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    Parables and Portraits
    Parables and Portraits
    Parables and Portraits
    Ebook93 pages43 minutes

    Parables and Portraits

    By Stephen Mitchell

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    About this ebook

    A revised edition of the first book of poems by Stephen Mitchell, the renowned translator of Rilke's poetry, The Book of Job, and the Tao Te Ching. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 27, 2009
    ISBN9780061968044
    Parables and Portraits
    Author

    Stephen Mitchell

    Stephen Mitchell's many books include the bestselling Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, and The Second Book of the Tao, as well as The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, The Gospel According to Jesus, Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Meetings with the Archangel.

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      Book preview

      Parables and Portraits - Stephen Mitchell

      CINDERELLA

      Cinderella, the soul, sits among the ashes. She is depressed, as usual. Look at her: dressed in rags, face smeared with grime, oily hair, barefoot. How will anyone ever see her for who she is? A sad state of affairs.

      Winter afternoons, in a corner of the kitchen, she has long conversations with her fairy godmother, over a cup of tea. The fairy godmother has, accidentally on purpose, misplaced her magic wand. In any case, these transformations are only temporary. The beautiful spangled gown, the crystal slippers, the coach and footmen—all would have disappeared at the stroke of midnight. And then what?

      It is like the man in the mirror, says the fairy godmother. No one can pull him out but himself.

      ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE

      Ready, set at their respective starting places, staring into the distance between the parallel white lines, they seem like an old married couple about to run through the same argument for the millionth time. Achilles is tense inside his huge golden muscles. The tortoise blinks.

      Afterward, they shower; then walk, side by side, to a neighborhood café.

      It’s the damnedest thing, says Achilles. The more I catch up, the more reality slows down. Until it’s no longer even a film. Every time: we finish, immobilized, in a single frame.

      With me a micro-meter ahead, the tortoise adds, sighing. He takes another bite of his lettuce sandwich; chews for a while, meditatively; blinks.

      Maybe if I tried something different, Achilles says. Maybe a new pair of shoes.

      CHERRY PLUMS

      They grow all over Berkeley, along the sidewalks, and start to ripen in May. They are tart but delicious. We stop on our after-dinner walk, reach up and pluck a few. Or fill our pockets from the trees in the empty lot across Vine Street. She bites into the first one as I watch. Mmmm, she says, plum cherries.

      No no, sweetheart. Cherry plums.

      "Oh you. I’ve always called them plum cherries. They look like cherries."

      But they’re plums. They taste like plums. They’re called cherry plums because they’re so small.

      "Well I don’t care. I call them plum cherries."

      The title of this parable is Plum Cherries.

      HITLER IN SHEOL

      I needed to write a parable about Hitler. My friend said Don’t.

      I sat down at my desk and waited. What I glimpsed was an afterworld. There were no physical torments. Only this: that he had to relive his life, as actor and observer both, a thousand times, out to the farthest consequence of his acts, with a constantly growing awareness of the horror, and a constantly growing, unbearable, shame. (In that world there are no ideas to escape into.)

      I showed the parable to my friend. He winced. He said, You have no right to imagine it that way.

      I said, But according to our sages, on the last day even Lucifer will be forgiven.

      He said, You must crawl to the very center of evil before you can see the stars.

      DR. JOHNSON

      Something I left behind

      calls me back to your time-zone,

      when the son of man spoke Latin,

      tucked lace in his collar, and upon

      his brachycephalic dome

      an equilateral velvet

      hat was perched, like a dove.

      Through the great marble hallways

      of the British Museum, the ghost

      of Descartes wandered, bemused.

      If I were to find you now,

      it could not be in the light.

      You would have no chandeliers blazing,

      no circle of friends around you

      as, steadily, immensely, you poured

      the distillates of your

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