Tag Spain

* living, dreaming & apples

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.

— Antonio Machado

I look at this quote and see much of the poetic craft summed up in it.

There is the living of everyday life – work, chores, relationships, food, tying your shoelaces – all the things that make up routine, the background to who we are.

Then there’s dreaming – both the idealizing of the future as well as the literal act of what is seen when we sleep.  The unspoken times.

Between these two things – the background and the unspoken – we do our best to do the guessing that Machado encourages.

*manzananza*

*manzananza*

In the poem below, Jay Leeming takes an everyday thing – in this case, an apple – and pushes it into dream.  The image of the apple’s core as a “little room” is a guess towards what the act of eating an apple suggests beyond the everyday.  You get the usual connotations of Adam and Eve, the Fall – but there’s something more to it.

The turn for me here is at the end, how the poem leaves you with enough image to keep on talking inside of you.  Just watch what happens when you get to the powerful compound word “tear-shaped.”

Apple – Jay Leeming **

Sometimes when eating an apple
I bite too far
and open the little room
the lovers have prepared,
and the seeds fall
onto the kitchen floor
and I see
that they are tear-shaped.

***

Happy appling!

Jose

p.s.  Jay Leeming is also the editor of Rowboat: Poetry in Translation, a great journal you can find out more about here.

* photo found here.

** published in the book Dynamite on a China Plate, The Backwaters Press.

* Phil Levine & the friday influence

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This week on the Influence: Philip Levine.

When I read the following poem to Ani she picked up on something I did not when I first read it four years earlier: that it takes place in Spain.  This makes sense seeing as Phil Levine has spent much time in Spain and written often on the poets who suffered and survived in the Spanish Civil War.

Having herself spent time there, Ani spoke of the place in the poem as if she had been there, the way one does in the light of experience.

This is the world…  Indeed!

What moves me still about the poem is the scope of human understanding, how much gets put into the poem, and yet it is only one man’s glimpse, as fleeting and unknowable even now.

the *photo* of time

the *photo* of time

The Music of Time – Philip Levine *

The young woman sewing

by the window hums a song

I don’t know; I hear only

a few bars, and when the trucks

barrel down the broken street

the music is lost.  Before the darkness

leaks from the shadows of

the great Cathedral, I see her

once more at work and later

hear in the sudden silence

of nightfall wordless music rising

from her room.  I put aside

my papers, wash, and dress

to eat at one of the seafood

places along the great avenues

near the port where later

the homeless will sleep.  Then I

walk for hours in the Barrio

Chino passing the open

doors of tiny bars and caves

from which the voices of old men

bark out the stale anthems

of love’s defeat.  “This is the world,”

I think, “this is what I came

in search of year’s ago.”  Now I

can go back to my single room,

I can lie awake in the dark

rehearsing all the trivial events

of the day ahead, a day that begins

when the sun clears the dark spires

of someone’s God, and I waken

in a flood of dust rising from

nowhere and from nowhere comes

the actual voice of someone else.

***

Happy nowhereing!

jose

* from Phil Levine’s News of the World.