Eternal Enemies: Poems (5 page)

We suspect that she strove

with the secret, uncertain ambition of introverts.

Her parents loved her to distraction.

We speculate that she wanted to express

some vast truth about life, ruthless

on the surface, sweet within,

about August nights, when the sea

breathes and shines and sings like a starling,

and about love, ineffable and precious.

We don’t know if she cried when she met darkness.

She left only a few hexameters

and an epigram about a cricket.

OF KINGDOMS

I LIKE TO DREAM OF THOSE
DEAD KINGDOMS —SU TUNG-P’O

I like to dream of those kingdoms

where brass glitters and sings,

and fires flame upward on the hilltops,

and someone’s love dwells in them.

Later afternoon, in November,

I travel by commuter train

after a long walk;

around me are tired office workers

and a mournful old lady

clutching a dachshund.

The conductor, alas,

makes an awkward shaman.

Life strides over us like Gulliver,

loudly laughing and crying.

SYRACUSE

City with the loveliest name, Syracuse;

don’t let me forget the dim

antiquity of your side streets, the pouting balconies

that once caged Spanish ladies,

the way the sea breaks on Ortygia’s walls.

Plato met defeat here, escaped with his life,

what can be said about us, unreal tourists.

Your cathedral rose atop a Greek temple

and still grows, but very slowly,

like the heavy pleas of beggars and widows.

At midnight fishing boats radiate

sharp light, demanding prayers

for the perished, the lonely, for you,

city abandoned on a continent’s rim,

and for us, imprisoned in our travels.

SUBMERGED CITY

That city will be no more, no halos

of spring mornings when green hills

tremble in the mist and rise

like barrage balloons—

and May won’t cross its streets

with shrieking birds and summer’s promises.

No breathless spells,

no chilly ecstasies of springwater.

Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor,

and flawless views of leafy avenues

fix no one’s eyes.

And still we live on calmly,

humbly—from suitcases,

in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains,

and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek an image,

the final form of things

between inexplicable fits

of mute despair—

as if vaguely remembering

something that cannot be recalled,

as if that submerged city were traveling with us,

always asking questions,

and always unhappy with our answers—

exacting, and perfect in its way.

EPITHALAMIUM

FOR ISCA AND SEBASTIAN

Without silence there would be no music.

Life paired is doubtless more difficult

than solitary existence—

just as a boat on the open sea

with outstretched sails is trickier to steer

than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners

after all are meant for wind and motion,

not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes

hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,

but also compassion, deep feeling.

Only in marriage do love and time,

eternal enemies, join forces.

Only love and time, when reconciled,

permit us to see other beings

in their enigmatic, complex essence,

unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement

in a valley or among green hills.

It begins from one day only, from joy

and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,

which is like a moist grain;

then come the years of trial and labor,

sometimes despair, fierce revelation,

happiness and finally a great tree

with rich greenery grows over us,

casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

GATE

TO BARBARA TORUŃCZYK

Do you love words as a shy magician loves the moment of quiet

after he’s left the stage, alone in a dressing room where

a yellow candle burns with its greasy, pitch-black flame?

What yearning will encourage you to push the heavy gate, to sense

once more the odor of that wood and the rusty taste of water from an ancient well,

to see again the tall pear tree, the proud matron who presented us

aristocratically with its perfectly formed fruit each fall,

and then fell into mute anticipation of the winter’s ills?

Next door a factory’s stolid chimney smoked and the ugly town kept still,

but the indefatigable earth worked on beneath the bricks in gardens,

our black memory and the vast pantry of the dead, the good earth.

What courage does it take to budge the heavy gate,

what courage to catch sight of us again,

gathered in the little room beneath a Gothic lamp—

mother skims the paper, moths bump the windowpanes,

nothing happens, nothing, only evening, prayer; we wait …

We lived only once.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2004

You’re at home listening

to recordings of Billie Holiday,

who sings on, melancholy, drowsy.

You count the hours still

keeping you from midnight.

Why do the dead sing peacefully

while the living can’t free themselves from fear?

NO CHILDHOOD

And what was your childhood like? a weary

reporter asks near the end.

There was no childhood, only black crows

and tramcars starved for electricity,

fat priests in heavy chasubles,

teachers with faces of bronze.

There was no childhood, just anticipation.

At night the maple leaves shone like phosphorus,

rain moistened the lips of dark singers.

MUSIC HEARD

Music heard with you

was more than music

and the blood that flowed through our arteries

was more than blood

and the joy we felt

was genuine

and if there is anyone to thank,

I thank him now,

before it grows too late

and too quiet.

BALANCE

I watched the arctic landscape from above

and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.

I observed white canopies of clouds, vast

expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness

that can promise one thing only: plenitude—

and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland

bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,

the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,

comic gardens forgotten by their owners,

pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt

a perfect balance between waking and dreams.

But when the plane touched concrete, then

assiduously circled in the airport’s labyrinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness

of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,

the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,

remembers and forgets.

MORNING

Sunday morning, the wind has washed our minds,

the streets are bleak as a monastic regimen.

The young still sleep in their white tents,

and only the elderly head churchwards.

A ginkgo, still clinging to its leaves,

aglow with autumn’s yellow fire,

announces that the moment has arrived.

Sunday morning, above the roofs of palaces and houses,

somber chimes hold conversations

while little bells laugh; Dominicans

and Norbertines exchanging telegrams.

Clad in bronze, the Planty Garden monuments

doubtless long for normal skin,

for flesh and aching heads, but eternity has its demands.

We quarreled here once, do you remember,

I looked for you in evening’s labyrinth;

I held a book, you wore a summer dress

(the book went unread, but the dress spread

like the jacket of a Neoplatonic tract).

A bronze Boy-Zelenski gazed at me, his eyes

retained the image of a firing squad,

that masterpiece of Prussian architecture.

The wind washed minds and streets, it washed the sun.

Georg Trakl died a few hundred yards away,

killed by ecstasy or despair.

And we sat on that bench late one night

and tried to hear the ocean.

The moon was full, the stars ran quietly.

The moment came, after long negotiations,

broken off and taken up, abandoned once again,

when the past, wise and dry as parchments,

decided to make peace with petty day,

with the morning’s improvisation, its damp breath,

my thoughts’ dampness, my unrest,

and a delegation of the dead—poets, but also night watchmen,

experienced students of the darkness, and midwives,

who knew how bodies opened—

agreed that it was high time,

in silence, Sunday morning, when trees

flame peacefully, agreed conditionally

that I should wake and realize that the moment had arrived,

the moment had arrived—and would be gone.

OLD MARX (2)

I try to envision his last winter,

London, cold and damp, the snow’s curt kisses

on empty streets, the Thames’s black water,

chilled prostitutes lit bonfires in the park.

Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night.

The workers spoke so quickly in the pub

that he couldn’t catch a single word.

Perhaps Europe was richer and at peace,

but the Belgians still tormented the Congo.

And Russia? Its tyranny? Siberia?

He spent evenings staring at the shutters.

He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,

reread young Marx for days on end,

and secretly admired that ambitious author.

He still had faith in his fantastic vision,

but in moments of doubt

he worried that he’d given the world

just a new version of despair;

then he’d close his eyes and see nothing

but the scarlet darkness of his lids.

DOLPHINS

The sun sets and prying pelicans fly just above the sea’s smooth skin;

you watch a fisherman killing a caught fish, invincibly convinced of his humanity,

while rosy clouds commence their slow, solemn march to the night’s foothills—

you stay a moment, waiting to see dolphins

—maybe they’ll dance their famous, friendly tango once again—

here, on the Gulf of Mexico, where you find tire marks and mussels along the broad beaches,

and energetic crabs that exit the sand like workers deserting a subterranean factory en masse.

You notice abandoned, rusty loading towers.

You walk along a stone lock and wave to a few anglers,

modest types, fishing not for sport, just in hope

of postponing the last supper.

A vast, brick-red ship from Monrovia sails up the port canal

like some bizarre imaginary beast boasting of its own oddness,

and briefly blocks the horizon.

You think: it’s worth seeking the backwaters, provincial spots

that remember much, but are uncommonly discreet,

quiet, humble places, rich, though, in caches, hidden pockets of memory like hunters’ jackets in the fall,

the bustling town’s outskirts, wastelands where nothing happens, there are no famous actors,

politicians and journalists don’t appear,

but sometimes poetry is born in emptiness,

and you start to think that your childhood halted here,

here, far from long-familiar streets—

since absence after all can’t calculate distance in light-years or kilometers,

instead it calmly waits for your return, doubtless wondering what’s become of you. It meets you without fanfare and says:

Don’t you know me? I’m a stamp from your vanished collection,

I’m the stamp that showed you

your first dolphin on a backdrop of unreal, misty blue. I’m the sign of travel.

Unmoving.

ORGAN TUNING

Someone was tuning the organ in an empty church.

In a Gothic hall a waterfall boomed.

The voices of the tortured and schoolchildren’s laughter

mixed with my vertical breath.

In an empty church someone tuned the organ

and tinkered with the pipes’ wild anarchy,

demolished houses, flung thunderbolts, then built

a city, airport, highway, stadium.

If only I could see the organist!

Catch sight of his face, his eyes!

If I could trace the movements of his hands,

I might understand where he’s taking us,

us and those for whom we care,

children, animals, shadows.

FIREMEN’S HELMETS

I scrutinize firemen’s helmets

which reflect clouds

and a microscopic glider.

The fire will start up soon,

in an hour or so.

Beauty and fear are always paired—

like the time I learned

Marek had died and wandered

through a cold Paris, from which

summer was slowly departing.

A BIRD SINGS IN THE EVENING

TO LILLIE ROBERTSON

Above the vast city, plunged in darkness,

breathing slowly, as if its earth were scorched,

you, who sang once for Homer

and for Cromwell, maybe even

over Joan of Arc’s gray ashes,

you raise your sweet lament again,

your bright keening; no one hears you,

only in the lilac’s black leaves, where

unseen artists hide,

a nightingale stirred, a little envious.

No one hears you, the city is in mourning