Puedo Escribir Los Versos . . .

by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved him, and sometimes he loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held him in my arms.
I kissed him again and again under the endless sky.

He loved me, and sometimes I loved him too.
How could one not have loved his great still eyes?

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have him. To feel that I have lost him.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without him,
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep him.
That night is shattered and he is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost him.

My sight searches for him as though to go to him.
My heart looks for him, and he is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love him, that is certain, but how I loved him.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch his hearing.

Another's. He will be another's. Like my kisses before.
His voice. His bright body. His infinite eyes,

I no longer love him, that is certain, but maybe I love him.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held him in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost him.

Though this be the last pain that he makes me suffer,
and these the last verses that I write for him.

-adapted from the original

Andy Garcia reading the original, from Il Postino

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

--Rumi, 1230

The Pleasures of Hating

I just heard this poem read aloud by Garrison Keillor on NPR. It's funny cause it's true. It's also funny (and charming) 'cause it's a "gob of spit" (to borrow Henry Miller's expression) in the face of political correctness and all those who say that a truly "enlightened" or "spiritual" person should never feel hatred, much less its pleasures.

Whenever the word "should" creeps in to the conversation (or the internal dialogue, as the case may be), you can bet that the ego has crept in by the back door, the tricksy little bastard.

Judith Lasater once advised a roomful of yoga teachers to "stop shoulding all over yourselves". I love that. I've endeavoured, ever since, to more or less remove that word from my vocab.

So here's my little fuck-you in the face of all that I supposedly "should" be, as a yogi, as a bodyworker, as a seeker, as a "spiritual person". (What IS a "spiritual person", anyway? That phrase always strikes me as completely redundant. We are spiritual beings by definition. It doesn't make any of us special. Deal with it!)

So without further ado,

The Pleasures of Hating
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

I hate Mozart. Hate him with that healthy
pleasure one feels when exasperation has

crescendoed, when lungs, heart, throat,
and voice explode at once: I hate that! —

there's bliss in this, rapture. My shrink
tried to disabuse me, convinced I use Amadeus

as a prop: Think further, your father perhaps?
I won't go back, think of the shrink

with a powdered wig, pinched lips, mole:
a transference, he'd say, a relapse: so be it.

I hate broccoli, chain saws, patchouli, bra—
clasps that draw dents in your back, roadblocks,

men in black kneesocks, sandals and shorts—
I love hating that. Loathe stickers on tomatoes,

jerky, deconstruction, nazis, doilies. I delight
in detesting. And love loving so much after that.

"The Pleasures of Hating" by Laure-Anne Bosselaar from Small Gods of Grief. © BOA Editions, 2001.