Tonight, it is a just a sliver of an ascending moon, in the spring to be known as a Kissing Moon. A sneak peek at the fullness that is coming.  It is a perfect moon on which to contemplate the coming new year. May it be a year of wholehearted living and loving.

Besos,

Elisabet

Tonight’s Moon, Tomorrow’s Hangover (three haikus)
by Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694)

A man that eats
his meal amidst morning glories –
that’s what I am!

On a blue sea,
waves fragrant with rice wine:
tonight’s moon

A hangover
but while the cherries bloom,
what of it?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If there is something you cannot figure out, please stop trying to calculate, to measure, to weigh. Just say ‘yes’.  Calculate me.

Besos,

Elisabet

Drown In Love
by ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 1131)
Translated by David and Sabrineh Fideler

If you drown in love, you will taste eternity;
in reason alone, you forsake real life.

Taste the strangeness of this wine!
Love’s intoxication is the path to sobriety.

Love stories surround us. If we look for them, we never have to look far. Look for the hands held, the sandwich cut in half, the hair strands brushed aside. Look for a walk on the beach with a dog, the love story in the missing,  pieces subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Here is the 22nd Sonnet of Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor, including a letter he wrote to Matilde.

Hold a guitar. Lift a wineglass. Be a love story.

Besos,
Elisabet

Pablo Neruda to Matilda Urrutia
Translated by Stephen Tapscott

My beloved wife, I suffered while I was writing these misnamed “sonnets”; they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver, or crystal, or cannonfire. But – with great humility – I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.
October 1959

100 Love Sonnets XXII
by Pablo Neruda

Love, how often I loved you without seeing -
without remembering you –
not recognizing your glance, not knowing you, a gentian
in the wrong place, scorched by the hot noon
but I loved only the smell of the wheat.

Or maybe I saw you, imagined you lifting a wineglass
in Angol, by the light of the summer’s moon;
or were you the waist of that guitar I strummed
in the shadows, the one that rang like an impetuous sea?

I loved you without knowing I did; I searched to remember you
I broke into houses to steal your likeness;
though I already knew what you were like. And, suddenly,

when you were there with me I touched you, and my life
stopped: you stood before me, you took dominion like a queen:
like a wildfire in the forest, and the flame is your dominion.

– John Keats

How many kisses are enough? When would that question present itself?  Perhaps on a first date? Perhaps on the third or fourth date? Maybe the question would come up after a marriage of seven years? There comes a time, whether it be in a marriage of fifty years, or for a couple after 50 first dates in 14 months, there is never enough… los besos no se puede limitar.

I share with you a poem from Catullus (c. 84 – C. 54 BC). William Harris (1926 – 2009) Professor Emeritas Middlebury College www.middlebury.edu/~harris writes of Catullus, “…if you get into his writing early and sincerely, there will be enough artistry and brilliance there to last you the rest of your years. One changes gears over the years, and some early favorites pall as time passes. It seems safe to say that if you once really “perceive” Catullus, his poems will stay with you for life. Crede experto.”

To me, Catullus seems to say that when there are enough, we are no longer able to count, or perhaps no longer need to.  I believe him.

Besos,
Elisabet

How Many Kisses
by Catullus

How many kisses satisfy,
How many are enough and more,
You ask me, Lesbia. I reply,
As many as the Lybian sands
Sprinkling the Cyrenaic shore
Where silphium grows, between the paces
Where old King Battus’s tomb stands
And Jupiter Ammon has his shrine
In Siwa’s sweltering oasis;
As many as the stars above
That in the dead of midnight shine
Upon men’s secrecies of love.
When he has all those kisses, mad-
Hungry Catullus will have had
Enough to slake his appetite –
So many that sharp eyes can’t tell
The number, and the tongues of spite
Are too confused to form a spell.

Buen viaje,
Elisabet

Drunk As Drunk
by Pablo Neruda
(Translated by W.S. Merwin)

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made out of flowers
Feasted, we guide it – our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal –
Over the sky’s hot rim,
The day’s last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

Paz,
Elisabet

In My Sky At Twilight
This poem is a paraphrase by Pablo Neruda of the 30th poem in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud.
and your form and colour are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
the sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine!

You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon’s
wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depths of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.

You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin.

Voiture:
“Mon âme sur ma lèvre étais lors tout entière,
   Pour savourer le miel qui sur la votre étais;
Mais en me retirant, elle resta derrière,
   Tant de ce doux plaisir l’amorce l’arrêtoit!”

Moore:
How heavenly was the poet’s doom,
To breathe his spirit through a kiss,
And lose within so sweet a tomb
The trembling messenger of bliss!

And, ah! his soul retunred to feel
That it again could ravished be;
For in the kiss that thou didst steal,
His life and soul have fled to thee!

In this passage from A Natural History of Love, she write of chilvary and troubadours. How do we convey our emotion and love in a way that rings true?  It is a personal endeavor, a personal art. It can never be wrong as long as what is truly in our hearts  is not left a secret.  If a troubadour brings a tale of love and longing, may we all bring such a message clear and true.

 Where is the wine, where the kiss? To be continued…

Sweet kisses of harvest,
Elisabet

 Troubadours
By Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love

When he returned from a spotty career in the Crusades, William IX, duke of Aquitaine (1,071 – 1,127), began composing songs of love and yearning, which we now recognize as the first troubadour love songs. He may well have been inspired by Moorish writers, who sang of love as an ennobling force and women as transcendent goddesses. Arabia and Spain regularly exchanged artists as well as ambassadors and their culture spread into southern France. Best known was the Andalusian poet Ibn-Hazm, who wrote in his classic The Ring of the Dove (1022) that “the union of souls is a thousand time more beautiful than that of bodies.” His attitude was deeply Platonic as well as Muslim, especially when he spoke about the need to become one with the beloved. It was a natural need, common as sand but powerful as radium, because love is the reunion of souls that, before creation, were made from the same primordial stuffs that became divided later in the physical universe.  “The lover’s soul,” he says, “is ever seeking for the other, striving after it, searching it out, yearning to encounter it again, drawing it to itself it might be as a magnet draws the iron.”