The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha
Listening to a voice,
is it inside of me or outside?
Is it the candle my mother
lit to the Milagrosa,
talking to me?
sound is coming from the
Crucifix
above and behind
the dancing flame,
is it the alphabet that
makes the words, each letter
each syllable
The language is what talks.
Is the whole Romanesque/Latino
Arábico off its hinges.
An old lady is balcony talking
has not stopped yapping
two days now, neighbors
resorting to witchcraft
Make the old bitch stop,
what they call in Spanish
Refunfuñar, bickering equals it
In English can’t approximate,
listless speech, spitting irritation
pestering
I sin sity que jo sin sity.
Alonso Quixano reminds
me of my uncles,
highfalutin boisterous
fiery, excuse for any conflict.
Quijote in one scene said
to a particular,
“I’ll jump off this mule,
and split you in half”
The loud voice threat
enough more sharp,
Valiente as art,
pendeja if has to be,
be it, you could have just
formed a circle, let me
and the guy understand each
other, uncle Juan.
If they not fighting moving
buildings
or a loose lion on Avenue Be
it’s not for nothing not,
a lion has escaped in the zoo
and logical it is to zoom, Raul.
The mirror lies to me
tis not the gallant cojones
testicular macho,
other uncle Carlos
said face his in mirror
offended him and he slapped it
blood drops hand.
Who was that abuser shameless?
to the balcony I had to lift
up from an inferno of books,
the niece the priest
burning picaresque novels
claiming readership
made Quixote sick.
Reading is bad for you,
Give way to music
Silent images in motion,
go for sword or masterbate.
Crushing, pictures pile up traffic
Jam thought airport.
In North African Algerian jail
voices to Cervantes came,
jail brings you closer to language-words,
Love letters to whomever,
Malcolm X got to reading the
Dictionary,
loneliness is the fire of language
there’s only you and it
under an ocean of time
repetitive like an eternal clave,
when inside the scenes rolling
Deck of cards.
El lenguaje becomes transparent
passage through, time erases.
The task of reading becomes light
transparent, when
I am home the coquí toad
dotting sonic space like stars
over the mountains,
Don Quixote hangs there
Don Q de la Mancha
De Plátano.
Reading Japanese in Morocco
“No oil to read by
I am off to bed
But ah . . .
My moonlit pillow”
—Bashō
I have always admired Haikus, I compare them to having little money and you have to enter into a grocery store and get the ingredients to compose a meal, thus select with the little there is wisely. Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa has been with me as constant companion since it came out around the mid 1990s, it was with me in Puerto Rico for years of morning café, along with the nightly singing of the coquís. Some of the nights of Bashō, Issa nearby owl mooing sitting on a lonely Guavara tree or was it a Guayacán árbol of Taino dark wood. My left elbow juncture bone point has stained itself dark from pressing upon it during my nocturnal bed reading, a bad habit I just have to live with; here in Morocco Senegal people in the old Medina sell some good Shea butter which I pick up to rub into the stain agony of my lectura. Once in New York I picked up three Japanese novels, Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata and A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899 and died in 1972 supposedly committing suicide a la Yukio Mishima who was his partner in right-wing politics, something about a gas stove. His wife denies the whole suicide bit. Blames his death upon some gas stove malfunction. Whatever happened he is stiff dead, his body that is. Both of these writers have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kawabata in 1968, making him the first Japanese to obtain this award. Kenzaburō Ōe was born in Uchiko, an agricultural region. As a child his mother gave him the gift of the American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, assuring him a lifelong influence from Mark Twain. Kawabata along with the writer Yukio Mishima signed a petition against the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China whereas the left wing leaning Kenzaburō gave it full support, even visiting China. Kenzaburō took influence from the French philosopher Sartre, existentialism something I could never understand, I had a copy of that big book Being and Nothingness in the 60s, but I was not analytical enough to penetrate the polemic, some people do and well many blessings to them. A friend of mine had told me to read Snow Country, aware as he was of my love for the Haiku form, indeed the Novel’s prose is like a necklace of haikus, a “renga,” as a Japanese critic called it. The scenes pace themselves slowly, a cadence of paso fino which was translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, he translated not words but spaceair-timing, the Japanese scholar and translator of many great Japanese works including The Tale of Genji in 1976. Seidensticker speaking about the translation of Snow Country: “You translate not just the words but the rhythm as well”; in other words you translate silence. I would imagine you translate the temperature as well, turning the pages I felt many whiffs of cold mountain snow air, even while reading segments in tropical Puerto Rico. The lonely freaky mountainous isolation zone, a feeling that you are sunken within an immense cold white stretch of earth scattered hotels, inns, rich lonely men, geisha girls, putas not exactly though the melody can be played. The character in the novel Shimamura a cultured man who loved the ballet, refined, making observations, young girls rattling through snow in kimonos. Komako his geisha vaporizing sake, dizzy of desire, snow drunk feel the chills evermore even. Like ice cubes the prose tumbles down into you until you apprehend the tragic avalanche you are frozen in, a prose precise, ice staring at the mountain snow tips. It shines cold sun. Slow honey dripping upon frozen chrysanthemums.
Chuchuki
It’s not guacamole,
Sure by now
You’ve found out
This wasabi shit
Not hot sauce
Rather some kind of vapor
It creates an implosion
Inward nostril
Tsunami next
As Brains spills
Down your nostrils,
Turns you insides out
The first rush
Survive that
I had some chuchuki
San Francisco
Red kimono
She spoke Spanish.
Books are paper
Wild timber tamed
Trees in your hands,
Wonder if they have lice
Mealybugs, termites.
In the Caribbean books aging
Heat moisture
Yellow spots grow
Makes a stank of mildew.
I am witness to print
That moves
Periods who stride
Meaning till the comma sleeps,
As such changing
The sentence-meanings,
The pace, apostrophe rests into semicolon
Like a question mark elaborated,
Minute creatures persist,
A particle of dot dust,
An organism partial to books.
Bamboo thin of tropic forest
Air.
Cool winter Maghreb
Paper holds better
Mediterranean ether
Reading the Japanese novel
Kawabata Snow Country
An isolated distant cold looms.
Are there people in town
Or frighten bones struggling
Toward hot spa water,
Geisha serves tea
In magenta kimono,
Ah what breast-less
Breathless beauty,
Buttock curve like
Shushi tuna rolls,
Something is aesthetic happening
Through the whiteness
The writer makes you see:
“The road is frozen. The village
Lay quiet under the cold sky. . .
The moon shone like a blade
Frozen in blue ice.”
How chuchi can you get,
The prose throughout
Links of Haiku pictures,
Slow peeling strips
Of apricot, cheek tongue
Labios blood red
Tumbling lengua in mouth,
Black hair silk shines.
Kenzaburō transmitted
A delight through my
North African icy fingers
Hanging on to: “Nip the buds,
Shoot the kids”:
“Then the girl’s small face
Appeared-red with fever
And with the down from
Her cheeks to her ears shining
Golden”
The no sense is non-logical
Sense it makes sense Since
In the cup of tea: it is taste.
Image rolls flickering
Measured shape colors,
Bud growing flowers,
Music like the
Zen spells of koto long zither
Meditations,
Bamboo by the river
Wind flutes color
Sounds.
I’ve long trips gone with
Bashō who is a road
Through cherry blossom springs,
The Spanish refrain
“Por si las moscas”
Mosquitoes/butterflies
Sapo/frogs
The chance
Knowledge comes suave
On a wave of obvious
Invisibility.
Geisha secret better
Than the mafia.
A rose like the
Waves of a fan
Within red,
Medina window view Mountains.
Language fades
Words diminish
As an alphabet
Sticks upon
Two little Sapo
Bashō
Frog/Legs.
Splash.
Chess
First time I saw a game of chess when I was young street kid Lower East Side hanging out at the Boys’ Club, across from Tompkins Square Park. It was in the library they had on the second floor which I visited frequently with my growing thirst for language knowledge which was within books. There a Polish- or German-looking white-haired older man sat in a wheelchair, the board in front of him, the pieces scattered throughout. He and the other player were in a pensive trance. Something was happening. I moved closer, felt the artisan concentration of the two players. The librarian saw my interest, asked me if I wanted to learn how to play the game. Of course. Few days later the old man was telling me the names of each of the pieces and how they moved in what he called the war, a battle. My next session with him I only remembered the names of the king and queen and forgot the rest, it had been a full four days and the info had scattered out of my mind, went blank as it got full of street and family life. The rotating and uproar of the speedy streets erasing mental content. Reviewed them all again, after three weeks I was aware of the moves and the names of the pieces, playing with him making the correct movements, never to win but to survive as long as possible. Since then I have always played a cruising game, I taught my son Vitin Ajani in San Francisco when he was about nine, after a few games with him he went on to corner my king each game we played, which is still the case now that he is an adult, I can never trap his king. I have also taught my young cousins in Puerto Rico, Arian y Ariel, and likewise after a few initial games they both now can always defeat my armies on the battle board and paralyze my king. It is puzzling how these sixteen pieces, the pawn-peones peasants the most abundant, the other pieces each repeated twice, the king and the queen who are singular and unique. The game’s origins some claim Indian antiquity, some China, India seems like the clearest home. From there it spread to the Persians, early on the Arabs got a hold of it and from the Middle East it took wings with the fervor of Islamic spread through North Africa and on to the Spanish peninsula during the Muslim occupation there. From Muslim Spain it traveled to other European urban centers. The world chess’d out. Some people can design ahead four to five moves; I could never plan beyond two moves. From chess master Bobby Fischer I got the move of bringing the knight out as a first move, next move I push a pawn up two squares and on to the conflict. It is a wonder how those thirty-two pieces can keep one up the night or perhaps even indefinitely till the king is paralyzed. In Cuba José Raúl Capablanca, last name means white cape, developed into a sharp chess player, they called him “la máquina” the machine due to his swiftness in the game; he was also fast with the ladies constantly on tour putting them in checkmate. Nabokov wrote about a chess player in a book called The Luzhin Defense, a book I am currently reading. There is Lewis Caroll skipping through boxes of double entendre in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There where Alice becomes a pawn defending the White Queen. Just the other night reading through Jorge Luis Borges’s Selected Poems ran across his poem “Ajedrez”
“It was in the East this war took fire.
Today the whole earth is its theater.
Like the game of love, this game goes on forever.”
Translated by Alastair Reid
For some reason we associate chess with the upper classes, and indeed it was quickly taken as a habit by Persian nobility. In a way it requires a certain amount of leisure-comfort; today the game is everywhere, with the rich and with the poor, United States prisoners practice the game in penal institutions, among them there are some very sharp players. The physical sport closest to chess would be baseball, with its moments of silence, its slow procedure, the importance of the pitcher’s aim and psychological shrill as the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand to tame the batter with deception, optical illusion. Baseball is a physical sport that is slow, unlike basketball and the frenzy of soccer. During lengthy pauses an outfielder can fall asleep. When I played chess with my cousins Ariel and Arian I always drank a strong cup of café to perk up, since they are young and have spare energy. Their mother Lisa and papa Jorge have taken to chess as well, we had lots of battles within afternoons of sun, splashes of rain showers and nights of coquís singing. The queen defiant, the king posted while the knight horse jumping around with the peasant pawns loose upon the squares of destiny.