to the surface, surely further than
consciousness,
it is not the haunting that makes us believe
in their presence, but the cold absence,
the sudden day a soul is too far off to be felt
something wakes her,
the vase of
dusk iris on the bed-table:
paper and water
The smallest detail gives them away,
the paper pulled from the typewriter, shoes
beside the bed. Nothing must be
too straight or neat.
They came while I was out, Sachs explained,
I knew it immediately, though they were
as cunning as I, and left things
exactly as they were.
the morning light, the same crimson
monks wear in Drepung or
hanging in the windows of Lisbon,
the pressback chair, the rug
sewn from scraps, the face of a child
torn from a magazine and tacked to the wall for her
forsaken expression,
the books on the plank-and-brick shelves,
the hundreds of LPs, every orchestra and
soloist in their cardboard
sleeves with spectacular covers I spent
my childhood living into,
every particular of driftwood and stone,
snowshoes, books on animal tracks, astronomical
maps, the memoirs of political prisoners and
Life with the Painters of La Ruche, edible
plants and woodcraft, pages of tortured
solace, survival in the wilderness;
always, from the moment we arrived
there you were, your spirit saturating
every blessed molecule,
even, exactly where you last left it,
years before,
an unbearable phrase of music
in the air
Not only what a soul remembers
but all it forgets,
as if all you know and all you don’t know
have changed places;
cloud shadow on the hills,
the sudden downpour in the vale of Borrowdale,
turning the blue slate black,
bare arms in the rain;
animals turned to stone in the blue lias beds;
the name that can’t be understood
without its story;
the narrow-bladed paddle and
all the water it displaces;
the help and helplessness
of love;
the photos and the millions
of indifferent eyes that have looked upon
their shaven nakedness;
the ghost life that lives itself
beside us, the shadow of what happened
and what didn’t happen;
If ever I lose
my memory of you, walk beside me
like a stag; like a bird heard, unseen
and then
we came and you were no longer there
everything in its place
your presence gone
we waited, went out, returned
but still nothing held
the light after rain,
for I looked there too
in the rain that fell
you could not bear to stay, all
a painting you cannot hear
and yet
a soul can make the wind blow,
make light and shadow through the trees,
through rain,
can be as near as your own skin
To listen as if the sea
had stopped
The scribe writes a language
without vowels, the reader’s breath
Celan read the river, his Seine
sein, his
must not be represented,
must remain invisible,
each word
eine, one
keine, no,
none
an oxygen tent, a shelter
of consonants,
water, a will rushing
breath to set fire
heaven, it is written, is a seine
thrown into the sea
to meaning
as the seine draws in, a breath, we swim
toward the net, not away
the difference between end and
and,
draws near
soiled and
solid,
draw
men and
mein
me in,
mein
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
the past, for if there is anything we must change
it is the past. To look back
and see another map.
Love enough to fill
a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,
a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,
a bit of chalk, a bit of
bone in ash.
All that is cupped,
all that is emptied
the rush of water from a pump,
a word spelled out
on a palm.
their relationship to their bodies changed,
bone, not flesh, containing the soul
and when the natural order of flesh
was restored, the place the soul was stored
was not;
too much
soul left in the bone
enough to fill
a bit of light on the water
the draw of the oar draws your name
from the shore, a breath drawn
each pull of your arm,
“life called for us”
scent, ascent, assent,
opened by love
the way a father gives birth
for only a moment, we belong
to ourselves, not to
parents, nor yet to a lover,
only to ourselves,
and then gravity returns,
the pull of other bodies
as it should be
as it must
and Salomon next to Sachs
and the girl from the orphan camp
caught by Chim, whose every photo
is a name fished out of a throat
every typewriter key, every piece
of clothing, a poem you remember word
for word but
will not recite
earth enough to fill a shoe
each word the reverse of a word
as if to say
the moment you stop believing in me
I will disappear
To name the world
that contains this world
the way night and morning
are the same day
perhaps there comes a time
when the dead leave off mourning
“I like to think the moon is there
even if I’m not looking at it”
the rain that held the light
that fell, the rain that fell,
the light that held
this room
and the love we lived here
that which your memory last looked upon
your task
now, perhaps,
to forget not us, but
the details of us, and love
again and love again, and love again,
sealing the seam
endlessly, one pressed to another,
like metal folded over and again
for strength, like
pleated cloth gathered and pierced
by the steel needle of that single moment
of dying
and you will come back to me
and I will come back to you
and all the world
will be a sign
all the world and
every thought, every
drop of paint to make sunlight or
love in a human eye, every word that
passes through our breath,
every weight we hold and carry, every
grasp of hair, grasp of heat,
every cupping and every emptying
your warm hand and – both in mine –
your soul’s hand above the hospital bed
as if your sight erased sound
from everything you beheld, a
reaching and a wiping clear,
a wave goodbye
where there was a great mass of leaves roaring
now only a shifting, swathing
swell of green
silence, like a fine mist
gradually soaking through
each word embedded,
the mud of another country on its shoes,
an upstairs lamp so we won’t bump our heads on
darkness, each word a fall
into inarticulate space, each word
a stub, a placeholder for the
inexpressible solute or solvent,
the fragment that is every object, every
cry, all the invisible freedoms
contained in a pair of socks, in warm clothes,
the infrastructure each object implies, of
industry, experience, chance, corruption,
loneliness, love; impossible to understand an object
without its story,
the brutal, the blessed particularity,
I think of the poet who wrote sixty pages of
rhyming verse fermented in classical philosophy and
Hindu gods, each word a barricade (as I am now)
against it; no matter what questions we build, whether
war, or illness, no matter the syntax or
mysticism, medical terms,
historical analysis, no matter,
because to touch
means always
the warm skin under the flannel shirt,
the soft hair under the tweed cap,
smell of wet pavement on that cool morning,
the ragged book left open by the bed,
every noun and verb a slow peristalsis
through our understanding,
each word so worn with use,
wanting to keep the surface as simple as possible,
without acrobatics or overstatement,
as invisible as a landmark in the desert,
the place where the bus driver releases the airlock,
an exhalation, and the traveller with his sack
steps down into the wilderness, an expanse
of sand without any singularity to the foreign eye,
though he walks resolutely,
without hesitation, into it,
knowing the way,
based on a single grain, a slant of light,
an angle, an intensity, a calibration of
an ever-changing element, a body
language, like the moment of
looking into that face and finding
yourself suddenly, or was it slowly
or like the moment of
looking into that face and finding
yourself suddenly or was it slowly
alone,
who is that woman with the baby,
pointing to me and to your grandchild
and when your language ceased,
a gap ever widening, swaying and closing, swaying and
opening between us, every word with the
inarticulation of the sea when there is
no shore to break and therefore bring
its rhythm, the swaying deck from which you
reached out to that coffin, to that child,
I began the piling of words,
to dig myself out
to dare myself
that single word
And, after the words, in the ache to be precise,
numbers:
6 avenue Emile Zola, Celan’s last flat
directly across from Pont Mirabeau
where he entered the water,
2 weeks, when it was still believed he was alive,
perhaps, his wife hoped, he has gone at last to Prague
7 miles downstream, May
1, when the fisherman drew him out.
Sachs was told, bedridden in Stockholm –
he has gone before me –
dying the same day Celan was buried, May
12, 1970, at the cemetery at Thiais, field
31, row 12,
followed shortly by Améry, whose grave
is inscribed with his number,
because long after flesh, stone might remember
1941, 22 June, Grodno occupied
30 June, the star enforced
1942, 2 November, ghetto A sealed
15 November, ghetto B, first deportation, 1,000
770 to the chamber upon arrival
2,000, 22 November, 1,467 to the chamber upon arrival
1943, 13 February, 5:40 a.m., the transport from
Lasosna, where my father swam as a child
And Charlotte Salomon’s
769 paintings, 1941 to 1943, in hiding, until
1943 September, Nice to Drancy,
7 October, Drancy to Auschwitz
10 October 1943, upon arrival with her child
5 unborn months old
even the unborn have a number, the same number
not given to the mother and all those
not worth counting
not two to make one,
but two to make
the third,
just as a conversation can become
the third side of the page
To name the moment one life
becomes another, the critical mass
of consciousness that allows us to see
one who might otherwise have remained
a stranger
the moment that enables Pessoa
every beginning is involuntary
to recognize Camus
in the light the earth remains
our first and last love. Our brothers breathe
under the same sky as we; justice is a
living thing. Now is born that strange joy which
helps one to live and die, and which we shall
never postpone to a later time
to recognize Levi
it is not my fault if I live and breathe,
eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes
to recognize Einstein
if a person falls freely he will not feel
his own weight
to recognize Keller
long ago I became convinced that the seeing
see little
and Akhmatova
no foreign sky protected me,
no stranger’s wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place
and Kafka
there is hope, but not for us
Mandelstam, Améry, Schwarz-Bart,
the burnt book, the drowned book,
the buried book,
the typewritten record, the handwritten
witnessing,
the precise waking that is born
from the nightmare,
and so,
I beg you,
come out of the night, just this night, and into
the hallway,
leave your boots
by the door, where they will be safe
here in the room of the lit window
you saw from the street,
each to smell their favourite dish
each to hear his own language,
her own song, mother and father
tongue, mother and father
reading under the lamp, the lost child
asleep upstairs, the lover’s breast,
the moth
er’s breast, the book open
to the third side of the page
They met at Zurich’s “Stork,”
the stork that is the Greek hieroglyph
for soul, the Greek stork that,
at death, takes human form
and brings children
into the house and cares for the old,
the Slavic stork carrying unborn souls to earth,
the Hebrew stork meaning mercy,
the German stork with its human spirit
and its protection against fire,
the stork, with its white wings dipped
in black, the stork with its nest
in the chimney
Come, it’s time to set the table,
dusk is bruised with rain, the water is alive
under the wind, evening is
upon us. Outside, the animals make their
accommodation, the lake loses its reflection,
settles deeper. Set down the brush
on the saucer, leave off the book,
open, with its words against the pillow.
The washing of hands, the tea kettle,
the whisky, stocking feet
on the wooden floor. Help me carry
the chairs, never enough chairs,
through the narrow doorway, chairs
borrowed from the sewing table,
from the desk, from the work table –
paint-spattered and mended with wire.
Bring the piano bench. Find the perfect
symphony for parsing vegetables into broth.
No need for candles, we’ll see each other well enough
in the dark. Draw close
your father’s chair next to my father’s,
and I’ll fetch a book for the orphan’s chair,
so she can reach the table.
And last, a chair for the mourner
who accompanies the body, so the soul is never,
not for a single moment, alone.
The surface of the water
cut and mended, cut and mended,
scissored into endless fragments and joinings,
places for the light to settle
then drown, and settle again,
a line break forever changing the word above