Astrogator's Logs

We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
//
…all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.

From Red Sea
by Aurora Levins Morales

Image by Eyasu Etsub (Unsplash)

Today is the fall equinox; the still golden light is here, and the crickets’ shy songs. Critters are busy restocking larders and refurbishing dens, and the leaves are dreaming of fiery journeys.

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.
— From Corona, by Paul Celan

Image: Leaf Spiral by Carol Goodwin, after Andy Goldsworthy

I’ve neglected my online home for a slew of reasons; the absence made my heart sore.

The sky is clear tonight, the Moon, Mars and Jupiter burn brightly near the beacons of Orion and his faithful hounds. A sight that lends me strength to tackle the New Year.

Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,
my speechless pirate!

— from Orion, by Adrienne Rich

And who will write love songs for you
When I am lord at last
And your body is some little highway shrine
That all my priests have passed?

My priests they will put flowers there,
They will kneel before the glass,
But they’ll wear away your little window light,
They will trample on the grass.

— Cohen, “Priests”

Leonard Norman (Eliezer) Cohen, whose surname underlines his descent from intellectual machers and Talmudic scholars, was a priest in the oldest sense of the word: someone who sang to his gods and demons as much to keep them returning to his burnt offerings as to keep them from devouring him.

By all accounts he was a difficult, haunted man, besieged by depression, hard on those who loved him. But he was also immensely aware and self-aware – and far more politicized than most people realize, though he was subtle about it unlike his contemporary peers. His main threshing floor was the struggle within and between persons, his realm the restless night – smoky darkness to match his smoky rough pelt of a voice. His love ballads, shot through with longing, ambivalence and pain, etch themselves on the mind and plexus with fine-tipped acid ink. Yet he also spoke of democracy and resistance, of tikkun, though he never shouted. In my view, he was as deserving of the Nobel as his mirror twin Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan.

Cohen spent formative years on Hydra, one of the iconic Aegean islands, where he met one of his muses and also forged his persona, as enigmatic and “slant” as Emily Dickinson’s. He knew exile and trying to navigate ancient traditions that suffocate while they nourish; he knew the powerful whisper of ancestral demands. And he knew the holy dark, where the profane and sacred become one, where prayers are never answered without a price in blood.

Adieu, shaman, songbird, shaper of dark light. Our world is poorer without your lais.

In this time and place, poetry has been assigned a month, like other marginalized causes. I grew up in a culture where poetry was not precious and hermetic, but a vital way of expression that belonged to all. Poems were set to music and sung, poets were bards that could fuel revolutions. They, and the satirists, were the first to be exiled or imprisoned by oppressive governments.

I have too many favorite poems. The one I finally decided to post here comes from a Greek of the diaspora, a cosmopolitan and polyglot, who spent most of his life in Alexandria. He lived in self-chosen obscurity, but his power and influence have only grown with time.

The God Abandons Antony

by Konstantinos Kavafis

When abruptly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession pass by
with delightful music, and voices,
don’t grieve for your failing fortunes,
your spoiled deeds, the illusion of
your life’s plan; to mourn is useless.
Rather, with foreknowledge and boldness,
bid farewell to the Alexandria that’s departing.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t claim
it was just a dream, that you heard a lie;
avoid all such futile notions.
As if long prepared, and ever courageous,
acting as one who deserves such a city,
make your way to the window,
and listen closely with your heart, not
with cowardly pleas and protests;
hear, as a last pleasure, those sounds,
the delightful music of the invisible procession,
and bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing.

Translated by Stratis Haviaras

The panel portrait is one of many found in the Fayum Basin of Egypt, dating from 1 BC to 3 AD.