Original Poetry

Seyfer

by Rebecca Seiferle

One word,
and the lead weights welded onto your infant shoulders
turn into wings, laughing through the air,

the mountains opening the sun with a blush,

but it is not just
one word —
it is your name, your Jewish name,

the name of your family,
what one gave you,  another took away,

and, years later, like one freed from prison, into a strange land
where you never expected to walk,

it will be restored to you, 
out of the secret vintage
of the trees

which are
compelled out of darkness
or impelled into light, and yet the dark is the deepest

saturation of light, so that it holds all of the light in its own body,
and the light is the shimmering skin of the dark

improbable fruit
of your own freedom . . .

So it’s not just a word, like those words
that twist
you in their envenomed hatred all night
or the word you know so well
that kills you;

it’s a particular calling, your name,

full of the wine of
silence and the bread broken with laughter. 

In it, someone smiles the smile beyond understanding,
welcoming you home to this world.

What Language Do You Speak?

by Rebecca Seiferle

Some languages are dangerous to speak — madness
for instance: that early summer, when Wayne couldn’t talk,
when he would just stand and look at his son, The Baby, crying,
while Jennifer,  his wife, took care of everything.  I
was there to help her, so I went to work in her place
for a dollar a day, and she stayed home with the baby
and the garden. When I told her one morning
that I had a strange dream — people in tribes of different colors
were fighting a war with their minds — she looked
at me and laughed, Oh that sounds like what Wayne thinks,
as if I were learning his language. I didn’t know how,
as I was gone all day trying to sell the few tie-dyed
shirts, peasant skirts, hip-hugger belts in her shop
(like a child’s idea of learning to speak business).
No customers, except one afternoon, a businessman
who glared with hostility: “I wanted to see what you people
looked like, what you people do here.” He meant hippies, I think,
but his hostility made me not want to respond to his language
of hating, so I was as quiet as Wayne, speaking schizoid —
so many voices within the mute lips of the body — as he thumbed
a belt that was too short to rein in his girth and left, dissatisfied.
Then I would go home and Jennifer might say something like
It would be nice if it rained lightly this afternoon, just a little,
enough to water the new seeds, and it would rain, quietly,
so I longed to learn her language of the gentle wish.
The baby would cry in his inarticulate need,
and Wayne would stand in the corner chewing on his lips gently
as if all the words he wanted to speak were grass. Uncertain,
that afternoon, I could only point, questioning the burnt circle
in the floor of the porch, and Jennifer told me
a convoluted story that ended with a friend
who’d stayed there with them, and I realized
that this friend knew a friend of mine in high school,
and so forth and so on, so when she said 
a guitar had burst into flames on the porch,
I knew it was my guitar, given away in high school, music
the language I had given up trying to speak. The instrument
had traveled across the country and back to burn up on this porch,
where I’d be standing several years later, looking at the black circle
of burning as if it were the language of signs. 
Life is weird, she said; I said, yes,
a language that I don’t know how to speak.
There are no such things as coincidences.
In  a week or so, we had company, a couple
who stopped by on their way to somewhere else, and suddenly
there was meat in the house, sizzling in the skillet,
and we were all so hungry, though we hadn’t known
how hungry, that we were eating the hamburger
out of the skillet with a spoon, and I felt
claustrophobic and went out into the back yard.
Wayne was standing under an apricot tree which was 
blooming. I looked at him, and our gazes were both of us
thinking together, and I wondered why I was learning
even his gestures (and was it just the language of symptoms?)
When he reached up and plucked a blossom from the tree
and held it out to me and said It’s edible, I took it and ate it;
sweet, delicate, and like eating fragrance, the sweetness
of air itself, and I said nothing, and looked, thinking
It’s all right, and it was as if he heard my silent reassurance
and followed me back into the house. Edenic word:
he had not spoken to anyone  for six months until
he held out the flower and said it was edible. We were
speaking each other’s language, but was it his language,
the language of madness, or mine, saying softly
he could go back into his own house? It was time,
eventually, for me to leave, to go back home
in the language of temporary and permanent,
and it was then, later, I had a dream that Wayne was curled,
fetal, under the stairs, again unable to speak,
and I was traveling out of my body and speaking
the language of something winged in me
that slipped into his body and curled up, taking
on the form of his hurt. I crooned to him in the language of healing
which is dangerous to speak because one might not come
back from the wound that one visits, but I was singing
it anyway in my bones, in my cells — rocking
another to life, It’s all right, it’s ok, all right,
for if some languages are dangerous to speak, love
speaks all of them, under the tree of life: In that tongue,
every blossom is edible, and no one is ever so alone.

Black Water

by Rebecca Seiferle

What the blackness in the 
universal trench and shovel returns me to
is the blackness  in myself–earth clotted on
my tongue, mud plastered upon
my eyelids, squawking as a parrot
repeating words it cannot comprehend, an angel’s stutter, a book full of
indictments of the dead who fell out of the lists of life like black water falling out of
my arms — how will I hang onto
my children? or cling to the table with
its pale profusions of flowers, and how
do the living ever answer the dead, their presence pouring out of
the radio and filling up the car?
Once every heart
had its own village, and every village
had its own cemetery, and was it enough
to undress the body one knew so well and lower it into
the blackness of the ancient ocean that broke at the edge of
the forest, at the edge of the world ?. . . but now each of
us has put on the knowledge of God without
the power. . .  
Each night my tiny hours fill up with
the illiterate x’s and statistics of the
dead, and the ancient answers do not
answer, so I  throw what I am, a stone to shatter the lack
of reflection, a crumb of bread to break the waters,
pushed to the lack and labor of being, where I know nothing except
I love you and that too, arrives with its sadness, a glass of black water
held by your hand that seems so full of light. 

Ancestral Refrain

by Rebecca Seiferle

Just now, I hate the sound of the bagpipes. Each morning
as we go from lecture hall to classroom, dozens
of children, bussed-in to practice for a week,
march up and down, pumping their arms and elbows
like flightless birds trying to take flight, changing
their individual breaths into a chorus of keening,
wild dirges, the piercing of Scottish war songs.
Yet, the woman who turns to me this morning
is rapturous at being Scot. “It’s so serene, that lilting
refrain, it reminds me of my heritage,” her face tilts
like that white island catching the  breaking sun.
“It’s ‘Garryowen,’” I choke out, “the damned song
Custer played before each ‘battle.’” Such élan
swinging into the waking hours,  the bayonets
flashing along the banks of the Little Washita,
to finish off the children hiding in the brush, to fashion
cartridge pouches out of the vaginas of women, and last,
to slaughter all the horses, for the army first tried
to cut their throats, but the animals were too afraid
of the smell of the white men, so the cavalry called
for more ammunition — it took 800 rounds to kill all
the horses — and Custer’s final tally listed 103 fighting
men killed. In truth, only 11 could be so classified. . .
the other 92 were women, children, and old men.
We’re both startled by my vehemence; her Scottish
fingers twitch in her tartan scarf, as if trying to unravel
that loose thread of  undisclosed genealogy, and still
she pleads, “I didn’t know, it sounds so sweet”; “oh,
it’s the voice of my ancestors.” And, of course, she’s right,
it is the voice of our ancestors — all those war cries; in any language,
the children rehearsing, trying to get just right,
each note in a song of slaughter.

Dragon Hill

by Rebecca Seiferle

To love is not only to gaze at the other, but
to gaze through the other,
so wherever love sends me, I look.
Among the painted
locust, the blue-footed booby, the lava lizard
whose skin still burns with the earth’s interior
fire,
Buddha returns, as a land iguana,
wearing the same mysterious smile,
to sit in a small cave hollowed out of lava,
his skin like living rock.
In the Galapagos,
isolation has made infinite variety
out of one monotonous cry. A laboratory
in evolution, we call it, the defunct eye of the tuna
against the bottom of the boat.

Here the earth is not your body but the heaven you think
you could  be — the shimmering patina
of the lightfoot crab, the happy angles
of the frigate birds shadowing your furrowed head,
and Buddha in a lizard’s visage, wearing
the spiked crown. 

Human, animal or divine . . .
there’s a large blackness in the center
of the iguana’s forehead,
murky as a galaxy
coalescing, a new face forming, and in the depths of the new
cells, a third eye, its eyelid closed, dreaming

the heart’s refrain: Out of so much,
so little; out of so little, so much. 

Don’t Sing Me a Song of Conquest

by Rebecca Seiferle

sing me a song of the parrot,

for when Maria Agreda, the lady in blue,
flew to New Mexico through the heavens

of the seventeenth century, while her body
lay, forsaken and drowsy, back

in a chapel in Spain, the thick-billed flock
must have flown beside her,

their profuse green clouds tapping a wilder rhythm
than the beat of her rosary, her cloth scapular

loosely noosed around her neck.
Don’t sing me a song of the soul flying —

like a dandelion seed, triumphant, to disseminate
the Word of God, a thorn traveling by foot,

transplanted from the City of God;
sing the lapsed song of

the cries of parrots,
earsplitting heaven

from a half-mile away, their red shoulders 
pressed to the lips of the sky.

Miraculous, the conquering fathers thought,
when the Indians they came to convert

parroted the sermons of the lady in blue,
captivity breaking their native tongue

to a stammering kuk-kuk-kuk,
by then, the remnants of those airy tribes fleeing

to Mexico to live in a few surviving forests
with their altiracial young.

O  lightning beneath those wings,
sing me a song of elsewhere, where you may still

live, though dying out for us: elsewhere
the beak of the parrot,  still neatly hinged

with the mobility of a third foot,
in visitations, not exalted as seraphim 

of imperial scion, but scaling a dusty piñon
with zygodactyl feet —

the two outer toes pointing backwards
and the two inner toes pointing forward.

For here, before this cedar,
so many trunks rising out of a single root,

in that ancient aromatic foliage, I cannot even begin
to imagine the  green gathering

of all the silences
we have created in this world.

Translations

The Spanish texts of the following poems are copyright 1988 by Herederos de Federico García Lorca. All rights are reserved throughout the world by Herederos de Federico García Lorca and Rebecca Seiferle. All inquiries should be addressed to lorca@artslaw.co.uk  or to William Peter Kosmas at 8 Frankline Square, London W14 9UU, England.

“Song of the Dead Orange Tree” appeared in Songs in 1927. Of Songs, Lorca said, “I don’t think music is everything, as do certain ‘young poets’; I give my love to the word, and not to the sound. My songs are not of ash,” and he said elsewhere that he wished for the book to have “the high air of the sierra.” “Song of the Dead Orange Tree” was first written in the summer of 1923 at the same time he composed “In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits,” a suite of poems in which the narrator feels the sharp anguish of what hasn’t been, including the unborn child he might have had.

“Casida of Weeping” and “Gacela of the Memory of Love” are from The Diván of Tamarit (The Collected Verse of Tamarit), which was published posthumously in 1940.   In Arabic, diván is “a collection of poems” and Tamarit  means “abundant in dates,” just as “casida” is  taken from qasidas and “gacela” from ghazal, the Arabic poetic forms. Tamarit had a personal association for Lorca, for it was also the name of a small farm which belonged to Lorca’s extended family, a place which Lorca loved for its poplar groves and views of the mountains. “Casida of Weeping,” the second of the casidas in the series, was written by Lorca in April, 1934, while he was returning by boat from Buenos Aires to Spain

SONG OF THE DEAD ORANGE TREE
For Carmen Morales

    Woodcutter.
Cut the shadow from me.
Free me from the anguish
of seeing myself without fruit.

   Why was I born between mirrors?
The day revolves around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars.

   I want to live without seeing myself.
And I will dream that ants
and thistle flowers are my
leaves and my birds.

   Woodcutter.
Cut the shadow from me.
Free me from the anguish
of seeing myself without fruit.

CANCIÓN DEL NARANJO SECO
A Carmen Morales

   Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
de verme sin toronjas.

   ¿Por qué nací entre espejos?
El día me da vueltas.
Y la noche me copia
en todas sus estrellas.

   Quiero vivir sin verme.
Y hormigas y vilanos,
soñaré que son mis
hojas y mis pájaros.

   Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
de verme sin toronjas.

CASIDA OF  WEEPING

I’ve shut my balcony
because I don’t want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls,
nothing is heard but the weeping.

There are very few angels who sing,
there are very few dogs that howl,
a thousand violins fit in the palm of my hand.

But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violence,
the tears muzzle the wind,
and nothing is heard but the weeping.

CASIDA II DEL LLANTO

He cerrado mi balcón
por que no quiero oír el llanto
pero por detrás de los grises muros
no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.

Hay muy pocos ángeles que canten,
hay muy pocos perros que ladren,
mil violines caben en la palma de mi mano.

Pero el llanto es un perro inmenso,
el llanto es un ángel inmenso,
el llanto es un violín inmenso,
las lágrimas amordazan al viento,
no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.

GACELA OF THE MEMORY OF LOVE

Don’t take away your memory.
Leave it alone in my breast,

quaver of white cherry
in the martyrdom of January.

I am separated from the dead
by a wall of bad dreams.

I give the pity of fresh lily
to  a heart of chalk.

All night in the orchard
my eyes, like two dogs.

All night, eating
the poisonous quince.

Sometimes the wind
is a tulip of honey,

a sick tulip,
the dawn of winter.

A wall of bad dreams
separates me from the dead.

A cloud shrouded in silence
the grey valley of your body.

In the arch of encounter
the poison hemlock is rising.

But leave your memory,
leave it alone in my breast.

GACELA DEL RECUERDO DEL AMOR

No te lleves tu recuerdo.
Déjalo solo en mi pecho,

temblor de blanco cerezo
en el martirio de enero.

Me separa de los muertos
un muro de malos sueños.

Doy pena de lirio fresco
para un corazón de yeso.

Toda la noche en el huerto
mis ojos, como dos perros.

Toda la noche, comiendo
los membrillos de veneno.

Algunas veces el viento
es un tulipán de miedo,

es un tulipán enfermo,
la madrugada de invierno.

Un muro de malos sueños
me separa de los muertos.

La niebla cubre en silencio
el valle gris de tu cuerpo.

Por el arco del encuentro
la cicuta está creciendo.

Pero deja tu recuerdo