Scraptals

from Opening Music and Theme Muscle

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Scraptals

By Olga Broumas

This has been a decade of lessening inner monologue and wide dreaming. The dreaming is akin to hypertext — each sensation opens to another,simultaneous on-goingness. Some I revisit, changed. Dreams appear tolast for hours, include entire histories, abstractions describe them bydaylight — the history of homosexuality along with the history ofMatisse-like colors, alongside Alexandrian family trees, of which mymother is, in truth, a branch.

Younger, I wrote for release,one. Now, containment. Then, because so little I saw satisfied. Now,gratitude, the many younger, the many visible, the many dreaming aloud,in print, in voice. Adrienne Rich: I write because I trust no one tosay these things for me. So, in abundant arrogance, I believed.

Don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
You can do that whenyou’re older
Lose it too young and you may
Merely replace itwith vanity
W.S. Merwin, on Berryman

I admirewhat you do, Rebecca, in The Drunken Boat. It is the shape of myinterior in this decade — the roots, the histories, the hyper-links,past and present, geographies. Playing it, I am inside your dream,exquisite.

I hear lines, scribble them, find them months/yearslater, throw them in a folder: Scraptals. Habit is to begin from them,habit no longer sways. A huge curiosity sways. What is it? Zen-like. Its answer self-evident, hyperlinked.

Fifty is the new five. Fifty to sixty as from 5 to 15. Enormous consciousness shifts,hormonal. But with history, as when being Greek, everywhere, statueswith your toes, your mother’s nose, father’s knuckles. The root-habit. Not hind-sight, given.

You see, as I go, phrases shorten. Adecade flies. Full & filling. Alone, I know noting; if someone asks,knowledge appears, surprising, available. Alone, I know just mysensorium. Just in its many meanings. I inhabit its taxonomies,etymologies, hours can drift on the latter — gratitude for so manywords originating in Greek, also given. As a child, looking at the sea,which was often, I became the sea. Now the reigns are much slacker. Alemon, a dustball, the huge and minute equivalencies of perception. Paul Éluard:

the body
is that part of the soul
perceptible by the five senses

The pear, is and is not abody. Hours drift by. I begin now to translate what I love from theEnglish to native Greek: Kunitz, Merwin, W C Williams; take what I loveto sing and sing again, in another tongue, take the tongue of the poetin my mouth on this oceanside, let it loose on the other. In Greek,transliterate is metaglotize: and in meta-phor, move the tongue, mouthto mouth. Taste it, the pear.

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Olga Broumas lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her partner, ChristineHart, and their two dogs, Lily and Nouni, fully aware of the terrible(every angel is) luxury of NOT HAVING YET BEEN EATEN. Her 7 books ofpoetry are collected in RAVE, and her 4 volumes of translation from theGreek of Odysseas Elytis are collected in Eros, Eros, Eros, both fromCopper Canyon Press. A CD of her reading from these books is availablefrom Copper Canyon as well. She currently translates American poetryinto Greek, teaches Pilates, meditates, and practices as a bodyworktherapist. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program atBrandeis University.