bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn’t have anything in the wagon they could take
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I’ve written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I’m going to the shadow play
I’ve written this somewhere before. I’ve written everything (it seems) before. What I love, and loved: the scent of rain when you wake in the night after a hot day and the edges of the linen curtains are damp where they’ve pressed against the screen (maybe they like the rain too); the first long beans picked from the vines you planted in spring; the skimming flight of the kingfisher yesterday morning as you walked down to the lake for your swim; a glass of cool wine in late afternoon; folding sheets you’ve brought in from the clothesline, stiff with sunlight; the lizard who has found a way into your greenhouse and who basks in the dry corner where you’ve laid some beach rocks over sand; the new arugula; the sound and then the sight of a male western tanager landing on a bare branch of dead cedar by the big rhododendron where the robins nested; a bowl of fresh raspberries, warm from the garden; the opening aria of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the 1955 recording (the year of my birth) so quick, a young man’s interpretation, and the later 1981 recording contemplative, yearning.
I’ve written this somewhere before, how much I love Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”, a compendium of beauty and loss, actual and anticipated.
and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I’ve written about bread before but how can you not celebrate each loaf as it comes from the oven after its long rise, its time in the hot pan?
Or the perfect galette, made with several of those peaches and beautiful blueberries? You stop to admire it on the counter, wishing you could paint. Give it words of praise, then. Sing of its shape, how the fruit glistens, the casual pleats of the pastry.
I’ve written about summers before, the railings draped with towels damp from the lake, bees in the oregano, the astonishing stars. But why not say it again?
I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below
or whether I’m flying at their side
This is a summer when I feel my life’s accumulated years as a harvest, unexpected riches. Maybe it’s because I’ve just published a book about a time when I didn’t value myself enough, when I thought pain was just something to get used to, when I didn’t imagine I’d see 25, never mind 71. At eighteen our lives are what we value least, he wrote, and I want to go back, brush the hair from the cheek of that sleeping girl, tell her, You will cut sweetpeas from vines you planted in the shade of the grapes. You will eat a piece of warm bread spread with butter. You will listen to Bach, quick-tempo, slow, and you will carry buckets of water to the tomatoes, gladly, gladly.
I didn’t know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn’t know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
I was on that train once, in a sleeping compartment, tucked under a white sheet, and when the train stopped at stations in the darkness, I woke briefly to push aside the little shutter on my window, glad to be alive.
Note: the lines are Nazim Hikmet’s, from his poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk.
