TO IRENE AND ALFRED BRENDEL
While you were singing, fall arrived.
A splinter set the stove alight.
While you were singing, while you flew,
the cold wind blew.
And now you crawl the flat expanse of
my greasy stove top, never glancing
back to whence you arrived last April,
slow, barely able
to put one foot before the other.
So crushing you would be no bother.
Yet death’s more boring to a scholar’s eye
than torment, fly.
While you were singing, while you flew, the leafage
fell off. And water found it easier
to run down to the ground and stare,
disinterested, back into air.
But your eyesight has gone a bit asunder.
The thought of your brain dimming under
your latticed retina—downtrodden,
matte, tattered, rotten—
unsettles one. Yet you seem quite aware of
and like, in fact, this mildewed air of
well-lived-in quarters, green shades drawn.
Life does drag on.
Ah, buggie, you’ve lost all your perkiness;
you look like some old shot-down Junkers,
like one of those scratched flicks that score
the days of yore.
Weren’t you the one who in those times so fatal
droned loud above my midnight cradle,
pursued by crossing searchlights into
my black-framed window?
Yet these days, as my yellowed finger-
nail mindlessly attempts to fiddle
with your soft belly, you won’t buzz with fear
or hatred, dear.
While you sang on, the gray outside grew grayer.
Damp door-frame joints swell past repair;
drafts numb the soles. This place of mine
is in decline.
You can’t be tempted, though, by the sink’s outrageous
slumped pyramids, unwashed for ages,
nor by sweet, shiftless honeymoons
in sugar dunes.
You’re in no mood for that. You’re in no mood to
take all that sterling-silver crap. Too good to
let yourself in for all that mess.
Me too, I guess.
Those feet and wings of yours! they’re so old-fashioned,
so quaint. One look at them, and one imagines
a cross between Great-grandma’s veil
et la Tour Eiffel
—the nineteenth century, in short. However,
by likening you to this and that, my clever
pen ekes out of your sorry end
a profit and
prods you to turn into some fleshless substance,
thought-like, unpalpable—into an absence
ahead of schedule. Your pursuer
admits: it’s cruel.
What is it that you muse of there?
Of your worn-out though uncomputed derring-
do orbits? Of six-legged letters,
your printed betters,
your splayed Cyrillic echoes, often
spotted by you in days gone by on open
book pages, and—misprints abhorring—
fast you’d be soaring
off. Now, though, since your eyesight lessens,
you spurn those black-on-white curls, tresses,
releasing them to real brunettes, their ruffles,
chignons, thick afros.
While you were singing, while you flew, the birds went
away. Brooks, too, meander free, unburdened
of stickleback. Groves flaunt see-throughs—no takers.
The cabbage acres
crackle with cold, though tightly wrapped for winter,
and an alarm clock, like a time bomb, whimpers
tick-tock somewhere; its dial’s dim and hollow:
the blast won’t follow.
Apart from that, there are no other sounds.
Rooftop by rooftop, light rebounds
back into cloud. The stubble shrivels.
It gives one shivers.
And here’s just two of us, contagion’s carriers.
Microbes and sentences respect no barriers,
afflicting all that can inhale or hear.
Just us two here—
your tiny countenance pent up with fear
of dying, my sixteen, or near,
stones playing at some country squire—
plus autumn’s mire.
Completely gone, it seems, your precious buzzer.
To time, though, this appears small bother—
to waste itself on us. Be grateful
that it’s not hateful,
that it’s not squeamish. Or that it won’t care
what sort of shoddy deal, what kind of fare
it’s getting stuck with in the guise of
some large nose-divers
or petty ones. Your flying days are over.
To time, though, ages, sizes never
appear distinguishable. And it poses
alike for causes
as for effects, by definition. Even—
nay! notably—if those are given
in miniature: like to cold fingers,
small change’s figures.
So while you were off there, busy flirting
around the half-lit lightbulb’s flicker,
or, dodging me, amidst the rafters,
it—time—stayed rather
the same as now, when you acquire the stature
—due to your impotence and to your posture
toward myself—of pallid dust. Don’t ponder,
decrepit, somber,
that time is my ally, my partner.
Look, we are victims of a common pattern.
I am your cellmate, not your warden.
There is no pardon.
Outside, it’s fall. A rotten time for bare
carnelian twigs. Like in the Mongol era,
the gray, short-legged species messes
with yellow masses,
or just makes passes. And yet no one cares
for either one of us. It seems what pairs us
is some paralysis—that is, your virus.
You’d be desirous
to learn how fast one catches this, though lucid,
indifference and sleep-inducing
desire to pay for stuff so global
with its own obol.
Don’t die! Resist! Crawl! though you don’t feel youthful.
Existence is a bore when useful,
for oneself specially—when it spells a bonus.
A lot more honest
is to hound calendars’ dates with a presence
devoid of any sense or reasons,
making a casual observer gather:
life’s just another
word for non-being and for breaking rules. Were
you younger, my eyes’d scan the sphere
where all that is abundant. You are,
though, old and near.
So here’s two of us. Outside, rain’s flimsy
beak tests the windowpanes, and in a whimsy
crosshatches the landscape: its model.
You are immobile.
Still, there’s us two. At least, when you expire,
I mentally will note the dire
event, thus mimicking the loops so boldly
spun by your body
in olden times, when they appeared so witless.
Death too, you know, once it detects a witness,
less firmly puts full-stops, I bet,
than tête-à-tête.
I hope you’re not in pain, just lonely.
Pain takes up space; it therefore could only
creep toward you from outside, sneak near
you from the rear
and cup you fully—which implies, I reckon,
my palm that’s rather busy making
these sentences. Don’t die as long as
the worst, the lowest
still can be felt, still makes you twitch. Ah, sister!
to hell with the small brain’s disaster!
A thing that quits obeying, dammit,
like that stayed moment,
is beautiful in its own right. In other
words, it’s entitled to applause (well, rather,
to the reversed burst), to extend its labor.
Fear’s but a table
of those dependencies that dryly beckon
one’s atrophy to last an extra second.
And I for one, my buzzy buddy,
I am quite ready
to sacrifice one of my own. However,
now such a gesture is an empty favor:
quite shot, my Shiva, is your motor;
your torpor’s mortal.
In memory’s deep faults, great vaults, among her
vast treasures—spent, dissolved, disowned or
forgotten (on the whole, no miser
could size them, either
in ancient days or, moreover, later)—
amidst existence’s loose change and glitter,
your near-namesake, called the Muse, now makes a
soft bed, dear Musca
domestica, for your protracted
rest. Hence these syllables, hence all this prattling,
this alphabet’s cortege: ink trailers,
upsurges, failures.
Outside, it’s overcast. Designed for friction
against the furniture, my means of vision
gets firmly trained on the wallpaper.
You’re in no shape to
take to the highest its well-traveled pattern,
to stun up there, where prayers pummel
clouds, feeble seraphs with the notion
of repetition
and rhythm—seen senseless in their upper
realms, being rooted in the utter
despair for which these cloudborne insects
possess no instincts.
What will it end like? In some housefly heaven?
an apiary or, say, hidden
barn, where above spread cherry jam a heavy
and sleepy bevy
of your ex-sisters slowly twirls, producing
a swish the pavement makes when autumn’s using
provincial towns? Yet push the doors:
a pale swarm bursts
right past us back into the world—out! out!—
enveloping it in their white shroud
whose winter-like shreds, snatches, forms
—whose swarm confirms
(thanks to this flicker, bustling, frantic)
that souls indeed possess a fabric
and matter, and a role in landscape,
where even blackest
things in the end, for all their throttle,
too, change their hue. That the sum total
of souls surpasses any tribe.
That color’s time
or else the urge to chase it—quoting
the great Halicarnassian—coating
rooftops en face, hills in profile
with its white pile.
Retreating from their pallid whirlwind,
shall I discern you in their winged
(a priori, not just Elysian)
a-swirling legion,
and you swoop down in your familiar fashion
onto my nape, as though you missed your ration
of mush that thinks itself so clever?
Fat chance. However,
having kicked off the very last—by eons—
you’ll be the last among those swarming millions.
Yet if you’re let in on a scene so private,
then, local climate
considered—so capricious, flippant—
next spring perhaps I’ll spot you flitting
through skies into this region, rushing
back home. I, sloshing
through mud, might sigh, “A star is shooting,”
and vaguely wave to it, assuming
some zodiac mishap—whereas
there, quitting spheres,
that will be your winged soul, a-flurry
to join some dormant larva buried
here in manure, to show its nation
a transformation.
Translated by Jane Ann Miller and the author