TO MARK STRAND
An eyelid is twitching. From the open mouth
gushes silence. The cities of Europe mount
each other at railroad stations. A pleasant odor
of soap tells the jungle dweller of the approaching foe.
Wherever you set your sole or toe,
the world map develops blank spots, grows balder.
A palate goes dry. The traveler’s seized by thirst.
Children, to whom the worst
should be done, fill the air with their shrieks. An eyelid twitches
all the time. As for columns, from
the thick of them someone always emerges. Even in your sweet dream,
even with your eyes shut, you see human features.
And it wells up in your throat like barf:
“Give me ink and paper and, as for yourself,
scram!” And an eyelid is twitching. Odd, funereal
whinings—as though someone’s praying upstairs—poison the daily grind.
The monstrosity of what’s happening in your mind
makes unfamiliar premises look familiar.
Sometimes in the desert you hear a voice. You fetch
a camera in order to catch the face.
But—too dark. Sit down, then, release your hearing
to the Southern lilt of a small monkey who
left her palm tree but, having no leisure to
become a human, went straight to whoring.
Better sail by steamer, horizon’s ant,
taking part in geography, in blueness, and
not in history, this dry land’s scabies.
Better trek across Greenland on skis and camp
along the icebergs, among the plump
walruses as they bathe their babies.
The alphabet won’t allow your trip’s goal to be
ever forgotten, that famed point B.
There a crow caws hard, trying to play the raven;
there a black sheep bleats, rye is choked with weeds;
there the top brass, like furriers, shear out bits
of the map’s faded pelt, so that they look even.
For thirty-six years I’ve stared at fire.
An eyelid is twitching. Both palms perspire:
the cop leaves the room with your papers. Angst. Built to calm it,
an obelisk, against its will, recedes
in a cloud, amidst bright seeds,
like an immobile comet.
Night. With your hair quite gone, you still dine alone,
being your own grand master, your own black pawn.
The kipper’s soiling a headline about striking rickshaws
or a berserk volcano’s burps—
God knows where, in other words—
flitting its tail over “The New Restrictions.”
I comprehend only the buzz of flies
in the Eastern bazaars! On the sidewalk, flat
on his back, the traveler strains his sinews,
catching the air with his busted gills.
In the afterlife, the pain that kills
here no doubt continues.
“Where’s that?” asks the nephew, toying with his stray locks.
And, fingering brown mountain folds, “Here,” pokes
the niece. In the depths of the garden, yellow
swings creak softly. The table dwarfs a bouquet
of violets. The sun’s splattering the parquet
floor. From the drawing room float twangs of a cello.
At night, a plateau absorbs moonshine.
A boulder shepherds its elephantine
shadow. A brook’s silver change is spending
itself in a gully. Clutched sheets in a room elude
their milky/swarthy/abandoned nude—
an anonymous painful painting.
In spring, labor ants build their muddy coops;
rooks show up; so do creatures with other groups
of blood; a fresh leaf shelters
the verging shame of two branches. In autumn, a sky hawk keeps
counting villages’ chicklets; and the sahib’s
white jacket is dangling from the servant’s shoulders.
Was the word ever uttered? And then—if yes—
in what language? And where? And how much ice
should be thrown into a glass to halt a Titanic
of thought? Does the whole recall the neat shapes of parts?
Would a botanist, suddenly facing birds
in an aquarium, panic?
Now let us imagine an absolute emptiness.
A place without time. The air per se. In this,
in that, and in the third direction—pure, simple, pallid
air. A Mecca of it: oxygen, nitrogen. In which
there’s really nothing except for the rapid twitch-
ing of a lonely eyelid.
These are the notes of a naturalist. The naughts
on nature’s own list. Stained with flowerpots.
A tear falls in a vacuum without acceleration.
The last of hotbed neu-roses, hearing the
faint buzzing of time’s tsetse,
I smell increasingly of isolation.
And I dread my petals’ joining the crowned knot
of fire! Most resolutely not!
Oh, but to know the place for the first, the second,
and the umpteenth time! When everything comes to light,
when you hear or utter the jewels like
“When I was in the army” or “Change the record!”
Petulant is the soul begging mercy from
an invisible or dilated frame.
Still, if it comes to the point where the blue acrylic
dappled with cirrus suggests the Lord,
say, “Give me strength to sustain the hurt,”
and learn it by heart like a decent lyric.
When you are no more, unlike the rest,
the latter may think of themselves as blessed
with the place so much safer than to the big withdrawal
of what your conscience indeed amassed.
And a fish that prophetically shines with rust
will splash in a pond and repeat your oval.
1976
Translated by the author