Hate Barrel
Hate’s a wine barrel from which I glug,
Turning me into Madam Vengeance with beefy raw arms
Rushing ridiculous to hurl slop-buckets of blood
And tears of the dead into the onslaught of lies.
Poke holes in their myths
And out fly centuries of toil and anguish.
Hate revives his victims,
Resurrecting us — to bleed us again.
Hate’s a drunk in the stickiest dive,
Its thirst gives birth to thirst
That multiplies like Hydra’s heads.
But lucky drunks know their oppressor
Hate’s doomed to a dismal fate:
Dumbass can’t even pass out under the table.
after “Le Tonneau de la haine”
* * * * *
White on White
Bored, our crew traps albatross,
Great birds of the deeps,
Lazy fellow travelers
Of vessels sliding above the bitter chasm.
The minute we lay them out on the boards,
These piteous kings of the azure,
Awkward and ashamed, splay,
Like oars, their white massive wings.
Winged wayfarer! Gauche. Stupid.
Was lovely, now ludicrous, and foul.
I stuff my lit pipe in its beak.
Another mocks its crippled step.
Sky-poet, prince of clouds
Who haunts the storm and laughs at hunters,
Grounded amid hoots and mocks, can’t walk.
What lifted you smacks you flat.
after “L’Albatros”
* * * * *
Twilight
Silk evening, criminals’ accomplice,
Comes padding like a wolf, sky
Clicking shut like a crypt —
Restless we turn into beasts.
Oh night, craved by us
Whose arms can honestly say: “Today
We’ve worked!” — night solaces
The soul devoured by mad grief,
The stubborn scientist bowing his head,
The stooped worker returning to bed.
But too: demons corrupt the atmosphere,
Waking hungover like stockbrokers,
Their fly-by knocking eaves and shutters,
While under wind-tormented gas lamps
Hustlers take the glimmering streets
Like an anthill, they open for business,
Clear roads and networks,
An enemy getting ready.
They move in our city’s filth,
Worms who strip men’s flesh and eat.
Here and there, a kitchen hisses,
Theater yelps, orchestra grinds and snores.
The buffet at the casino, where games delight,
Fills up with hookers and sharps, all that scum,
And merciless thieves
Prepare for their nightly routine
Of forcing doors and cracking safes,
To fund a few more nights with their bejeweled whores.
Collect yourself, self, in this dark time.
Close your ears to the mayhem.
This is the hour the sick suffer most!
Black night takes their throats; fate
Rushes them towards their final nothingness.
The hospital is filled with their suffocating sighs.
No more aromas of soup by the fire,
Evenings with the beloved.
But how many have never known
The sweetness of home: have never lived.
after “Le Crépuscule du soir”
* * * * *
Correspondences
Our woods today was a temple where living pillars
Whispered leaf-words, bark-words; a woman
Passing there crosses a forest of symbols
In the lichens, the mosses, schist on the hillside,
Which watch her with knowing glances.
Like faraway echoes
Their shadowy, complex entwining
Was vast as night in the clear light of day
In the deepnesses between trees
And the chasm the creek carved,
So your smells, colors, the sounds you made —
I remember them — correspond:
Scents fresh as infant skin, sweet as oboes,
Prairie-green —
And others, mulchy and rich,
Becoming compost, expanding infinite
As amber, musk, resin, and incense
To sing the soarings of my spirit and senses.
after “Correspondances”
/ / / / /
I don’t know French well and I don’t like Baudelaire much — he oozes with decay, pestilence, death, and adjectives; is a tireless invoker of muses, classical figures, goddesses and personifications; is even more self-centered than me, and — have you ever counted how many times “azure” shows up in Les Fleurs du Mal? But his disgust is glorious, and diagnostic, and he’s always most revolted by himself. We in America could use more romantic self-disgust. Also, is there anything in poetry so terribly dry and so full of yearning as Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne,” a poem of his I probably love?
I started messing with Baudelaire by accident in spring, 2020. My husband was slowly dying of a cruel disease that attacked his body and mind, and he spent most of his time in a hospital bed in the living room. For quite a while, we didn’t have help to speak of. For months we — by which I mean I, with legal advice — were fighting Medicaid, and then an insurance company Medicaid contracts with, to get them to pay for sufficient home-health-aide hours to make the time Jim had left a little more bearable. We got COVID too, mild cases, but it knocked us out for a time, and delayed what help we finally did get. There were other things, but that’s enough whining for now. After all, we were all alive last spring, and as Jim said until quite far along, “It’s always better to be alive.”
I wasn’t writing much new poetry. But one day I was stealing a rare few minutes for myself and pulled a book of John Ashbery translations from the French off the shelf. As I recall, I’d decided to read a few poems from each book in my library in alphabetical order, and had already been through Agudelo, Ai, Amichai, Ammons, and Anderson. Ashbery was next. (He killed the reading project because he gave me a writing one.) Not having the brain power just then for “…Convex Mirror….” I turned straight to see what Baudelaire Ashbery had translated, for no particular reason other than that I’d read some Baudelaire in the past, limpingly in the original, and in inadequate translation. He’d done only one, “Paysage” (“Landscape”). Better than many, its English nonetheless chimed and bounced too much. “I can do better!” I thought, self-importantly, which is how, I assume, most translators start.
Jim wasn’t feeling too bad that day, so I had longer than usual to work. I discovered when I’d gotten it pretty well done, that “Paysage” seemed very much a quarantine poem: Baudelaire alone in his attic, mob outside, dreaming of eternity. Best thing was, for the first time in a long time, I felt the pure joy of making and revising that finishing a poem brings — only without the grave difficulty of confronting a completely blank page to begin. Over the next weeks and months I tried another, and another, and each poem I made seemed to have something to say about life in 2020, about illness, about losing one’s beloved, in a corrupt, violent, economically spiraling country led by an incompetent malignant narcissist, with its police and other institutions racist, its people in crisis.
I guess Baudelaire let me say things I wouldn’t normally say, in ways I can’t imagine writing in my own poems. More and more as I went, I shifted him towards 21st-century America, and/or towards my own idiom. I think most of these are recognizable as coming from Baudelaire, especially in the poems’ imagery and structure. But I jettisoned adjectives, chose Germanic-origin words over Latinate, moved poems from Paris to Philly, and wrote as a woman (looking, for example, mostly at men, where Baudelaire did the opposite). I didn’t stress about meter or end rhyme — that’s where translators most often go wrong anyway. I’m sure — no, I hope — I got many things wrong about the French. I take that as an achievement. This year I have had — I’d say, if I were writing this for social media — no fucks left to give. In that, I was, maybe, a little like Baudelaire in his own time. Strangely, across centuries and an ocean, it seemed we were in tune. Je verrai les printemps, les étés, les automnes, wrote Baudelaire in “Paysage”: “I’ll see springtime, I’ll see summer, and fall.” And all through that time, Baudelaire helped me, enormously. Thanks, Charlie.
— Daisy Fried
/ / / / /
The Year The City Emptied: After Baudelaire, published by Flood Editions on March 15, 2022. $15.95, 82 pages. You may acquire the book from Small Press Distribution by clicking here.