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.
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 TOR
UŃCZYK
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
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.
&
nbsp; 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