Autobiography of Melancholy
a cento-ghazal with lines from Jules Renard
I was born with two wings, one of them broken.
Dreamed of flight before my first word was spoken.
First frost. A little ice on a cabbage leaf.
February. A snowdrift, a globe, a subway token.
All day I was drugged with sadness.
Asleep, my fists curled like thoughts unspoken.
I am a realist bothered by reality.
Someone who dreams with eyes wide open.
Nothing adds to your age like the death of a father.
Your notebook fills with lines you wish you’d spoken.
The wind claps in the night like a black sheet.
Is that you? Wind says, it’s no one.
The curtain of memory draws back only when it wills.
Pick up your pen. The angel has spoken.
[Lines by Renard are taken from The Journal of Jules Renard, edited and translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget (Tin House Books, 2008 & 2017 editions)]
* * * * *
Silence
The red toy piano had fifteen white keys and ten painted black
keys. Mornings on the cool flagstone I sat on my haunches next
to Juanita washing laundry in a big palanggana, slapping the
wrung sheets with a wood paddle, her gaze both worried and
kind. Suds flew. My fingers tapped the keys, the hollow tones
rose like bubbles. Under the lid, hidden parts knocked together
making sound. The painted keys kept their silence.