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Two Poems by Blaise Cendrars
translated by Dick Jones
Chinks
Sea vistas
Waterfalls
Trees long-haired with moss
Heavy rubbery glossy leaves
Glazed sun
High burnished heat
Glistening
I’ve stopped listening to the urgent voices of my friends discussing
The news that I brought from Paris
On both sides of the train close by or along the banks of
The distant valley
The forest is there watching me unsettling me enticing me like
a mummy’s mask
I watch back
Never the flicker of an eye.
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Journal
Christ
There goes another year in which I haven’t thought about You
Since I wrote my penultimate poem Easter
My life has changed so much
But I’m the same as ever
I still want to become a painter
Here are the pictures that I’ve done displayed here on the walls this evening.
They reveal to me strange perspectives into myself that make me think of You.
Christ
Life
See what I’ve unearthed
My paintings make me uneasy
I’m too passionate
Everything is tinted orange.
I’ve passed a sad day thinking about my friends
And reading my diary
Christ
A life crucified in this journal that I hold at arm’s length.
Wingspans
Rockets
Frenzy
Cries
Like a crashing aeroplane
That’s me.
Passion
Fire
A serial
Diary
No matter how much you try to stay silent
Sometimes you have to cry out
I’m the other way
Too sensitive
Editor’s note: In four months of trying, we were unable to contact the current copyright holders of the French originals (“Trouees” and “Journal”). We will of course be happy to accommodate their wishes should they ever decide to contact us.
portrait of Cendrars by Amadeo Modigliani (1917)
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Initially wooed by the First World War poets & then seduced by the Beats, Dick Jones (blog) has been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15. Fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years of rambling, grand plans for the meisterwerk have been undermined constantly either by a Much Better Idea or a sort of Chekhovian inertia. So Dick Jones has no prize collection to his name; he has masterminded no radical creative writing programmes in a cutting edge university department; he has edited no recherché poetry magazines with lower case titles. However, work has been published in a number of magazines, print and online, including Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Qarrtsiluni, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles, Other Poetry, Rattlesnake and Ouroboros Review.
Sea of Stars
by Dick Jones
They will require,
should I return,
that I give name
to all the things I saw.
Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share
my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,
seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.
As now their aerial voices —
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans —
whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation
like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,
lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes, speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.
Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes — long black
sargassos drifting, planet wrack
and flotsam, dereliction.
And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.
Dick Jones blogs at Patteran Pages and has placed poems in such magazines as Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Westwords, MiPOesias, Three Candles and Other Poetry.
Still Life
by Dick Jones
Each morning they organise your bones
into the wheelchair, stack you leaning
out of kilter. Thus I find you, wall-eyed,
feather pulse and mouth ajar. This is
a stillness you are learning as silence
silts up your blood. I name you: ‘Mum’,
I call, quietly at first, as if this were
only sleep and you might resent the passage
interrupted. But your shade is walking
a broken road on the far side of dreams.
I keep my coat on, lean in the doorway,
breathing in the alkalines and salts
that are your presence in this world.
Beyond, through narrow windows, rain
drifts like smoke. The trees shift
their high shoulders, hefting their leaves
like heroes. I can see the lift and fall
of their evergreen breath, the slow,
dispassionate pulse. Such senseless beauty,
propping up the sky as if there were no
tides turning or falling stars, no ashes to dust,
no time at all. You speak — a half-word,
cracked in the middle. Syllables drift
like fumes. Somewhere in that steam
of meaning, the filaments of memory:
the horn’s tip of a lover’s moon,
a song’s dust, the eye’s tail catching,
not quite catching, doorway phantoms,
window ghosts. Grief crosses my mind:
its hydrogen release — from local pain
to lachrymae rerum, all in one ball
of fire. Easy, it would be to cauterise
this lassitude, here against the lintel,
watching not the rise and fall of your
fish-breath, your insect pulse, but
the immortal trees beyond. Too easy;
but death looked in and turned away,
indifferent, and now it’s down to me,
the blood-bearer, to wish away your life
for you. The house ticks and hums.
A voice calls out, thin and querulous;
another coughs. I turn down your light.
There, against the window, dusk outside,
you are becoming your shadow
cast against the shifting of the trees.
Dick Jones blogs at Patteran Pages and has placed poems in such magazines as Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles and Other Poetry.
Mal
by Dick Jones
Strange word, ‘stroke’ — a gentle sleep
and then you wake up,
changed. Caressed by infirmity
on the brown hill, kissed
by disability as you climb
the long drive. The farmhouse tips
and, heart in crescendo,
you embrace the grass.
Indifferent sheep manoeuvre,
crowding out your sky.
You lie in a lump, adrift
at the field’s edge, floating
on the dead raft
of your limbs.
The sun nails light
into your one good eye.
Near dusk her scarecrow voice
scatters your crowding dreams:
she calls you from the house,
the sound of your name
curling out of the past,
a gull-cry, fierce, impatient,
tearing at the membrane
that has dimmed your world.
Root-still, potato-eyed,
you are another species now.
Your medium is clay and saturation.
Mummified, like the bog-man
trapped by time, you lie dumbfounded,
mud-bound and uncomprehending
as the sun slips down
behind the hill.
The urgent fingers
scavenging for a heartbeat,
fluttering like bird-wings
at your throat,
are busy in the dark.
You feel nothing
of their loving panic,
their distress.
All love, all optimism, pain,
all memory, desire coarsen,
thicken into vegetable silence.
A dim siren wobbles in the dark.
And then rough hands manhandle
your clod-heavy bulk.
Night swallows the spinning light
and closes in like smoke.
Dick Jones writes, “Initially wooed by the First World War poets and then seduced by the Beats, I have been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15. Fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years of rambling — Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Qarrtsiluni, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles, Other Poetry and others. Grand plans for the meisterwerk have been undermined constantly either by a Much Better Idea or a sort of Chekhovian inertia.
Credere
by Dick Jones
If God did not already exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
—Voltaire
“He’s God, cried all the creatures…”
—James Thurber, “The Owl Who Was God”
If there has to be a God —
no option on the broken
road, the bridge of sighs —
then let it be a dancing god,
like Shiva but a voiceless one,
indifferent, treading out
the double loop, the bee’s infinity
of weaving round and round until
the measure’s known by all.
Or if not the dancer,
how about a singer?
One who cants in tongues,
a lingua franca from the
furnace heat (ex corde vita),
singing the blues, sean nos,
la duende, passionate, engaged,
yet powerless to lift the curse
of Sisyphus, or block the juggernaut,
or move the stone. These gods omnipotent,
who claim our praise and swallow
our prayers like hungry birds,
are dreams that draw
on the oxygen of our need.
We might as well worship
water falling, shape-shifting
clouds, the janus faces watching
from the cliffs that tell us
what we want to know.
Dick Jones writes, “Initially wooed by the First World War poets and then seduced by the Beats, I have been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15. Fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years of rambling: Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Qarrtsiluni, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles, Other Poetry and others. Grand plans for the meisterwerk have been undermined constantly either by a Much Better Idea or a sort of Chekhovian inertia.”
Between Stations
From the 2009 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest finalist Wavelengths, by Dick Jones
Between stations lies
what I call, faute
de mieux, the real world.
Long jawbones of houses,
each exposed like molars,
upturned and particular.
Here, a garden tricycle,
tilted onto a bony shoulder.
Fallen or pushed? And there,
beanrows and water features,
gouts of flowers like
spilled butter and blood.
And someone sleeping,
pinned to a blanket
like a specimen whilst
a girl in green
at an open window
waves a ‘phone, yelling,
frozen, voiceless, like
a gargoyle. All so clear
then immolated at
a track’s turning. This
is how our lives
walk and talk, coughing
syllables heard by no one,
throwing shapes that
are black against obsidian.
Dick Jones, a musician and recently retired drama teacher, has been writing seriously for the past 20 years. His poems and short stories have been published in a wide range of magazines, both on- and offline.
Body Beautiful
I have become my bones.
I wear my skin
like a shield of leaves,
like wing cases. I am safe
here at my core.
My mother grooms herself.
She turns and turns before mirrors,
buffing the peach, the downy,
the over-ripe as if
you can hide behind beauty forever.
My father watches apples
falling in October. No-one
will gather them now.
He dreams the old dream
of fruit that lies unharvested.
My lover drinks. His eyes
burn at me across
the beaker’s rim. ‘What
is the nature of this journey
that she needs no flesh, no comfort?’
I have become my bones.
They are a cage for the dust
that is my element.
I diminish. It is cold
here at my core.
by Dick Jones
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Night Rain
I sleep with the quarterlight
half open, tipped
like a questing lip
into the dark.
Night rain is falling
and the talk
is all of transformation:
black on black in threads
and swatches, gravity diamonds
heading south down window
panes; the air itself
partitioned into beads
and space. Fluctuation, shift —
this parcel of earth self-
ministers, self-heals. And I
bear witness whilst below
my body ticks backwards
like a novelty clock —
new times, new intervals,
deep secret bells and
slipping gears. Yes,
just outside, a skin
and filament away,
the heft of falling rain
in space, against
the leaves and on
the running earth
is like breathing.
by Dick Jones
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qarrtsiluni 