New and Selected Poems (9 page)

We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.

The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

 

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

 

She's pressing me gently with a hot steam iron, or she slips her hand inside me as if I were a sock that needed mending. The thread she uses is like the trickle of my blood, but the needle's sharpness is all her own.

“You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light,” her mother warns. And she's right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

 

We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.

The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving goodbye. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

 

“Everybody knows the story about me and Dr. Freud,” says my grandfather.

“We were in love with the same pair of black shoes in the window of the same shoe store. The store, unfortunately, was always closed. There'd be a sign:
DEATH IN THE FAMILY
or
BACK AFTER LUNCH
, but no matter how long I waited, no one would come to open.

“Once I caught Dr. Freud there shamelessly admiring the shoes. We glared at each other before going our separate ways, never to meet again.”

 

He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother's cupboard. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell—and for what? All because some people don't know how to bring up their children.

 

It was the epoch of the masters of levitation. Some evenings we saw solitary men and women floating above the dark treetops. Could they have been sleeping or thinking? They made no attempt to navigate. The wind nudged them ever so slightly. We were afraid to speak, to breathe. Even the nightbirds were quiet. Later, we'd mention the little book clasped in the hands of the young woman, and the way that old man lost his hat to the cypresses.

In the morning there were not even clouds in the sky. We saw a few crows preen themselves at the edge of the road; the shirts raise their empty sleeves on the blind woman's clothesline.

 

Ghost stories written as algebraic equations. Little Emily at the blackboard is very frightened. The
X'
s look like a graveyard at night. The teacher wants her to poke among them with a piece of chalk. All the children hold their breath. The white chalk squeaks once among the plus and minus signs, and then it's quiet again.

 

The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. “I remember,” someone said, “how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.”

 

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

 

Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I'm coming! I'm coming! You want to show me a train station with its clock stopped at five past five. We can't see inside the stationmaster's window because of the grime. We don't even know if there's a train waiting on the platform, much less if a woman in black is hurrying through the front door. There are no other people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some small town so effaced by time it has only one veiled widow left, and now she too is leaving with her secret.

 

The hundred-year-old china doll's head the sea washes up on its gray beach. One would like to know the story. One would like to make it up, make up many stories. It's been so long in the sea, the eyes and nose have been erased, its faint smile is even fainter. With the night coming, one would like to see oneself walking the empty beach and bending down to it.

 

Margaret was copying a recipe for “saints sautéed in onions” from an old cookbook. The ten thousand sounds of the world were hushed so we could hear the scratching of her pen. The saint was asleep in her bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window, the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing lice between his fingernails.

 

A poem about sitting on a New York rooftop on a chill autumn evening, drinking red wine, surrounded by tall buildings, the little kids running dangerously to the edge, the beautiful girl everyone's secretly in love with sitting by herself. She will die young but we don't know that yet. She has a hole in her black stocking, big toe showing, toe painted red . . . And the skyscrapers . . . in the failing light . . . like new Chaldeans, pythonesses, Cassandras . . . because of their many blind windows.

 

“Tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul,” writes Nietzsche. I always felt that too, Friedrich! The Amazon jungle with its brightly colored birds squawking in every tree, but its depths dark and hushed. The beautiful lost girl is giving suck to a little monkey. The great lizard in attendance wears ecclesiastical robes and speaks French to her: “La Reine des Reines,” he chants. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous and insulting to religious sentiments.

 

Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only your heart, the Russians the soul. “The soul is a mirage in the desert,” I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.

“Like a confit of duck, or like a sparkling littleneck clam still in its native brine?” I inquired. But she just rubbed her tummy and smiled naughtily at me from across the table.

 

My guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he's not, sends me ahead, tells me he'll be along in a moment. Pretty soon I can't see a thing. “This must be the darkest corner of heaven,” someone whispers behind my back. It turns out her guardian angel is missing too. “It's an outrage,” I tell her. “The dirty little cowards leaving us like this alone.” And of course, for all we know, one of us may be an old man on his deathbed and the other one a sleepy little girl with glasses.

 

The old farmer in overalls hanging from a barn beam. The cows looking sideways. The old woman kneeling under his swaying feet in her Sunday black dress and touching the ground with her forehead like a Mohammedan. Outside the sky is full of sudsy clouds above an endless plowed field with no other landmarks in view.

 

O witches, O poverty! The two who with a sidelong glance measured the thinness of my neck through the bars of the birdcage I carried on my shoulder . . .

 

They were far too young and elegant to be storybook witches. They wore low-cut party dresses, black seams in their stockings, lips thickly painted red.

The big-hearted trees offered their leaves by whispering armfuls over the winding path where the two eventually vanished.

I was left with my cage, its idiotic feeding dish, the even more absurd vanity mirror, and the faintly sounding silver bell.

 

Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me.

“Doubt nothing, believe everything” was my friend's idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather.

I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!

My friend's empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.

 

Thousands of old men with pants lowered sleeping in public restrooms. You're raving! You're exaggerating! Thousands of Maria Magdalenas, I see, kneeling at their feet, weeping.

 

A century of gathering clouds. Ghost ships arriving and leaving. The sea deeper, vaster. The parrot in the bamboo cage spoke several languages. The captain in the daguerreotype had his cheeks painted red. He brought a half-naked girl home from the tropics whom they kept chained in the attic till her death. After lunch, someone told of a race of people without mouths who subsisted only on the scent of flowers. It was the age of busy widow's walks, fires lit with pages of love letters, long-trailing white gowns and much soundless screaming in the small hours of the night.

 

The time of minor poets is coming. Goodbye Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine . . . while the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.

It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.

—
after Aleksandar Ristović

 

Lots of people around here have been taken for rides in UFOs. You wouldn't think that possible with all the pretty white churches in sight so well attended on Sundays.

 

“The round square doesn't exist,” says the teacher to the dull-witted boy. His mother was abducted only last night. All expectations to the contrary, she sits in the corner grinning to herself. The sky is vast and blue.

“They're so small, they can sleep inside their own ears,” says one eighty-year-old twin to the other.

 

My father loved the strange books of André Breton. He'd raise the wine glass and toast those far-off evenings “when butterflies formed a single uncut ribbon.” Or we'd go out for a piss in the back alley and he'd say, “Here are some binoculars for blindfolded eyes.” We lived in a rundown tenement that smelled of old people and their pets.

“Hovering on the edge of the abyss, permeated with the perfume of the forbidden,” we'd take turns cutting the smoked sausage on the table. “I love America,” he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

 

Someone shuffles by my door muttering, “Our goose is cooked.”

Strange! I have my knife and fork ready. I even have the napkin tied around my neck, but the plate before me is still empty.

Nevertheless, someone continues to mutter outside my door regarding a certain hypothetical, allegedly cooked goose that he claims is ours in common.

 

The room is empty,
And the window is open

 

 

 

IV

 

There was a child's Sunday suit
Pinned to a tailor's dummy
In a dusty store window.
The store looked closed for years.

 

I lost my way there once
In a Sunday kind of quiet,
Sunday kind of afternoon light
On a street of red-brick tenements.

 

How do you like that?
I said to no one.
How do you like that?
I said it again today upon waking.

 

That street went on forever
And all along I could feel the pins
In my back, prickling
The dark and heavy cloth.