The sea was lifted
By distant waves
Remembering the shores
From where they left
And the wind carried
Old promises
Mossy rocks were inviting
For bare feet to play
With other bare feet
In await for low tide
And the wind carried
Old voices
January 6, 2025
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025
The first weekend of 2025, and I went back to my
routine of reading poetry. This time it was about introspection, without melancholy.
It seemed a natural moment to have with
change. With the unknown.
Poetry that fits such a state of soul knows no
culture, language, or inheritance. It is panhuman. So, I first read a sonnet by
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, a representative of Spanish Romanticism circa 1890s, entitled
“Rima XI”. I have read this poem
before as it reminded me of the Armenian poet Mateos Zarifian, who, victim of
tuberculosis during the early 1900s, rejected all those who loved him. As such,
although he did not reciprocate, his poems are all about love, destiny, and longing.
Zarifian’s poetry influenced my teenage years, and
intermittently, my adult life. Interestingly, the compendium of his poems, a
book published in 1957, is still with me, tortured aver the decades of my
vagabondage around the globe.
So, I opened that book, put it next to Bécquer’s
sonnet, and read about unrequited love, in Spanish and in Armenian.
“Rima XI”
is about a woman rejecting on non-reciprocating Bécquer’s love. The last stanza
of the sonnet reads:
Yo soy un sueño, un imposible,
vano fantasma de niebla y luz;
soy incorpórea, soy intangible:
no puedo amarte.
—¡Oh ven, ven tú!
Translated as
I am a dream, an impossibility,
a fleeting phantom of mist and light;
I am incorporeal, intangible:
I cannot love you.
—Oh, come, come then!
In this case, it is only when the poet admits that
he cannot love her, that the woman agrees that he is the one for her. In Zarufian’s poems, it is he who rejects the
love of women in fear that his deteriorating health would be unfair to any relationship.
But his longing never stops or ends.
… And that was my first moment of introspection for
2025. Without melancholy. Without longing. Just a moment of inspection and
perhaps introspection. In an interesting way, I found myself not thinking in
Armenian, not reading in Spanish, and not writing in English. I was listening
to another language. One with no alphabet, and no sound. A language of “mist and light” as Bécquer described it.
And it was harmonious and soothing.
“Love takes
only from itself; love gives only from itself” as K. Gibran said. And I thought of it as a marvelous existence.
January 4, 2025
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025
I often meet new people because of my dog. It did not used to be the case with my previous 4 dogs as they did look and behave like many of their other canine brethren. This one stands out with his size and the mellowness he has acquired with age. He pulls me like a reindeer to say hello to those who sit on the square benches, or to the homeless folks bundled up in the street during our walks before sunrise.
A few days ago, he got interested by the smell of a cigar a man was smoking in the cold of a December early morning. He smiled and said:
“I once had an Akita. May I pet him?”
Before I could respond, Ziggy was licking his hand and sniffing the cigar smoke around him.
So, we talked a little. I could immediately tell that he was very well educated, and well kept for someone who has been sleeping in the street and waiting for the soup kitchen to open. He was of Asian heritage, wearing rimless glasses and wearing a thick wool coat. Next to him was his wheeled suitcase.
“I am the only one who smokes a cigar,” he said looking to the few other men bundled up next to the soup kitchen door. “Everyone else rolls their cigarettes.”
By then he was hugging all 130 pounds of Ziggy as one would do to a blanket on a cold morning.
“I miss my dog. Well, I miss a lot of things.” he whispered while keeping his cigar away from my furry friend’s face.
Of course I sat down next to him, curious.
“You may wonder about my being here, no?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
“Well, it is the old story, nothing particularly worth talking about. I was on the other side of midnight once. Then things went wrong. So, I am learning about a new life, one that I used to only read about. Perhaps even teach.”
We were silent for a while, as he kept scratching behind Ziggy’s ears.
Then he turned to me:
“But I am at peace that I did not forget who I was and refused to find comfort in what others expected me to be. I learned that to be the most important decision.”
The enigmatic one-way conversation had captivated me.
“This is the only cigar I have for the day, so excuse me that I make the most of it. Ziggy wants to go on his walk and you have no choice than to hold his leash. It was good he kept me company for a short while.”
He kissed Ziggy on the nose, and turned his head away.
I got up and let Ziggy decide which dark alley of the town he wanted to explore on that cold and dark morning.
PS/ The encounter reminded me of a similar one and of the brief conversation I had years ago in Baltimore, Maryland while walking my last dog Rocky. The man accepted that I take a photo, but I did not print it to respect his privacy. Instead, I scanned the medium format frame which made the capture of the moment appropriately more ethereal.
December 21, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
It is Thanksgiving Day and I am thinking about seasonality. I often do, when my dog takes me for long walks before sunrise. We walk through the desert heat; we shiver with the first freeze; and, we tell ourselves that sunrise is in a couple of hours. At least I do. For him, it is the daily gratitude of being able to walk long miles and have me at the end of the leash.
It is that gratitude that I have cherished in dogs, and learned from, over the past 45 years, as I have never been without a canine friend during that period of time. And, we have probably walked enough miles to circle the earth more than once. There are few rules during these walks – in fact just one: I follow my dogs. That is what a long leash allows – there is always one who leads and one who follows.
… I grew up learning how seasons dictate what we eat, what we celebrate and what we cherish in those changes. The food on our table was always fresh, never from seasons past kept in await in a freezer or a tin can. We ate lamb only in the spring, beans and tomatoes in the summer, and fish when small fishing boats were able to get out to sea and upon return, sell the fish on the beach. It was glorious simplicity around the Mediterranean when garlic fried in olive oil always made our house a home. And as I grew older, I listened to the advice of accepting my own changes of season, the discoveries they bring, and the limitations they impose on what to expect and do.
It was never a feeling of being cheated; of being restricted or regretful. Perhaps life can be untasty if it were kept in a freezer or a tin can. It had to be lived and celebrated with the moment, in the moment, but only with love. Even in the most difficult times. Even when one feels that there is no sunrise by the end of a long walk, at the end of a leash.
Because there is.
… It is Thanksgiving Day and tables will be full for the lucky ones who can fill their tables. And I thought about our dining room table when I was a kid as I have kept a picture my father took during a holiday more than 60 years ago when my sister and I were about to start lunch under the watchful eye of our mother. Our dining table was simple, but there was plenty of sunshine bathing the room. And always a bottle of red wine for my father to toast in gratitude. Those lunches tasted better than any I have had in restaurants or prepared by street vendor on four continents. And we gave thanks to our mother before every meal. And after.
It is a photo I revisit when I think about what makes a house (in our case growing up, an apartment) a home. The answer is universal and simple – love of the moment. And we felt fulfilled.
And I recited a line from K. Gibran that has stayed with me as I circled and lived around the globe for the past 50 years:
“Love has no desire than to fulfill itself”
November 28, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
And you shut it tight with a smile. All that remains
is the illusion of being complete, piece by piece. Of being attainable.
With time, those pieces become warped and do not fit
together again. But you do not un-shut the deadbolt. Rather, you find new pieces
to fill the gaps. The cracks. So tight, that no light is seen through.
You fill your red wine glass with white wine.
Without regrets. And for all the sunsets you missed, you raise that glass to a
name you never met. To the memories of all those without names.
Of that deadbolt you speak rarely. Sometimes you
only think about the door it holds tight. The one that was repaired with new
parts. The one that does not let light pass through.
And then, one sunrise, you wash your red wine glass
with a promise, wipe it dry with scar tissue, and fill it with cold coffee left
from a previous sunrise.
And you walk pass the door, the deadbolt still on
it. The coffee tastes like the first coffee you brewed in an old land. Or perhaps
like the second one. But the wine glass warms your hands.
You are not attainable at that moment. Because it
belongs only to you.
And at sunrise, you go to the seaside of a city of steel and concrete, and feed your inner Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
November 14, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
In the 1990s, I worked with the Argentinean Ministry
of Health toward improvements in their healthcare system. At the conclusion of
my first visit to Buenos Aires, a colleague who had read my poetry gave me a book
entitled “La ùltima Inocencia “as a
gift.
“You probably do not know Alejandra Pizarnik’s work”
he said, “She is our femme fatale poet. I found the first edition of her book,
published in 1956. I think you will like it.”
I read the book during my flight back. One poem
stood out entitles “La de los Ojos Abiertos“(The
One with Open Eyes) and I read it a few times at 40,000 feet.
This weekend, as I was searching for a book, I came
across that copy and many memories of B. Aires kept me away from continuing my
search for the initial book. So, I sat down and reread the above poem.
Pizarnik was a lost soul, often lost in her own
loneliness and despair about a life she did not figure out how to live. Or why
to live through it. And she put an end to it at age 36, but her poetry
continued to hold a special place in modern Argentinean poetry. Thirty years
after my first reading of “La de los Ojos
Abiertos“, I found new meanings to her imagery. Here are a few lines from that poem and an
attempt to translation to English:
La vida juega en la plaza
Con el ser que nunca fui
(Life plays in the square
With the being that I never was)
Mi vida
Mi sola y aterida sangre
percute
en el mundo
(My life
My lonely and frozen blood
Beat in the
world)
… ... Pizarnik’s “open eyes” is an inverse metaphor;
rather, her depression of seeing her life pass without the achievements she
wanted would better be described as “eyes shut and chin touching the chest” reading her own tortured entrails.
And that thought surprisingly made me think of a photo I took, also in the
1990s on the streets of Taipei, Taiwan. There was a young woman, in front of a Buddhist
temple, holding a white umbrella. Perhaps she was leaving the traditional
written message for the spirits hoping for an answer. Perhaps she was just
there for no reason. And I could not see her eyes.
A few minutes later I wrote my feelings of the moment, in my own way:
In the shadow of a tree
I found the tree
In solitude
Yet unhurried
Under a white umbrella
Her smile
Remained tender
Yet unshared
In streets of concrete
A promise was left
To become a poem
Yet unread
And the river forgot
That in every flow
The old dance
Loses its foot
Unhurried
Unshared
A secret smile
Under a white
Umbrella
November 3, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
Lingering at the fork
A stony wall
Borrowed my shoes
To let me sleep
But I could not
Fearing old dreams
Like a name
Behind a curtain
Yet it has been a long while
Since I lost my shoes
At the fork of the road
When I could
Not
Reach
The lake
September 30, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
