Gisèle Celan Lestrange
He urged his starving elephants upward into the snows,
the barges still smelling of Mediterranean brine,
packed with huddled troops, men of Carthage
in ice-covered armor, some wearing desert sandals
wrapped in leaves, elephants up to their necks in snow,
trumpeting, their trunks grabbing at crumbling clouds of snow.
The colossal gray boulders swayed, moved upward,
some tumbled back into the echoing ravines.
An avalanche, forests of ice fell on Africa.
In the morning soldiers gathered remnants of red and blue silk,
dry sardines and beans, gold goblets still sandy
from desert victories, live turtles meant for soup,
a tangle of chained goats and sheep meant for sacrifice.
O you runners, walkers, horsemen, riders of bicycles,
men of sense and small gesture, commuters like me,
remember Hannibal came down from the Alps
into the warm belly of Italy, and conquered.
It was twenty years later in another place,
after errors of administration and alliance,
that he poisoned himself. What is remembered?
His colossal head asleep on the sand of Tunis,
a few dates, confusion between victories and defeats,
his elephants.
I saw a virgin who did not want to be
impregnated by words—but I do,
or did I see her pushing off the unwanted angel
when it was over, her humped-back cat hissing,
sensing perhaps the human, inhuman, natural son.
The loudest sound I ever heard came from within my ear:
babble and chaos, twins inside me, as if word and verb
from the beginning were without pause, stop, caesura—
all words meaningless, life without time and weather.
Did I hear my death conceived inside my ear,
like a child some call “the Savior”?
He stared at a word and saw his face,
in every noun and every verb—his own face.
He could understand if he saw his face
in words like ocean, or on a blank page
or in anything that might mirror him,
but he saw his own face in buts and ands,
in neither nor, in which and whose and what.
In the names of others living and dead
he saw his own face.
The moment his senses came into play,
at the very edge of any perception, in light or darkness,
the word became his flesh
with his obscene mouth, his poisonous eyes.
Secretly he drew close to certain words
he hoped might not be his face, words he misspelled
in languages he barely knew, but every letter
was hair and tooth. What was not his face
was wordlessness—wordless tears, wordless laughter—
that never came to vowel or consonant.
I remember her first as a swimmer:
I saw my mother swimming in a green and white bathing suit,
her arms reaching out across giant ocean waves,
swimming through the breakers of the Atlantic.
I stood on the shore,
knowing almost nothing, unable to go to her—
dumbfounded by the wonder of it,
It happened long before I could dress myself.
I was a little older than the weeping Chinese child
sitting alone in the rubble of Nanking—
barely old enough to be read to,
not able to tell time or count.
When I had that kind of knowledge, in her old age
she showed me herself naked, the tubes and the sack.
An hour later she said, “I must have been crazy.”
Then she swam off again and never came back.
For a few days I awoke as that child again.
Now I have learned a kind of independence.
It is mostly in dreams she comes back, younger or older,
sometimes fresh from the joy of the swim.
Five centimeters, already Chinese,
in your mother’s womb, pre-intellectual,
about sixty days. Sounds can see you,
music can see you. Fu Xu, your father,
I introduce you to him, he is a painter
already saving for your education, preparing
to carry you on his shoulders to museums.
Zhu Ming, your mother, holds you close
as it is possible to hold a being close,
rare as an Empress, Freudian Chinese therapist,
she will teach you the joys and sorrows
of writing Chinese. May you spend
many happy years washing ink from your hands.
You have made the Great Wall of China bleed.
Who am I? Something like a tree
outside your window: after you are born,
shade in summer, in winter my branches
heavy with snow will almost touch the ground,
may shelter deer, bear, and you.
Surrounded by a great Chinese wall of love,
he is already three weeks old and has a name.
His mother combs his hair with her hand, nurses him.
Soon he will learn the tragic news: the world is not all love.
He has already begun to earn a living,
a little of his poopoo was just put in a flower pot.
The least part of him bears the seal of his Manufacturer.
Now that you are looking over the edge of the world,
who will blame you for refusing to exchange
your mother’s warm breast for rubber and warm glass?
Will you ever again be content? There will be laughter
and music, the solace of small talk, the solace
of art or science, twelve-year-old whiskey.
You will search the earth through hard years
to find somewhere in a timeless bed, or Venice,
or God forbid in the back seat of a car,
the return of such contentment. Alexander,
fight the bottle, fight it with all your being.
I will fight at your side.
Big fool, my ancestors understood
we live in two societies: time and that other society
with its classes and orders, which you, Mr. America,
like to think you can ascend or descend at will.
Do I, a baby,
have to tell you there are laws that are not legislated,
judges neither appointed nor elected?
You are wetting your pants to talk to me.
Did it ever cross your mind I like to be ten months old,
going on eleven? You are trying to rob me of my infancy
because I have all the time in the world, and you don’t.
On this May evening passing round the world
I probably have more diapers on the shelf
than you have years to go. I wish every time I shit
you’d have another year. Now that’s an honest wish,
better than blowing out candles.
(Secretly you want to learn from me.)
You say I look like a prophet. Did it ever cross your mind
I would just like to be a bore like you?
Stop thinking about the Jew, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist thing!
The Long March wasn’t from Kovno to Queens.
In summa: you are old and I am young,
that’s the way it should be. I have better things to think about
than are dreamt of in your toilet-trained world.
LETTER TO ALEXANDER FU, SEVEN YEARS OLD
A few days after your first birthday,
we had lunch on soup I made for grown-ups,
your father took you from your mother’s arms,
carried you around our house to show you the sights;
he passed a painting of barren Sarah offering Hagar
to Abraham, old as I am. Then he stopped
before a half-naked lady looking in a mirror,
her two faces made you laugh.
In the library he showed you a family
resting on a hillside while their donkey grazed.
He did not tell you who they were, or that they were
on their way to Egypt.
He explained in Chinese and English:
“In this kind of painting, you must show the source of light.
The sunlight is behind the olive tree, the donkey
and sleeping father are in shade.”
He named the colors, showed you a rainbow over a river.
You clapped hands and danced in his arms,
screeched so loud for joy, the dogs barked.
Next he came to an archangel with black wings
leading a boy carrying a fish.
He didn’t tell you the boy will take fish gall,
put it into his father’s eyes and cure his blindness.
Your father is a Chinese artist with a green card,
you are an American citizen in his arms.
Six years have passed. I read this letter to Alexander,
asked him what it meant.
He said, “It means Daddy likes me.
He should have explained in English before Chinese.
Abraham lived a hundred years,
had a baby and made God laugh.
God tells the heart what to do,
the heart tells the brain what to do.
I like that story, I want to take it home.”
TO ANGELINA, ALEXANDER’S COUSIN, WHOSE
CHINESE NAME MEANS HAPPINESS
She lies naked, five days old,
a chance that history might be kindness and love,
a chance the size and strength of her hands—
the rarest Chinese-American beauty,
certain to break hearts.
May she teach her children Mandarin,
Tu Fu and calligraphy,
however busy the city.
May she know the joy of singing,
may she play a musical instrument,
may she find her own way in the wilderness.
Under the seven halts in the sky,
may she and her brother who is four
having sucked from the breast
of one mother, swear on her dark nipple
to be true to her nature.
I remember an ancient Chinese poet
saw a nine-year-old beauty
in a rose garden.
No one near the child
would speak except in whispers—
such was the power and burden of beauty.
After ten ancient years
the poet returned to marry her.
Later, the French and British
in Beijing ravished the sacred garden,
pillaged the Summer Palace.
It was not enough for the Brits
to have roses bloom at Westminster in December . . .
Angelina, you are five days old
and I have some 28,000 days.
If I were not married, I would wait.
Some of the self-containment of my old face
has been sandblasted away. The “yellow wind”
is blowing and my mouth and face burn
from the Gobi dust that scorches the city
after its historic passage over the Great Wall.
When I was young, I hosed the Atlantic salt
off my body—the salt was young too.
In China, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”
means something more; work, no matter how cruel,
is part prophecy. Workers in fields
that were Chinese eight thousand years ago,
their plows and terraces a kind of calligraphy,
face the living and the dead, whose windy fortress
takes on a mortal form: the Great Wall.
Even here the North Wind abducts a beauty.
Never before have I heard ancient laughter.
In China, I can taste the dust on my own grave
like salt. The winter coal dust shadows every wall
and window, darkens the lattice and the rose,
offers its gray society to the blue cornflower,
the saffron crocus, the red poppy.
The moon
brushed by calligraphy, poetry and clouds,
touched, lowered toward mortality—
to silk, to science, to paper,
requires that the word and painting respond
more intimately to each other, when the heart
is loneliest and in need of a mother,
when the ocean is drifting away,
when the mountains seem further off.
The birds sing in the dark before sunrise
because sunlight is delayed by dust and the sound
of a poet grinding his own ink from stone
according to the moon’s teaching.
I am happy to be here, even if I can’t breathe.
The emperor of time falls from a tree,
the dust rises.
On a red banner across the center of a cave house
there is painted in gold Chinese letters:
“Strive to Build Socialist Spiritual Civilization.”
On the right side hangs a red banner saying,
“Intellectuals: Cleaning Shithouses for Ten Years
in the Cultural Revolution Clears the Head.”
Down the left side is pasted
a lantern-thin red and black paper-saying,
“When Spring Comes Back, the Earth is Green.”
Down the hill is China: the people give little importance
to what they call “spring couplets,” the paper-sayings
pasted with wheat-flour and water above the lintels
and down the sills of peasant houses. They seldom notice
they enter and depart through the doors of poetry.
An ancient story is told in calligraphy.
Until the rain takes over my life I’ll never change,
although I know by heart the Lord’s Prayer
and the prayer Christ prayed to his father
in John, chapter 17, sanctifying himself.
Trying to convert me would be like teaching a dog to drive a car
just because it likes to go out for a drive.
On the other hand I am a dog that has been well treated
by his master. He kisses me and I lick his face. When he can
he lets me off the leash in the woods or at the beach.
I often sleep in his bed.
ON TRYING TO REMEMBER TWO CHINESE POEMS
I’ve forgotten the book, the poet,
the beauty of calligraphy,
the poems made to be seen and read out loud,
two lost songs on hanging scrolls
stolen by foreigners . . .
White as frost,
a piece of freshly woven silk
made a fan, a bright moon.
She, or my lady, kept a fan nearby,
its motion a gentle summer breeze . . .
He dreaded the coming of autumn
when the north wind breaks the summer heat
and the fan is dropped unwanted
into a lacquer box,
its short term of favor ended.
A catalog of beds:
riverbed, flower bed, family bed.
My mother died when I was three,
dreadful to be a child in baby clothes.
I climbed into her bed and tried to nurse,
clutching her body with all my strength;
not knowing she was dead I spoke to her,
called to her. I remember thinking,
before, when I wept and ached for her,
although she was sick she came to me,
she whispered and caressed me,
then the lamp went out
and my mother coughed by the chilly window.
. . . A night of restless birds.
Without warning
a great forest fire, a devouring flaming wind,
rolling mountains of fire
with nothing to stop them but the sea.
Woman is half the sky.
POSTCARD TO WALT WHITMAN FROM SIENA
Today I walked along the vaulted hall
of a Renaissance hospital opposite the Duomo
and I thought of you, Walt Whitman, in your forties,
writing letters for the wounded and dying.
This October Italian morning is clean as the air of Montauk.
In the sunlit galleries among medieval painters
there is a kind of gossip about the life of Christ
—the artists did not sign their names,
worked for the honor of illumination,
gold leaf, not leaves of grass.
I remember you sang Italian arias
and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in your bathtub.
To wash the horribly wounded and the dying,
you did not need to think of them as Jesus.
Walt, I saw a cradle that was a church that you could rock.
Yesterday at five o’clock I heard the rosary
up to the “ joys and sorrows” of the Virgin, had coffee,
then returned for the litany, metaphors about the Virgin:
star of the sea, lily of the valley, tower of ivory—
like you and your America.
Walt, I know you and the Virgin Mother
have conversation with the poor.
I try to listen.
She felt ashamed. She was only a poor woman
no different from any other. Whom could she ask to forgive her?
She was taught in childhood if you wrong someone
only the person you wrong can forgive you, not God.
She could sew and sell her sewing. Fruit of the womb,
He was not her only son, He was not His own Father.
People found it easier to believe after the parables
the first miracle, the water to wine,
His going to hell, His suffering, the rising.
She wept. His flesh tore like paper.
She did not want anything to happen to the good He had done,
the love and kindness He taught.
She remembered the pleasures of His childhood,
a donkey ride to Egypt, the Passover meals, the joy of His being
a child carpenter making His first table
years before the “love meals.” She knew that sometimes
people nursed the sick and dying,
thinking they were helping Him in His suffering.
She said, “It’s too late for Him, but do it anyway,
He would like you to feed the sick and hungry—
for the suffering people themselves.”
Once a man, twice a child.
Sometimes behind the door or in the street
she heard them call her “Our Lady.”
Although the virgin goddess, sister of Apollo, was more beautiful,
what does the moon goddess offer the poor and grieving now.
It was better to be a mother who worked all day.
Sometimes she would bathe, powder her face, put on a blue dress
and sit at the window to hear them talk in the street.
ALLEGORY OF THE LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER
I came to Athens, and no one knew me.
—Democritus
1
Not myth, not document or hymn,
but a way of remembering by writing
and rewriting—as it turned out, he wrote
a page about the distance between father
and son, mother and daughter,
as if it were natural law
that they reflect one another. Laughing,
he wrote, “Often they meet like water and sky
that, at a distance, seem to touch . . .
and the moon and sun are like father and son,
each sometimes an eclipse of the other.”
Love tore open the oak chest of his memories:
what were names and titles became
figures of speech, slips of the tongue,
the bright day of the soul.
A small child, he remembered his joy before he could read or write,
he wrote the shape of the letter e
he knew but could not name.
And so through the years he learned a touch of what was new
that later became something remarkable he could name.
Gray now, in a garden at a stone table
below a trellis of grape leaves he sleeps on his books.
2
The first days of March,
the smell of the newborn in the air
brought his imitations and guffaws
over the miracles and illusions of everyday life:
his birth and death—donkeys
chewing the same grass, breaking the same wind.
Loving donkeys, he was pleased
that in medieval views of the Nativity
the donkey stood for the Synagogue,
the cow the Church of Rome.
Laughing became anapestic giggles,
hee-haws. He wrote a farce
with a chorus of barbers and shoemakers.
Unbalanced, he tripped over his roots
between father and son, mothers and daughters.
He slept with his dogs, laughed
about the seasons passing more quickly,
the worship and praise his god had disregarded.
On the inner surface of a bowl, he wrote scripture,
poured water in, stirred until the writing was dissolved,
then filled his mouth, gargled, swallowed, and grinned.
I hear a Te Deum of . . . “Who are you to think . . .
touch religion like a hot stove,
hide bad news and the dead . . . a fool will light candles,
a fool will bless the children, a fool is ceremonious.”
I see my first roadside wildflowers,
the lake—every sunfish nibble is a kiss.
On a summer afternoon
the clouds and I are useless brothers;
Eros carves his bow with a kitchen knife.
I read by the light of fire blazing in their hands:
my father who I thought would die forever,
my mother who I thought would live forever.
I won’t forget the child who could not speak his name,
Rossini arias, the condoms on the floor,
the studying, the sweet and sour of moral purpose,
under a frowning etching of Beethoven.
The cuckoo clock was moved from room to room.
Age ten, I flew a red flag for revolution
in my bedroom and yearned for a better world.
I’ve made my family into an entertainment.
Once I named their symbols: the sewing basket,
fruits and animals, as their attributes.
I could show us as we were at home,
walking across a New York street or at the ocean
each brooding alone in the sand.
There is a lullaby children sing to the old.
The truth is, now in death we hold hands.
A creature half horse, half human,
my father herded his mares and women together
for song, smell and conversation. He taught me
to love wine, music and English poetry.
Like the Greeks he left the temple’s interior
for priests, he observed outside
where he could see the pediment and caryatids.
If he saw a beauty out walking, or on a journey,
the proper centaur offered to carry her
over ice, or across a river—he’d bolt
to the edge of a wood, a place of sunlight.
He slid her gently down his back,
held her to him with a hoof.
Hooves cut. How could he touch with tenderness?
I feel his loneliness when I am just with horses,
or just with humans. There was a time
when he was tied to a tree,
so he could not go to one or the other.
Now his city crushed deep in the ground
has disappeared in darkness
—which is a theme for music.
He licked the blood from a trembling foal,
he galloped back to his books.
Today the North Wind fathers,
which is why it is said mares
often turn their hindquarters to the wind
and breed foals without the aid of stallions.
A VISIT TO THE ISLAND OF JAMAICA
I
Foggy weather.
The most aloof birds
come closer to the earth,
confused by the apparent
lowering of the clouds and sky.
I walk in these descended clouds,
set birds off in terror.
The fish don’t care.
I surf cast a silver spoon
into the clouds
in the direction of the sea.
II
Last summer in Long Island
I saw a pair of white egrets
standing at the shoreline.
Now in Jamaica I see hundreds of them
swooping above me,
more delicate than gulls—
beyond Fern Gully
where the road leads into fields of sugar cane,
the old slave plantations.
The flights of white birds
remind me of alarmed swallows.
Then I see what they are doing:
hundreds of birds are driving
a single buzzard out of the valley.
I am afraid of what I see.
They are diving again and again
to protect their nests.
In just a few days
I have become accustomed
to seeing egrets perch on cattle
or standing silently beside
motionless.
Now I see them fighting for life,
summoning whatever violence they have,
unable to be graceless.
One by one, not as a flock,
the birds dive, pursue,
but do not touch.
Off the Caribbean,
a fresh afternoon wind
lifts the egrets higher
and gives the red-throated scavenger,
who must also feed its young,
a momentary passage
down into the tall, moist grass.
IN FRONT OF A POSTER OF GARIBALDI
1
When my Italian son
admired a poster of Garibaldi
in the piazzetta of Venice,
a national father in a red shirt,
gold chain, Moroccan fez and fancy beard,
I wished the boy knew the Lincoln
who read after a day’s work,
the commoner, his honesty.
My knees hurt from my life and playing soccer—
not that I see Lincoln splashing with his kids
in the Potomac. Lord knows where his dead son led him.
2
My son tells me Fortuna could have put
Lincoln and Garibaldi in Venice—
Garibaldi in red silk, Lincoln
in a stovepipe hat black as a gondola.
My son mimics Garibaldi:
“Lincoln, you may be the only man in the piazza
to log down the Mississippi
and walk back the 1,500 miles to Illinois
but you are still a man who calls all pasta macaroni.
How do you know where you are going?
Your shoes are straights, no lasts,
no right or left, no fashion, white socks.
How can the President of the United States
make such a brutta figura?”
3
I can’t speak for Lincoln,
any more than I can sing for Caruso
—toward the end when Caruso sang,
his mouth filled with blood.
Not every poet bites into his own jugular:
some hunger, some observe the intelligence of clouds.
I was surprised to see a heart come out
of the torn throat of a snake. I know a poet
whose father blew his brains out
before his son was born, who still leads his son
into the unknown, the unknowable.
4
My son tells me I must not forget
Garibaldi fought for liberty in six countries
including Uruguay, refused the command
of a corps that Lincoln offered. He asked
to be head of the Union armies and for
an immediate declaration against slavery,
he was the “King’s flag,” defeated
the papal armies in 1866,
which gave the Jews equality in Italy.
5
I’ve always had a preference
for politics you could sing
on the stage of the Scala.
I give my son Lincoln and Garibaldi
as guardian angels.
May he join a party and a temple
that offer a chair to the starving and unrespectable.
We come from stock that on the day of atonement
asks forgiveness for theft, murder, lies, betrayal,
for all the sins and crimes of the congregation.
May he take his girls and bride to Venice,
may the blessings come like pigeons.
Lincoln waves from his gondola and whispers,
“I don’t know what the soul is,
but whatever it is, I know it can humble itself.”
There was a risk, a dividing of waters,
there was an Irish Jew whose father arrived
in Belfast from Kovno, heard English,
got off the boat and was in Ireland three years
before he discovered he wasn’t in England.
His face was something like a distant sky,
his eyes were so restless one looked like the moon,
the other a sunset. Unlucky, he lost the money
for a rainy day, their daily bread, did time, then vanished.
His daughter waited all her life for the miracle
of his return, offered comfort to those beyond reason
who hoped for riches of all sorts. Years passed,
he played roulette in Monte Carlo,
won 100,000 pounds on red 3,
gave it to his wife and children, disappeared
in Provence, where he studied mystical
philosophy, the universe still on a roll,
the greatest of all crap shoots, he wrote poems,
the earth winning the familiar waters, the stars
taking the heavens, and darkness was the big winner.
TO MY SON’S WIFE ON HER WEDDING DAY
First I embrace you. I come prepared with this,
a wedding song, a love song beneath your balcony
because the world is different now,
there is a little more hope, a wild flower of hope.
It is for you to name it.
If marriage were a canoe—a foolish idea,
most will say, marriage may be a canoe in Montana
but not in Tuscany. They are wrong. Be Iroquois.
In a canoe both paddle, see how beautiful the lake is,
in every fiery sunrise the clouds of remembrance.
Waterlilies are wild flowers. Listen to the loons
surrounded by wilderness. Stay far from fashion.
If you ever put on war paint, jump in the lake
as soon as you can. Remember
when your brave husband caught his first fish, he wept
because he thought I would not let him throw it back.
To live together forever in one tent
you will have to learn to make fire by rubbing
two sticks together. Every Iroquois prays
that a great spirit will turn the hearts of the fathers
to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers,
lest thunder and lightning strike the earth with a curse.
to Federico Zeri
1
I pass a half-naked child
asleep on a marble slab in Grand Central Station.
I remember a painting: the Infant Christ
asleep on a red marble slab,
and another: the man, Christ Dead,
on the same red marble stone of unction.
The great iron clocks
in the railroad stations of Christendom
witness nothing,
they are simply above with their everydayness,
in natural, artificial and supernatural light.
I turn my head away from the faceless
puddles of drying urine
in the marble passageways
between nowhere and the street above.
I turn away from time’s terrible sufficiency
that is, like God, in need of nothing whatsoever.
I am not pitchman enough to speak
for the poor of the world so hungry
God only appears to them as bread.
2
Last June under the horologe of the Italian sky,
my mind full of timetables and illusions,
I went back to Siena after forty years,
faithful to something, the city scolded
by San Bernardino of the flaming heart
for loving the Madonna so much it had forgotten Jesus.
Before a painting of the kneeling Archangel
announcing to Mary a child will be born to her:
I noted she wears two delicate, looped earrings,
from which hang two little gold crosses,
signs of the Crucifixion that has not yet occurred.
Time is nothing—an echo;
night and day are only a foreshadowing.
I have not yet disappeared.
His smile says he has had the smell of it,
he flies a rooster tail in his hat.
In a torn army jacket
the old soldier pounds the tavern table.
They bring him an onion, garlic and a rose.
He discards the rose. He says, “To hell and back
a man stinks of what he is.” He laughs:
“I myself am a sack of piss—thanks to brandy,
mine smells like an apple orchard.”
He remembers the gardens of women:
summer women, when they pass, enter
a man’s soul through the nostrils, the consolation
the good Lord provides old soldiers.
A smell can be as naked as a breast.
His red eyes shine with tears from the onion he eats.
You, a goiter on my neck, lick my ear with lies.
Generously, you mother and father a stolen boy.
The Visconti put you on their flag, a snake
devouring a child, or are you throwing up a man
feet first? Some snakes hunt frogs, some freedom of will.
A man can count years on your snakeskin,
yet I must listen, smile, and kiss your cheek,
or you may swallow the child completely. In Milan
there is a Bramante, the throned Virgin in glory.
On the marble floor below her, two figures:
a human-size dead frog on its back,
and a dead naked man. There’s hope!
My eyes look into the top of my head
at the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me.
I have protected the flame of a match
I lit and then discarded
more than I cared for you.
I had little to go on:
a postcard that came for no reason,
forty years ago,
that told me of your birth and name,
but not who was your father.
I would never give my child your name.
In the woods and ditches of my life you
are less than a wildflower.
If you have a garden I
am less than melted snow.
I never held your hand
and this is the only bedtime story
I will ever tell you.
No love, no prayer, no flame.
Home, I bang the sand out of my shoes.
I haven’t the craft to make a goat’s-belly bagpipe
from a shoe or the art to play it,
but I can see my cold wet shoes
as unwept-for bodies without a poet.
I speak for the leather ghosts of children.
I hold one up: a newborn infant without breath.
I cannot smack it into life. I face
mountains of shoes, endless lines of children
holding their parents’ hands. I hold a shoe to my ear
like a seashell—hear a child’s voice: “God is the old woman
who lived in a shoe, she had so many children . . .”
I hear the cries of cattle
begging for mercy in a slaughterhouse,
I smell the stink of the tannery.
I am a shoemaker, not a poet.
Creature to creature,
two years before we met
I remember I passed his table
at the Cedar Tavern.
He who never knew his father
seemed to view all strangers
as his father’s good ghost,
any passing horse as capable
of being Pegasus, or pissing
in the street.
I who knew my father
was wary of any tame raccoon
with claws and real teeth.
At our first meeting forty years ago,
before the age of discovery,
I argued through the night
against the tragic sense of life;
I must have thought God wrote in spit.
I keep a petrified clam, his gift, on my desk.
These gray rings and layers of stone,
shape of a whale’s eye, are old as any desert.
Measured against it, the morning, the Hudson River
outside my window are modern and brash,
the star of David, the cross, the hand of Fatima,
are man-made weathervanes.
My clamstone has weight and lightness.
It is my sweet reminder that flesh,
perhaps love, can remain in the natural world
long as poetry, tides, phases of the moon.
Tomorrow I shall wear it in my right eye,
a monocle for my talk on the relationship
between paleontology and anthropology.
Bless Celia, the cat of his middle years,
with her ribbons and hats, her pagan smile.
Bless the bobcat that was his in boyhood,
that killed a police dog in battle
on Main Street, Worcester, lost a foot for it
and had to be shot. A child with a leaf in his head,
he walked through devil’s bit scabious,
marsh ragwort, vernal grass
until the meadows wept. Bless his first garden,
his bird feeder still there after eighty-one years.
Did any of his long-forgotten kindnesses
alter history a little?
What a luftmensch he might have been,
his feet barely touching Commercial Street,
dancing home at three in the morning
with an ocean of money!
But how could he face the moon or the land
beside his house without a garden? Unthinkable.
I think what is written
in roses, iris and trumpet vine
is read by the Lord God.
Such a place of wild and ordered beauty
is like a heart that takes on the sorrows
of the world . . . He translates into all tongues.
They say my old friend is “a good man with a worm in him.”
An old revolutionary, he denies his least good fortune.
Owning his home makes him uncomfortable,
and it’s true he slept in a fruit crate with his sisters,
outside their window on a brick wall he told me:
“Jesus Saves, Free Tom Mooney, Fuck You.”
He believes the working class sees a different sunset.
No one will deny his life of wild love
has left him caring, with a sweet intimacy
few others have. When I took him fishing,
he wouldn’t put a worm on his hook.
He needed to be held, so his country
held him in jail awhile, nonviolent,
manic New Englander. In conversation
his hands moved across sentences, a music
of almost indiscernible Latin consonants
and Tennessee cakewalking vowels.
What was sight but a God to fool the eye?
Although he looked at you he stared away,
his eyes moved across some distant lawn
like the eyes on a peacock’s tail.
Now his life of love, books and nightmares
seems 19th-century American allegory,
without the lofty language.
Could he imagine the lives of those who read
without the slightest attention to form,
the lives of readers of newspapers, books
of passing interest, or nothing at all—
their deaths a slip of the tongue?
A generation that might kill itself
gathered in him as if he were a public place:
to pray, agitate and riot. The man and flame he was
waved back and forth in the wind,
became all tongue. Falling off his ladder
in Ireland his last morning, “Whack. Huroo.
Take your partners,” caught without time
to tell what happened, locked in a museum,
he tried to break through the glass door.
That evening in Manhattan he fell silent
on the floor of a taxi, the meter running.
Gluck said of early opera, “It stinks of music.”
Cal, your life stank of poetry . . . “Buzz, buzz,” he said,
“a few bring real honey to the hive.”
The red fisherman
stands in the waters of the Sound,
then whirls toward an outer reef.
The krill and kelp spread out,
it is the sea anemone that displays the of,
the into, the within.
He throws the net about himself
as the sea breaks over him.
The krill in the net and out of it
follow him. He is almost awash
in silver and gold.
How much time has passed.
He believes the undulation of krill
leads to a world of less grief,
that the dorsal of your smelt,
your sardine, your whitebait, humped
against the ocean’s spine, cheers it
in its purpose.
The krill break loose, plunge down
like a great city of lights. He is left
with the sea that he hears
with its if and then, if and then, if and then.
When Yahweh spoke to me, when I saw His name
spelled out in blood, the pounding in my heart
separated blood from ink and ink from blood,
and Yahweh said to me, “Know your soul’s name
is blood and ink is the name of your spirit.
Your father and mother longed with all their hearts
to hear my Name and title given to every generation.”
When I heard the clear difference between my spirit
and my soul, I was filled with great joy,
then I knew my soul took the hillside
under its own colors, in the mirror red as blood,
and that my spirit stood its ground in the mirror
that is black as ink, and that there raged
a ferocious war in my heart between blood and ink.
The blood was of the air and the ink of the earth
and the ink defeated the blood, and the Sabbath
overcame all the days of the week.
You are Jehovah, and I am a wanderer.
Who should have mercy on a wanderer
if not Jehovah? You create and I decay.
Who should have mercy on the decayed
if not the creator? You are the Judge
and I the guilty. Who should have mercy
on the guilty if not the Judge? You are All
and I am a particle. Who should have mercy
on a particle if not the All?
You are the Living One and I am dead.
Who should have mercy on the dead if not
the Living One? You are the Painter and Potter
and I am clay. Who should have mercy on clay
if not the Painter and Potter? You are the Fire
and I am straw. Who should have mercy on straw
if not the Fire? You are the Listener
and I am the reader. Who should have mercy
on the reader if not the Listener? You
are the Beginning and I am what follows.
Who should have mercy on what follows
if not the Beginning? You are the End and I am
what follows. Who should have mercy
on what follows if not the End?
Ancient of Days,
I hear the sound and silence, the lumière
of molds, disease and insects, I believe poetry
like kindness changes the world, a little.
It reaches the ear of lion and lamb, it enters
the nest of birds, the course of fish, it is water
in the cupped hands of Arab and Jew.
Reader, in writing this I become you, I must awake
in your darkness and mine and sleep with your sleep
and mine. As a stone I will not stone the innocent
or guilty, my Arabs and Jews will do
what my imagination wishes: make peace.
If you bring the flood, I will dam you up
as a river, though I do it on lined paper,
with an awkward hand. I believe something is thundering
in the mold, churning the hives of insects,
that the breath of every living creature mixes
in a kiss of life, that the killer’s breath may taste of honey,
that when the forms of music change,
the walls of the city tremble.
Gisèle Celan Lestrange
MON PÈRE, ELEGY FOR PAUL CELAN
1
After his death, her blood was glass
that shattered within her, my mother could not bleed
or heal. Once in the moonlit snows of France
she offered his dark soul her breast.
Now for her night meal, she stares
at a little fish and vegetables
ladled out of being,
as if they were a family crucifix.
Her work: etchings she holds up
(the whorls of her fingertips stained by acid),
small, detailed views of mountains,
coastlines, complex clouds.
Sometimes you simply have to repeat
a little of the design of the creator—
nothing whatsoever made by man.
2
My father could turn the word being
into begging, into bed, into please,
his son twists his legs around his own neck,
man of rope, no farther from my father
than where a tree may root;
I hang by my teeth
from a rope fixed to the roof,
while the 19th-century French band below
plays “Art Is the True Religion.”
I bite a stranger’s leather tongue.
* The poet Paul Celan threw himself into the Seine April 21, 1970 (the first night of Passover). His son is an aerialist and juggler.
3
Juggler as poet, not the fire-eater,
not the fat man, like father, like son:
my chilly eyes and two hands keep three, four, ten,
twenty clubs or white plates going in air,
like after likes, the sins of the fathers,
red silk balls, kept up in the air.
I throw up household effects: his Hebrew Bible,
a yellowing toothbrush, shoes and ties,
his murdered family, his thanks
that it happened to them, not to him.
I fling up against the crowd
my father’s head, red silk balls, white plates
of the unthinkable, a way of mourning,
Jerusalem remembered, synagogue as circus.
Prophecy has fallen to sleight of hand,
better to learn magic, better to change
two blue eggs in a lacquer box
into three fluttering white doves.
4
Hanging on by a hair,
on that night different
from all other nights,
he could not pull himself out
by a breath.
He was something like hair
with feeling only at its roots.
Coming from a musical family,
he could not bear to hear music,
he could not stop
his constant, endless bleeding
in private, in public,
on the bread he ate,
on my mother’s face.
Drowning
sent his life and blood off
in water like smoke.
His fingers were dactyls again.
A fisherman found him
decomposing black below
Notre Dame Cathedral,
where in the Chapel of Virtues
the Virgin wept for her son
surrounded by images
of women without lives:
Temperance, Fortitude, Justice,
and Prudence with her three eyes
to see past, present and future.
Once his garments were warmed
when Jehovah quieted the earth
with the south wind.
The language of the psalms
has a different word
for why asked in the past
and why asked in the future.
Why lose the rest of spring, mon père?
One by one I lit the candles of nothingness,
a candle for each nostril, the eyes and ears,
a candle for the mouth, penis and anus.
Under the clouds of nothingness,
below the flaming particles of the universe,
I stood beside the nothing tree,
I ate my fill.
To God I swore nothing.
In the blood and fires of without
nothing was written. I heard the sermons of nothing
and I knew nothing had come, and would come again,
and nothing was betrayed.
I called prayer
the practice of attention. Nothing was
the balance of things contrary.
Disobedient, I did not make
the sacrifice of the lamb or the child.
My candelabrum was ablaze.
LINES FOR A STAMMERING TURKISH POET
to Edouard Roditi
1
When he was a child, he thought of sea birds as Muslim,
fidgety land birds as Christians and Jews;
in his village, when a man approached, the women
squatted down in the roadside and turned away,
the branches of pomegranate and orange trees
heavy with fruit, lowered to the ground . . . .
In the sky-blue copybook of his school days
he was compelled by revolution to change
from an Arabic alphabet, with its gardens and forests,
to twenty-nine Roman letters bare as sticks.
Now he is older, the birds have no religion.
He walks the industrial gutters that cross the silk routes,
faithful to January, two-faced god of beginnings.
He speaks for, stammers for—mothers, mothers
and mothers, he gets tangled in four thousand years
of apron strings of the Hittite, Greek, Roman,
Christian mother Goddesses and ordinary
women who do most of the work.
He has come to a bridge, the tongue of a balance
that crosses the Bosphorus between Europe
and Asia. He says: “Although it seems for commerce
not wisdom, a br-br-br-br-bridge
across the meandering Bosphorus is a Goddess.
They fa-fa-fa-found her statue near Ephesus.”
Her face had a beauty exceptional
even for a God—lady of wild things,
sister of Apollo, from her neck she wore
a wreath of eighteen bull’s balls to show
the fear and love the Greeks had for her,
the kind of sacrifice she commanded.
2
In the agora of rusty girders and broken concrete
sheep graze among burning automobile tires.
At dawn, when Gods roll over in our human beds
and the sea mends the torn robes of the mother Goddess,
in mosques that were churches in Byzantium,
beneath the giant calligraphy of sacred names,
men without shoes, standing,
cup their hands behind their ears at the beginning
of prayer to better hear a voice before they touch
their foreheads to the ground, prostrate themselves.
Strengthened by years of his hatred, and hatred of hatred,
he says, stammering, “They are all covered with dust,
a kind of bone meal of those they have prayed to kill,
hoping to follow the green bird that leads to paradise.”
3
He offers two souls, East and West, over coffee
like honey cakes to Muslims, Christians and Jews.
He writes his love poems in a fifteen-syllable
Greek line. Sweet-faced, bearded, sometimes jailed,
lonely Ottoman of extra syllables,
he sees downhill, above the dark river
long accustomed to slaughter,
the marble fragments of ancient tombstones,
the Jewish cemetery, an avalanche of broken writing.
Of course chaos is not separate from form,
above Istanbul exploding stars
may be an embroidered slipper
on the bare foot of the Asian night.
With only his tongue to know, he stammers,
“A word is a sacrificial goat
and the goat sent into the wilderness.
Sometimes my semen turns to blood.”
In bear country, in a daydream,
near the lake in Canada, to save my dogs,
I fired a shotgun at a bear’s head,
turning its face and eyes into bleeding peach pits.
Mama bear gasped something less than a syllable,
made for the forest like a shot,
stood up for a moment at the brambles
like my small son standing in bed asking “Why? Why?”
What can she teach her two cubs now? They are still hungry.
Not the lesson of acorns, not the song of grubs in damp stumps—
that mice are sweet. Once she nursed her cubs while she slept,
two heartbeats per minute, under branches and fresh snow.
Now they tongue the blood from her face—
then they die in my cruel song.
The park benches, of course, are ex-Nazis.
They supported the ass of the SS
without questioning; the old stamp Juden Verboten
has been painted out.
The only signs of World War II, photographs,
displayed at the classical Greek museum,
show its roof bombed, now handsomely repaired,
although the sculpture itself has been overcleaned
by a very rough hand.
But the flowers are the children of other flowers,
the hypocrite roses and the lying begonias,
part of gardens so sentimental, so ordered,
they have nothing to say about freedom and beauty,
nothing to say about the burning bush.
They should see the flowers on the hills of Judea,
pushing between limestone and gypsum, ordinary
beautiful flowers with useful Hebrew and Arabic names,
useful to children, old people, everyone,
their colors and grace, the poetry of them,
page after page.
A man can hide under his shirt
flowers made by metal and fire, stems cut,
neck wounds, missing bone, history
of generations, new branches grafted
onto old stumps.
The saying goes in the streets of Munich:
“Wear a good overcoat.” Everyone knows,
you can put a dead body under a handkerchief.
Every handkerchief’s a grave,
that’s why so many gentlemen wear clean handkerchiefs
in their breast pockets. For the ladies, lace gloves
serve the same purpose—blue handkerchiefs, pink gloves,
green, lavender und so weiter are symbolic—
but you have to really know—white for Jew,
blue for Jew, green for Polack, pink for—
you’d better watch out, a little joke.
This year in the Spanish garden during Carnival
someone decapitated a donkey,
Renaissance symbol of the Old Testament,
or perhaps the meaning is, as the TV
commentary said: the donkey
stands for a fifteenth-century Jew,
or was it just Kinderspiele,
a game like this hee-haw.
Later in Italy, at the Hotel Stendhal, Parma, I discovered
my friend from Munich can sleep through anything,
a lesson he learned for life during the Allied bombings,
while I sleep four hours on, four hours off,
a lesson I learned in the U.S. Navy.
We still sleep at war. Awake, we embrace.
1
You had almost no time, you were something
not quite penciled in, you were more than darkness
that is shaped by its being and its distance from light.
(To give birth in Spanish is to give to light.)
There was the poetry of it:
a word, a letter changed perhaps
or missing and you were gone.
Every word is changed when spoken.
The beauty is you were mine and hers,
not like a house, a bed, a book, or a dog,
unsellable, unreadable, not love, but of love,
an of—with a certain roundness and a speck
that might have become an eye, might have
seen something, anything: light,
Tuscany, Montana, read Homer in Greek—
unnamed of, saved from light and darkness.
2
I was not told of you until long after,
I would not have handed down that suitcase
to her through the train window in Florence
had I known. I might have suggested tea
instead of Strega, might have fanned the air.
Fathers can do something. I didn’t ask the right questions.
I did not offer any sacrifice.
I just walked around in my usual fog looking
at pictures of the Virgin impregnated by words.
What if the Virgin Mother had miscarried? What if
the Magi arrived with all that myrrh and frankincense
like dinner guests on the wrong evening?
Our Lady embarrassed, straightening up,
Joseph offering them chairs he made and a little wine,
sinners stoned in the street
while John who would have been called the Baptist
wept in his mother’s belly.
In Canada, on a dark afternoon,
from a cabin beside Lake Purgatory
I saw your two clenched fists in a tree—
your most recent rage—until I came to my senses,
and saw two small lighted glass lamps reflected
through a window onto the maple leaves.
Was it simply that I had stolen away
in the wilderness to go fishing on your birthday,
twelve years after your death, and you
less than your rusty pliers in my fishing box?
It is late August in the moral North.
To answer your first question,
I obey the fish and game laws
of New York State, Ontario and Quebec.
The odd branch has already turned red.
As for me I have turned inside out,
I cry for revolution against myself—
no longer red, I’m parlor pink and gray,
you, less than a thumbprint on a page.
Matters still outstanding: you will not remember—
a boy, I cut school, sneaked out
to the 42nd Street library to read among readers
like a stray lion cub taken into a great pride.
I have kept your Greek grammar,
your 78 revolutions per minute
recording of Rossini’s Barber
you played to stop me from crying,
almost my first memory.
Your “valuable papers,” now valuable
only to me, I fed to a fire years ago.
Frankly I am tired of receiving letters from the dead
every day, and carrying you on my back,
out of the burning city,
in and out of the bathroom and bedroom,
you less than the smoke you wanted for a shroud.
Let us dance with Sarah behind the curtain
where God in his divine humor
tells Abraham Sarah will at ninety bear a son,
and she asks, laughing within herself, “Will I have pleasure?”
Take one foot, then the other . . . Imitate a departure
if you make it not, and each going
will lend a kind of easiness to the next.
Father, you poisoned my father.
I am standing alone, telling the truth
as you commanded. (Without too many
of the unseemly details, like the sounds of you in bed
sucking, I thought, on fruit I later would not eat.)
You, less than a seed of a wild grape.
Today, in the last moments of light
I heard a fish, a “Musky,” your nickname, break water.
As I sing my song of how you
will be remembered, if I could
out of misericordia, I’d tie you to the mast
and stuff your ears with wax. I regret
some parts of the body forgive, some don’t. Father,
do not forget your 18-inch Board of Education ruler
on which I measured my penis, marking its progress.
You kept it on your desk before you till your old age.
One reason, perhaps, for the archaic Greek smile
I wore on my face through boyhood.
I never thought I’d dig your grave with laughter.
Full of the city and accounting, I stepped out of my car
into the mist and sand near the Atlantic,
to see a bright haze within a cloud,
a wordless passage from an older testament.
I had forgotten in the unreadable night
that once like a child learning to speak I tried to write,
on a dark night of my life, something lunar,
to be my own Ordinary of secrets and rebirth.
In my prayer book I find, after the blessings
called “The Giving Thanks for Trees Blossoming”
and “The Giving Thanks for Fragrance,”
Prayers for the New Moon in large type,
night prayers for unconscious sins and new beginnings,
to be read outside in moonlight or at an open window.
I speak of prayer, it is not prayer.
I count syllables like minutes before sunset.
I have nothing to show the new moon
but a few lines about the present,
the lesser time under the sun.
Old enough, I have learned to be my own child.
To get even, have I lived my life to make adults cry?
Tonight the child runs to and from me,
already full of memory and cruel history,
talking a blue streak about injustices.
The child falls asleep. I’m up late with the moon.
It is not revelation but the mystery itself I praise.
Greetings, I hope you will not be disappointed I survived
the flood riding the back of a giant turtle. Adrift
in the waters of chaos, above the ice-covered mountain ranges
that had become part of the deep,
I saw the sun and moon embrace in terror.
I kept my senses counting the days that had no name,
I heard all manner of newborn things
crying for their mothers—nearly the last living sounds.
We swam through islands of angry faces, an ocean of rodents
devouring each other, great serpents of children knotted
together in whirlpools. I saw the beauty of jungle birds
that in mid-afternoon filled the horizon like a sunset.
Once I saw your vainglorious ark, three stories of lights,
your windows filled with riches,
a woman on the deck, her wet blouse
clinging to her breasts—I was that close.
If you had heard my call, saw me alive,
would you have reached down to save me?
It wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
But you of course were following orders, a tune as old
as Adam’s song to Eve before the serpent.
Then after all the days of nights
I heard my turtle gasp, “Hallelujah.”
I turned and saw the rainbow, the raven and the dove,
in sunlight the waters that reflected nothing, receding,
Noah, I think I am as grateful for the rainbow as you.
I have survived, corrupt and unclean.
The poor of Venice know the gold mosaic
of hunger, the grand architecture of lice,
that poverty is a heavier brocade
than any doge would shoulder. To the winter galas
the poor still wear the red silk gloves of frostbite,
the flowing cape of chilblains.
The winged lion has his piazza, lame dogs
and pigeons with broken wings have theirs.
Let the pigeons perform for dry corn
their commedia dell’arte in the palms of tourists.
The rich and poor don’t share a plate of beans.
There used to be songs about squid and sardines
in love the poor could make some money from.
A boy in bed with his family asks for a violin,
his father leaps up,
“Violin, violin, I’ll buy you a shovel!”
Moored in the dark canals of Venice,
gondolas for prisoners, for the sick,
gondolas for the dying, the hungry,
tied to poles by inescapable knots
looped by Titian.
Salute an old Venetian after his work.
Eating his polenta without quail, he sits
on a slab in the freezing mist, looking back
at the lagoon and his marble city:
years of illusion, backache, sewerage and clouds.
THE HAWK, THE SERPENTS AND THE CLOUD
In writing, he moved from the word I,
the word once a serpent curled between the rocks,
to he, the word once a hawk drifting above the reeds,
back to we: a nest of serpents.
Of course the hawk attacked the serpents.
She became a cloud, nursed us, mothered us,
scrubbed us with rain. I, once a serpent, know the Chinese
character for he is a standing figure,
the sign for she is a kneeling figure,
the word cloud is formed by two horizontal waves
above a plain, and that in writing Chinese
you must show feeling for different parts of the word.
Writing contains painting and painting writing.
Each is bird and sky to the other, soil and flower.
Their last pages are transparent: The lace makers
choose to see a world behind the words,
not the words, tatting, not stitching, an open page
of knots, never a closed fabric stitched by needles.
They see from the apples and pears on their plates
out to the orchard, from their tatting
to a bird with a piece of straw in his beak.
From combings transferred onto a running thread,
they make a row of rings resembling a reef,
a chain of knots, hammocks, fishnets,
things found in the hands of sailors.
Without looms, with their fingers,
they make bridal objects, knotted hairnets
seen in certain Roman bronze female portraits,
the twisted threads and knotted fringes of dusty
Egyptian wrappings, something for the cuff,
the lapel, the drawing room, nothing to wear in the cold.
They care about scrolls and variations,
a handkerchief, a design on a pillow,
a completed leaf, four ovals with connecting chains
becoming four peacocks, part of a second leaf,
as if they were promised the world would not
be destroyed, with or without paradise.
Noting the French for tatting is frivolité,
they make false chains, things obsolete, improper,
in search of new forms. They carry a thread
to a distant point, eight measured peacocks
of equal size with an additional thread
and the ends cut off. It has the heartless advantage
of being decorative in itself.
They sit and work in the aging light
like Achilles hiding from his pursuers
in a dress, tatting among the women,
discovered by Odysseus who offered a trap of gifts:
the women picked hammered gold leaves and bracelets,
deserted by his Gods, Achilles chose a sword.
In any fabric there are constant beginnings
and endings with cut threads
to be finished off and cut out of sight.
The lace makers read their yellow lace,
washing and ironing it is a fine art
—beautiful a straw basket filled with laundry
and language. But shall we call gossip prophecy?
Who will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children
and the hearts of the children to their fathers?
They are unworthy of undoing the laces of their own shoes.
Before the geography of flowers and fruit,
he learned warmth, breast, wetness.
He came late to mapmaking, the arches and vaults
of the compass, a real and unimagined world
of prevailing winds, coastlines and mountains,
large bodies of water, rifts and faults,
altitudes and depth. Under the stars
he studied what he learned as a child:
that geography determined history,
that weather defined places, principal products.
He would simply walk out of doors to find
the Jews of the wind arguing with the Jews of the dust:
who shall be placed among the writings,
who among the prophets, what is legend
and what is visionary dream.
He studied the deserts, the once dry Mediterranean,
the colossal sculpture of Egypt and Assyria,
art that outweathered its gods.
Under History his notes linked the Armada—
the entry: “parched Castile had nothing,
had to conquer the world”—to Napoleon leading his armies
into the Russian winter—like a carload of sheep
each marked for slaughter with a splash of red paint.
They too seemed to have a leader.
He believed the molecular connection of all living stuff
since the beginning of life made him less lonely—
no message, but a cri de coeur.
He had a small globe of the earth he kept
inside another blue and silver globe of stars.
He learned and relearned touch, flesh and place,
the simple “where is,” the colors of nearness,
the light and dark of naked bodies in repose.
He learned countries and cities as if
they were verbs, meaning beyond subject:
the word poetry came from the Greek “to make,”
the Chinese character for poetry is “to keep.”
A fine day does not forget lightning and thunder. Facts:
it was not the fifty-degrees-below-zero cold in winter,
or the ten-degrees-below-zero cold in summer,
that caused one percent of the population to die each day
in the coal and blood-black snows of the Soviet arctic.
Memory makes any place part illusion.
Weather remembers, has a long memory of itself,
oceans and landscape, nothing human.
He came to a certain calm in his studies:
the healing and destroying power of water,
the chaos of forest fires, followed by new unheard-of growth.
He noted bougainvillea and oleander
crossing continents like vacationing lovers—
he sketched the universe as an animal belly
full of exploding gases.
He had to make it all human as a bad joke.
He had cause to be frightened,
to turn his head to the beauty of it.
Under the fruit trees of this world, he wrote:
there’s a murder for every apple, every peach, every pear,
beneath the oak a starving child for every acorn,
among the evergreens a lie for every pine needle.
These are the forbidden fruit.
1
I owe a debt to the night,
I must pay it back, darkness for darkness
plus interest.
I must make something out of almost nothing,
I can’t pay back by just not sleeping
night after night. I hear them screaming
in the streets of New York, “What? What? What?”
I can’t write a check to the night,
or a promissory note: “I’ll write songs.”
Only the nightmare is legal tender.
I bribe owls, I appeal
to creatures of the night: “Help me
raccoons, catfish, snakes!”
I put my head in the tunnel of a raccoon,
pick up a fish spine in my mouth.
Perhaps the night will accept this?
Dying is my only asset.
These days driving along I turn up my brights.
I love and am grateful for anything that lights
the darkness: matches, fireworks, fireflies.
My friend who’s been to Antarctica
tells me when the sun is high against the ice
you see the shadow of the earth.
The night after all is just a shadow . . .
The debt keeps mounting.
I try to repay something by remembering
my Dante, the old five and ten thousand lira notes
had Dante’s face etched on the front.
(I bought that cheap.) Hard cash to the night
is finding out what I do not want to know
about myself, no facts acceptable,
a passage through darkness,
where the one I stop to ask, “Why? What?”
is always myself I cannot recognize.
2
If only I could coin nightmares:
a barnyard in Asia,
the last dog and cat betrayed, are no more.
A small herd of three-legged blind cows
still gives milk.
A pig with a missing snout, its face like a moon,
wades in a brook.
A horse, its mane burnt to cinders,
a rear hip socket shot off, tries to get up,
thrusting its muzzle into the dark grass.
A rooster pecks without a beak or a coxcomb.
A rabbit that eats stones, sips without a tongue,
runs without feet.
A ditch of goats, sheep and oxen
locked in some kind of embrace.
All move their faces away,
refuse the charity of man
the warrior, the domesticator.
I see a whale with eyes yards apart
swimming out of the horizon,
surfacing as if it were going to die,
with a last disassociated vision,
one eye at peace
peers down into the valleys and mountains
of the ocean, the other eye floats,
tries to talk with its lids to the multitude.
While in the great head
what is happening and what happened mingle,
for neither has to be.
I pray for some of my eyes to open and some to close.
It is the night itself that provides
a forgiveness.
My mother near her death
is white as a downy feather.
I used to think her death was as distant
as a tropical bird, a giant macaw, whatever that is—
a thing I have as little to do with
as the distant poor.
I find a single feather of her suffering,
I blow it gently as she blew into my neck and ear.
A single downy feather is on the scales,
opposed by things of weight, not spirit.
I remember the smell of burning feathers.
I wish we could sit upon the grass
and talk about grandchildren
and great-grandchildren.
A worm directs us into the ground.
We look alike.
I sing a lullaby to her about her children
who are safe and their children.
I place a Venetian lace tablecloth
of the whitest linen on the grass.
The wind comes with its song
about things given that are taken away
and given again in another form.
Why are the poor cawing, hooting,
screaming in the woods?
I wish death were a whip-poor-will
the first bird I could name.
Why is everything so heavy?
I did not think
she was still helping me to carry
the weight of my life.
Now the world’s poor are before me.
How can I lift them one by one in my arms?
A gift of a Greek horse to my enemy,
my body is a ruse so I can sack a city,
my navel, guts, penis and anus—a snake
a goddess dropped upon me. I carry within
a man whose wife was raped, a murdered friend.
Through the eyes of the horse I see death and the sun
I cannot look at steadily.
Behind me—the oceanic snail and floating mollusks
that pass their lives on the open seas.
Eros, perhaps tomorrow I shall envy them.
Their poetry is remembered for a detailed calligraphy
hard to decipher, less factual than fireflies in the night:
the picture-letters, the characters, the stuff
their words were made from were part of the meaning.
A word like “summer” included a branch of plum blossoms,
writing about “summer in a city street”
carried the weight of the blossoming branch,
while “a walk on a summer afternoon”
carried the same beautiful purple shade.
They dealt with such matters distractedly,
as though “as though” were enough, as though
the little Japanese woman with the broom
returning to her husband’s grave to keep it tidy
was less loving than the handsome woman in the café
off the lobby of the Imperial Hotel
who kissed the inside of her lover’s wrist.
In their flower arrangements, especially distinct
were the lord flower and emissary roses—
public representations now shadows.
Their generals and admirals took musicians
with them to war, certain their codes
would not be deciphered, in an age when hats
and rings were signs of authority and style.
They thought their secrets were impenetrable,
they thought they had the power to speak and write
and not be understood, they could hide the facts
behind a gold-leaf screen of weather reports.
It was Buddha who had an ear for facts:
coins dropping into the ancient cedar box,
hands clapping, the sound of temple bells and drums.
Codes were broken, ships sank, men screamed
under the giant waves, and a small hat
remained afloat longer than a battleship.
From the rock of my heart a horse rose,
that I should ride to follow them,
the night they left by taxi
from the Damascus gate, and fled toward Bombay.
My heart threw me off.
If only I had robes white enough,
But my robes were full of ashes and dust.
The rouge, lipstick, and eyeshadows
you left on my flesh, I washed off before prayer.
My heart was gone, it looked back at me
from a distance, its reins bitten through.