end of a long journey home.
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