Vocabulary
“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?” she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is climate.
“Madame,” I want to reply, “my people’s poets do all their writing in mittens. I don’t mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms’ constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an ax at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame.”
That’s what I mean to say. But I’ve forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I’m not sure of icicle and ax.
“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?”
“Pas du tout,” I answer icily.
Travel Elegy
Everything’s mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.
Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.
From the town of Samokov, only rain
and more rain.
Paris from Louvre to fingernail
grows web-eyed by the moment.
Boulevard Saint-Martin: some stairs
leading into a fade-out.
Only a bridge and a half
from Leningrad of the bridges.
Poor Uppsala, reduced to a splinter
of its mighty cathedral.
Sofia’s hapless dancer,
a form without a face.
Then separately, his face without eyes;
separately again, eyes with no pupils,
and, finally, the pupils of a cat.
A Caucasian eagle soars
above a reproduction of a canyon,
the fool’s gold of the sun,
the phony stones.
Everything’s mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.
Inexhaustible, unembraceable,
but particular to the smallest fiber,
grain of sand, drop of water—
landscapes.
I won’t retain one blade of grass
as it’s truly seen.
Salutation and farewell
in a single glance.
For surplus and absence alike,
a single motion of the neck.
Without a Title
The two of them were left so long alone,
so much in un-love, without a word to spare,
what they deserve by now is probably
a miracle—a thunderbolt, or turning into stone.
Two million books in print on Greek mythology,
but there’s no rescue in them for this pair.
If at least someone would ring the bell, or if
something would flare and disappear again,
no matter from where and no matter when,
no matter if it’s fun, fear, joy, or grief.
But nothing of the sort. No aberration,
no deviation from the well-made plot
this bourgeois drama holds. There’ll be a dot
above the “i” inside their tidy separation.
Against the backdrop of the steadfast wall,
pitying one another, they both stare
into the mirror, but there’s nothing there
except their sensible reflections. All
they see is the two people in the frame.
Matter is on alert. All its dimensions,
everything in between the ground and sky
keeps close watch on the fates that we were born with
and sees to it that they remain the same—
although we still don’t see the reason why
a sudden deer bounding across this room
would shatter the entire universe.
An Unexpected Meeting
We treat each other with exceeding courtesy;
we say, it’s great to see you after all these years.
Our tigers drink milk.
Our hawks tread the ground.
Our sharks have all drowned.
Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage.
Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy,
our peacocks have renounced their plumes.
The bats flew out of our hair long ago.
We fall silent in midsentence,
all smiles, past help.
Our humans
don’t know how to talk to one another.
Golden Anniversary
They must have been different once,
fire and water, miles apart,
robbing and giving in desire,
that assault on one another’s otherness.
Embracing, they appropriated and expropriated each other
for so long
that only air was left within their arms,
transparent as if after lightning.
One day the answer came before the question.
Another night they guessed their eyes’ expression
by the type of silence in the dark.
Gender fades, mysteries molder,
distinctions meet in all-resemblance
just as all colors coincide in white.
Which of them is doubled and which missing?
Which one is smiling with two smiles?
Whose voice forms a two-part canon?
When both heads nod, which one agrees?
Whose gesture lifts the teaspoon to their lips?
Who’s flayed the other one alive?
Which one lives and which has died
entangled in the lines of whose palm?
They gazed into each other’s eyes and slowly twins emerged.
Familiarity breeds the most perfect of mothers—
it favors neither of the little darlings,
it scarcely can recall which one is which.
On this festive day, their golden anniversary,
a dove, seen identically, perched on the windowsill.
Starvation Camp Near Jaslo
Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they weren’t given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It’s a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don’t know.
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed:
a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows,
stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
no one’s spot in the ranks.
It became flesh right here, on this meadow.
But the meadow’s silent, like a witness who’s been bought.
Sunny. Green. A forest close at hand,
with wood to chew on, drops beneath the bark to drink—
a view served round the clock,
until you go blind. Above, a bird
whose shadow flicked its nourishing wings
across their lips. Jaws dropped,
teeth clattered.
At night a sickle glistened in the sky
and reaped the dark for dreamed-of loaves.
Hands came flying from blackened icons,
each holding an empty chalice.
A man swayed
on a grill of barbed wire.
Some sang, with dirt in their mouths. That lovely song
about war hitting you straight in the heart.
Write how quiet it is.
Yes.
Parable
Some fishermen pulle
d a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper, with these words: “Somebody save me! I’m here. The ocean cast me on this desert island. I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I’m here!”
“There’s no date. I bet it’s already too late anyway. It could have been floating for years,” the first fisherman said.
“And he doesn’t say where. It’s not even clear which ocean,” the second fisherman said.
“It’s not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere,” the third fisherman said.
They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That’s how it goes with universal truths.
Ballad
Hear the ballad “Murdered Woman
Suddenly Gets Up from Chair.”
It’s an honest ballad, penned
neither to shock nor to offend.
The thing happened fair and square,
with curtains open, lamps all lit:
passersby could stop and stare.
When the door had shut behind him
and the killer ran downstairs,
she stood up, just like the living
startled by the sudden silence.
She gets up, she moves her head,
and she looks around with eyes
harder than they were before.
No, she doesn’t float through air:
she steps on the ordinary,
wooden, slightly creaky floor.
In the oven she burns traces
that the killer’s left behind:
here a picture, there shoelaces,
everything that she can find.
It’s obvious that she’s not strangled.
It’s obvious that she’s not shot.
She’s been killed invisibly.
She may still show signs of life,
cry for sundry silly reasons,
shriek in horror at the sight
of a mouse.
Ridiculous
traits are so predictable
that they aren’t hard to fake.
She got up like you and me.
She walks just as people do.
And she sings and combs her hair,
which still grows.
Over Wine
He glanced, gave me extra charm
and I took it as my own.
Happily I gulped a star.
I let myself be invented,
modeled on my own reflection
in his eyes. I dance, dance, dance
in the stir of sudden wings.
The chair’s a chair, the wine is wine,
in a wineglass that’s the wineglass
standing there by standing there.
Only I’m imaginary,
make-believe beyond belief,
so fictitious that it hurts.
ants that die of love beneath
a dandelion’s constellation.
I swear a white rose will sing
if you sprinkle it with wine.
I laugh and I tilt my head
cautiously, as if to check
whether the invention works.
I dance, dance inside my stunned
skin, in his arms that create me.
Eve from the rib, Venus from foam,
Minerva from Jupiter’s head—
all three were more real than me.
When he isn’t looking at me,
I try to catch my reflection
on the wall. And see the nail
where a picture used to be.
Rubens’ Women
Titanettes, female fauna,
naked as the rumbling of barrels.
They roost in trampled beds,
asleep, with mouths agape, ready to crow.
Their pupils have fled into flesh
and sound the glandular depths
from which yeast seeps into their blood.
Daughters of the Baroque. Dough
thickens in troughs, baths steam, wines blush,
cloudy piglets careen across the sky,
triumphant trumpets neigh the carnal alarm.
O pumpkin plump! O pumped-up corpulence
inflated double by disrobing
and tripled by your tumultuous poses!
O fatty dishes of love!
Their skinny sisters woke up earlier,
before dawn broke and shone upon the painting.
And no one saw how they went single file
along the canvas’s unpainted side.
Exiled by style. Only their ribs stood out.
With birdlike feet and palms, they strove
to take wing on their jutting shoulder blades.
The thirteenth century would have given them golden halos.
The twentieth, silver screens.
The seventeenth, alas, holds nothing for the unvoluptuous.
For even the sky bulges here
with pudgy angels and a chubby god—
thick-whiskered Phoebus, on a sweaty steed,
riding straight into the seething bedchamber.
Coloratura
Poised beneath a twig-wigged tree,
she spills her sparkling vocal powder:
slippery sound slivers, silvery
like spider’s spittle, only louder.
Oh yes, she Cares (with a high C)
for Fellow Humans (you and me);
for us she’ll twitter nothing bitter;
she’ll knit her fitter, sweeter glitter;
her vocal cords mince words for us
and crumble croutons, with crisp crunch
(lunch for her little lambs to munch)
into a cream-filled demitasse.
But hark! It’s dark! Oh doom too soon!
She’s threatened by the black bassoon!
It’s hoarse and coarse, it’s grim and gruff,
it calls her dainty voice’s bluff—
Basso Profundo, end this terror,
do-re-mi mene tekel et cetera!