Photo by Jacob Cook: An image of the Milky Way behind Mt. Whitney
Mother Forehead Cradle Sky
A renga “conversation” among Hafez-e Shirazi, José Lezama Lima, Paul Celan & Jerome Rothenberg
Between two rivers
Shiraz is a city built
on a holy site.
And the size of a loud laugh,
are already remembered;
All poets are Jews.
Constellation of Canis,
roads mirrored earthwards,
Neither the mother language
into the water silence
A rose that isn’t
the beloved’s face is worthless;
a spring that is not
Who pulled up flowers nightly
to weigh nocturnal water.
Dwarf-light that also
roaming in the orbit of
stelae and cradles.
Whose leader was the arch babe
chewing at his mother’s breast
Was a pilgrim’s thirst
ever quenched by a mirage?
Nothing in this well
Tremendous drought, blaze of sun:
I go towards my forgiveness
Pilgrim-staffs, there too,
the south, nightfiber-near like
unsepulchered words,
The pink pale sky of Paris
that held no constellations
In love the moon’s worth
only a barley seed, the
Pleiades’ just two.
Shepherd’s forehead while he sleeps.
Herd together, stumble, goats;
Of a tree, of one.
And of the woods around it.
The woods untrodden,
Out of the shadow of the
white café was not “the tree”
Kill me, then give my
blood to beggars like mother’s
milk to quench their thirst.
But the dog bitten by the light
by shadow, by tail and head;
To-be-forgotten,
continents, heartinents, swam,
the mother-flower,
Babe in womb is goat, feeble
bird, is shadow of a babe
A thousand birds and
a hundred roses will grow.
Under the cypress
So it bites the light and the
fruit, the wood and the shadow,
Carnival brood of
martenstars in the abyss
nib-, nib-, nibbled, bled.
Wind’s hand on the brow of space,
stars half close their blue eyelids.
Laughing, rose replied:
Tears must thread your eyelashes
wine from this jeweled cup;
That cradle somnambulant
with concise keys and soft flames.
Of the one-letter,
of the hard, tiny word-heap,
of the unarmed eye,
Beggar with one hand on a
cane, the other with a scroll
Asked beachcombers for
a pearl which is outside the
shell of space and time.
A child who inhaled all the
tenacious dew from the sky,
Economical
ignition points in the sky,
crests under fire,
The armies of drunk artists
spread out through the forests
When came this cosmic
tankard? When he enameled
the vault of the sky.
A tokonoma hollow
set my forehead into its place.
Existence, a phase
stripped bare. No reply — the thorn
climbs up through cradles.
It from your voice & cradle
it that ancient & dark word
author’s note on procedures
I learned of the renga collaborative form at Boise High School in the early 1980s, while having tremendous fun writing “communal poetry” with two close friends for our wonderful English teacher Ruth Vinz.
The original source for me was John Cage’s “Themes and Variations.”
Cage wrote: “Traditionally renga is written by a group of poets finding themselves of an evening together and having nothing better to do. Successive lines are written by different poets. Each poet tries to make his line as distant in possible meanings from the preceding line as he can take it.”
I also found the 1971 book “Renga: A Chain of Poems” by Octavio Paz, Charles Tomlinson, Edoardo Sanguineti and Jacques Roubaud, in four languages. From that I learned the traditional Japanese form involves a group of poets passing a series of 5-7-5 syllable “kaminoku” and 7-7 syllable “shimonoku” back and forth.
I’ve used renga here to read and bring together four poets I’m interested in. I chose four poems (or sets of poems if needed), then tried to find sets of words to fit the syllable constraint.
In “Mother Forehead Cradle Sky,” I had been reading Hafez around the same time as I’d discovered José Lezama-Lima through Jerome Rothenberg’s and Pierre Joris’s “Selections” series. Paul Celan was another poet in the series.
The sequence is Hafez—Lezama-Lima—Celan—Rothenberg.
As the renga grew, I would look for and appropriate lines that not only fit the constraint, but if possible also resonated with what had come before. I allowed myself to combine lines from separate poems by the same poet, if necessary.
Some examples of “resonance”:
water silence > spring > nocturnal watercradles > babe & mother > mother’s milk > cradle somnambulant Canis > constellations > Pleiades > dog bitten by light > bites the light > Martenstars in the abyss > nib-, nib-, nibbled shepherd’s forehead > goats > babe in womb is goat
For Hafez, I pulled 5-7-5 lines from translations I found at the Los Angeles Public Library by Thomas Rain Crowe (2001), Peter Avery & John Heath-Stubbs (2003), and Robert Bly (2008).
All the Lezama-Lima 7-7 lines came from “Selections,” including the poems “Thoughts in Havana,” “Insular Night: Invisible Gardens,” “Fifes, Epiphany, Goats,” and “Pavilion of Nothingness.”
Most of Celan’s 5-7-5 contributions came from “Selections,” including “And with the Book from Tarussa,” “The Syllable Pain,” and “Leap Centuries.” Another set of Celan translations, “Glottal Stop,” provided lines from “In the Most Remote.”
Rothenberg’s 7-7 lines came from “A Letter to Paul Celan,” “The Burning Babe,” “Wick,” his translation of Lorca’s “Night,” “In the Shadow of the 1000 Buddhas,” “Autobiography 1997,” and “In the Dark Wood, Khurbn.”
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