[As originally published in Joris & Tengour, Poems for the Millennium, volume 4: The University of California Book of North African Literature, 2012]
dirty and ugly they saw me there goes an empty head they said in fact I am more like an open book there’s much useful stuff inside this head * o my heart I burn you and if you want I will do more o my heart you shame me because you like who doesn't like you.
*
neither think nor search too much don’t always be despondent the planets are not fixed and life’s not eternal
*
don't play with your best friend's feelings & if people insult him, ease his mind who loves you, love him more but if he betrays you, don't ever be his friend again *
all I’ve had in life is one goat but I’ve written beautiful quatrains many are fulfilled through God’s favor yet claim those favors as their own labors
*
travel and you’ll get to know people and owe obedience to the noble the fathead with the pot-belly sell him for a dime
*
my heart’s between a hammer & an anvil & that damned blacksmith has no pity he keeps hammering & when it cools he kindles the fire with his bellows
[NOTE. In a too short life, Pablo Tac (1820-1841) produced a rare work for his time: a completely indigenous study of Luiseño language & culture -- much more than what can be shown here. Writes Lisbeth Haas in her introduction about a work never translated or published before now: “As a historian and scholar, PabloTac defied the dominant ideas expressed about Luiseño and other indigenous people under Spanish colonialism. His work used categories of analysis such as ‘dance’ that offered an indigenous way of understanding Luiseño society during the colonial and Mexican eras in California, from 1769 to 1848. Born in Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in 1820, Tac devised a way to write Luiseño from his study of Latin grammar and Spanish, and in so doing he captured many of the relationships that existed between Luiseños during his youth. Drawing on local knowledge, traditions, and ideas, his writing leaves traces of Luiseño spiritual practice and thought, while also revealing the relations of power and authority that existed within his indigenous community.”]
(1) Image & Melos: a Letter, 1960, to Robert Duncan [From New York City] September 27, 1960
... following with great interest your interchange with Kelly. On the basis of your first letter to reach here (only one I’ve seen, other 2 being described) I feel no real disagreement as to melos, etc., being other vehicles for manifestation of “floating world” (source) within the poem, tho if you define yourself as a poet of “word-magic” primarily, my own direction in these last years has probably been toward “image-magic”— yet it doesn’t seem to me that any of the “powers” are totally to be denied, nor can they where the poem is allowed to happen.
Poems and poetics