A keresés eredménye

Recipe for Making the Colour Blue

If you wish to make the colour blue
take a piece of sky and put it in a pot
large enough to place on the flame of the horizon.
Stir into the blue a pinch of early morning red
until it dissolves. Pour everything
into a brass bowl that has been well washed
to eliminate all of the afternoon’s impurities.
Finally, sift in a few smidgens of gold from the sand
of midday until the colour adheres to the bottom of the bowl.
To prevent the colours from separating with time,
drop a charred peach pit into the liquid.
It will disintegrate, leaving no telltale
sign, not even – from the black ash – an ochre trace
on the golden surface. You may then raise the colour
to eye level and compare it with genuine blue.
The two colours will look so alike
that you cannot distinguish one from the other.
This was how I did it – I, Abraham ben Judah Ibn Haim,
illuminator from the town of Loulé. And I left the recipe
for whoever, one day, would imitate the sky.
 

How to make a Poem

If we’re going to talk about how to make a poem,
rhetoric has nothing to do with it. It’s simpler than that, and doesn’t
require subtleties or formulas. Pick
a flower, for example, but not one of those flowers that grow
in the middle of fields, nor the ones they sell in stores,
or in the markets. A flower of syllables rather, in which the
petals are vowels, and the stem is the consonant. Place it
in the vase of the stanza, and let it be. So that it doesn’t die,
it’s enough to put a little Spring in the water, which,
on a rainy day, is fetched from the imagination,
or is pushed in through the window when the cool air
of morning fills the blue room. This is when
the flower begins to seem like a poem, but it’s still not
the poem. For it to really sprout, the flower needs
to find more natural colors than those
which nature gave it. They might be the colors
of your complexion – its whiteness, when the sun falls on you,
or the depths of your eyes in which all the colors
of life mix with the sheen of life. After that,
I pour these colors over the corolla, and watch them descend
to the leaves, like sap which runs through
the invisible veins of the soul. I can then pick the flower,
and what I have in my hand is this poem
that you gave me.
 

Image

. . The man who talked to himself in munich’s central station
. . what language did he speak? What language speak those lost like that, on
. . platforms of train stations, at night, when no
. . kiosk sells newspapers or coffee? The munich
man asked me for nothing, he didn’t even look
as if he needed anything,
. . meaning, he looked
. . like someone who had arrived at the last stage
. . the stage of someone who does not even need himself. Although,
. . he spoke to me: in a tongue not resembling a language
capable of expressing emotion
. . or feeling, limited to a sequence of sounds whose logic
. . the night contradicted. Was he asking me if by any chance I understood
. . his language? Or did he want to tell me his name and where he was from
. . – at such an hour when no train was
. . about to arrive or leave? If he had told me this,
. . I would have told him that I too was waiting for no one,
. . nor was I saying goodbye to someone, in that corner of a german station, though I could remind him that some meetings depend only
. . on chance, not requiring a previous arrangement
. . to occur. That is when horoscopes acquire meaning,
. . and life itself, beyond them, lends meaning to the solitude that pushes
. . someone toward an empty station, at an hour when newspapers
. . are not bought or coffee drunk, restoring a touch of soul to the absent
. . body – enough to establish a dialogue, although
both are each other’s shadow. Since, at certain hours of the night,
. . no one can be certain of one’s own reality, not even when another,
. . like myself, witnessed all the loneliness in the world
. . dragged through senseless meandering sentences in a dead station.