#michiko nogami

[music-despite-everything]

The Spirit and the Soul by Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert, February 18, 1925 – November 13, 2012, born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, died in Berkeley, CA.

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It should have been the family that lasted. Should have been my sister and my peasant mother. But it was not. They were the affection, not the journey. It could have been my father, but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me, and the newness after that, and newness again. It was the important love and the serious lust. It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl, but the black-and-white winters with their girth and geological length of cold. Streets ripped apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when the snow finally left in April. Freight trains with their steam locomotives working at night. Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy, I saw downtown a large camera standing in front of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s Department Store. Usually around midnight, but the people still going by. The camera set slow enough that cars and people left no trace. The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia, my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit. The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate. The way a child knows the world by putting it part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw my way into the Lord, working to put my heart against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night, letting the rain after all the dry months have me.

[nsantand]

Jack Gilbert – Poemas e Elegias para Michiko Nogami: VII - Encontrando algo

Michiko está morrendo no edifício atrás de mim, / as imensas janelas abertas para que eu possa ouvir / o som fraco que ela fará quando quiser / chupar melancia ou para que eu possa leva-la, / no canto do quarto de teto alto, ao balde (...)

Digo que a lua são cavalos na suave escuridãoporque cavalos são o que mais se parecem com o luar.Sento-me no terraço desta velha casa que o telegrafistado rei construiu em uma montanha que dá paraum mar azul e a pequena balsa brancaque cruza lentamente para a ilha vizinha a cada meio-dia.Michiko está morrendo no edifício atrás de mim,as imensas janelas abertas para que eu possa ouviro som fraco…

[transvaluator]

Kochan #4

Secret Mornings

She does not wake in the morning. Or if she does, she looks over to my bed to see if I am watching. Sees I am and folds the blanket back from the futon a little and I visit her. We make love or we don’t and she sleeps. When she wakes again it is between morning and after. There is San Francisco sun in four of the six windows. She does not look for me but makes a small sound. I stand in the doorway and say Ohio, Michiko. She makes a different sound which pretends to complain. Poor thing, I say, and go to get the tea. After, she puts on the blue yukata and I return to my writing. There is the sound of water. Then the sounds of her making breakfast behind me. It’s ready, she says gently, and I carry the tray in. We have cabbage with eggs which she says is Japanese and it may be. Or we have udon with tofu and chopped green onions put in after. Then it is day.

[wintryblight]

i hope this is okay to ask, but do you have any poem about grief? i'm struggling with it at the moment and i don't really know how to handle it. thank you so much.

hi anon. of course it is okay, and i am so sorry you’re grief-stricken. i hope these poems can be of some comfort to you. when i was struggling with grief, i found my solace in some of these poems as well.

Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods” | to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it / go, / to let it go.

Joanna Klink, “Elegy” | You left that night and we stayed, / our arms braced with weight.

Meghan O’Rourke, “The Night Where You No Longer Live” | Do you intend to come back / Do you hear the world’s keening / Will you stay the night.

C. D. Wright, “only the crossing counts” | The genesis of an ending, nothing / but a feeling, a slow movement

Jack Gilbert, “By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 a.m” | I wanted / to crawl in among the machinery / and hold her in my arms

Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)” | "The roses you gave me kept me awake / with the sound of their petals falling."

Jon Pineda, “My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task” | this elegy / would love to save everything

Kim Addonizio, “Prayer” | I want death to take me if it / has to, to spare you, I want it to pass over.

[celynvenus]

Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)

Jack Gilbert 

Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.”

[dosycuarto]

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

¿Se habrá vuelto más clara porque ya no va a estar para siempre? ¿Su blancura es más blanca porque era del color de la miel blanquecina? El humo de una chimenea que hace ver más el cielo. Una mujer muerta que llena el mundo entero. Michiko me dijo: “Las rosas que me regalaste no me dejaron dormir por el ruido que hacían los pétalos al caer”.

Jack Gilbert

[cose-belle]

It should have been the family that lasted. Should have been my sister and my peasant mother. But it was not. They were the affection, not the journey. It could have been my father, but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me, and the newness after that, and newness again. It was the important love and the serious lust. It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl, but the black-and-white winters with their girth and geological length of cold. Streets ripped apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when the snow finally left in April. Freight trains with their steam locomotives working at night. Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy, I saw downtown a large camera standing in front of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s Department Store. Usually around midnight, but the people still going by. The camera set slow enough that cars and people left no trace. The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia, my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit. The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate. The way a child knows the world by putting it part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw my way into the Lord, working to put my heart against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night, letting the rain after all the dry months have me.

- Jack Gilbert, “The Spirit and the Soul”

[contremineur]

Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

Jack Gilbert, Michiko Nogami 1946-1982 (in ‘Collected poems’, Knopf Doubleday 2012)

[lisaboo83]

‘Michiko Dead’ by Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box    that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out,    he moves the hands forward, hooking them    on the corners, pulling the weight against    his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly    when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes    different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood    drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now    the man can hold underneath again, so that    he can go on without ever putting the box down.

[allthereisiswhatyousee]

The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

Michiko Nogami, from The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

[nsantand]

Jack Gilbert – Poemas e Elegias para Michiko Nogami: VI - Sozinho

Nunca pensei que Michiko voltaria / depois de morrer. Mas se voltasse, eu sabia / que seria como uma dama em um longo branco. / É estranho que ela tenha voltado / como a dálmata de alguém. (...)

Nunca pensei que Michiko voltariadepois de morrer. Mas se voltasse, eu sabiaque seria como uma dama em um longo branco.É estranho que ela tenha voltadocomo a dálmata de alguém. Eu encontroo homem que a leva para passear, de coleira,quase toda semana. Ele diz bom diae me curvo para acalma-la. Ele disse uma vezque ela nunca se comportou assim comoutras pessoas. Às vezes ela está amarradano gramado…

[transvaluator]

Kochan: With Four Poems by Michiko Nogami

Hi Strangers. I’ll be posting a poem a day from the rare chapbook Kochan, an elegiac book of poems by Jack Gilbert on the death of Michiko Nogami. This book also includes four of her poems. I couldn’t find these poems anywhere online and the chapbook is hard to find these days, so I thought I’d share them in the order of their appearance in the chapbook. It is a tiny delicate thing wrapped in some kind of thin paper. Nights and Four Thousand Mornings I go out the back gate and past the orchard. Up the stream over the small sound of water. Through olive trees, under the big cypress, and come to a dirt road. When it curves left I am above the villa. Michiko raises her arms and I wave and the road climbs to the nunnery. I go past and down the other side onto the scree of a donkey trail. Soon I can see the village white and miniature far below by the sea. A path branches off through an old terrace to Linda’s shepherd hut. I look under the marble rock for messages. Leave a note and go on. Now Michiko will be in the shady arbor behind the house watching the swallows in the early morning sky or painting the fig tree or translating Heian poems. The trail drops faster across stone shelving. The farm with a child and a mean dog on the right. The old woman’s house with her dying husband after. It gets steeper and mostly boulders. I go too fast on their tops as a treat and come to the dry creek and rushes and thicket of oleander at the bottom of the mountain. It is hot now. Every wise man I met in Asia warned me against caring. Explained how everything I loved would get old, or be taken away and I would suffer. I tried to explain what a bargain it is. They patiently helped me understand. I said the Devil must care if he lets us get so much, as though he can’t resist something we are. Christopher Smart believed his cat, Jeoffry, played with the mouse to give it a chance, for one in seven escaped by his dallying. Across the flat farmland through ferocious sun. Bleak fields and straggling dry vineyards. Past the turn for the Valley Of the Owls where I lived three years before. I stop at the ugly fig tree for shade and the fruit. Then handsome fields of ripe barley with the Aegean very blue behind. Michiko was to be with me that year in the valley, but we had bad luck. Now she is sitting on the mountain under the jasmine. Like moonlight in midday, Linda said. She has sliced cucumbers and put them with lemon juice. I stop at the best fig tree. I pass the field of three black cows and pass the delicate goats. Cross the dribbling stream to plum treas in a walled garden. Stony plots again and severe heat. The farmhouses become more frequent and it is the edge of town. I buy tomatoes and eggs, squid for dinner and bread. Check the mail and start back. Zen monks circle a hill each day for a hundred days, then walk it for a hundred sitting in their spirit. I climb the Greek landscape daily in San Francisco, getting the ten miles and the light and Michiko clear. Today giant American winds churn violently in the firs and eucalyptus. Uprooting and tearing down. Their bulk is astonishing up close, like buffaloes at arm’s length. I move small among them in the strong air. Two possums cross a clearing and I recognize the faces of the dead. Two years and and I know Michiko is not like that. Her bones are burned clean and hidden in Japan. The Michiko I miss is the Michiko I contain. We are composed of memory. We are the past ignited in  the present. Without felt history, America is merely another country. Without Tuesday and the years before conscious in me, I am merely someone, uninflected. Our past is an orchestra which merges with the tenor now. The eleven years of Michiko are me. Those months in the gardens of Kyoto and she with me now amid these splintering trees are both happiness. Memory is the equity we have in our lives. Michiko calls softly out of the orchard in me. She eludes and laughs, gentle and pleased. I know she and her shy heart and small breasts are in there with the apple trees and figs, however invisible among the leaves. The air is fresh around her.

[definingpoetry]

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

by Jack Gilbert

Is she more apparent because she is not

anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white

because she was the color of pale honey?

A smokestack making the sky more visible.

A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko

said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake

with the sound of their petals falling."

[buxomofluxembourg-blog]

The Roses Keep Me Awake

"Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling."

— Michiko Nogami by Jack Gilbert

[nsantand]

Jack Gilbert – Poemas e Elegias para Michiko Nogami: V - Michiko morta

Ele se comporta como quem carrega uma caixa / muito pesada, primeiro com os braços / por baixo. Quando suas forças se esgotam, / ele move as mãos para frente, encaixando-as / nas quinas, puxando o peso contra o o peito. (...)

Ele se comporta como quem carrega uma caixamuito pesada, primeiro com os braçospor baixo. Quando suas forças se esgotam, ele move as mãos para frente, encaixando-asnas quinas, puxando o peso contra oo peito. Ele move ligeiramente os polegaresquando os dedos começam a se cansar, e isso fazcom que diferentes músculos assumam o controle. Depois,ele a carrega no ombro, até que o sangueseja drenado do…

[nsantand]

Jack Gilbert – Poemas e Elegias para Michiko Nogami: III - Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

Ela está mais aparente porque já não é / mais, para sempre? Sua brancura está mais branca / porque ela era da cor de mel claro? (...)

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982) Ela está mais aparente porque já não émais, para sempre? Sua brancura está mais brancaporque ela era da cor de mel claro?Uma chaminé tornando o céu mais visível.Uma mulher morta enchendo o mundo todo. Michikodisse: “As rosas que você me deu me mantiveram despertacom o som de suas pétalas caindo.” Trad.: Nelson Santander Michiko Nogami (1946-1982) Is she more…