Ruth L. Schwartz: "Versions of Ghalib: Ghazal I"["Everything sings, in each moment"]

            Ghalib was a 19th-century Urdu poet. These versions were developed
            from the prose translations provided by Aijaz Ahmad in Ghazals of
            Ghalib (Columbia University Press, 1971). Numbering corresponds to
            the numbers used in that volume.

            i

Everything sings, in each moment, a song—and is,

in the very next moment, unsung.

It's no use being a mirror which sees both sides;

both sides are wrong.

What you claim to know will fail you; so will

what you venerate. Drink up. Refill your cup.

Deliberately love kicks up dust

to irritate the eye between two worlds.

            ii

Each song loves and hates itself.

If there's a mirror which tells the difference, don't look.

Forget what you know; don't bother to believe.

Not-knowing is the only cup which can hold the world.

Where love has been and gone, the world grows honest.

Each thing sings: I am essential. I do not exist.

All you think you know is wrong. So is all you worship.

No matter how much you drink, there's more in the cup.

            iii

Praise the futility of song. Accept that the shine in the mirror

is wrong. You are not important.

What's a mirror, anyway? Who looks back from that bright glass?

It's love again, come to save us, or drive us mad.

The more you know, the less you see;

faith can't be drunk, though it fills your cup.

Love's like a dust which settles on all things

and clings like skin. Even the sky bows down to it.

              

"Versions of Ghalib: Ghazal I" ["Everything sings, in each moment"] by Ruth L. Schwartz. Text as published in Dear Good Naked Morning (Autumn House Press, 2005). © Ruth L. Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Ruth L. Schwartz: "I had been sad for so long that it shocked me,"

the enormous yellow moon
balanced like a honeydew

on the hill's knife-edge,
fat and implacable.

It wavered there as long as it could,
then started—and who can blame it—

its slow slide.
As if it meant to show me what was missing.

As if the world were asking, Will you learn
to stand beside this pain?

No, I said,
I wish it dead.

I said no. But the world
said yes.

"I had been sad for so long that it shocked me," by Ruth L. Schwartz. Text as published in The Sun (April 2013). © Ruth L. Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Ruth L. Schwartz: "Important Thing"

I’ve always loved the way pelicans dive,
as if each silver fish they see
were the goddamned most important
thing they’ve ever wanted on this earth—
and just tonight I learned sometimes
they go blind doing it,
that straight-down dive like someone jumping
from a rooftop, only happier,
plummeting like Icarus, but more triumphant—
       there is the undulating fish,
       the gleaming sea,
there is the chance to taste again
the kind of joy which can be eaten whole,
and this is how they know to reach it,
head-first, high-speed, risking everything,

                and some of the time they come back up
as if it were nothing, they bob on the water,
silver fish like stogies angled
rakishly in their wide beaks,
—then the enormous
                        stretching of the throat,
then the slow unfolding
                             of the great wings,
as if it were nothing, sometimes they do this
a hundred times or more a day,
as long as they can see, they rise
       back into the sky
to begin again—

                and when they can’t?

We know, of course, what happens,
they starve to death, not a metaphor, not a poem in it;

this goes on every day of our lives,
and the man whose melting wings
spatter like a hundred dripping candles
                       over everything,

and the suicide who glimpses, in the final
seconds of her fall,

       all the other lives she might have lived.

                The ending doesn’t have to be happy.
                The hunger itself is the thing.

"Important Thing" by Ruth L. Schwartz. Text as published in Edgewater (HarperCollins Press, 2002). Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Photograph of California Brown Pelican "dive-bombing for fish," taken June 7, 2007, by Alan M. Pavlik.

Ruth L. Schwartz: "Music for Guitar and Stone"

In music I can love the small failures,
the ones which show how difficult it is:
the young guitarist's fingers slipping,
for an instant, from their climb of chords.
He sits alone on the stage, bright light,
one leg wedged up on a step, his raised knee
round and tender, and the notes like birds
from a vanishing flock, each one more exquisite and lonely;
the fingers part of the hand, yet separate from the hand,
each living muscle married to the whole.
In life the failures feel like they'll kill me,
or you will, or we'll kill each other;
it's so hard to feel the music
moving through us, the larger patterns
of river and mountain, where damage is not separate
from creation, transformation;
where every mistake we make can wash
smooth and clean as stones in water,
then land on shore, then be thrown in again.
I want to sleep, like a stone, for a thousand years.
I want to wake with creatures traced smooth on my skin.
I want to forget I loved you and failed you
as you failed and loved me too, in the lengthy, painful
evolution of our kind; I want to sleep
for a thousand years, then wake up in some other world
where failure is part of the music, and seen
to make it more beautiful; where the fingers
forgive each other; where we can sit naked again
at the window, watch the notes fly by like birds
who have finally found their way home.

"Music for Guitar and Stone" by Ruth L. Schwartz. Published in Tampa Review, 2002. 

Photography credit: "Close Up Shot of Musician Leadbelly, aka Huddie Ledbetter's Hands While Playing Acoustic Guitar," by Bernard Hoffman (originally black and white).

Ruth L. Schwartz: "Tangerine"

It was a flower once, it was one of a billion flowers
whose perfume broke through closed car windows,
forced a blessing on their drivers.
Then what stayed behind grew swollen, as we do;
grew juice instead of tears, and small hard sour seeds,
each one bitter, as we are, and filled with possibility.
Now a hole opens up in its skin, where it was torn from the
branch; ripeness can’t stop itself, breathes out;
we can’t stop it either. We breathe in.

"Tangerine" by Ruth L. Schwartz, from Dear Good Naked Morning. © Autumn House Press, 2005.  

Image credit: "Peeled Tangerine," oil painting by Justin Clayton, 2005 (originally color).