Reader's Connection

If I’m going to squirt any personal, trivial goop into this Miguel Hernández post, I’d better do it before I remind you about his short, momentous life. So here goes.

“Letter,” the first poem here, reminds me of the Moody Blues song “Knights in White Satin” (letters I’ve written, never meaning to send) and also of the end of Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” where we learn that poor Bartleby’s lapse may have been triggered by his having worked in a dead letter office.

Mostly, it reminds me that I haven’t written a full-fledged letter in ages. And that’s embarrassing. (the inkwells stir,/the cold black inkwells/blush and tremble,/and a bright human warmth/rises from the dark depths.) My sad excuse: I live with my wife, am not separated from her by wartime or incarceration. But isn’t there anyone else for whom I could make the inkwells blush and tremble?

“Letter” and “War” and “In the Depths of Man” and “To Sing” and “Goodbye, Brothers” are all from Miguel Hernández, selected and translated by Don Share, © 1997, 2013, published by New York Review Books. Used by permission. NYRB was so friendly, in fact, that I went berserk with my permissions request. Five poems in one post.

Letter

The pigeon-house of letters
begins it impossible flight
from the shaky tables
on which memory leans,
the weight of absence,
the heart, the silence.

I hear the ruffling of letters
sailing toward their centers.
Wherever I go, the women,
the men I meet,
are wounded by absence,
worn out by time.

Letters, stories, letters;
postcards, dreams,
bits of tenderness
tossed into the sky,
launched from blood to blood,
from longing to longing.

Although my loving body
is under earth now,
write to me on earth
so I can write to you.

Old letters, old envelopes,
grow quiet in the corner,
the color of age
pressed into the writing.
The letters perish there,
filled with shivering.
The ink suffers death throes,
the loose sheets weaken,
and the paper fills with holes
like a crowded cemetery full
of passions gone by
and loves yet to come.

Although my loving body
is under earth now,
write to me on earth
so I can write to you.

When I start to write you
the inkwells stir,
the cold black inkwells
blush and tremble,
and a bright human warmth
rises from the dark depths.
When I start to write you
my bones are ready to write you:
I write with the indelible
ink of my love.

There goes my warm letter,
a dove forged in fire,
its two wings folded
and the address in the center:
A bird that homes in early
on your body, your hands, and your eyes,
the space around your breath,
for its nest and air and sky.

And you will stay naked there,
inside your feelings,
without your clothes on, so you can feel
it all against your breast.

Although my loving body
is under earth now,
write to me on earth
so I can write to  to you.

Yesterday a letter was left
abandoned, unclaimed,
flying past the eyes
of someone who had lost his body.
Letters that stay alive
talk to the dead.
Wistful paper, nearly human,
with no eyes to see it.

While the eye-teeth keep growing,
I feel the small voice
in your letter more and more
as a great shout.
It comes to me while I sleep,
if I don’t stay awake.
And my wounds will become
spilling inkwells,
trembling mouths
that recall your kisses,
and they will repeat,
in an unheard-of voice: I love you.

Miguel Hernández was born in the south of Spain in 1910, and was raised to be a shepherd. He began to write poems when young. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he was quick to join the Republican Army.

After the war, Fransisco Franco condemned Hernández to death for his poetry, but then reduced the sentence to an imprisonment that lasted until Hernández’s death by tuberculosis in 1942, at the age of 31.

If I have this right, “Letter” was written during the war, and the rest of these poems were written while Hernández was imprisoned, which affects the way I read, for example, “To Sing,” his rapturous poem about his wife and home.

War

Old age in the villages.
The heart with no master.
Love with no object.
Grass, dust, crow.
And children?
In the coffin.

The tree alone and dry.
Woman like a log
of widowhood lying on the bed.
Incurable hatred.
And children?
In the coffin.

In the Depths of Man

In the depths of man,
unruly water.

In the clearest water,
I want to see life.

In the depths of man,
unruly water.

In the clearest water,
shadow with no outlet.

In the depths of man,
unruly water

To Sing

The house is a dovecote
and the bed is a bed of jasmines.
The door is wide open
to the whole world.

The child: your motherly heart
grown large.
In these rooms:
everything that has blossomed.

The child makes you into a garden,
and you, my wife, make the child into
a room full of jasmine,
a dovecote of rose.

Around your skin
I bind and unbind my own.
You exude a noontime
of honey: a noon.

Who entered this house
and took it from the desert?
I remember:
I am somebody, and he has died.

Roundest light comes
to the whitest almond trees.
Life, and light digs deeply down
among the dead men and the gullies.

The future is prosperous,
like those horizons
of pure porphyry and marble
where mountains breathe.

The house,kindled
by kissing and love’s shadow, burns.
Life can’t go on
more deeply, more charged than this.

Mute and overflowing, milk
illuminates your bones.
And the house, with child and kisses,
is flooded with it.

You, your abundant womb,
the child and the dove.
My wife, over your husband
the sea’s passage resounds.

Goodbye, Brothers

The following lines were found after Hernández’s death, scribbled on the wall above his cot.

Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends,
let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.

Thanks to Susanne for sending this one.

Each year a group of mystery enthusiasts who call themselves Malice Domestic gathers together to bestow honors upon writers who follow the traditional mystery style of Agatha Christie (i.e., no gratuitous sex, violence, or offensive language). “Hard-boiled” crime is not considered, but good writing and a nice plot-twist is just their cup of tea.

Nominees for Best Novel of 2012, along with descriptions from their publishers:

The Diva Digs Up the Dirt – Krista Davis

“While replacing a dead rosebush in her perennial boyfriend Wolf’s backyard, Sophie Winston digs up a purse belonging to his missing wife, a discovery that causes Wolf to head for the hills, leaving Sophie behind to clean up the ensuing mess.”

 

A Fatal Winter – G. M. Malliet

“Max–Anglican priest, former MI5 agent, and village heartthrob–investigates two deaths at Chedrow Castle. But his growing attraction to Awena Owen complicates his case, as does the recent arrival at Chedrow Castle of a raucous group of long-lost, greedy relatives, any one of whom has a motive for murder.”

 

The Buzzard Table – Margaret Maron

“A mysterious ornithologist staying at Mrs. Lattimore’s Victorian home and doing research on Southern vultures seems familiar to Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant, especially after a murderer strikes.”

 

The Other Woman – Hank Phillippi Ryan

“Tracking down a candidate’s secret mistress days before a pivotal Senate election, reporter Jane Ryland discovers links between her story and a serial killer investigation by detective Jake Brogan, with whom she partners to stop a killer in the face of dirty politics and betrayal.”

 

And remember: Hank will be the Banquet Speaker at the Magna cum Murder mystery conference  this October, at the Columbia Club downtown.

 

 

and the winner is ….

A Beautiful Mystery – Louise Penny

“When a peaceful monastery in Québec is shattered by the murder of their renowned choir director, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Sãurete du Québec are challenged to find the killer in a cloistered community that has taken a vow of silence.”

Russell Schaeffer is an impossible husband, and one evening his wife Boyd says, “Do me a favor, Russell. Die.” And the next day, he dies.

Life after Death, a novel by Carol Muske-Dukes, isn’t a murder mystery, but it does spend wondering how this death came to be, and what Russell’s–or anyone’s–life means. Will Youngren, who runs the funeral business that he inherited, is attracted to Boyd; and if you’re thinking that the two of them will open up to each other, you won’t be disappointed. But that opening is complicated, sometimes funny, and now and then literally subterranean.

Boyd attempts to re-enter a profession from which she had lapsed, as an ob-gyn, so between her and her funeral director, readers have intimate encounters with life’s beginning and its end. Novelist Muske-Dukes is also a poet, and it shows in the way she weaves this material together.

Not only that! There’s a scene in which Boyd’s four-year-old daughter Freddy realizes that letters come together to form words which mean something. There may be dozens of such episodes scattered through other novels, but I haven’t lucked upon many of them. Even if Freddy’s moment of literacy weren’t tied up with the loss of her father, I would have found this scene moving.

Freddy’s mom is moved, too. By a fluke, she happens to be at the preschool, watching Freddy catch on, and Boyd knows what she’s seeing.

Laurie Lou steps back into the observation room with a blue plastic cup of orange juice for Boyd.
“She seems much happier today. A little distracted, but really happy,” she says, but Boyd does not turn to look at her. Boyd is watching hungrily through the glass, watching Freddy stand up in the sunlight and smile all around her . . .

Life after Death is also available as a downloadable e-book

Ron Tanner, the author of
From Animal House to Our House: A ♥ Story, will be at Central Library to discuss his book on Monday, June 24th at 7:00 p.m.

Shortly after this century began, Tanner and his wife Jill (still his girl friend at the time), bravely bought an abandoned, garbage-filled fraternity house in Baltimore. “Jill wanted the house and Ron wanted Jill.”

From Animal House . . . tells the story of how they fixed up the place which has become their home. Copies of the book will be available for signing.