Wild Gratitude (5 page)

and my button-down shoes are four sizes too big,

my pockets are filled with weightless blue pebbles.

When the Health Service sent me to a rural sanatorium

I fell in love with my analyst. I bellowed and moaned,

I invoked the faithfulness of dogs, the fatigue

of slaves, but nothing helped. And I came home.

I admit that I’m desperately in need of a job

and I’ll agree to anything: I’m honest, I’m

an excellent typist, I can speak French and German,

I can take dictation and crawl on all fours.

I’m a gymnast of the dialectic and I can sing

the startled green lyrics of a prisoner’s song.

This is a promissory note and a curriculum vitae,

this is a last will and testament: On April 11, 1905,

I was sentenced to thirty-two years of hard labor,

but I was innocent. Where is that freight train?

I am cutting off my right sleeve with a scissors.

I am leaving my right arm to a strange god.

It’s daybreak and I wish I could believe

In a rain that will wash away the morning

That is just about to rise behind the smokestacks

On the other side of the river, other side

Of nightfall. I wish I could forget the slab

Of darkness that always fails, the memories

That flood through the window in a murky light.

But now it is too late. Already the day

Is a bowl of thick smoke filling up the sky

And swallowing the river, covering the buildings

With a sickly, yellow film of sperm and milk.

Soon the streets will be awash with little bright

Patches of oblivion on their way to school,

Dark briefcases of oblivion on their way to work.

Soon my small apartment will be white and solemn

Like a blank page held up to a blank wall,

A message whispered into a vacant closet. But

This is a message which no one else remembers

Because it is stark and German, like the silence,

Like the white fire of daybreak that is burning

Inside my throat. If only I could stamp it out!

But think of smoke and ashes. An ominous string

Of railway cars scrawled with a dull pencil

Across the horizon at dawn. A girl in pigtails

Saying, “Soon you are going to be erased.”

Imagine thrusting your head into a well

And crying for help in the wrong language,

Or a deaf mute shouting into an empty field.

So don’t talk to me about flowers, those blind

Faces of the dead thrust up out of the ground

In bright purples and blues, oranges and reds.

And don’t talk to me about the gold leaves

Which the trees are shedding like an extra skin:

They are handkerchiefs pressed over the mouths

Of the dead to keep them quiet. It’s true:

Once I believed in a house asleep, a childhood

Asleep. Once I believed in a mother dreaming

About a pair of giant iron wings growing

Painfully out of the shoulders of the roof

And lifting us into away-from-here-and-beyond.

Once I even believed in a father calling out

In the dark, restless and untransfigured.

But what did we know then about the smoke

That was already beginning to pulse from trains,

To char our foreheads, to transform their bodies

Into two ghosts billowing from a huge oven?

What did we know about a single gray strand

Of barbed wire knotted slowly and tightly

Around their necks? We didn’t know anything then.

And now here is a grave and mysterious sentence

Finally written down, carried out long ago:

At last I have discovered that the darkness

Is a solitary night train carrying my parents

Across a field of dead stumps and wildflowers

Before disappearing on the far horizon,

Leaving nothing much in its earthly wake

But a stranger standing at the window

Suddenly trying to forget his childhood,

To forget a black trail of smoke

Slowly unraveling in the distance

Like the victory-flag of death, to forget

The slate clarity of another day

Forever breaking behind the smokestacks.

It’s sweet to lie awake in the early morning

Remembering the sound of five huge bells

Ringing in the village at dawn, the iron

Notes turning to music in the pink clouds.

It’s nice to remember the flavor of groats

Mixed with horse’s blood, the sour tang

Of unripe peppers, the smell of garlic

Growing in Aunt Stefania’s garden.

I can remember my grandmother’s odd claim

That her younger brother was a mule

Pulling an ox cart across a lapsed meadow

In the first thin light of a summer morning;

Her cousin, Irka, was a poorly planted tree

Wrapping itself in a dress of white blossoms.

I could imagine an ox cart covered with flowers,

The sound of laughter coming from damp branches.

Some nights I dream that I’m a child again

Flying through the barnyard at six a.m.:

My mother milks the cows in the warm barn

And thinks about her father, who died long ago,

And daydreams about my future in a large city.

I want to throw my arms around her neck

And touch the sweating blue pails of milk

And talk about my childish nightmares.

God, you’ve got to see us to know how happy

We were then, two dark caresses of sunlight.

Now I wake up to the same four walls staring

At me blankly, and the same bare ceiling.

The morning starts over in the home:

Someone coughs in the hall, someone calls out

An unfamiliar name, a name I don’t remember,

Someone slams a car door in the distance.

I touch my feet to the cold tile floor

And listen to my neighbor stirring in his room

And think about my mother’s peculiar words

After my grandmother died during the war:

“One day the light will be as thick as a pail

Of fresh milk, but the pail will seem heavy.

You won’t know if you can lift it anymore,

But lift it anyway. Drink the day slowly.”

For some of us it began with wild dogs

Howling iike dirges in the early morning

And crazed wolves answering in the distance.

It began with the shrieking of peacocks

And three mad sables roving through the streets

And a sound of donkeys screeching like children.

Some of us heard the polar bears wailing

And two African giraffes whining in terror

At the death throes of a baby elephant

And we knew it had begun in earnest.

But some people refuse to imagine zebras

Careening around in hysterical circles,

Or cheetahs smashing their cages, or bats

Clinging to crippled leopards and then

Floating over their heads in a broad light.

Some people need to see the sky speaking

German, and the night wearing a steel helmet,

And the moon slowly turning into a swastika.

But then we saw the stomach of the city

Burning in the distance, all the charred

Sugar and fresh meats, all the white flour

And dark grains flaming on the far horizon

In oily black clouds of smoke tinged

With ember-reds and soiled brown mauves.

It was like seeing hundreds of waves of

Blood rolling over the city at dusk and then

Hanging in heavy layers under the stars.

No one cried out or screamed in pain

To see our crumbling wooden depots of food

Climbing in swollen clouds into the sky

But a few children who were already hungry

And an old man who saw his own small intestine

Drifting like a balloon over his wife’s head.

That’s how in Peter the Great’s white showcase

Built on a vast swamp on the northernmost

Fringe of Europe, we began to starve.

It’s to lie in the dark at four a.m.

Thinking about the sweetness of surrender,

What the mind yields to a mattress in fatigue

And the body forgets to remember, what

The reluctant night yields to a cold room

Where windows are boarded with plywood

And light searches for a crack in the roof.

It’s to remember the women with bright parasols

Strolling down the wide Parisian boulevards

And the men cruising in black limousines.

It’s to forget the words “typhoid” and “cholera,”

The sirens that go on wailing in your sleep.

There are days when dying will seem as

Easy as sitting down in a warm, comfortable

Overstuffed chair and going back to sleep,

Or lying in bed for hours. But you must

Not sit down, you must spend your life digging

Out trenches with a shovel, staying awake.

So whoever will eat must work and whoever

Will survive must fight. But the sick

Civilians shiver on narrow gray stretchers

In the dark in unheated hospital rooms,

The soldiers respect the terror of their wounds.

There is no water, no warmth, and no light

And the bodies keep piling up in the corridor.

A red soldier tears his mouth from a bandage

And announces to a young nurse, “Darling,

Tanks are what we need now, beautiful tanks,

Beloved tanks rolling over the barren fields

And playing their music in the pink sky.”

No one pays attention, but a volunteer regrets

That trolleys have stopped running to the front:

He’ll have to walk the distance. Meanwhile,

The bodies keep piling up in the corridor

And a dazed girl keeps shouting, “But I
can

Fight the Nazis!” Whoever can fight will eat.

I have lanced the boils on every finger

And sucked the warm pus; I have eaten

A thin jelly made of leather straps,

And swallowed the acrid green oil cakes,

And tasted a cold extract of pine needles.

I have stared at the flayed white trees

And watched my children chasing a scrawny

Cat through the streets at dawn, and smelled

The dead cat boiling in my own kitchen.

I have tried to relinquish judgment,

To eat the cat or the dog without disgust.

I have seen starved women begging for rations

And starved men crawling under a frozen black

Sun, and I have turned my back slowly.

I have waited in a thousand lines for bread,

But I won’t gouge at another human body;

I won’t eat the sweet breasts of a murdered

Woman, or the hacked thighs of a dying man.

After we burned the furniture and the books

In the stove, we were always cold, always:

But we got used to icicles in our chests.

We got used to the fires falling from the sky

At dusk, spreading across the scorched roofs.

And we got used to the formula of edible

Cellulose and cottonseed cakes and dry meal dust

And a pinch of corn flour for our dark bread.

We got used to our own stomachs bulging with air.

And then one day the bodies started to appear

Piled on the bright sleds of little children,

Bundled up in thick curtains and torn sheets

And old rags and sometimes even in newspapers.

We saw the staircases jammed with corpses,

The doorways and the dead-end alleys, and smelled

A scent of turpentine hanging in the frosty air.

We got used to leaving our dead unburied,

Stacked like cordwood in the drifts of snow.

Somehow we lived with our empty stomachs

And our ankles in chains, somehow we managed

With a heavy iron collar wrapped tightly

Around our necks. Sometimes the sun seemed

Like a German bomber, or an air-raid warden,

Or a common foot soldier speaking German.

We saw houses that had been sliced in two

From the attic to the cellar and large buildings

That had been blown apart like small windows.

We saw a soldier cradling a kneecap in his palms

And children watching the soft red fluids

Of their intestines flowing through their fingers.

We saw a girl tearing out clumps of hair

And surgeons who tried to scratch out their eyes

Because they couldn’t stand to see their hands.

Slowly we touched a sharp razor to our necks

And scraped away the useless blue skin

And the dead flesh. Somehow we lived.

                         It was as if the rain could feel itself

               falling through the air today, as if the air

    could actually feel its own dampness, the breeze

could hear a familiar voice explaining the emptiness

    to the dark elms that swayed unconsciously along

               the wet road, the elms that could still feel

                         their own branches glistening with rain.