Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Waters of March
I woke up this morning to the first daylight of Chanukah with an unusually good attitude. I feel well-rested, fully occupied at work, and in good health after a short bout with a cold. Last night I went to a new yoga class and performed at a much higher level than I’d had any reason to expect. Once we got home it started raining hard, and the sound of drops hitting the roof and of wind outside our window lulled me to sleep quickly and kept me sleeping soundly. Today I have a variety of interesting and useful tasks to complete at the office, and if I get the chance, a few fun things to do for me, too. In general, I’m in a damn decent mood.
This seems to be a shift in the prevailing emotional conditions I’ve experienced over the past few days. In retrospect, I’ve felt a bit glum and stressed-out over the past week or so, even though I rarely let myself become aware of it. I do think, though, that those moods affected my blogposts lately; that fragment from yesterday has been rolling around in my head like a pachinko ball since I hit “publish.” It’s had me thinking of moods and fragments generally, and as I was ruminating on the matter and how things seem to have turned a corner in my mind, I happened coincidentally to come across a scrap of paper I found on the sidewalk early week: a sheet torn from a memopad, lined, folded into eighths; the only words on it are handwritten in spotty ballpoint pen with left-angled printing, reading: “I kiss ya with my thoughts of liven different”....
And that’s where I’m going to start today. And the first place it takes me is one of my all-time favorites songs, which I only discovered a month or so ago, a Brazilian jazz standard called Aguas de Marcos, or “Waters of March.” I was pretty sure it was a love song when I first heard it (the Elis Regina version, not the original but the best) till I listened more carefully and imagined my pathetic shreds of high school french allowed me to translate enough of the portugese that I understood it to be a “love lost” song. Finally my genius friend Simon from first grade wrote me a letter and included a translation of the lyrics, which I’m posting here. I’ve read them several times and have yet to come up with a working hypothesis. I suppose the song is about something I have yet fully to grasp, but it’s so beautiful I almost get misty each time I listen to it. Seems to me like a lot of positive potential for a wednesday morning. Let’s see how long it lasts.
A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of the stump, it’s a little alone,
It’s the sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gun.
The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush,
The nod of the wood, the song of a thrush
The wood of the wing, a cliff, a fall,
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all.
It’s the wind blowing free, it’s the end of a slope,
It’s a bean, it’s a void, it’s a hunch, it’s a hope.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the end of the strain, it’s the joy in your heart.
The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone,
The beat of the road, a sling-shot stone,
A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light,
The shot of a gun in the dead of the night.
A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,
It’s a girl, it’s a rhyme, it’s a cold, it’s the mumps.
The plan of the house, the body in bed,
And the car that got stuck, it’s the mud, it’s the mud.
Afloat, adrift, a flight, a wing,
A cock, a quail, the promise of spring.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the promise of life, it’s the joy in your heart.
A point, a grain, a bee, a bite,
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night,
A pin, a needle, a sting, a pain,
A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain,
A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe,
A fish, a flash, a silvery glow
And the Riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the promise of life in your heart, in your heart.
A stick, a stone, the end of the load,
The rest of the stump, a lonesome road.
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun,
A night, a death, the end of the run.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the end of all strain, it’s the joy in your heart.
