Eternal Enemies: Poems (4 page)

In every city and in every port

he had his agents; he sometimes sang his poems

before an avid crowd that didn’t catch

a word. Afterwards, exhausted, he’d smoke a Gauloise

on a cement embankment, gulls circling overhead,

as if above the Baltic, back home.

Vast intelligence. Favorite topic: time

versus thought, which chases phantoms,

revives Mary Stuart, Daedalus, Tiberius.

Poetry should be like horse racing;

wild horses, with jockeys made of marble,

an unseen finish line lies hidden in the clouds.

Please remember: irony and pain;

the pain had lived long inside his heart

and kept on growing—as though

each elegy he wrote adored him

obsessively and wanted

him alone to be its hero—

but ladies and gentlemen—your patience,

please, we’re nearly through—I don’t know

quite how to put it; something like tenderness,

the almost timid smile,

the momentary doubt, the hesitation,

the tiny pause in flawless arguments.

SELF-PORTRAIT, NOT WITHOUT DOUBTS

Enthusiasm moves you in the morning,

by evening you lack the nerve

even to glance at the blackened page.

Always too much or too little,

just like those writers

who sometimes bother you:

some so modest, minimal,

and underread,

that you want to call out—

hey, friends, courage,

life is beautiful,

the world is rich and full of history.

Others, proud and serious, are distinguished

by their erudition

—gentlemen, you too must die someday,

you say (in thought).

The territory of truth

is plainly small,

narrow as a path above a cliff.

Can you stick

to it?

Perhaps you’ve strayed already.

Do you hear laughter

or apocalyptic trumpets?

Perhaps both,

a dissonance, ungodly grating—

a knife that skates

along the glass and whistles gladly.

CONVERSATION

A chat with friends, sometimes

about nothing, TV or the movies,

or more important conversations, earnest talk

on torture, suffering, and hunger,

but also on easy amorous adventures,

“she said this, so he thought that.”

Perhaps we talk too much,

like the French tourists I overheard

on a Greek mountain’s steep slope,

careless in the Delphic labyrinth

(caustic comments on the hotel dinner).

We don’t, we can’t know,

if we’ll be saved,

if our microscopic souls,

which have committed no evil

and likewise done no good,

will answer a question posed in an unknown tongue.

Will poetry’s epiphany suffice,

delight in the staccato of past music,

the sight of a river and air entering

August’s warm towers,

and longing for the sea, always fresh, new.

Or moments of celebration and the sense

they bring, that something has suddenly

returned and we can’t live without it (but we can),

do they outweigh the years of emptiness and anger,

months of forgetfulness, impatience—

we don’t know, we can’t know,

if we’ll be saved

when time ends.

OLD MARX

He can’t think.

London is damp,

in every room someone coughs.

He never did like winter.

He rewrites past manuscripts

time and again, without passion.

The yellow paper

is fragile as consumption.

Why does life race

stubbornly toward destruction?

But spring returns in dreams,

with snow that doesn’t speak

in any known tongue.

And where does love fit

within his system?

Where you find blue flowers.

He despises anarchists,

idealists bore him.

He receives reports from Russia,

far too detailed.

The French grow rich.

Poland is common and quiet.

America never stops growing.

Blood is everywhere,

perhaps the wallpaper needs changing.

He begins to suspect

that poor humankind

will always trudge

across the old earth

like the local lunatic

shaking her fists

at an unseen God.

TO THE SHADE OF ALEKSANDER WAT

Newly arrived at infinity—which turned out to resemble an elongated, vastly improved Wolomin Street—he received, upon entering, a gift in the shape of Schumann’s music, bursting with rapture and chaos (the first movement of the first sonata for violin and piano as performed by two insufferable, but, we must concede, very gifted cherubim).

    Later a certain learned rabbi parsed the distinctions between a silken and a stony death, and the famed theologian P. gave a lengthy lecture on “The Old, New, and Even Newer Testaments in Wat’s Postwar Opus.”

    “Pain as a Pivotal Experience” and “An Inborn Gift for Synthesizing Unlike Objects” were the topics of other talks, which were received less attentively since afterward eternity was scheduled to perform and an orchestra of swarthy gypsies in snug tuxes played without pausing, without end.

NIGHT IS A CISTERN

Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads

with the loud rustling of endless grief.

Who are you, walking in this worried crowd.

And who will you become, who will you be

when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round.

Night is a cistern. The last pairs dance at a country ball.

High waves cry from the sea, the wind rocks pines.

An unknown hand draws the dawn’s first stroke.

Lamps fade, a motor chokes.

Before us, life’s path, and instants of astronomy.

STORM

The storm had golden hair flecked with black

and moaned in a monotone, like a simple woman

giving birth to a future soldier, or a tyrant.

Vast clouds, multistoried ships

surrounded us, and lightning’s scarlet strands

scattered nervously.

The highway became the Red Sea.

We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.

You drove; I watched you with love.

EVENING, STARY SACZ

The sun sets behind the market square, and nettles reflect

the small town’s imperfections. Teapots whistle in the houses,

like many trains departing simultaneously.

Bonfires flame on meadows and their long sighs

weave above the trees like drifting kites.

The last pilgrims return from church uncertainly.

TV sets awaken, and instantly know all,

like the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces.

Knives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings.

The sky grows darker; angels used to hide there,

but now it’s just a police sergeant on his departed motorcycle.

Rain falls, the cobbled streets grow black.

Little abysses open between the stones.

BLAKE

I watch William Blake, who spotted angels

every day in treetops

and met God on the staircase

of his little house and found light in grimy alleys—

Blake, who died

singing gleefully

in a London thronged

with streetwalkers, admirals, and miracles,

William Blake, engraver, who labored

and lived in poverty, but not despair,

who received burning signs

from the sea and from the starry sky,

who never lost hope, since hope

was always born anew like breath,

I see those who walked like him on graying streets,

headed toward the dawn’s rosy orchid.

NOTES FROM A TRIP TO FAMOUS EXCAVATIONS

You suddenly surface in a city that no longer is.

You turn up abruptly in a vast city

that isn’t really there.

Three scrawny cats meow.

You notice campaign slogans on the walls

and know that the elections ended long ago,

emptiness was victorious and reigns

alongside a lazy sun.

Tourists wander nonexistent streets,

like Church Fathers—afflicted, alas,

by deepest acedia.

Bathhouse walls are bone-dry.

The kitchen holds no herbs,

the bedroom is sleepless.

We enter homes, gardens,

but no one greets us.

It seems we’re stranded in a desert,

faced by the dry cruelty of sand

—just as in other places

that don’t exist,

the native city

you never knew, will never know.

Even the death camps are lifeless.

Some friends are gone.

Past days have vanished,

they’ve hidden under Turkish tents,

in stasis, in a museum that’s not there.

But just when everything is gone

and only lips move timidly

like a young monk’s mouth,

a wind stirs, a sea wind,

bearing the promise of freshness.

A gate in the wall leans open,

and you glimpse life stronger than oblivion;

at first you don’t believe your eyes—

gardeners kneel, patiently

tending the dark earth while laughing servants

cart great piles of fragrant apples.

The wooden wagons rattle on thick stones,

water courses through a narrow trough,

wine returns to the pitchers,

and love comes back to the homesteads

where it once dwelled,

and silently regains its absolute

kingly power

over the earth and over me.

Look, a flame stirs from the ashes.

Yes, I recognize the face.

ZURBARÁN

Zurbarán painted by turns

Spanish saints

and still lifes,

and thus the objects

lying on heavy tables

in his still lifes

are likewise holy.

NOTO

TO GEORGIA AND MICHAEL

Noto, a town that would be flawless

if only our faith were greater.

Noto, a baroque town where even

the stables and arbors are ornate.

The cathedral’s cupola has collapsed, alas,

and heavy cranes surround it

like doctors in a hospital

tending the dangerously ill.

Afternoons town teenagers

gather on the main street

and bored stiff, whistle

like captive thrushes.

The town is too perfect

for its inhabitants.

III

TRAVELING BY TRAIN ALONG THE HUDSON

TO BOGDANA CARPENTER

River gleaming in the sun—

river, how can you endure the sight:

low crumpled train cars

made of steel, and in their small windows

dull faces, lifeless eyes.

Shining river, rise up.

How can you bear the orange peels,

the Coca-Cola cans, patches

of dirty snow that

once was pure.

Rise up, river.

And I too drowse in semidarkness

above a library book

with someone’s pencil marks,

only half living.

Rise up, lovely river.

THE GREEKS

I would have liked to live among the Greeks,

talk with Sophocles’ disciples,

learn the rites of secret mysteries,

but when I was born the pockmarked

Georgian still lived and reigned,

with his grim henchmen and theories.

Those were years of memory and grief,

of sober talks and silence;

there was little joy—

although a few birds didn’t know this,

a few children and trees.

To wit, the apple tree on our street

blithely opened its white blooms

each April and burst

into ecstatic laughter.

GREAT SHIPS

This is a poem about the great ships that wandered the oceans

And groaned sometimes in deep voices, grumbling about fog and submerged peaks,

But usually they sliced the pages of tropical seas in silence,

Divided by height, category, and class, just like our societies and hotels.

Down below poor emigrants played cards, and no one won

While on the top deck Claudel gazed at Ysé and her hair glowed.

And toasts were raised to a safe trip, to coming times,

Toasts were raised, Alsatian wine and champagne from France’s finest vineyards,

Some days were static, windless, when only the light seeped steadily,

Days when nothing happened but the horizon, which traveled with the ship,

Days of emptiness and boredom, playing solitaire, repeating the latest news,

Who’d been seen with whom in a tropical night’s shade, embracing beneath a peach-colored moon.

But filthy stokers tirelessly tossed coal into open flaming mouths

And everything that is now already existed then, though in condensed form.

Our days already existed and our hearts baked in the blazing stove,

And the moment when I met you may also have existed, and my mistrust

Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail and capricious,

And my searches for the final answer, my disappointments and discoveries.

Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences and fear,

Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars of special bulletins.

Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial ports, in dockyards,

Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust, and waited

For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and objects,

They still wait patiently, like chess players in Luxembourg Garden nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.

ERINNA OF TELOS

She was nineteen when she died.

We don’t know if she was lovely and flirtatious,

or if perhaps she looked like those

intelligent, dry girls in glasses

from whom mirrors are kept hidden.

She left behind just a few hexameters.