David Mason

October 5, 2022

“An Old Man” by C.P. CavafyPosted by

C.P. Cavafy

AN OLD MAN

An old man, stooped over the table,
sits in the hubbub of a café’s middle,
alone, a newspaper open before his face.
 
And scorning the misery of age
he thinks how little he engaged
the time when he had strength and speech and grace.
 
He’s much declined; he knows it, sees it,
though years when he was young still please
by seeming close. How small a span, how small!
 
He thinks about how good sense laughed
at him, while he believed—how mad!—
that cheat who promised “all the time in the world.”
 
He recalls the urges he controlled,
joy given up, his caution cold,
and every lost chance that haunts him now.
 
But all this thinking and remembering
dizzies him. Soon he’s slumbering
at the café table with his head laid down.
 
 
Translated from the Greek by David Mason
 

—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022
Tribute to Translation

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C.P. Cavafy (1863–1933) was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. During his lifetime Cavafy lived in relative seclusion and published little of his work, choosing instead to circulate it among his friends. His most important poems were written after his fortieth birthday, and only published two years after his death. | David Mason: “I started translating poems in the 1980s in my effort to hold on to the bit of Greek I had learned when I was young. Over time, I have refined these translations as best I can. In two of them I come close to Cavafy’s rhymes, which are more brilliant and incisive than mine. The other two poems are free verse in the originals, but even so I find I have to make small alterations to bring them across in English.”

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December 22, 2021

“A Pestilence” by David MasonPosted by

David Mason

A PESTILENCE

At night a needle of sound nears my ear,
waved off by a drowsy hand, yet the whine
had a winged and long-legged body I see
this morning, afloat above my coffee cup.
Still here, still living, my little enemy?

I’ve made the journey to another year,
another island where such creatures are
in all their hunger, poised upon a nerve,
their being honed into the sharpest spike.
They too are dodging danger in the night.

—from Rattle #73, Fall 2021

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David Mason: “Though Tasmania is famous for poisonous spiders and snakes, we’re not really bothered by such things. It was the more common pest, the mosquito, that was bugging me when I wrote this poem. I had just escaped lockdown in the U.S. and come home to Tasmania, narrowly avoiding hotel quarantine, and the word ‘pestilence’ was in the air. So was this rather persistent mosquito. I began to think that he and I were locked in the same struggle, the same relationship, and I had no desire to donate blood to his cause. But we do live in relation to everything, don’t we?—even the things we would sometimes like to avoid.”

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January 1, 2021

“Note to Self” by David MasonPosted by

David Mason

NOTE TO SELF

To be old and not to feel it is a gift.
To be supplanted and not to care. So be it.
The birds are not supplanted by the air,
the air, what’s left of it, by flood or fire.

The effort of a life, the wasted hour,
the kind word given to a stranger’s child
are understood as kin and disappear.
Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild.

—from Rattle #69, Fall 2020

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David Mason: “Momentous events occasioned these poems. I am retiring from teaching after 30 years, and I am immigrating to Australia, specifically my wife’s home island, Tasmania. The journeys involved are retrospective, involved with summing up and moving on. In both of these poems, identity dissolves, as if change itself were rubbing away old delusions. Or so it seems.”

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December 30, 2020

“Long Haul” by David MasonPosted by

David Mason

LONG HAUL

In airports everywhere I see
people I think I know.
Someone I used to be married to,
someone who’s dead now.

That one I wrote about,
and blush at what I said.
That one I met at a conference—
no, he too is dead.

I had a friend who looked like that
when we were twenty.
If I spoke to him I’m sure
he’d tell me plenty.

Another looks at me as if
I’m a familiar ghost
then turns away, discarding me
among the rest.

And when we fly, the earth below
and all identities
are cloud or glimpses of the sea
or blazing cities

in the dark, our wing a blinking eye
until the clock unwinds
the dream, until the dream unbinds
all that is passing by.

—from Rattle #69, Fall 2020

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David Mason: “Momentous events occasioned these poems. I am retiring from teaching after 30 years, and I am immigrating to Australia, specifically my wife’s home island, Tasmania. The journeys involved are retrospective, involved with summing up and moving on. In both of these poems, identity dissolves, as if change itself were rubbing away old delusions. Or so it seems.”

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September 26, 2018

“A Cabbie in America” by David MasonPosted by

David Mason

A CABBIE IN AMERICA

He was from Rwanda, from Senegal—
there had been much motion in his life.
And did he miss his country? All
the time, and yet he lived here with his wife

and children, who were very good at school.
I said I’d always dreamed of Africa
and wondered if he thought me an old fool
for saying so. No, no, but it was far.

So many things were far, so many things
we wished for for our families
were far. And we were men, not kings.
He’d spoken French since he was three

and now the French was also far,
his tongue was struggling with American.
Once, he too wished to be a writer.
But couldn’t he go to school again?

It’s not too late, I told him as I paid
and finger-signed his little screen.
But how did I know whether it was late,
or half of what this gentle man had seen?

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018

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David Mason: “I write from the margins, and I am interested in people who live in the margins. The anecdote behind this poem is true, the cab driver I met in Colorado Springs. I hope I run into him again. All my life I have known and lived among immigrants of one sort or another, and this kind and gentle man, whatever history had driven him here, had a lightness of manner that I loved.” (web)

 

David Mason is the guest on Rattlecast #64! Click here to watch …

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