For Auld Lang Syne: Part 2

the fruit of my father's christmas gift to me, a couple of kafka's zurau aphorisms, follows:
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there are two cardinal human vices, from which all the others derive their being: impatience and carelessness. impatience got people evicted from paradise; carelessness kept them from making their way back there. or perhaps there is only one cardinal vice: impatience. impatience got people evicted, and impatience kept them from making their way back.
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the crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. this is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.

For Auld Lang Syne: Part 1

christmas day has been bled of most of its meaning for me. i stopped believing in god before i stopped believing in santa claus, and gave it all up some twenty years ago. it's like some proxy birthday celebration, i guess.
but this christmas, my son, 6-mths-old, is leaving on an aeroplane for russia with maria--one month with that OTHER family--and i'm staying behind with the dogs.

winter is just setting in here, with protean precipitation--snow, warm rain, ice storms, hail, the alarms are going out for a weekend blizzard, yesterday i slipped on the frozen steps, the day before that i went out for a walk with the boy in a t-shirt and shorts.

i'm steeling myself for two-faced january, when my family will be on the opposite face of the earth. the season deserves an elegy, so today--a sort of half-finished translation of marina tsvetaeva's 'new year's letter' to rainer maria rilke, written almost immediately after hearing of his death in late 1926 after a losing battle with (undiagnosed at the time) leukemia. i've been working on a draft since the summer, and am going to give a good push starting next week to finish it off, when i expect to be fully in the appropriate mood.

here's what i have so far...

happy holydays,
james
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New Year’s [Letter]

Happy New Year’s, new—world—roof above—frontiers!
The first letter to you in your new—
—Not a den of vice (in the verdant, paradis-al sense)—
(Maybe you mistook thoughtful for awful?) place, all pealing and piping
As Aeolus’ deserted tower.
The first letter from yesterday’s address,
Where I’m pining away without you.
Your new birthplace now—a point
Among the stars…The laws of disengagement
By which the loved one becomes the anonym
And the never—nonexistent.
Shall I tell you how I heard the…?
No, the earth didn’t move—or avalanche.
A man came by—nobody—(the somebody is
You).—Most regrettable news.
—In the Russian Paris News and Times.—Can you write an article?
—Where?—In the mountains. (Window hung with linen sheets
and fir-view). Don’t you read the paper?
And the obit…ur, article?—No.—But…—Let’s drop it.
Aloud: it’s hard to bear. To self: no, I'm no traitor.
—In the sanitarium (a rented paradise).
—The day?—Yesterday, or the day before, I forget.
Will I see you at the Alcazar?—Probably not.
Aloud: family obligations. To self: anything, everything but a Judas.

And here’s to the coming year! (You were born the day after today!)
Did I mention how I took the…
Forget it, force of habit.
I learned long ago to put life and death in quotes
Like stale, deflated rumour.
I didn’t do a thing, but something was
Done, shadow-bereft and echoless
The doer!
What else?—How was the ride?
How’s being rent and ripped apart—How’s—
Your heart? Riding on unflagging Orlovsky trotters
(From the Russian for hawk: oreóle, (not oriole)),
Was your soul soiled, spoiled?—Or else fleeter?
Sweeter? There’s no high nor dive (up nor down) for—
Whomever’s flown on highbred Russian eagles.
The bloodline we held with the old world:
In old Rus—one world ripened on the
Other. It’s been set straight!
I utter life and death with a simper,
Sly—which yours runs tangent to!
I utter life and death with an asterisk,
Star in the sky (the sidereal side
Of your brain’s replaced the night
I was awaiting!)
Dear, keep in mind
The following: that if Russian letters
Have replaced the German—
It’s not because these things don’t matter
Anymore, or that the (destitute) dead will swallow anything—
And not bat an eye, but because this world,
Our world—at thirteen at Novodevichy Monastery
(The maiden brotherhood) I knew—isn’t nil- but hundred-tongued!

I hate to ask:
You don’t have to ask the Russian way
To say nest, now? I guess one rhyme
(one tongue) covers aster and nester, nest and celestes.

But I digress. But there’s no digression but
Turns back to you.
Every thought, sound, syllable, Du Lieber-
’s a reference leading back (though German is even more my native tongue
Than Russian, my first was angel-ese!) no matter what the
Topic—since
there's no place left you don't abide, besides the grave.
All’s as it wasn’t and as it was.
—A little something about me, maybe?—
Or about your surroundings, Rainer, spirits?
Anything pressing, important?—
Your first glimpse of the galaxy
(that is, the poet’s)
and last glimpse of the planets,
only for you, for once—all’s one.

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God must be a rioting baobab, right Rainer?
— not a Louis D’Or—
And he’s not the only one, right? Above him there’s another god, isn’t there?

Getting any writing done in your new place?

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