Suzanne Vega, Calypso.

Cream, Tales of Brave Ulysses

You thought the leaden winter
Would bring you down forever
But you rode upon a steamer
To the violence of the sun

And the colors of the sea
Blind your eyes with trembling mermaids
And you touch the distant beaches
With tales of brave Ulysses

How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
For the sparkling waves are calling you
To touch their white laced lips

And you see a girl's brown body
Dancing through the turquoise
And her footprints make you follow
Where the sky loves the sea

And when your fingers find her
She drowns you in her body
Carving deep blue ripples
In the tissues of your mind

The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
And you want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter

Her name is Aphrodite
And she rides a crimson shell
You know you cannot leave her
For you touched the distant sands

With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
Yeah

The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
You want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter

Rafael Anton Irisarri , Blue Tomorrows

Joanna Brouk (Usa, 1981) , Sounds of the Sea

William Carlos Williams,The Poem

It's all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song—made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian—something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady's
eyes—waking
centrifugal, centripetal.

William Carlos Williams, Spring and all

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

This is just to say, William Carlos Williams (used in: Paterson, Jim Jarmusch)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Ron Padgett, How to Be Perfect

Everything is perfect, dear friend.
                                                  —KEROUAC

Get some sleep.

Don't give advice.

Take care of your teeth and gums.

Don't be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don't be afraid, for

instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone

you love will suddenly drop dead.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute for 20 straight minutes

four or five times a week doing anything you enjoy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room

before you save the world. Then save the world.

Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression

of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.

Make eye contact with a tree.

Be skeptical about all opinions, but try to see some value in each of

them.

Dress in a way that pleases both you and those around you.

Do not speak quickly.

Learn something every day. (Dzien dobre!)

Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.

Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't

forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length

and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball

collection.

Be loyal.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Design your activities so that they show a pleasing balance

and variety.

Be kind to old people, even when they are obnoxious. When you

become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at

them when they call you Grandpa. They are your grandchildren!

Live with an animal.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

If you need help, ask for it.

Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural.

If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off.

Plan your day so you never have to rush.

Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if you

have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want.

Do not waste money you could be giving to those who need it.

Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far

more defective than you imagined.

When you borrow something, return it in an even better condition.

As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal

ones.

Look at that bird over there.

After dinner, wash the dishes.

Calm down.

Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have

expressed a desire to kill you.

Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want to.

Meditate on the spiritual. Then go a little further, if you feel like it.

What is out (in) there?

Sing, every once in a while.

Be on time, but if you are late do not give a detailed and lengthy

excuse.

Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory.

Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't.

Walk upstairs.

Do not practice cannibalism.

Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do

anything to make it impossible.

Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week.

Keep your windows clean.

Extirpate all traces of personal ambitiousness.

Don't use the word extirpate too often.

Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not possible, go

to another one.

If you feel tired, rest.

Grow something.

Do not wander through train stations muttering, "We're all going to

die!"

Count among your true friends people of various stations of life.

Appreciate simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of chewing, the

pleasure of warm water running down your back, the pleasure of a

cool breeze, the pleasure of falling asleep.

Do not exclaim, "Isn't technology wonderful!"

Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day.

Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel even

older. Which is depressing.

Do one thing at a time.

If you burn your finger, put it in cold water immediately. If you bang

your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for twenty

minutes. You will be surprised by the curative powers of coldness and

gravity.

Learn how to whistle at earsplitting volume.

Be calm in a crisis. The more critical the situation, the calmer you

should be.

Enjoy sex, but don't become obsessed with it. Except for brief periods

in your adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age.

Contemplate everything's opposite.

If you're struck with the fear that you've swum out too far in the

ocean, turn around and go back to the lifeboat.

Keep your childish self alive.

Answer letters promptly. Use attractive stamps, like the one with a

tornado on it.

Cry every once in a while, but only when alone. Then appreciate

how much better you feel. Don't be embarrassed about feeling better.

Do not inhale smoke.

Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the

street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped

in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.

Be good.

Walk down different streets.

Backwards.

Remember beauty, which exists, and truth, which does not. Notice

that the idea of truth is just as powerful as the idea of beauty.

Stay out of jail.

In later life, become a mystic.

Use Colgate toothpaste in the new Tartar Control formula.

Visit friends and acquaintances in the hospital. When you feel it is

time to leave, do so.

Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others.

Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time.

Read and reread great books.

Dig a hole with a shovel.

In winter, before you go to bed, humidify your bedroom.

Know that the only perfect things are a 300 game in bowling and a

27-batter, 27-out game in baseball.

Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to drink,

say, "Water, please."

Ask "Where is the loo?" but not "Where can I urinate?"

Be kind to physical objects.

Beginning at age forty, get a complete "physical" every few years

from a doctor you trust and feel comfortable with.

Don't read the newspaper more than once a year.

Learn how to say "hello," "thank you," and "chopsticks"

in Mandarin.

Belch and fart, but quietly.

Be especially cordial to foreigners.

See shadow puppet plays and imagine that you are one of the

characters. Or all of them.

Take out the trash.

Love life.

Use exact change.

When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window.

Ron Padgett, The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World

What makes us so mean?

We are meaner than gorillas,

the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on.

It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival,

as if survival were the most important thing on earth.

It isn't.

You know—surely it has occurred to you—

that there is no way that humankind will survive

another million years. We'll be lucky to be around

another five hundred. Why?

Because we are so mean

that we would rather kill everyone and everything on earth

than let anybody get the better of us:

"Give me liberty or give me death!"

Why didn't he just say "Grrr, let's kill each other!"?

A nosegay of pansies leans toward us in a glass of water

on a white tablecloth bright in the sunlight

at the ocean where children are frolicking,

then looking around and wondering—

about what we cannot say, for we are imagining

how we would kill the disgusting man and woman

at the next table. Tonight we could throw an electrical storm

into their bed. No more would they spit on the veranda!

Actually they aren't that bad, it's just

that I am talking mean in order to be more

like my fellow humans—it's lonely feeling like a saint,

which I do one second every five weeks,

but that one second is so intense I can't stand up

and then I figure out that it's ersatz, I can't be a saint,

I am not even a religious person, I am hardly a person at all

except when I look at you and think

that this life with you must go on forever

because it is so perfect, with all its imperfections,

like your waistline that exists a little too much,

like my hairline that doesn't exist at all!

Which means that my bald head feels good

on your soft round belly that feels good too.

If only everyone were us!

But sometimes we are everyone, we get mad

at the world and mean as all get-out,

which means we want to tell the world to get out

of this, our world. Who are all these awful people?

Why, it's your own grandma, who was so nice to you—

you mistook her for someone else. She actually was

someone else, but you had no way of knowing that,

just as you had no way of knowing that the taxi driver

saves his pennies all year

to go to Paris for Racine at the Comédie Francaise.

Now he is reciting a long speech in French from Andromache

and you arrive at the corner of This and That

and though Andromache's noble husband Hector has been killed

and his corpse has been dragged around the walls of Troy by an

      unusually mean Achilles,

although she is forced into slavery and a marriage

to save the life of her son, and then people around her

get killed, commit suicide, and go crazy, the driver is in paradise,

he has taken you back to his very mean teacher

in the unhappy school in Port-au-Prince and then

to Paris and back to the French language of the seventeenth century

and then to ancient Greece and then to the corner of This and That.

Only a mean world would have this man driving around in a city

where for no reason someone is going to fire a bullet into the back of

     his head!

It was an act of kindness

on the part of the person who placed both numbers and letters

on the dial of the phone so we could call WAverly,

ATwater, CAnareggio, BLenheim, and MAdison,

DUnbar and OCean, little worlds in themselves

we drift into as we dial, and an act of cruelty

to change everything into numbers only, not just phone numbers

that get longer and longer, but statistical analysis,

cost averaging, collateral damage, death by peanut,

inflation rates, personal identification numbers, access codes,

and the whole raving Raft of the Medusa

that drives out any thought of pleasantness

until you dial I-8OO-MATTRES and in no time get a mattress

that is complete and comfy and almost under you,

even though you didn't need one! The men

come in and say Here's the mattress where's

the bedroom? And the bedroom realizes it can't run away.

You can't say that the people who invented the bedroom were mean,

only a bedroom could say that, if it could say anything.

It's a good thing that bedrooms can't talk!

They might keep you up all night telling you things

you don't want to know. "Many years ago,

in this very room. . . ." Eeek, shut up! I mean,

please don't tell me anything, I'm sorry I shouted at you.

And the walls subside into their somewhat foreverness.

The wrecking ball will mash its grimace into the plaster and oof,

down they will come, lathe and layers of personal history,

but the ball is not mean, nor is the man who pulls the handle

that directs the ball on its pendulous course, but another man

—and now a woman strides into his office and slaps his face hard

the man whose bottom line is changing its color

wants to change it back. So good-bye, building

where we made love, laughed, wept, ate, and watched TV

all at the same time! Where our dog waited by the door,

eyes fixed on the knob, where a runaway stream came whooshing

down the hallway, where I once expanded to fill the whole room

and then deflated, just to see what it would feel like,

where on Saturday mornings my infant son stood by the bedside

and sang, quietly, "Wa-a-a-ke up" to his snoozing parents.

I can never leave all the kindness I have felt in this apartment,

but if a big black iron wrecking ball comes flying toward me,

zoop, out I go! For there must be

kindness somewhere else in the world,

maybe even out of it, though I'm not crazy

about the emptiness of outer space. I have to live

here, with finite life and inner space and with

the horrible desire to love everything and be disappointed

the way my mother was until that moment

when she rolled her eyes toward me as best she could

and squeezed my hand when I asked, "Do you know who I am?"

then let go of life.

The other question was, Did I know who I was?

It is hard not to be appalled by existence.

The pointlessness of matter turns us into cornered animals

that otherwise are placid or indifferent,

we hiss and bare our fangs and attack.

But how many people have felt the terror of existence?

Was Genghis Khan horrified that he and everything else existed?

Was Hitler or Pol Pot?

Or any of the other charming figures of history?

Je m'en doute.

It was something else made them mean.

Something else made Napoleon think it glorious

to cover the frozen earth with a hundred thousand bloody corpses.

Something else made . . . oh, name your monster

and his penchant for destruction,

name your own period in history when a darkness swept over us

and made not existing seem like the better choice,

as if the solution to hunger were to hurl oneself

into a vat of boiling radioactive carrots!

Life is so awful!

I hope that lion tears me to pieces!

It is good that those men wearing black hoods

are going to strip off my skin and force me

to gape at my own intestines spilling down onto the floor!

Please drive spikes through not only my hands and feet

but through my eyes as well!

For this world is to be fled as soon as possible

via the purification of martyrdom.

This from the God of Christian Love. 

Cupid hovers overhead, perplexed.

Long ago Zeus said he was tired

and went to bed: if you're not going to exist

it's best to be asleep.

The Christian God is like a cranky two-thousand-year-old baby

whose fatigue delivers him into an endless tantrum.

He will never grow up

because you can't grow up unless people listen to you,

and they can't listen because they are too busy being mean

or fearing the meanness of others.

How can I blame them?

I too am afraid. I can be jolted by an extremely violent movie,

but what is really scary is that someone wanted to make the film!

He is only a step away from the father

who took his eight-year-old daughter and her friend to the park

and beat and stabbed them to death. Uh-oh.

"He seemed like a normal guy," said his neighbor, Thelma,

who refused to divulge her last name to reporters.

She seemed like a normal gal, just as the reporters seemed like

      normal vampires.

In some cultures it is normal to eat bugs or people

or to smear placenta on your face at night, to buy

a car whose price would feed a village for thirty years,

to waste your life and, while you're at it, waste everyone

      else's too!

Hello, America. It is dawn,

wake up and smell yourselves.

You smell normal.

My father was not normal,

he was a criminal, a scuffler, a tough guy,

and though he did bad things

he was never mean.

He didn't like mean people, either.

Sometimes he would beat them up

or chop up their shoes!

I have never beaten anyone up,

but it might be fun to chop up some shoes.

Would you please hand me that cleaver, Thelma?

But Thelma is insulted by my request,

even though I said please, because she has the face of a cleaver

that flies through the air toward me and lodges

in my forehead. "Get it yourself,

lughead!" she spits, then twenty years later

she changes lughead to fuckhead.

I change my name to Jughead

and go into the poetry protection program

so my poems can go out and live under assumed names

in Utah and Muskogee.

Anna Chukhno looks up and sees me

through her violet Ukrainian eyes

and says Good morning most pleasantly inflected. Oh

to ride in a horse-drawn carriage with her at midnight

down the wide avenues of Kiev and erase

the ditch at Babi Yar from human history!

She looks up and asks How would you like that?

I say In twenties and she counts them out

as if the air around her were not shattered by her beauty

and my body thus divided into zones:

hands the place of metaphysics, shins the area of moo,

bones the cost of living, and so on.

Is it cruel that I cannot cover her with kisses?

No, it is beautiful that I cannot cover her with kisses,

it is better that I walk out into the sunlight

with the blessing of having spoken with an actual goddess

who gave me four hundred dollars!

And I am reassembled

as my car goes forward

into the oncoming rays of aggression

that bounce off my glasses and then

start penetrating, and soon my eyes

turn into abandoned coal mines

whose canaries explode into an evil song

that echoes exactly nowhere.

At least I am not in Rwanda in 1994 or the Sudan in '05

or Guantanamo or Rikers, or in a ditch outside Rio,

clubbed to death and mutilated. No Cossack

bears down on me with sword raised and gleaming

at my Jewish neck and no time for me

to cry out "It is only my neck that is Jewish!

The rest is Russian Orthodox!" No smiling man tips back

his hat and says to his buddies, "Let's teach

this nigguh a lesson." I don't need a lesson, sir,

I am Ethiopian, this is my first time in your country!

But you gentlemen are joking. . . .

Prepare my cave and then kindly forget where it was.

A crust of bread will suffice and a stream nearby,

the chill of evening filtering in with the blind god

who is the chill of evening and who touches us

though we can't raise our hands to stroke his misty beard

      in which

two hundred million stars have wink and glimmer needles.

I had better go back to the bank, we have

only three hundred and eighty-five dollars left.

Those fifteen units of beauty went fast.

As does everything.

But meanness comes back right away

while kindness takes its own sweet time

and compassion is busy shimmering always a little above us and

      behind,

swooping down and transfusing us only when we don't expect it

and then only for a moment.

How can I trap it?

Allow it in and then

turn my body into steel? No.

The exit holes will still be there and besides

compassion doesn't need an exit it is an exit—

from the prison that each moment is,

and just as each moment replaces the one before it

each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it

and pretty soon you get to like those jolts,

you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted

by their own feelings. The hippopotamus

sits on you with no sense of pleasure, he doesn't

even know you are there, any more than he takes notice

of the little white bird atop his head, and when

he sees you flattened against the ground

he doesn't even think Uh-oh he just trots away

with the bird still up there looking around.

Saint Augustine stole the pears from his neighbor's tree

and didn't apologize for thirty years, by which time

his neighbor was probably dead and in no mood

for apologies. Augustine's mother became a saint

and then a city in California—Santa Monica,

where everything exists so it can be driven past,

except the hippopotamus that stands on the freeway

in the early dawn and yawns into your high beams.

"Hello," he seems to grunt, "I can't be your friend

and I can't be your enemy, I am like compassion,

I go on just beyond you, no matter how many times

you crash into me and die because you never learned

to crash and live." Then he ambles away.

Could Saint Augustine have put on that much weight?

I thought compassion makes you light

or at least have light, the way it has light around it

in paintings, like the one of the screwdriver

that appeared just when the screw was coming loose

from the wing of the airplane in which Santa Monica was riding into

 heaven,

smiling as if she had just imagined how to smile 

the first smile of any saint, a promise toward the perfection

of everything that is and isn't.