I lie down on the cot, lie
there still, suspended
between ceiling and floor
as though the bleeding
had nothing to do with me,
as though I'd been in an accident
but died one second before the collision.
In a hospital room
I have to turn my face
from the bright needle;
I see it, nevertheless,
and I see the blood,
and I see the test tube
in which my nurse carries it
obliviously, like a candle
in a sleepwalker's hand.
Old Bottle Found in the Cellar of an Abandoned Farmhouse
It is still more light
than glass.
*
Though it leans halfway
into the invisible
it has a seam,
like a dress;
it sings
when you blow into its lips.
*
Since it is so empty and clear
it fills up the imagination,
makes me want to bring some well water
in a sieve
after setting fire to the barn
with a magnifying glass in the moon.
Knife
Holding a knife, or imagining it holds a knife, my blood goes to sleep in my fist. If I stare into it long enough, inevitably the moment when I no longer recognize it arrives. This is the moment when the blood unknowingly offers itself to be slaughtered; when cuts can occur like a slip of the tongue; when a little blood could billow in a glass of water and impart to it the disappearing taste of my own life.
Mosquitoes
Playing your trumpets
thin as a needle
in my ear,
standing on my finger
or on the back
of my neck like the best arguments
against pity I know.
You insignificant vampires
who sip my life
through a straw;
you drops of blood
with wings;
carriers
of insomnia
I search for
with a lit match.
I had a job once
driving around in a truck
to look for your eggs.
They can be found
in ditches, near
train tracks, outside
of a barn
in an upright piano filled with rainwater.
It is impossible to kill
all of you,
invisible in the uncut grass
at the edges of the cemetery:
when the dogs go down there it
looks like they've gotten into birds.
Trakl
It is November 1914. I am not very old
yet. Now I almost feel you
place the needle in your arm, dreaming
of the lightvessel in Mary's right wrist,
the wheatfields, the blond cemeteries,
the wind shepherding the dead leaves.
Now I am you walking among trees.
I have walked a long way from my army. I am dead.
I have already slept through the twentieth century,
I've slept through my clothes, through my body,
and nothing remains. I am a blind man who's
sitting with photographic absence in a park
in Vienna, which at twilight is utterly silent
and vacant as only a city I have never
visited can be. Now I am in a small bed,
I can hear myself breathing. I haven't learned to talk.
The Sniper
… stopping to light a cigarette
in a crowded street
it suddenly happens,
I'm able to feel
the crosshairs
of a high-powered rifle
randomly focused
on my forehead or chest.
Oblivious to the lit match
in my fingers, I raise
the other hand
to my face
and instantly see myself
through the sights
of the imagined weapon
equipped with a silencer.
It's then I begin to envision
my own thoughts: a black rainbow—,
a hearse filled with water
and driven by men wearing diving suits,
goggles, oxygen tanks. The deceased
allowed to float aimlessly
inside this womblike compartment,
inside this immense tear
lit by the candle
a mourner holds
in her thin rubber hand.
Far from people right around me
I strike another match,
something like a man waiting
in front of a firing squad.
Something like a man waiting
for his photograph to be taken,
in his fingers the seed
of a tree
from which he'll be hanged
in another life.
The Wedding
The photograph's crowded with the dim figures of dimmingly remembered people. People without childhoods. Children dressed in stiff clothes as in grave clothes, for appearance's sake. Trees. It is one of my mother's weddings. There I am, eight years old, already wearing that resignedly griefstricken expression of someone whose life is behind him. In the crowd, my mother and I are still not separated, but it is startling clear that we are now both citizens of another past and that nothing is going to diminish our sense of for-eignness in this one. The photograph fades ineluctably; two thousand miles from here my mother's hair turns gray as she combs it… Now she looks out at me through years. She sees how I long to torture her white dress. And I turn my face from that awful forgiveness.
The Visit
Almost always, it's just getting dark
when you come back, when you arrive
on this street;
dark
and perhaps just beginning to rain,
as it is, lightly, now.
Lightning
along the perimeter of the black cornfields past N. Professor,
and out back from the nursing home,
where they're putting people
to sleep.
Almost always, it's just getting dark
when I realize you are gone;
when you come here
and lie down beside me, without any clothes on
and without a body.
Drinking Back
From where I am
I can hear the rain on the telephone
and voices of nuns singing
in a green church in Brugge three years ago.
I can still see the hill,
the limestone fragment of an angel,
its mouth which has healed with
the illegible names in the cemetery,
the braillelike names—
the names of children, lovers, and the rest.
The names of people
buried with their watches running.
They are not sleeping, don't lie.
But it's true that once
every year of their death
it is spring.
Initial
To be able to say it: rose, oak, the stars.
And not to be blind!
Just to be here
for one day, only
to breathe and know when you lie down
you will keep on breathing;
to cast a reflection—,
oh, to have hands
even if they are a little damaged,
even if the fingers
leave no prints.
The Wish
I'm tired of listening to these
conflicting whispers
before sleep;
I'm tired of this
huge, misshapen body.
I need another: and w
hat could be prettier
than the wolf spider's, with its small
hood of gray fur.
I'm told it can see in the dark;
I'm told how its children
spill from a transparent sack
it secretes, like a tear.
I'm told about its solitude,
ferocious and nocturnal.
I want to speak with this being.
I want it
to weave me a bridge.
Hand
Striking the table it seems to impose
silence on all metaphysics.
Yet touching the word sun in braille
or switching on a lamp, the hand
is clearly the mind's glove,
its sister, its ghostly machine.
You'd hardly call what I feel pity
as I watch it
light this match.
Yet it is the hand of the child
and the corpse in me—
the sleeper's hand, buried apart
in its small grave of unconsciousness;
the hand that's been placed in handcuffs by police;
the hand I used to touch you, once;
the cool hand on my forehead.
The Solitude
You're thinking of the pilot
in his glass cockpit
40,000 feet above the street
you live on
unseen
except for the white line
traced halfway across the darkening sky
all at once it dawns on you
the telephone is ringing
for the first time in weeks
and with equal suddenness
it ceases
as your hand goes to lift the receiver
in the next room
so that when you return to your window
the sky has grown empty the first star
Brugge
{for C.P.}
I have had a strange thought: I see a young woman wearing a bridal dress stretched out asleep on her back in some grass. In an immense field. The sky darkening in another century… The sleeper's right hand floats an inch or so above the earth, the string of a kite—too high to be seen—tied around her wrist. There is no one else in sight. I stand looking on at what seems to be a great distance; yet the slightest movements of her lashes, the most insignificant alteration in her breathing, are as clear to me as they would be to somebody kneeling beside her and peering into her troubled, unrecognizable face. I don't approach. I am in no position to touch the alone. I move in and out of their fragile worlds erratically and by complete accident… I make one more attempt to place her; but now it's like trying to detect the motion of the minute hand, or watch yourself grow old in a mirror … Churchbells. The moon a mile off.
Morning
A girl comes out
of the barn, holding
a lantern
like a bucket of milk
or like a lantern.
Her shadow's there.
They pump a bucket of water
and loosen their blouses,
they lead the mare out
from the field
their thin legs
blending with the wheat.
Crack a green kernel
in your teeth. Mist
in the fields,
along the clay road
the mare's footsteps
fill up with milk.
The Road
I see the one walking this road
I see the one whose coat is thin whose shoes need mending
who is cold it's a very cold day
for stopping beside this dead cornfield
and basking one's face in those gray Rorschach clouds
I see the one whose lips say nothing
I see through his eyes I see the buried radiance in things
the one who isn't there
Those Who Come Back
{for B.W.}
You are one of those
who came back miraculously
whole. And yet
if someone shakes your hand,
if he welcomes you
into his home, without knowing it
he also welcomes in those who did not:
those who came back with hooks
protruding from their sleeves,
who came back in wheelchairs
and boxes.
They fill the house,
those who came back
with empty pant legs
or black glasses; those who
came back with no voice; those
who come back in the night
to ask you their name.
The Old
Their fingernails and hair continue to grow.
The bandaged eggs of their skulls
are frequently combed by the attendants
and friends no one has mentioned are dead.
A few of them wander around in the hallway,
waiting to be led off to the bathroom.
And these move as if underwater, as if
they were children in big people's shoes,
exploring each thing in their own rooms
for the first time:
mirror, glasses, a vial of pills
with a name typed microscopically on it,
impossible to make out.
Their memories tear
beside places recently stitched.
When I get up in the morning I'm like them
for four or five minutes: I'm anyone
frightened, hungry, somnambulistic, alone.
Wind rustles the black trees once.
Then I grow young.
Brussels, 1971
Some night
I will find myself walking
the sunlit halls of the school for the blind
I used to go past
on my way to you gliding by one vacant classroom
after another all at once I will stop
inside the doorway
of one where a child
in white shirt and black tie sits
alone at a desk
fingertips pressed to the page
of an immense book
where leaves' shadows stir
and when I wake up
I will not remember
your face won't appear in my mind
and I will lie there a long time
hearing things
the pines outside a car
grinding its engine
a block away
the voice of a crow
this world's chilling star-rise
and I will open my eyes
and get it over with
St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church, Minneapolis, 1960
There are times I can still
sense the congregation
all around me, whispering
to the one who raised the dead;
the one whose own
pulse had ceased, and yet returned
from the tomb.
His face above
in the high
enormously bright golden dome
of the ceiling:
the Face
so different
from the human
face of Jesus clenched
with agony,
or the beautiful Lord
of Hieronymus Bosch
gently bearing his cross through
the sneering crush.
Each Sunday morning
my speechless lost mother
brought me among them there;
they were mostly old people
on canes, and some I remember
were blind: all of them gone
by now, to their Father's mansion
under the grass.
Poem with No Speaker
Are you looking
for me? Ask that crow
rowing
across the green wheat.
See those minute air bubb
les
rising to the surface
at the still creek's edge—
talk to the crawdad.
Inquire
of the skinny mosquito
on your wall
stinging its shadow,
this lock
of moon
lifting
the hair on your neck.
When the hearts in the cocoon
start to beat,
and the spider begins
its hidden task,
and the seed sends its initial
pale hairlike root to drink,
you'll have to get down on all fours
to learn my new address:
you'll have to place your skull
beside this silence
no one hears.
Last Poem
When was it
you first began to pack?
The earth was already, without your awareness,
the earth without you. Because you left
your battered clothes behind. You left
no address. You simply left,
that's all. And when the first star occurred
to the sky—
60 years later, it is still
dusk: it is what happens
when you return,
unseeable, comatose, your empty sleeve
raised above black waters where
the stars' reflections shine
before the stars appear.
The Brother
I'm speaking, of course, on the mirror, the shadow, the other. I'm addressing myself to the dreamer of the body: the one whose eyes open, at night, when you close your eyes. The one who leaves your fingerprints on things you touched tomorrow; whose glove is your hand, whose voice is your muteness, whose sight is your … So: inside the darkest room of the darkest house on the darkest avenue in the darkest city, a man is reading a story to his blind identical twin. A man is shaving his blind identical twin. A man is straightening the tie of his blind identical twin. A man is feeding his blind identical twin soup with a large spoon. Now he's helping him on with his coat, they're about to take a little air. As they reach the corner they'll stop, the man will take care to cast a glance left and right before going on; while the brother stands perfectly still, erect, head bowed beneath a black sky in rapt attention to the remote trill of a bird hidden in one of the nearby trees which line this particular street, empty of traffic. All the windows unlit, as you know. No one on earth is awake.