14 March 2021—Más notas sobre la niebla

Desperate to sit outside and read poetry aloud with friends. My Spanish lesson today was about el tiempo: la niebla, la tormenta, etc, but then writing this poem I open a new lesson and a slew of new (to me) words como la escarcha, que cubre todo en el invierno, el chubasquero, que es necesitado cuando llueve. There is also la ventisca, which I keep trying to make masculine, grammatically (Freud, don’t @ me), and finally escampar, as in: Espero que el tiempo escampa en la primavera. Pienso que la niebla es la mas belleza de todas formas de la clima. Eso es por qué escrivé un poema sobre la niebla o, si quieres, en que la niebla es una metáfora de la indeterminación y ambigüedad de la existencia—reforzada con fuentes literarias. Los sospechosos de siempre: Francis Ponge, un poeta fenomenológico, traducido por Karen Volkman, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, cuyas poemas exudan una energía curativea y Alice Notley, reina de lo negativa, y por eso, adecuada para representar el oscuridad de la niebla. Today it isn’t the fog which charms but the wind which torments me, scraping the branches across the windowpane, slipping through the cracks of this old house like a dagger between ribs. What a violent thought! But it was just a f’r’instance—a literary touch, condensing into a phrase what McCann (in The Third Policeman) and Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment) expand into an entire novel. What is a novel? I live at the edge of history, a blasted plain, where an accursed wind prevents anyone from stacking pages in sufficient number to constitute a novel.