“And this tenderness was not like
That which a certain poet
At the beginning of the century called true
And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all?
It rang out, like the first waterfall,
It crunched like the crust of bluish ice
And it prayed with a swanlike voice,
And it broke down right before our eyes.”
- Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems
The Name Drawn from the Names
By Juan Ramón Jiménez
Translated By Robert Bly
If I have created a world for you, in your place,
god, you had to come to it confident,
and you have come to it, to my refuge,
because my whole world was nothing but my hope.
I have been saving up my hope
in language, in a spoken name, a written name;
I had given a name to everything,
and you have taken the place
of all these names.
Now I can hold back my movement
inside the coal of my continual living and being,
as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal,
surrounded by air that is all blue fire;
now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere,
the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy,
stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light,
and all of them moving upward, upward.
All the names that I gave
to the universe that I created again for you
are now all turning into one name, into one
god.
The god who, in the end, is always
the god created and recreated and recreated
through grace and never through force.
The God. The name drawn from the names.
Rumored to be Living…
An Urban Legend
I have been holding my breath
Since boyhood,
Seated in the back row of every class.
Pouting and turning blue,
I waited, obstinately,
Grade after grade,
For the teacher or Hypoxia to reach me.
Now, a lifetime later, and
Left back all of those years,
I still tip-toe around crowds,
Skirt the outer umbra of hot spots,
And live in an attic, like an urban legend,
Always on the fringe, just within rumor.
For, it is only in the negative spaces of photographs,
Or an empty chair at gatherings, that I am even sensed, at all.
12.28.07 John Tansey
Copyright ©2008 John Thomas Tansey
