• III •
I stayed overnight at a motel by the E3.
In my room a smell I’d felt before
in the Asiatic halls of a museum:
masks Tibetan Japanese on a pale wall.
But it’s not masks now, it’s faces
forcing through the white wall of oblivion
to breathe, to ask about something.
I lie awake watching them struggle
and disappear and return.
Some lend each other features, exchange faces
far inside me
where oblivion and memory wheel and deal.
They force through oblivion’s second coat
the white wall
they fade out fade in.
Here is a sorrow that doesn’t call itself sorrow.
Welcome to the authentic galleries!
Welcome to the authentic galleys!
The authentic grilles!
The karate boy who paralyzed someone
is still dreaming of fast money.
This woman keeps buying things
to toss in the hungry mouth of the vacuum
sneaking up behind her.
Mr. X doesn’t dare go out.
A dark stockade of ambiguous people
stands between him
and the steadily retreating horizon.
She who once fled from Karelia
she who could laugh . . .
now shows herself
but dumb, petrified, a statue from Sumer.
As when I was ten and came home late.
In the stairwell the light switched off
but the lift I stood in was bright, it rose
like a diving-bell through black depths
floor by floor while imagined faces
pressed against the grille . . .
But the faces are not imagined now, they are real.
I lie straight out like a cross street.
Many step out from the white mist.
We touched each other once—we did!
A long bright carbolic-scented corridor.
The wheelchair. The teenage girl
learning to talk after the car crash.
He who tried to call out underwater
and the world’s cold mass poured in
through nose and mouth.
Voices in the microphone said: Speed is power,
speed is power!
Play the game, the show must go on!
We move through our career stiffly, step by step,
as if in a Noh drama—
masks, high-pitched song: It’s me, it’s me!
The one who’s failed
is represented by a rolled-up blanket.
An artist said: Before, I was a planet
with its own dense atmosphere.
Entering rays were broken into rainbows.
Perpetual raging thunderstorms, within.
Now I’m extinct and dry and open.
I no longer have childlike energy.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
No rainbows.
I stayed overnight in the echoing house.
Many want to come in through the walls
but most of them can’t make it:
they’re overcome by the white hiss of oblivion.
Anonymous singing drowns in the walls.
Discreet tappings that don’t want to be heard
drawn-out sighs
my old repartees creeping homelessly.
Listen to society’s mechanical self-reproaches
the voice of the big fan
like the artificial wind in mine tunnels
six hundred meters down.
Our eyes keep wide open under the bandages.
If I could at least make them realize
that this trembling beneath us
means we are on a bridge.
Often I have to stand motionless.
I am the knife thrower’s partner at a circus!
Questions I tossed aside in rage
come whining back
don’t hit me, but nail down my shape
my rough outline
and stay in place when I’ve walked away.
Often I have to be silent. Voluntarily!
Because “the last word” is said again and again.
Because good-day and good-bye . . .
Because this very day . . .
Because the margins rise at last
over their brims
and flood the text.
I stayed overnight at the sleepwalker’s motel.
Many faces here are desperate
others smoothed out
after the pilgrim’s walk through oblivion.
They breathe vanish struggle back again.
They look past me.
They all want to reach the icon of justice.
It happens rarely
that one of us really sees the other:
a person shows himself for an instant
as in a photograph but clearer
and in the background
something that is bigger than his shadow.
He’s standing full-length before a mountain.
It’s more a snail’s shell than a mountain.
It’s more a house than a snail’s shell.
It’s not a house but has many rooms.
It’s indistinct but overwhelming.
He grows out of it, it out of him.
It’s his life, it’s his labyrinth.