Corps parallèles // The Parallel Body

Je suis heureux d’annoncer la publication de The Parallel Body / Corps parallèles dans une édition bilingue fabriquée à la main, avec une préface inspirée écrite par le remarquable poète et traducteur Jacques Ancet. Ma gratitude également à Laetitia Lisa, qui a travaillé avec moi à la traduction et à Christophe Chomant, notre éditeur, pour avoir mené à bien ce livre avec détermination et professionnalisme.

C’est un livre dans la plus pure tradition des livres de poésie. La couverture arbore fièrement des dessins de  Piers Faccini.

http://chr-chomant-editeur.42stores.com/product/Dom-Gabrielli-Parallel-Body-Corps-paralleles-poesie-bilingue

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I am delighted to announce the publication of The Parallel Body / Corps parallèles in a bilingual hand-made edition with a beautiful and insightful foreword by distinguished poet and translator, Jacques Ancet. Gratitude extended also to Laetitia Lisa, my translator, and Christophe Chomant, the publisher, for seeing the book through with determination and professionalism.

 It's a book in the old tradition of poetry books. The cover is proudly graced by drawings by Piers Faccini.

 

http://chr-chomant-editeur.42stores.com/product/Dom-Gabrielli-Parallel-Body-Corps-paralleles-poesie-bilingue

Extraordinaire préface de Jacques Ancet / amazing foreword by Jacques Ancet

Je suis très honoré d'avoir reçu cette incroyable préface, écrite par un poète si extraordinaire :

«(...)  La poésie de Dom Gabrielli, dans sa légèreté et le poids de son enracinement, dans sa concentration et son emportement, dans son croisement de méditation et de sensualité fait signe vers ce lieu sans lieu, cette charnière où tout se fait et se défait, où tout n’est plus qu’un pur jaillir insaisissable : « pourquoi cela s’efface-t-il / alors que je l’aborde ». Proche d’une certaine tradition mystique à la fois occidentale et orientale, elle est chemin vers la nudité et le silence de vivre. Vers l’oubli et la vacuité. Vers cet effacement de soi qui est la condition de toute véritable apparition : « là où le silence devient musique / je n’ai plus d’œil plus d’oreille plus de front ». Alors, dans un suspens du temps qui n’est plus celui de la séparation, quelque chose pourrait naître. Sur le seuil – dans la force d’évidence du poème :

 

                                   « écris et

                                   le temps viendra se briser

                                    les poèmes sont ».

 

(...)

 (Extrait de la préface de Jacques Ancet à The Parallel Body / Corps Parallèles)

 

***

 

Very honoured to have this amazing foreword written by such a great poet.

“(...) The poetry of Dom Gabrielli, in both its lightness and its deep-rootedness, in both its concentration and its passion, in its mix of meditation and sensuality, points towards that placeless place, that transitional point where all is done and undone, where all that remains is a sheer, uncatchable spring: "why does it disappear / as I approach it." Close to both oriental and western mystical traditions, the poem is a path towards nakedness and the silence of living. Towards forgetfulness and emptiness. Towards that effacement of self which is the condition of all true apparitions: "where silence is musicality / I have no eye no ear no forehead". Thus, within the suspension of time, which is no longer that of separation, something could be born. On the threshold - in the force of the poem's statement:

                        “write and

                        time will come crashing

                        poems are”
(...)

(from the foreword to my book, by Jacques Ancet)

A Strange Frenzy, intro and poem XV

The principle behind my recent book, A Strange Frenzy, if you can call it a principle is to improvise a response to a snippet from a Rumi aphorism or poem. In the uncanny, and rather unlikely dialogue which ensues over cultures and epochs, hopefully, there is a constant challenge thrown down to boredom and convention and an exaltation of freedom in all its myriad manifestations, freedom to speak, freedom to be different, freedom to dare, freedom, above all else, to love.

Love teaches us that we must dare, we must take the gamble or else our lives are dull and lacklustre affairs. Rumi may talk of a love which joins with a grander more spiritual love of all loves, and I may attempt to write of a more material poetic love of moments and commitments to desire, and yet, there seems to be a bridge, where something like hope, dances, in a strange frenzy. Something like a desire which cannot be smuggled away into fact or capital, a stolen moment which somehow contributes to the eternal through its laughter and joy. Something remains, something sings, even in the pain. This strange book says: open me and write your way out of this prison!

Here 'en avant-premiere' is poem XV




"How do we keep our love-secret?
We speak from brow to brow
and hear with our eyes."
- Rumi


XV.

skin to skin
i breathe who you are

through the lung in my eye
i gobble your lies

i devour each one with laughter
licking the tips of your impudence

i have grown vast like an ancient olive
my silver leaves mirrors to skies azure

i do not need to look to find your mouth
nor call to hear your eyelashes caress my chest

you have grown vast also
like the deep underwater rivers
without which your whole land of liars
would lie beneath us in cinders


links to purchase

"let words mingle from the desert"

"let words mingle from the desert"
(A Strange Frenzy, Poem VIII)

A Strange Frenzy - new book

I am delighted to announce the publication by Unbound Content of  a short book of poems (17 in number) inspired by the mystical writings of Rumi.

The poems are accompanied by illustrations from Emily Faccini. Her drawings are simply marvelous.

I hope you enjoy the journey.

Here are the links to purchase :

Unbound Content
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.fr

And here :
to visit the website of Unbound Content

3 improvised moments for a young aubergine, for a kiss, for the dark

1

it is scarce
enough for a word or two
to slide along the hymen of your absence
dont speak
dont show me your eyes
be blind a minute
be lips for me
be tongue be remembrance
let my pen tip toe into you
be the beginning
of another chapter of scream

2

the words piled
burning compost of existence
i walked through there
it was a new roaming
with songs in my head
i had not written
i promise i said nothing
it all came alone
and said what it had to say
that was the beginning at least
of our poems' kissing

3

voices
equal to the scream
turned your suffering into song
still our lips
toothless in their unfathomable abyss
time of no time
they broke the piano
they smashed the insect with hideous wing
we were nobodies
again
in the little dark night
the graceful aubergine
you wish to kill
sung to me
i caught its violet flower
i broke the powders of its future dying
i sniffed their coming
i conjured a totem
i left
there is really nothing

morning song

it is a Gypsy guitar morning
to dance silently on the terrace
in the dawn's warm invitation

it is a semi erect pine
blown by a northerly storm
into the sands of forgetting

it is the voice of an unknown woman
singing to me alone
from the stage of anonymity

the sea will take my bones
it will be full of salt wind
the sky will blacken
i will be alone finally

my poems scattered in the spume

melancholy sky

an undying sunset

what constricts me is what hurts you
it stutters in my heel as i limp
the potatoes are under attack
as they flower in the white heat

the first zucchini small tender
fried with their orange flowers
delectable in egg batter
sprinkled parsimoniously with salt

the radishes are finished
too bitter now too hard
they will be cast to the eager rays of the sun
and burnt to compost
between midday and the dying night

i amble this evening
thinking of how much money one needs
to protect a dream
i fear the air they breathe
i do not trust the words
from beneath their southern smiles

spinach leaves raw peas
pungent rucola coriander plenty
parsley and basil gathered
water sprinkled carrots in ferrous earth
finally starting to grow

pain is a lizard mating in the jaws of morning
the grass snake seems to fly
over the dead weeds
the lizards jump to avoid its black gullet
the swallows year after year
build the same nest of dead olive twig and straw

somewhere you dance
somewhere you scream
i doubt these rumours which have you dead
your flamenco is an undying sunset
as you cry dry tears over your baby's sleeping brow

you learn falling

the Scirocco is a wind from the south
it fetches water from the far reaches of the Mediterranean
it brings cloud this morning over the olive grove

in the night the motorbike skidded to its death
the cars sliding under the bright full moon
i had one hand on the wheel
we were kissing the moon and the night
we stripped the blackness

sip my coffee this morning
gather the dead carcasses of the slugs
as i write to the soul music from that other planet
where my fellow poetess suffers
where they are trying to stop her beauty
with forms to compile and post
with lawyers and injunctions
with the insults of jealousy
and inverted adulation

i pick up the compost and the slender tomato plants
what else can i do
i must take advantage of these first clouds
i have lost too many seedlings already
their leaves crinkled or black
you learn falling the man said

there is no way forward
which is not backwards
into the errors we can repair
with love

no need for tomorrows

in this baking august-may
the burnt grasses homes
to hungry lizards
must be harvested
much as a piano plays
for the echoes of a lost child

all the farmers know
any more rain is a bonus now
as they fix their leaky hoses
as they plant the final battalions
of peppers and aubergines and tomatoes

the peas are so sweet my friend
they rarely make it to the kitchen
we pull the first garlics
we merrily crunch on radish and lettuce
the rocket leaves marry well
with Parmesan and olive oil
the spinach nourishes the multitude

the last cauliflowers and broccolis
the fave are picked
they lie in the sun to blacken and dry
for faraway rainy winters
the first tiny courgettes along with their flowers
are gaily fried and munched

this cloudless week
has seen many casualties
collapsed seedlings pasted on the red muds
but the lavender and sage and cistus are in flower
there is something eternal
something contrary to man which delights me
in their necessary flowerings

it is dark now as i sip red wine
listening to Arabian jazz
i have punctured time
and yet still it screams revenge at me
sometimes an extra glass
brings eternity to your bedside
it is draped in images of olive groves in the sun
what i transmit now is the feeling of it
the rising moon of friendship
which needs not look for tomorrows

Salad for the Heart, for Marilyn Basel

young spinach leaves
crunchy spicy wild rocket
young fava beans from long green pod
spring red onion chopped fine
safran pecorino balsamic vinegar
unfiltered olive oil
cloudy green from terracotta jar

barley bread and malvasia bianca
brings a smile a song from blue

from afternoon heat to fresh dew morning
from celeritous green lizard to lazy black snake
rosemary bloom ends now to thyme and sage
from calendula to poppies
from dandelion to rocket

the day spent kneeling
to rake away the weeds
to part the ferrous earth
for a hundred tomatoes
fearing for their youthful stock
in the burning midday sun

it is late you say to take arrogances seriously
you sung of Rilke as now zinnias and peas
it is the same word you sing for an old fellow
whose echoes wade into the shallows of Michigan
there is love in everything you do
no judgement no shame
just these words which sing despite themselves
and challenge the plentiful to introspection

my knees hurt now as i write these tender words
i will dream of tomato saplings and sprouting purple basil
everything needs a guardian and i know you have one
every plant i place will live within a chaotic logic
garlic on either side of every tomato
mint with the potatoes
chick peas with broad beans
all this you know
you know these weeds are far more than that
they are the answer they are the antidote
far too easy of course to listen to your wisdom
as the world sleeps into folly dreaming of monsters

i open my garden to you

The image we have of ourselves is not ours (Translation of a Juarroz poem)

One must let the negative of one's image
take shape within oneself,
the blacks and whites transformed,
the meanings transformed,
the abysses transformed.

One must allow the wrong side
to rise to the surface of oneself,
in order to see oneself differently,
to look at things differently.

One must allow the free form of oneself
rise in oneself
and let it mingle with its virtual images,
its lost images,
make it form a bouquet of all its images.

The images we have of ourselves are useless.
They undo themselves like a canvas without a frame,
they collapse like a mirror of dust
into death.
One must seek one's own negative
and instead of developing it, dig into it.

The image we have of ourselves is not ours.
We have loaned an image.
But its negative can be the path
to an image which is ours this time:
the positive side of a thought
which corrects the void.

(Roberto Juarroz, 2002, Translation Gabrielli)

Blues for Maalouf 2

so many empty chairs
when to many a stone suffices

how much to lose

on the ascent

the tumbling hoof

stones once more
falling on the innocent

i climb with you
we are here by chance
we are visitors
we are accidents
which somehow do not happen
standing still
in a future moment

i feel like kicking all the chairs down
all the stones into the blue air
punching the living daylights out of
the goon who sprayed his weed killer
on once resplendent orchids

the victory of arrogance never ceases
his will to greater
and the dying bees
and the dying snakes
in the midnight moon the lame fox
preys on the mutant mouse

the earth cries from its open wound
and we are in there
our anger is only the will to continue
is that another arrogance

wouldn't it be best to push it all
down the burning slope
a fine apocalypse finally

the bees and poetry and all our magnificent children

sometimes smiling is impossible in this south
yet the sun effaces even idiots
the Mediterranean takes the lonely coke bottle to hell
and leaves it there with my bad temper

it will rain your music on this unknown city
on this my anger

i call it blues
i take so many supreme liberties
none greater than this writing itself
which stutters
which strides
which your trumpet soothes
serenading the bees as they die
for an extra ounce of meat
for an extra litre of oil
for some meagre profit
it is always for profit
the waters ineluctably polluted
the people slowly surely
poisoned and cured by the same hand

the taxi driver will risk his and your life
to take you to where you needn't go
to smoke a cigarette under a millenary olive tree at midnight

what does it matter
don't forget your malt whisky and hashish
your raw fennel munchies

hugging the most beautiful girl in the world
you will look over the valleys
signs
still to be written
in music

the bus will take you at dawn
through the pine woods and the groves

the homeless gathering kindling
in the waterless plains

you have to take your sound with you my brother
you cannot stop at every village
you are always already leaving
you must leave your tears in your eyes

one or two heavy suitcases
to cross the historical water
the ethnic divide
our chance is to be born into ignorance
the walls will no longer come down
they will rise again the same evening
in these lands of the deaf and the blind
in these lands of suffocating beauty

if we have enemies
even they are as unknown as us

they are the common murderers of beauty
bee killers and snake assassins

man cannot rid himself of the organ which kills

the ladies in headscarves know that
as they carry the grains to market
they sit on carpets
they talk in silent signs

the men smoke

dogs bark

you play your trumpet in silence

dawn your sister on a hill top

echoes

with stripes of silver and blue

For Tomás Segovia

I heard with great sadness that Tomás Segovia has died at the age of 84 in Mexico where he was still teaching. Segovia was a tremendous poet but unfortunately very little has been translated, if anything, into English. There is a good collection in French called Cahier du Nomade. He used to post poems on his blog. His wife has kept the blog going. You can visit it here: http://tomassegovia2.blogspot.fr/. It is moving to go there and feel the signs of the passing genius. He has just flown to a land of echoes, to join with the echoes he has always left, here, the leavings of leavings, robbed from time, strange objects, outlaw meanings in a labyrinth of the precarious. Here is a translation I did of his rather complex but superlatively fascinating metaphysical poem, Don de lo Hecho. I remember sending it to him at the time and he replied in perfect English (he is very well known for his translations of Shakespeare). He said he was astonished that I had got so close to the original. I was moved and then sent him some of my own work including a piece which I dedicated to him and is now in The Parallel Body, poem 32. In fact the translation of this particular piece led me to the poem. I then send him the full collection and he wrote back immediately saying how he spontaneously enjoyed them and that my poetry was the type of poetry he immediately felt drawn to. Later when speaking with my editor, Marcus Reichert, we wondered if we might not use a sentence from his informal comment in an email for the back cover of the book. He quickly replied: "Of course you can, I do not believe in intellectual property." Truly the comment of a great and humble man. Later he invited me to the Spanish consulate in France for a talk on Cahier du Nomade. I could not make it. I wanted to go to Valencia and meet him last year. I didn't make it there either. Now it's too late. I really should have gone. Here is the stupendous poem. Tomás , sorry I never made it!



The Gift of what is Made

We should learn to forgive ourselves
for not having made the world Love you and I
to forgive the enigmatic nastiness of Time
humiliating father who never gives up
we should learn to stop fearing him
to look at his ghosts so they remain ghosts
to not die for having lived
to not be the ghosts of our ghosts
time - not love - made me
time nourished me from the sap of its betrayals
time sowed me already poisoned me with pluralism
all that time brought me was perishable
apart from the negation of myself by which I efface time
but what to do Love with this trickster
how do we play your triumphs against him
if you win against Time Love we have lost
I betrayed you since birth
I gave you lots of faces which only Time devoured
and all of them were you who were none other than him
and you always repeated yourself and you never said anything
or each time you spoke a real name
and all save the last you give to him
and once again you rip me up to give me to him so he can eat me
let's not joke Love shuffle the deck of cards
eat time and eat my life
I can tell you all your false names
and your false true names
start by speaking start at the end
don't start with the defences of fidelity
which is like building a castle with a moat of treachery
start by launching an offensive into the heart of Time to fight it
in your name I will betray my betrayals
and I will become faithful to the infidelity of Time
to you Love I can say everything
to you Love i can speak
in your name I oblige my time to speak to you
it is he and not I who will give you what he stole from me
you alone will be able to give the gift which is yours
this said for you there is nothing outside your life
and i am yours only and you alone are you

Video and Reading of Poem 22 from The Parallel Body

A big thanks to Vincent Segal and Ballake Sissoko for allowing me to use their sublime music from their recent album, Chamber Music. Hope you enjoy.

Orillas del Sar (A Translation)

ESTABAS desleida en la dulzura
de los secretos jugos de tu cuerpo
y te llevaba el agua
como a una larga cabellera verde
engendrada en los limos
obstinados del fondo.

Era tu forma ese deshacimento.
Brotar.
             Fluir.
                        Abandonarse.
Bajaba el aire hasta los limites
perfectos de tu piel.
Blancura.
Y ya oblicuo, el poniente la encendia
para nacer de ti aquella tarde
de que lugar, que tiempo, que memoria.

                                                   (Orillas del Sar)


YOU WERE diluted in the sweetness
of the secret moods of your body
and the water carried you
like long green hair
bred in the obstinate
silts of the river bed.


This disappearance was your form.
To spring.
                 To flow.
                                   To let go.
The air descended to the perfect
contours of your skin.
Whiteness.
And already oblique, the sun set it ablaze
to be born of you that night
in that place, that time, that memory.

                                                  (The banks of the Sar)

Blues for Maalouf (when will you become a woman)

To the Following Music:

and the trumpet sounded the orient


where do you come from
in the night as the piano plays
another blues

when will you be woman
woman with a voice

you share a bed with memory

dark soils hide you from dawn

night a deeper cloak for a smile

there is no trust which is not distance
which does not sing from another land

in the desert sands
i was closer to this sound of trust

i played this naked piano first

i watched the blues pour from your eye

it wasn't a crime

it was the play of love on love

it was dawn being dawn


we are paths to nowhere

our graces are words

folded fingers of perfumes rare

leavened scriptures
kneaded by our bodies

crawl across


to where woman becomes woman

evening note to Rumi

I am not good but I worship your goodness.
I am not the red of wine but I am drunk on you.
Even if I am prone to ecstasies, my love for you is only slightly mad.

an instinct to differ

poems are colours lost in the sky
voices below paintings
talking to songs
in search of logic

paths are to wander down

will they ever end
it is legitimate to ask

what makes the poet stop along the path

an instinct to differ

in what spheres has the poet travelled
to listen to a stone
to wait before a tree
as if mesmerised by a lover's chant

into what temporality
do guitars make me cry
with headaches of acoustic similarity

you are an olive tree
your cross armed kisses lost in shouting

you return
in fields of orange suns
on scattered carpets of snow dusts
beneath ancient olive bark

there is no knowing you

there is nothing

until the next time

until the next time