By a mountain stream where butterflies play?
In a town scented with mignonette?
Die Toten reiten schnell, S. repeated eagerly (he too
is gone).
They ride little horses in the steppe’s quiet, beneath a round yellow
cloud.
Maybe they steal coal at a little railroad stop in Asia and melt
snow in sooty pots
like those transported in freight cars.
(Do they have camps and barbed wire?)
Do they play checkers? Listen to music? Do they see Christ?
They dictate poems to the living.
They paint bison on cave walls, begin building
the cathedral in Beauvais.
Have they grasped the sense of evil, which eludes us,
and forgiven those who persecuted them?
They wade through an arctic glacier, soft from the August heat.
Do they weep? Regret?
Talk on telephones for hours? Hold their tongues? Are they here among us?
Nowhere?
I read poems, listen to the mighty whisper
of night and blood.
IN A STRANGE CITY
The faint, almost fantastic
scent of the Mediterranean,
crowds on streets at midnight,
a festival begins,
we don’t know which.
A scrawny cat slips
past our knees,
gypsies eat supper
as if singing;
white houses beyond them,
an unknown tongue.
Happiness.
CAMOGLI
High old houses above the water
and a drowsy cat waiting for fishermen
on furled white nets:
a quiet November in Camogli—
pensioners sunbathe on lounge chairs,
the sun rotates sluggishly
and stones revolve slowly
on the gravelly shore,
but it, the sea, keeps turning landward,
wave after wave, as if wondering
what happened to summer’s plans
and our dreams,
what has our youth become.
BOGLIASCO: THE CHURCH SQUARE
A photographer develops film,
the sexton scrutinizes
walls and trees,
boys play ball,
a dry cleaner purges the conscience
of this quiet town,
three elderly ladies discuss the world’s end—
but evening brings back
the sea’s tumult
and its din
returns the day just past
into oblivion.
STAGLIENO
Don’t linger in the graveyard
where the nineteenth century, dusty, charmless,
still repents; you’ll be received
by doctors in stucco frock coats
buttoned to the throat, in stone cravats,
stone barristers with stony, slightly mournful
smiles (duplicity has outlived itself).
You’ll be received by patresfamilias, professors
and children, marble children, plaster dogs,
always flawlessly obedient.
You’ll see the past, meet
your older brothers, glimpse
Pompeii, submerged
in time’s gray lava.
TWO-HEADED BOY
The fifteen-year-old boy carried a kitten
inside his dark blue windbreaker.
Its tiny head turned,
its large eyes watching
everything more cautiously
than human eyes.
Safe in the warm train,
I compare the boy’s lazy stare
to the kitten’s pupils,
alert and narrow.
The two-headed boy sitting across from me
made richer by an animal’s unrest.
OUR WORLD
IN MEMORIAM W.G. SEBALD
I never met him, I only knew
his books and the odd photos, as if
purchased in a secondhand shop, and human
fates discovered secondhand,
and a voice quietly narrating,
a gaze that caught so much,
a gaze turned back,
avoiding neither fear
nor rapture;
nor rapture;
and our world in his prose,
our world, so calm—but
full of crimes perfectly forgotten,
even in lovely towns
on the coast of one sea or another,
our world full of empty churches,
rutted with railroad tracks, scars
of ancient trenches, highways,
cleft by uncertainty, our blind world
smaller now by you.
SMALL OBJECTS
My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don’t desire light.
DEFENDING POETRY, ETC.
Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,
but also summer evenings in a small town,
where gardens waft and cats sit quietly
on doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.
SUBJECT: BRODSKY
Please note: born in May,
in a damp city (hence the motif: water),
soon to be surrounded by an army
whose officers kept Hölderlin
in their backpacks, but, alas, they had
no time for reading. Too much to do.
Tone—sardonic, despair—authentic.
Always en route, from Mexico to Venice,
lover and crusader, who campaigned
ceaselessly for his unlikely party
(name: Poetry versus the Infinite,
or PVI, if you prefer abbreviations).
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 seriou
s, 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.”
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
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