April 27, 2012

A mixed bag for today, sun, clouds, wind, air so heavy it leans against the skin wanting to melt into you.  Slowly a gray sheet is covering the blue, tattered, and thin enough to dim the light and make me wonder if they will thicken and make evening of the middle of the day.   The yard is not busy this morning, green and shadowed, with only an occasional bird, and the cats, both of them, somewhere else.  Earlier I heard the pileated woodpecker's hooting laugh and rapid tattoo of its hunt for bugs beneath bark, but now it's eerily quiet.  A dark car rounded the corner, a spot of sun glinting of its chrome, throwing thin spears of light out, engine humming and then gone.  In a yard in the distance, a lawnmower begins its uneven traveling back and forth, the sound wobbling along its path, soon there will be the roaring of the leaf blower, they are like Siamese twins of sound lately, rarely one without the other.

This poem talks of the untranslatable song, how everyone needs one, what do you think?

Untranslatable Song    

          "Everyone needs one untranslatable song."
                     --Juarroz

On hearing the striped contralto of guinea fowl,
its mock opera quivers the parsley atop its head--

The song makes its imprint
in the air, making itself felt,
a felt world. Here, there,
the stunned silence
of knowing I will not remember
what I heard;

futures
that will never happen,
a fluidity we cannot achieve
except as a child
creating possibility.

This is the untranslatable song
hidden in the earth.

Claudia Reder

This morning, it was the "song" of the woodpecker, the only recognizable one early on, and its laugh and rapid stutter of noise.  I write it here so I will remember, so I will have it another day, in the future when I look back to see what I can't remember, what a morning in April was like in this year.  Children do create possibilities, but I am not willing to give up my own creation of possibilities, not willing to think only children have that fluidity that means opening those doors we are willing to walk through into some different place, a different choice.  So what is that untranslatable song that is hidden in the earth?  Perhaps it's the mystery of answers we will never know, perhaps all those questions that reverberate in our minds and have us chasing them down the intricate halls of meaning.  Perhaps it's all those lives we can never know, every life but our own, and I am not so sure about that one either.  I think there are probably enough untranslatable songs for each of us to have our own hidden in the earth, hidden in our own lives.