| Four Poems by Jaime Sabines translated by Athena Kildegaard | ||
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Consider It Well They say that I have to exercise to lose weight, that at fifty fat and cigarettes are dangerous, that one should keep one's figure and fight the battle of time, of age. Well-intentioned experts and friendly doctors recommend diets and programs to prolong life a few years more. I'm thankful for the good intention, but I laugh at how shallow are the prescriptions, how stingy the fervor. (Death too laughs at these things.) The only recommendation I'll seriously consider is to find a young woman for my bed because at this age youth is the only thing that comes close to curing this disease. Pedestrian It's said, it's rumored, they affirm it in the salons, at parties, someone or many in the know, that Jaime Sabines is a great poet. Or at least a good poet. Or a poet who's decent, worthy. Or simply, really, a poet. Jaime hears the news and he's happy: how marvelous! I'm a poet! I'm an important poet! I'm a great poet! convinced, he goes out or comes home, convinced. But in the street, no one, and in the house, fewer: no one notices that he's a poet. Why don't the poets have a star before them, or a visible brilliance, or a ray of light shining from their ears? My god, says Jaime. I have to be a father or husband, work in the factory like others, or go about, like others, as a pedestrian. That's it! says Jaime. I'm not a poet. I'm a pedestrian. And this time he hangs about in bed, sweetly happy and tranquil. (Prose poem) Reading Tagore I thought of this: the lamp, the path, the jug in the spring, the bare feet, they are a lost world. Here are the electric light bulbs, the automobiles, the water faucet, the jet airliners. No one tells stories. Television and movies have replaced the grandparents, and all of technology approaches the miraculous in order to tell of soaps and tooth pastes. I don't know why I walk, but I must come to this tenderness of Tagore, of all oriental poetry that substitutes the girl with the jug on her shoulder for our efficient and impoverished typist. After all, we have the same clouds, the same stars, and if we only look, the same sea. This office girl too likes love. And in this chaos of papers that dirty the days, there are pages of white dreams that she guards with care, clippings of tendernesses with which she challenges the solitude. I want to sing some day this immense poverty of our life, this nostalgia for simple things, this luxurious trip that we have undertaken for tomorrow without having loved enough our yesterday. (Prose poem) I love you at ten in the morning, at eleven, and at twelve noon. I love you with all my soul and with all my body, sometimes, on rainy afternoons. But at two in the afternoon, or at three, when I begin to think of the two of us, and you think of dinner or the daily chores, or the amusements you lack, I begin to hate you silently, with the half of hate that I keep for myself. Later I return to love you, when we lie down together and I see that you're there for me, that in some way your knee and your belly speak to me, that my hands convince me of it, and that there is no other place where I can come and go more easily than your body. You come whole to my seeking, and we two disappear in an instant, we plunge into the mouth of God, until I tell you of my hunger or my dream. Every day I love you and hate you hopelessly. And there are days, there are hours, in which I don't know you, in which you are another's--like the other woman. Men worry me, I worry myself, my griefs distract me. I probably don't think of you too much. You know that. Who could love you less than I, my love? _________________________________________________________________________ JAIME SABINES
was born in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico, in 1926, and died this year, in March. His passing
was noted on the front pages of the country's newspapers. His first book of poetry
appeared in 1950. W.S. Merwin wrote that "listening to Sabines one is struck by the
jarring authenticity of passion in his tone, a great cracked bell note of craving and
frustration, irony and anger, outrage and black humor all jangled at once, unabashed,
unsweetened, unappeased...." ATHENA O. KILDEGAARD: Click here to read Athena Kildegaard's poems and bio. |
