first of the all night races

the plan - go to work, come home tomorrow morning, not be excited and get at least four hours sleep, get in the van, drive for another four hours, pitch the tent, register, warm up and race all night. oh yes and it'll be raining!

at least it'll keep the midgies down. even then, i'm sure it won't be pretty....

moniza alvi

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro.

Barely distinguishable from other dots,
it's true, but quite uniquely placed.
And from my dark centre

I'd survey the beauty of the linescape
and wonder - would it be worthwhile
to roll myself towards the lemon stripe,

Centrally poised, and push my curves
against its edge, to give myself
a little attention?

But it's fine where I am.
I'll never make out what's going on
around me, and that's the joy of it.

The fact that I'm not a perfect circle
makes me more interesting in this world.
People will stare forever -

Even the most unemotional get excited.
So here I am, on the edge of animation,
a dream, a dance,a fantastic construction,

A child's adventure.
And nothing in this tawny sky
can get too close, or move too far away

dylan thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

anne sexton

Wanting to die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

and things i dislike this week....

avid brakes

which are fitted as standard on both my last bikes and which i've had problems with in each case. in the former it was all about avid's foolish pad replacement finnickiness - was the stupid pad clip the best they could do? The easiest way to replace these, unless you have the fingers of an elf, is to remove the caliper. now call me cynical but i'm not about to be doing this any time soon in the middle of an endurance race. or at night.

as to the latter bike. well there the rear brake just hasn't worked since i got. my bike shop guy can't/won't/isn't going to fix it and i'll be making yet another trip to him tomorrow to suggest it may be disc alignment that's causing the awful noise and juddering braking so characteristic of the bike since buying. race friendly? i think not. was i happy this week when, after taking the bike out for the first time after it being 'fixed' i was almost instantly back to using front brake only, a rule of diminishing returns for me on the steep bits and the reason all of my left elbow is currently a fetching shade of green. at least it wasn't broken which at first i feared. modesty forbids me putting up a picture of my shoulder, revealed to be full of gouges once i;d pulled my jersey out of it. ow, that's got to hurt, said t. she wasn't wrong. was i happy? i was not.

suffice to say i will be avoiding any bike sporting avid brakes in the future.

talking of things disappointing and unreliable on to the euros and the entire french team. i threw what can only be described as a strop when italy, for god's sake, put them out of their misery. i shan't repeat any of it. no i really shan't. then it was an early bath for sweden and further grumpiness. tonight i endured the only game i've actually been able to watch, a two hour borefest until the last two minutes until croatia actually scored then the turks who, unlike their european counterparts really do play to the final whistle, scored in the dying seconds on injury time in extra time. what drama! and then croatia blow it on the penalties. germany are the only winners after this performance. other than france and sweden my third team choice, poland, because of the immigrants obviously, had to be my third team and a good choice for a proxy scotland they were. three games and off home. it was as if they were wearing blue....

ana blandiana

Perhaps Someone is Dreaming Me

Perhaps someone is dreaming me -
That's why my gestures
Are so soft
And unfinished,
With their aim forgotten
Half-way,
Grotesquely,
That's why my outlines get blurred
Second by second
And my deeds melt...
And perhaps the one who's dreaming me
From time to time is plucked
From sleep,
Awoken,
Carried by force into
His true life,
That's why I darken
Suspended sometimes
As from a thread that melts with snow,
Without knowing
If he will fall asleep again
So that something might happen to me
Again.

trans Peter jay and Anca Cristofovici

carol ann duffy

Death and the Moon

(for Catherine Marcangeli)

The moon is nearer than where death took you
at the end of the old year. Cold as cash
in the sky's dark pocket, its hard old face
is gold a s a mask tonight. I break the ice
over the fish in my frozen pond, look up
as the ghosts of my wordless breath reach
for the stars. If I stood on the tip of my toes
and stretched, I could touch the edge of the moon.

I stooped at the lip of your open grave
to gather a fistful of earth, hard rain,
tough confetti, and tossed it down. It stuttered
like morse on the wood over your eyes, your tongue,
your soundless ears. Then as I slept my living sleep
the ground gulped you, swallowed you whole,
and though I was there when you died,
in the red cave of your widow's unbearable cry.

and measured the space between last words
and silence, I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars. I turn
to the house, its windows tender with light, the moon,
surely, only as far again as the roof.the goldfish
are tongues in the water's mouth. the black night
is huge, mute, and you are further forever than that.

waiting for the race

packing the day before the race seems, these days, almost anti-climactic. evrything is in its box, everything in its place, pre sorted and pre checked to avoid any last minute panic. which of course leaves a void between packing the van and watching the clock until leaving time.

read a book. do some stretches. don't think about all the training i haven't done. tomorrow's going to hurt. a lot. but at least the forecast isn't too bad. dry, overcast, not too hot. if the sun comes out, i'm done.

consider going down the bike shop but the bike shop guys are busy doing everyone else's bikes and, having been there yesterday, know fine well i'm ready and don't need anything else. they have six guys going in the pairs, all faster in me. all younger than me as well. i've grown to love these race doubts - am i strong enough, am i quick enough? they clog your limbs up like glue. mostly now, i can ignore them. mostly. except when the hills are too steep and my legs are too sore and everyone and their cat seems to be going past me (but they're not solo!). i learn more about myself in these races than at any other time. the race becomes irrelevant and it's only the questions that matter. keep the pedals turning. breathe

antonio machado

The Ephemeral Past

Habitué of a small-town club, this man
who saw Carancha poised one day
to take the bull,
has a withered skin, hair going grey,
eyes dim with disenchantment, and beneath
the grey moustache, lips bent
in nausea and a look
that’s sad – yet sadness it is not
but something more, and less: the void
of the world in the hollow of his head. He still
sports a jacket coloured currant-red
in a three pile velvet, breeches
booted at their extremities and a caramel
Córdoba hat, turned and furbished well.
Three times he inherited, and then lost the lot
Three times at cards and twice
Was widowed. An illegal round of chance
Alone will make him brighten
Sprawled at the green baize table;
Once more the blood begins to flow
As he recollects a gambler’s luck
Or the afternoon of some torero,
Drinks in an episode from the life
Of a daring bandit of the road
Or the bloody prowess of a knife.
He satirizes with a yawn the government’s
Reactionary politics and then
Predicts the liberals will come to power
Again, just as the stork returns to the bell-tower.
Something of the farmer still, he eyes
the heavens, fears them and at times will sigh
thinking of his olives and, disconsolate,
watches for weather-signs when rain is late.
For the rest, boredom. Taciturn, hypochondriac,
shut in the Arcadia of the present,
and to his brow
only the movement of the smoke gives now
its look of thought. The man is neither
of yesterday nor tomorrow
but of never. Hispanic stock, he’s not
the fruit that grew to ripen or to rot,
but shadow-fruit
from a Spain that did not come to be,
that passed away, yet, dead,
persists to haunt us with a greying head.


trans by charles tomlinson and henry gifford

octavio paz

A Song Out Of Tune

non visto color de buen verdigay
nin trobo discor ni fago deslay
Juan Alfonso de Baena

The day is short,
the hour long
Motionless I retrace its steps,
climbing its minor calvaries,
I descend on stairs made of air,
and am lost in transparent galleries
-but I don't find me,
and I don't see you.

The day is short,
the hour long.
I see my stubborn hand that writes
its circular words on the page,
I see my shadow on the page,
I see myself falling through the hour's blank center
-but I don't find you,
and I don't see me.

The day is short,
and the hour long.
Time drags on, hides, and peeks,
time is buried, clods of air,
time sprouts up, a column of air,
it bashes my forehead,
scrapes my lids
-but I don't find me,
and I don't see you.

The day is short,
the hour long.
I walk through lots and corridors and echoes,
my hands touch you and you suddenly vanish,
I look in your eyes and suddenly vanish,
the hour traces, erases, invents its reflections
-but I don't find you,
and I don't see me.

The day is short,
the hour long.
There is a seed asleep in time,
that explodes in the air with a burst of syllables,
it is a word, and it speaks without speaking
the names of time, yours and mine,
-but I don't find me,
and I don't see you.

Names are fruit that ripen and fall;
the hours immense, inside itself it falls.

raymond carver

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted form this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on earth.

and then i came back

so, a bit of time on mull, a place i'd only been briefly to before and which, after this visit, i'll be back again very shortly. mostly i was on the road bike, though i did have both the x and the mtb. the x bike is good but being back on the road bike after so long was just sublime especially given some of the country i got to ride through. i was surprised by the size of the cliffs and, aside from iona, the lack of tourists. i felt really chilled out there and can't wait to go back.

off back to sweden after that for family related shenanigans and my birthday. aside from much time spent on the boat and some really pretty successful fishing my abiding memory is when we first all got together, three generations of us (of which i realise now i was the second or third oldest!), of which really only the children are properly swedish (though there's quite a lot of 'proper' swedes would disagree i think). the kids, once they got used to us again, were great, teaching me how to count up to ten in swedish and showing off the fact they could sing songs in spanish and english.

coming home was difficult, esp as the university have decided to give me some hassle, but mainly because i feel as if i don't have the energy for another move, something i need to be thinking about. my head is, however, stuffed with stuff to write and make, and the garden, which has assumed an increased presence this year, is full of growing things.

rilke

discussion about rilke elsewhere have got me to reading rilke again, this in particular. haven't come across the original or i'd have posted it but here's a couple of versions both of which i like and one in portuguese, that i think is rather lovely

Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;
plug up my ears, and I can still hear;
even without feet I can walk toward you,
and without mouth I can still implore.
Break off my arms, and I will hold you
with my heart as if it were a hand;
strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;
and should you set fire to my brain,
I still can carry you with my blood.

trans annemarie s. kidder

Extinguish Thou my eyes:I still can see Thee,
deprive my ears of sound:I still can hear Thee,
and without feet I still can come to Thee,
and without voice I still can call to Thee.

Sever my arms from me, I still will hold Thee
with all my heart as with a single hand,
arrest my heart, my brain will keep on beating,
and Should Thy fire at last my brain consume,
the flowing of my blood will carry Thee.

trans albert ernest flemming

Apágame los ojos: puedo verte,
ciérrame los oídos: puedo oirte,
y hasta sin plantas puedo ir hacia ti
y hasta sin boca puedo conjurarte.
Destrúyeme los brazos: puedo asirte
en mi corazón lo mismo que una mano,
detán mi corazón y mi cerebro
palpitará, y si arrojas fuego en él
te llevaré en la sangre.

the shore

I take 'seaboard' (littoral, shore) to be particularly significant space. We are close there to the beginnings if life, we cannot but be aware there of primordial rhythms (tidal, meteorological). In that space, too, we have one foot, as it were, in humanity (inhabited, inscribed space) the other in the non-human cosmos (chaos-cosmos, chaosmos) - and I think it is vital important to keep that dialogue alive. It may be for reasons similar to those I have just evoked that in a text belonging to a tradition which I perhaps bear in my bones, an old Celtic text, 'The Talk of the Two Scholars' (Imacallam in da thuarad), we read: 'the shore was always a place of predilection for the poets'.

Kenneth White

emily dickinson

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!