In the Lateness of the World Read online

If you return, your father will be alive to prepare for you

  his mint-cucumber soup or give you the little sweet called bird’s milk,

  and after hours of looking with him for his sandals lost near the sea,

  you visit again together the amusement park where

  your ancestors are buried, and then go home to the apartment house

  built by German prisoners of war, to whom your father gave bread,

  which you remember surprised you. You take the tram to a stop

  where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks

  with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand.

  FISHERMAN

  March. The Neva still white, crisp as communion, and as we walk

  its bridges, steadying ourselves on the glaze, tubes of ice

  slide from the gutter-spouts to the astonishment of dogs, some of whom

  have not seen spring before, while others pretend not to remember,

  and a woman bends over her late potatoes, sorting and piling, and you say

  “in this house lived a friend of my father who was killed” and

  “in that house lived another, and in this, a very bad poet no longer known.”

  We come to the synagogue and go in, as far back as a forgotten holiness,

  where, we are told, you can whisper into the wall and be heard on the other side.

  But the rabbi doesn’t know you are deaf. We whisper into the wall to please him.

  A sign in Cyrillic asks for donations, and in exchange we apparently buy

  dozens of matzos wrapped in paper. There are only a hundred

  of us left in the city. While we are here, a fisherman waits on the river,

  seated with a bucket beside him, his line in the hole, but in the last hour

  water has surrounded his slab of ice, so unbeknownst

  he is floating downstream, having caught nothing, cold and delirious

  with winter thoughts, as they all are and were, and as for rescue,

  no one will come. It is spring. The Neva, white and crisp as communion.

  FOR ILYA AT TSARSKOYE SELO

  We stand at the casement window of Pushkin’s Lycée.

  These are the desks where Pushkin wrote, his chalkboards, his astrolabe.

  Snow falls from here into the past and vanishes on golden minarets.

  Snow recedes from the birches. A lesson writes itself in winter chalk:

  On the day Michelangelo died in Rome, Galileo was born in Pisa.

  Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. When they searched for

  the poet Kabir, they found nothing beneath his shroud but a sprig of jasmine.

  Man is like the statue whispering about the marble chiseled from his mouth.

  You are the guardian of this statue, standing in your silent world.

  The year Isaac Newton died, there was a barn fire during a puppet show.

  Kabir says all corpses go to the same place, and the world has fallen

  in love with a dream. This life is not the same as your other life.

  We are here now in one of the shrines of the silver poets.

  You are one of the silver. The snow is a white peacock in a Russian poem.

  THE LOST SUITCASE

  So it was with the suitcase left in front

  of the hotel—cinched, broken-locked,

  papered with world ports, carrying what

  mattered until then, when turning your back

  to cup a match it was taken, and the thief,

  expecting valuables, instead found books written

  between wars, gold attic-light, mechanical birds singing,

  and the chronicle of your country’s final hours.

  What, by means of notes, you hoped to become:

  a noun on paper, paper dark with nouns:

  swallows darting through a basilica, your hands up

  in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows

  breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost

  in a hospital gown, and here your voice,

  principled, tender, soughing through

  a fence woven with pine boughs:

  Writing is older than glass but younger

  than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope.

  Dear one, who even in speaking is silent,

  for years I have searched, usually while asleep,

  when I have found the suitcase open, collecting snow,

  still holding your vade mecum of the infinite,

  your dictionary of the no-longer-spoken,

  a commonplace of wounds casually inflicted,

  and the slender ledger of truly heroic acts.

  Gone is your atlas of countries unmarked by war,

  absent your manual for the preservation of hours.

  The incunabulum is lost—both your earliest book

  and a hatching place for your mechanical birds—

  but the collection of aperçus having to do

  with light laying its eggs in your eyes was found,

  along with the prophecy that all mass murders were early omens.

  In an antique bookshop, I found your catechism of atrophied faiths,

  so I lay you to rest without your Psalter,

  nor the monograph wherein you state your most

  unequivocal and hard-won proposition:

  that everything must happen but to whom doesn’t matter.

  Here are your books, as if they were burning.

  Be near now, and wake to tell me who you were.

  LAST BRIDGE

  Andreanska, you were with him

  in his final hours and I give you that,

  speaking the language understood only

  in the kitchen of childhood: for you,

  a lamplit tongue spoken in tomato gardens

  and prison camps by those sent away

  and those who let them be sent, so many

  words for no one and nothing,

  until history came for them too

  with its years of industry and waste,

  a tram pulling black smoke behind itself.

  These are the suitcases manufactured in

  “communist times,” from balsa and tin.

  Here are the books, ink on vellum, sold

  by hoodlums on the black market.

  We must have crossed the bridge a dozen

  times those nights, but—can you imagine?—

  alone, with no one from whom to borrow a match.

  There appeared a Russian deserter

  “from Afghan war,” who drew caricatures

  for small change but never drew our likeness.

  And some nights there was singing beneath

  stone angels, but we were otherwise alone.

  Svetko’s memories were of the scent of garlic

  fields beside the river, and of riding in the basket

  of his father’s bicycle along its banks. On the night

  of the invasion there was a radio, and red-starred jeeps

  that would become white-starred jeeps in the West.

  Svetko, with his friends, turned the street signs

  around, and by mistake the enemy marched into Austria.

  So, it is over, you tell me. When he closed

  his eyes, there were swans. You took his hand

  on the last bridge and made him laugh.

  You have my yes, Andreanska.

  ELEGY FOR AN UNKNOWN POET

  You who were apart, wanderer, stranger, who bent down in winter

  for th
e lost glove of another, you are ein Fremder on earth

  as if you had been written toward us. Listen: bells! You are sheltered

  once again in the stillness of childhood, where the slow river remains,

  rain singing from a gutter-spout, wet bottles, misted grillwork.

  Apartness gathers the music of solitude as if it were a glass viola.

  Bells ring that are and are not, and the soul is left wandering in the blue night.

  You are the one watching, the one dreaming this, the homeless one left behind.

  The soul has departed. Thinking, alone with your thoughts,

  the poverty of waking life, here where it nears the eternal.

  A man stood behind you holding a knife. You walked into the lake until only

  your hat could be seen. The dead began to wander quietly in the hall of stars.

  Your sister took her life. And then you couldn’t bear the gaze of others.

  What you could bear, and for long hours, were the star-filled eyes of a toad.

  I am your translator. Pity me. It is impossible to slip ein Fremder

  into the mouth of another.

  Last summer I went with you to the crematorium.

  We said poems and covered your body with gloves and roses.

  I know that you are dead. Why do you ask and ask what can be done?

  Black is the color of footsteps, frost, stillness, and tears.

  It modifies branches and wings. Blue appears as cloud, flower, ice.

  Deer stepping from the forest are also blue. A river is green,

  but green as well are flecks of decomposition. Silver, the blossoming

  poppies, a wind’s voice, faces of the unborn.

  The living, you say, appear unreal to you, as if they were on fire.

  Yet the living gaze at the dead, imploring them to appear.

  Why? you ask. The living are oblivious to what they are,

  measuring time as the flickering of day and night.

  Brown are the cesspools, rafters, and shadows; golden the day,

  candles, and a tent of stars, ivory the hands and limbs of lovers,

  purple a night wind, nostrils, and snails. A skiff is red, as are

  wolf and wound. Yellow are the walls of summer.

  Sleep is white, as is sickness, shirt, and revenant.

  What is left us then but darkness? Oneself is always dark and near.

  LETTER TO A CITY UNDER SIEGE

  Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city,

  reading the braille on its walls, walking beneath ghost chestnuts

  past fires that turn the bullet-shattered windows bronze,

  flaring an instant without warming the fallen houses

  where you sleep without water or light, a biscuit tin between you,

  or later in the café ruins, you discuss all night the burnt literature

  borrowed from a library where all books met with despair.

  I wanted to give your notes back to you, to be

  printed in another language, not yours or mine but a tongue

  understood by children who make bulletproof vests out of cardboard.

  We will then lie down in the cemetery where violets grew in your childhood

  before snipers fired on the city using gravestones for cover.

  Friend, absent one, I can tell you that your tunnel is still there,

  mud-walled and hallowed of earth, dug for smuggling

  oranges into the city—oranges!—bright as winter moons by the barrow-load.

  So let’s walk further up the street, to the hill where one is able to see

  the city woven in fog, roofs filled with sky, uprooted bridges,

  and a shop window where a shard of glass hangs over the spine of a book.

  The library burns on page sixty, as it burns in all the newspapers of the world,

  and the clopping of horses’ hooves isn’t the sound of clopping horses.

  From here a dog finds his way through snow with a human bone.

  And what else, what more? Even the clocks have run out of time.

  But, my good friend, the tunnel! There is still a tunnel for oranges.

  TRAVEL PAPERS

  Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur.

  To the silence of the one who sets us dreaming.

  RENÉ CHAR

  1.

  By boat we went to Seurasaari, where

  the small fish were called vendace.

  There a man blew a horn of birch wood

  toward the nightless sea.

  Still voice. Fire that is no fire.

  Ahead years unknown to be lived—

  2.

  Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then

  one by one, hours. Outside

  (so fleetingly) ourselves—

  3.

  In a still mirror, in a blue within

  where this earthly journey dreaming

  itself begins,

  4.

  thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible.

  5.

  Mountains before and behind,

  heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse,

  then a sea village of chartreuse fronds.

  Spent fuel, burnt

  wind, mute swans.

  6.

  We drove the birch-lined

  highway from Dresden

  to Berlin behind armored

  cars in late afternoon,

  nineteenth of June, passing

  the black cloud of a freight

  truck from Budapest.

  Through disappearing

  villages, past horses grazing vanished fields.

  7.

  The year before you died, America

  went to war again on the other

  side of the world.

  This is how the earth becomes,

  you said, a grotto of skeletons.

  8.

  In the ruins of a station: a soaked

  bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove.

  9.

  White weather, chalk, and basalt,

  puffins, fuchsia, and history shot

  through with particles

  of recognition: this one

  wetted down with petrol then

  set alight, that one taking

  forty rounds, this other

  found eleven years later in a bog.

  10.

  In the station house, imaginary

  maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry

  of arrivals, the logs of ghost

  ships, and a few prison

  diaries written on tissue paper.

  11.

  Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies?

  The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze?

  Through the casements of glass handblown

  before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop

  through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigs

  in wind through glass.

  12.

  Who were we then? Such

  a laughter as morning peeled

  its light from us!

  13.

  You said the cemeteries were full in a voice

  like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom

  but silent without grasshoppers or bees.

  What do you want then? You with your

  neverness, your unknown, your

  book of things, you

  with once years ahead to be lived.

  14.

  Your fat
her believes he took you

  with him, that you are

  in an urn beside your sleeping mother,

  but I am still writing with your hand,

  as you stand in your still-there of lighted words.

  15.

  Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight.

  Stairwells remember, as do doors, but windows do not—

  do not, upon waking, gaze out a window

  if you wish to remember your dream.

  16.

  An ache of hope that you will come back—

  the cawing flock is not your coming.

  17.

  Did you float toward Salzburg? A wind

  in the mustard fields?—or walk instead

  beside me through the asylum in Kraków?

  Hours after your death you seemed

  everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight.

  Now your moments are clouds

  in a photograph of swifts.

  18.

  In the hour held

  open between day and night under

  the meteor showers of Perseid

  we held each other for the last time.

  Dead, you whispered where is the road?

  There, through the last of the sentences, just there—

  through the last of the sentences, the road—

  THE REFUGE OF ART

  I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments . . . the refuge of art.

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  In an atelier once a shoe factory, an artist paints walls,

  cromlechs, and cairns with pigmented stone-dust:

  dolmens with markings from an unknown past,

  horses chiseled in chalk on bluestone,

  a huntsman’s frieze in Paleolithic time.

  Slate tiles light his vigil over stags in flight,

  bison stampeding, wild aurochs with lyre-shaped

  horns, horses galloping his walls, and upon them

  serpents, spirals, lozenges, and stars.

  In the dawn of humanity, children built passage tombs

  for the dead: stone hives in earth for the hum of spirit.

  At solstice still, the sun enters their chambers precisely

  for seventeen minutes. Certain years also the moon.

  Wintering swans fly over as the stars hiss out.

  In hollow pits the dead repose, bones whitening