Every This and That

ULYSSIPPO
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Does Ben's view resemble that of Ulysses,
3000 years ago or so?

According to legend, Ulysses / Odysseus was the founder
of Lisbon, thus the linguistic connection between the hero's
name and city's ancient name of Ulyssippo, Olissipona,
Olisipo [sometimes with double "ss" or double "pp"], or Lissabon
Once again (see preceding post OXB), I'm grateful to Ben and Cathleen, who not only shared their vacation photographs but also picked out this inspirational souvenir for me:

Featuring clockwise from top:
Cesario Verde, Fernando Pessoa (with glasses),
Luis de Camoes (with laurel wreath),
Florbela Espanca, Mario de Sa-Carneiro
First in the anthology comes Luis de Camoes (1524 - June 10, 1580), a poet so important to the language and people of Portugal that the day of his death is observed annually as Portugal's National Day. Camoes is the author of Portugal's national epic poem The Lusiads. This saga recounts the adventues of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama who sets sail from Lisbon, accompanied by a cast of classical gods, heroes, and muses:

From Canto IV: The Departure
Amidst a noble roar of eager cries
in Lisbon’s harbour – where renowned Ulysses
made berth; where into briny Neptune spills
the Tagus its sweet liquor and white sands –
the ships stand yare at last; and not a fear
bridles from youthful show of zeal the crews,
for these seafaring men with men of Mars
will follow me, across the very globe.

Up from the beaches come the soldiers, clad
in diverse styles and colors, all as much
trimmed in desirousness to brave the world
and seek new regions out. Aloft, calm winds
billow with gentle swells the flags flown high
on our proud carracks, which, as they behold
the seas' expanse, promise one day to rise,
as Argos' ship before, to Olympus, stars.

Camoes was also the author of numerous sonnets. The autobiographical message of this one, for example, captures the introspecitve tone of his lyric poetry:

My own mistakes, cruel fortune, and love's flame
devised a plot together to undo me.
Mistakes and fortune were a surfeit to me;
Love alone would have done for me the same.

I'm past it; yet I still feel the excess
of pain so freshly now from troubles past,
that from their sorry rage I've learned at last
never to take desires for happiness.

The whole tale of my years, I was mistaken,
and with my groundless hopes I did my part
to earn my troubles; Fortune was no cheat.

I've known no love but flashes of deceit.
Oh if some power only would awaken
the vengeance that could sate my hardened heart!

Camoes looks at the passing of time with a similar honesty, concluding in puzzlement rather than nostalgia:

The times change, the desires change, and who
we are, and what we trust, keeps changing with them;
the whole world is composed of change's rhythm,
forever shifting qualities anew.

Constantly we see new things, every this
and that showing our guess was ill - attuned;
and when they bring us hurt, we keep the wound,
while what was good (if anything), we miss.

Time cloaks the ground in green, where it before
lay covered underneath the snowy cold;
in me, it turns to tears what was sweet song.

And as these daily changings pass along,
another change amazes me still more:
things don't change now the way they changed of old.

Camoes' amazement -- that even change itself is subject to change -- reminds me of the Charles Durning's amusing and bemused Thanksgiving prayer in Home for the Holidays:

" . . . even things we hated
. . . are starting to stop
. . . and they shouldn't."
In any age, it seems, despite our preferences, change is the way of the world. Modernist Lisbon poet Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) repeats the same lament in no uncertain terms:

". . . for change is what I hate,
and something I do not want. . . ."
~ from "I suffer Lydia" ~

and

" . . . Provided life does not weary,
I'll let life pass slowly by,
on the condition that I stay the same. . . ."
~ from "I prefer roses" ~

Photo by Cathleen ~ Ponta Delgada, Azores
[Click for More Tile Art]

Another favorite from Fernando Pessoa:

With one eye on the past
some see which they cannot see,
whilst others in the future see
that which cannot be seen.

Why go so far, look closer!
What is freedom? The day is here!
This is the hour, the moment;
and this moment is who we are and that is that.

Forever flowing, the eternal hour
reveals our insignificance.
In a single gasp we live and die, so seize the day,
for the day is simply who you are.

In the coming weeks, I will look more closely at the work of Camoes and Pessoa, as well as the remaining three poets whose work comprise this enlightening and often heart-breaking volume of verse. Thanks to Cathleen and Ben for opening my eyes to the poetry of Portugal.

Belated Honeymoon

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

OBX

THE OUTER BANKS
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Cathleen's Favorite Place ~ Bennett Street ~ Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
~ Acrylic Painting by Cathleen Amalia ~

My Talented Daughter - in - Law & My Elder Son!
Cathleen & Ben at the Outer Banks

*****************

"In the summer, the days were long,
stretching into each other.
Out of school, everything was on pause
and yet happening at the same time,
this collection of weeks when anything was possible." (387)

~ Sarah Dessen ~ Along for the Ride ~

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The Outer Banks

1

Horizon of islands shifting
Sea-light flame on my voice
burn in me
Light
flows from the water from sands islands of this horizon
The sea comes toward me across the sea. The sand
moves over the sand in waves
between the guardians of this landscape
the great commemorative statue on one hand
—the first flight of man, outside of dream,
seen as stone wing and stainless steel—
and at the other hand
banded black-and-white, climbing
the spiral lighthouse.

2

Floor over ocean,
avalanche on the flat beach. Pouring.
Indians holding branches up, to
placate the tempest,
the one-legged twisting god that is
a standing wind.
Rays are branching from all things:
great serpent, great plume, constellation:
sands from which colors and light pass,
the lives of plants. Animals. Men.
A man and a woman reach for each other.

3

Wave of the sea.

4

Sands have washed, sea has flown over us.
Between the two guardians, spiral, truncated wing,
history and these wild birds
Bird-voiced discoverers : Hariot, Hart Crane,
the brothers who watched gulls.
“No bird soars in a calm,” said Wilbur Wright.
Dragon of the winds forms over me.
Your dance, goddesses in your circle
sea-wreath, whirling of the event
behind me on land as deep in our own lives
we begin to know the movement to come.
Sunken, drowned spirals,
hurricane-dance.

5

Shifting of islands on this horizon.
The cycle of changes in the Book of Changes.
Two islands making an open female line
That powerful long straight bar a male island.
The building of the surf
constructing immensities
between the pale flat Sound
and ocean ever
birds as before earthquake
winds fly from all origins
the length of this wave goes from the great wing
down coast, the barrier beach in all its miles
road of the sun and the moon to
a spiral lighthouse
to the depth turbulence
lifts up its wave like cities
the ocean in the air
spills down the world.

6

A man is walking toward me across the water.
From far out, the flat waters of the Sound,
he walks pulling his small boat

In the shoal water.

A man who is white and has been fishing.
Walks steadily upon the light of day
Coming closer to me where I stand
looking into the sun and the blaze inner water.
Clear factual surface over which he pulls
a boat over a closing quarter-mile.

7

Speak to it, says the light.
Speak to it music,
voices of the sea and human throats.
Origins of spirals,
the ballad and original sweet grape
dark on the vines near Hatteras,
tendrils of those vines, whose spiral tower
now rears its light, accompanying
all my voices.

8

He walks toward me. A black man in the sun.
He now is a black man speaking to my heart
crisis of darkness in this century
of moments of this speech.
The boat is slowly nearer drawn, this man.

The zigzag power coming straight, in stones,
in arcs, metal, crystal, the spiral
in sacred wet
schematic elements of
cities, music, arrangement
spin these stones of home
under the sea
return to the stations of the stars
and the sea, speaking across its lives.

9

A man who is bones is close to me
drawing a boat of bones
the sun behind him
is another color of fire,
the sea behind me
rears its flame.

A man whose body flames and tapers in flame
twisted tines of remembrance that dissolve
a pitchfork of the land worn thin
flame up and dissolve again
draw small boat

Nets of the stars at sunset over us.
This draws me home to the home of the wild birds
long-throated birds of this passage.
This is the edge of experience, grenzen der seele
where those on the verge of human understanding
the borderline people stand on the shifting islands
among the drowned stars and the tempest.
“Everyman’s mind, like the dumbest,
claws at his own furthest limits of knowing the world,”
a man in a locked room said.

Open to the sky
I stand before this boat that looks at me.
The man’s flames are arms and legs.
Body, eyes, head, stars, sands look at me.
I walk out into the shoal water
and throw my leg over the wall of the boat.

10

At one shock, speechlessness.
I am in the bow, on the short thwart.
He is standing before me amidships, rowing forward
like my old northern sea-captain in his dory.
All things have spun.
The words gone,
I facing sternwards, looking at the gate
between the barrier islands. As he rows.
Sand islands shifting and the last of land
a pale and open line horizon
sea.

With whose face did he look at me?
What did I say? or did I say?
in speechlessness
mover to the change.
These strokes provide the music,
and the accused boy on land today saying
What did I say? or did I say?
The dream on land last night built this the boat of death
but in the suffering of the light
moving across the sea
do we in our moving
move toward life or death

11

Hurricane, skullface, the sky’s size
winds streaming through his teeth
doing the madman’s twist

and not a beach not flooded

nevertheless, here
stability of light
my other silence
and at my left hand and at my right hand
no longer wing and lighthouse
no longer the guardians.
They are in me, in my speechless
life of barrier beach.
As it lies open
to the night, out there.

Now seeing my death before me
starting again, among the drowned men,
desperate men, unprotected discoverers,
and the man before me
here.
Stroke by stroke drawing us.
Out there? Father of rhythms,
deep wave, mother.
There is no out there.
All is open.
Open water. Open I.

12

The wreck of the Tiger, the early pirate, the blood-clam’s
ark, the tern’s acute eye, all buried mathematical
instruments, castaways, pelicans, drowned five-
strand pearl necklaces, hopes of livelihood,
hopes of grace,
walls of houses, sepia sea-fences, the writhen octopus and
those tall masts and sails,
marked hulls of ships and last month’s plane, dipping his salute
to the stone wing of dream,
turbulence, Diamond Shoals, the dark young living people:
“Sing one more song and you are under arrest.”
“Sing another song.”
Women, ships, lost voices.
Whatever has dissolved into our waves.
I a lost voice
moving, calling you
on the edge of the moment that is now the center.
From the open sea.

©Muriel Rukeyser (1913 - 1980)
Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968)

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More by Muriel Rukeyser:

Icarus, Who Really Fell

Lot's Wife, Who Gave Her Life For a Single Glance

La Cucaracha

When the Iris Blows Blue

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The Student Body in the Text

All the Little Animals

The Wrong Answer

Another Good Poem By Muriel Rukeyser

La Cucaracha

AND

More Beautiful Ocean Poems

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Cathleen, Carmen, Ben ~ OBX Easter 2016

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com