轻如空气

【美】罗恩·帕吉特　  陈子弘 译

1

今天很平静。我坐在外面，或者在窗边，看向外面，突然意识到我的左手托着头。我看到照向万物的光，树、山和云层，但我没有看到树、山和云层的本身。我看到的是光，它让我感觉今天可以是任何一天，不是今天，只是某一天。

2

风吹动树木，发出沙沙声，忽大忽小。我在这里坐了好久，起初看向草丛、树木和天空，尔后更多地沉入思绪，之前的景象渐次消散。一道巨大的弧形闪电划过我上下思索精神路径最后一处的转折，从左边逼向我。我头侧向左，林中传来沙沙声。我两腿发凉。我要等到再听见一次，然后再起身回屋。
万籁俱寂。

3

困顿和沮丧时，我会换上运动服。我衣柜里刚添了三条浅色短裤、四件浅灰色T恤和一件优雅随性得像是法国设计的黄色全棉套头衫。我穿上新衣，系好新白鞋，去见人。他们说：“你气色很不错。这是新短裤？”
“嗯，就是。”我答。
然后我穿着新短裤回家坐在门廊下仰望
天空。

4

你不注意时我有时会看你。像个陌生人一样看你，这样才能更清楚地看到你。事实上，你看起来总是那么新颖和熟悉，就像我心中的你。我喜欢你看的样子。我就坐在这里看着你，就像狗坐在我们脚边，仰望着我们，它的神。我坐在你的脚边，仰望着你。我看着你的脚。

5

我脱掉衣服，置身空气中，流动其间，它环绕着我。我向右看。村中第一座小屋、镇上第一栋房子、市里第一座建筑：骨骼、血肉和衣物。空气环绕这一切。我无法呼吸，因为我也是个结构，我绕过一座坟、一座纪念碑、一座巨大虚无。

6

他是一个有许多矢量的人，这些矢量不断组合重组，像音乐先从空气中传来，又从一块生长在空气中木头传来。之后，空气进入一个现在你不被允许进入的国家博物馆，因为你的矢量在失序。你必须回家，重新组装你的细杆和锥体：夜幕降临，他吐纳的柔和灰雾。

7

我梦到见自己变成一个高大的汉堡，开一架飞机在偏远的丛林降落便宜的绿色纸板挥舞着激动的土著欢呼，他们的救世主终于到来。我轻盈地飘到他们回旋着的棱角分明的绿色中间顶在我头顶一个光芒四射的汉堡包打开。

8

我来到一个心灵的空地，只能从心底说话。我摆脱了过去的身份包袱，摆脱了所有必须背负这些包袱的脚夫，也摆脱了高昂的出租车费用，变成一个更完整的同样渺小的人，我似乎是很久以来第一次深吸一口气，呼吸到肺底更深处，在呼吸结束的停顿中，出现了一面小镜子，上面的轻雾迅速散去。

9

我的手掌处于星期天，虚弱无力，休假中。我的其余部分又在星期三，在上面，在左边，在天空中。我看到你需要一点光，虽然你没有抽什么烟。你把烟具留在了星期四。让我唤回我的手，为你取来吧。看，现在你造出烟雾。但它们没有消散。它们形成了我的手的影子，靠近你的脸。

10

突然意识到我在重复自己。又过了一天日子，我在外面的空气中平静下来，手沿着它的矢量返回。在这片心灵空地上，光子在野蛮人周遭跳跃。突然，巫医把脸凑近我，大喊：“姆瓦比！姆瓦比！”指着我的光子。我伸手从他脸上取下光，用手指折叠它，突然意识到我在重复自己。

11

在光的尽头，我从下面那里到上面这里提高声音，你却不在这里。我可以一直喊到声音变色，但这并无任何区别。你的矢量正远离我手的声音，朝着它指的方向，那片亮云，那片边缘燃烧的云，英俊潇洒，最终轻如空气。

12

一条冷光带在空中蔓延颜色如湿水泥构成一个高度超过地球上所有高度的人体。这情感的绝对零度像一根脊柱，浓雾和细雨穿透他的身体，当太阳的矢量接近他表面，它们转向并平行移动。这个大水泥人是谁？我怎么知道他是不是今早来的那个打开电源让电流流过我的心脏的人？

13

黑暗的一天。我坐在屋里，右手摸着头。我看着地板、布料、嘴里冒出的烟。仿佛没有光，仿佛事物存在的一部分是它们本身无法分离的光，看不见。桌子不代表任何东西，虽然它记得树。桌子不是永恒的，虽然它哼着永远不停的调子。桌子和我都在星期五，在这黑暗、悲惨的日子，而我感觉自己在微笑，尽管我没有。

诗人简介：罗恩·帕吉特（Ron Padgett，1942- ）美国诗人、散文家、小说家、翻译家，纽约诗派重要成员。他曾获得 2009 年雪莱纪念奖， 2018 年获美国诗歌协会颁发的弗罗斯特奖章。帕吉特的诗风多样，涵盖了从日常生活观察到哲学思考的广泛主题。他的作品常常以平实的语言和生动的意象打动读者，展现出对人类经验的深刻理解。

RON PADGETT

Light As Air

1

It’s calm today. I sit outside, or inside by the window, and look out, and for a moment I realize my left hand is holding up my head. I see the light on everything, trees, hills, and clouds, and I do not see the trees, hills, and clouds. I see the light, and it plays over my mind that it is any day, not today, just day.

2

The wind is making the trees swoosh and the volume goes up and down. I have been sitting here for some time, at first looking out at the grass and trees and sky, and then, turning more and more into my mind and its noticing things, gradually looking at nothing of what was before my eyes. A great cutting slash arced across the last turn of the mental pathway I had wandered down and up, and was approaching me from the left. I cocked my head to that left. Slash, slash in the woods. My legs chilled. I will wait until I hear it once more, then I will get up and go inside.
Silence.

3

In times of trouble and despondency I turn to sportswear. I have just added to my wardrobe three pairs of pastel-colored shorts and four light-gray T-shirts and a yellow cotton pullover so elegant and offhand it must have been designed in France. I put on my new clothes, lace up my new white shoes, and see people. They say, “You look nice. Are those shorts new?”
“Yes, they are,” I answer.
Then I go back home and sit on the porch under the sky in my
new shorts.

4

I look at you sometimes when you’re not aware of it. I look at you in those moments the way a stranger might so I can see you better than I usually do. And in fact you do always look fresh and new and similar to the person I think of as you. I love the way you look. And I feel happy just to be here looking at you, the way the dog sits at the feet of us, his great gods. I sit at the feet of the thing that is you. I look at your feet.

5

I take off my clothes and am in the air, me flowing through it and it flowing around me. I look to the right. The first cottages of the little village, the first houses of the town, the first buildings of the city: bones, flesh, and clothing. Air around it all. Air 1 cannot breathe, because I am also a structure I am moving past, a tomb, a monument, a big nothing.

6

He is a man of many vectors, that assemble and reassemble, the way music comes first from the air, then from a piece of wood grown in air. Then the air is in a museum in a country you are not permitted to enter at this time because your vectors are not in order. You must go home and reassemble your rods and cones: night is falling, the soft gray mist of his breath.

7

I dreamed I had become a tall hamburger piloting a plane going down in a remote jungle waving up at me with inexpensive green cardboard natives ecstatic at the arrival, at last, of their messiah. A radiant hamburger bun top opened above me as I floated softly into their gyrating angular green midst.

8

I come to a mental clearing where I can speak only from the heart.Free of the baggage of who I happen to be, and of all the porters who must carry the baggage, and the exorbitant taxi ride into a fuller version of the same small personality, I take, for what seems to be the first time in a long time, a breath that goes deeper than the bottom of the lungs, and in the pause that comes at the end of that breath there appears a little mirror, light fog on it clearing quickly.

9

The palm of my hand is in Sunday, groggy, sabbatical. The rest of me is in Wednesday, up there and to the left, in the sky. I see you need a light, though you have nothing to smoke. You left your smoking utensils in Thursday. Let me recall my hand and fetch them for you. There, now you are creating puffs. But they do not dissipate. They form shadow copies of my hand that is moving toward your face.

10

It dawns on me that I’m repeating myself. Another day and there I am, calm outside in the air with my hand returning along its vectors. In this mental clearing the photons are jumping all around the savages. Suddenly the witch doctor brings his face to mine and shouts, “Mgwabi! Mgwabi!” pointing to my photons. I reach up and take the light from his face and fold it with the fingers on my hands and it dawns on me that I’m repeating myself.

11

At the end of the light I raise my voice from down there to up here and you are not here. I could shout until the words change colors and it would make no difference. Your vectors are heading out away from the voice of my hand and toward what it is pointing to, that bright cloud over there, the one with the burning edges,handsome and lighter than air at last.

12

A cold streak runs through the sky now the color of wet cement that forms the body of the man whose brain is at a height of more miles than can be found on earth. This emotional absolute zero is like a spine conducting thick fog and thin rain through him, and when the sun’s vectors approach his surface they turn and move parallel to it. Who is this big cement man? And how do I know whether or not he is the same who came this morning and threw on the power that sent the electricity branching through my heart?

13

It’s dark today. I sit inside, my right hand touching my head. I look at the floor, the fabrics, the smoke from my mouth. It’s as if there isn’t any light, as if part of things being here is what light they have inseparable from themselves, not visible. The table doesn’t stand for anything, although it remembers the tree. The table isn’t immortal, though it hums a tune of going on forever. The table is in Friday, with me, both of us here in this dark, miserable day, and I have the feeling I’m smiling, though I’m not.

from Boulevard