Eternal Enemies: Poems

TRAVELING BY TRAIN ALONG THE HUDSON

TO BOGDANA CARPENTER

River gleaming in the sun—

river, how can you endure the sight:

low crumpled train cars

made of steel, and in their small windows

dull faces, lifeless eyes.

Shining river, rise up.

How can you bear the orange peels,

the Coca-Cola cans, patches

of dirty snow that

once was pure.

Rise up, river.

And I too drowse in semidarkness

above a library book

with someone’s pencil marks,

only half living.

Rise up, lovely river.

THE GREEKS

I would have liked to live among the Greeks,

talk with Sophocles’ disciples,

learn the rites of secret mysteries,

but when I was born the pockmarked

Georgian still lived and reigned,

with his grim henchmen and theories.

Those were years of memory and grief,

of sober talks and silence;

there was little joy—

although a few birds didn’t know this,

a few children and trees.

To wit, the apple tree on our street

blithely opened its white blooms

each April and burst

into ecstatic laughter.

GREAT SHIPS

This is a poem about the great ships that wandered the oceans

And groaned sometimes in deep voices, grumbling about fog and submerged peaks,

But usually they sliced the pages of tropical seas in silence,

Divided by height, category, and class, just like our societies and hotels.

Down below poor emigrants played cards, and no one won

While on the top deck Claudel gazed at Ysé and her hair glowed.

And toasts were raised to a safe trip, to coming times,

Toasts were raised, Alsatian wine and champagne from France’s finest vineyards,

Some days were static, windless, when only the light seeped steadily,

Days when nothing happened but the horizon, which traveled with the ship,

Days of emptiness and boredom, playing solitaire, repeating the latest news,

Who’d been seen with whom in a tropical night’s shade, embracing beneath a peach-colored moon.

But filthy stokers tirelessly tossed coal into open flaming mouths

And everything that is now already existed then, though in condensed form.

Our days already existed and our hearts baked in the blazing stove,

And the moment when I met you may also have existed, and my mistrust

Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail and capricious,

And my searches for the final answer, my disappointments and discoveries.

Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences and fear,

Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars of special bulletins.

Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial ports, in dockyards,

Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust, and waited

For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and objects,

They still wait patiently, like chess players in Luxembourg Garden nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.

ERINNA OF TELOS

She was nineteen when she died.

We don’t know if she was lovely and flirtatious,

or if perhaps she looked like those

intelligent, dry girls in glasses

from whom mirrors are kept hidden.

She left behind just a few hexameters.

We suspect that she strove

with the secret, uncertain ambition of introverts.

Her parents loved her to distraction.

We speculate that she wanted to express

some vast truth about life, ruthless

on the surface, sweet within,

about August nights, when the sea

breathes and shines and sings like a starling,

and about love, ineffable and precious.

We don’t know if she cried when she met darkness.

She left only a few hexameters

and an epigram about a cricket.

OF KINGDOMS

I LIKE TO DREAM OF THOSE

DEAD KINGDOMS — SU TUNG-P’O

I like to dream of those kingdoms

where brass glitters and sings,

and fires flame upward on the hilltops,

and someone’s love dwells in them.

Later afternoon, in November,

I travel by commuter train

after a long walk;

around me are tired office workers

and a mournful old lady

clutching a dachshund.

The conductor, alas,

makes an awkward shaman.

Life strides over us like Gulliver,

loudly laughing and crying.

SYRACUSE

City with the loveliest name, Syracuse;

don’t let me forget the dim

antiquity of your side streets, the pouting balconies

that once caged Spanish ladies,

the way the sea breaks on Ortygia’s walls.

Plato met defeat here, escaped with his life,

what can be said about us, unreal tourists.

Your cathedral rose atop a Greek temple

and still grows, but very slowly,

like the heavy pleas of beggars and widows.

At midnight fishing boats radiate

sharp light, demanding prayers

for the perished, the lonely, for you,

city abandoned on a continent’s rim,

and for us, imprisoned in our travels.

SUBMERGED CITY

That city will be no more, no halos

of spring mornings when green hills

tremble in the mist and rise

like barrage balloons—

and May won’t cross its streets

with shrieking birds and summer’s promises.

No breathless spells,

no chilly ecstasies of springwater.

Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor,

and flawless views of leafy avenues

fix no one’s eyes.

And still we live on calmly,

humbly — from suitcases,

in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains,

and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek an image,

the final form of things

between inexplicable fits

of mute despair—

as if vaguely remembering

something that cannot be recalled,

as if that submerged city were traveling with us,

always asking questions,

and always unhappy with our answers—

exacting, and perfect in its way.

EPITHALAMIUM

Without silence there would be no music.

Life paired is doubtless more difficult

than solitary existence—

just as a boat on the open sea

with outstretched sails is trickier to steer

than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners

after all are meant for wind and motion,

not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes

hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,

but also compassion, deep feeling.

Only in marriage do love and time,

eternal enemies, join forces.

Only love and time, when reconciled,

permit us to see other beings

in their enigmatic, complex essence,

unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement

in a valley or among green hills.

It begins from one day only, from joy

and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,

which is like a moist grain;

then come the years of trial and labor,

sometimes despair, fierce revelation,

happiness and finally a great tree

with rich greenery grows over us,

casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

GATE

TO BARBARA TORUŃCZYK

Do you love words as a shy magician loves the moment of quiet

after he’s left the stage, alone in a dressing room where

a yellow candle burns with its greasy, pitch-black flame?

What yearning will encourage you to push the heavy gate, to sense

once more the odor of that wood and the rusty taste of water from an ancient well,

to see again the tall pear tree, the proud matron who presented us

aristocratically with its perfectly formed fruit each fall,

and then fell into mute anticipation of the winter’s ills?

Next door a factory’s stolid chimney smoked and the ugly town kept still,

but the indefatigable earth worked on beneath the bricks in gardens,

our black memory and the vast pantry of the dead, the good earth.

What courage does it take to budge the heavy gate,

what courage to catch sight of us again,

gathered in the little room beneath a Gothic lamp—

mother skims the paper, moths bump the windowpanes,

nothing happens, nothing, only evening, prayer; we wait …

We lived only once.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2004

You’re at home listening

to recordings of Billie Holiday,

who sings on, melancholy, drowsy.

You count the hours still

keeping you from midnight.

Why do the dead sing peacefully

while the living can’t free themselves from fear?

NO CHILDHOOD

And what was your childhood like? a weary

reporter asks near the end.

There was no childhood, only black crows

and tramcars starved for electricity,

fat priests in heavy chasubles,

teachers with faces of bronze.

There was no childhood, just anticipation.

At night the maple leaves shone like phosphorus,

rain moistened the lips of dark singers.

MUSIC HEARD

Music heard with you

was more than music

and the blood that flowed through our arteries

was more than blood

and the joy we felt

was genuine

and if there is anyone to thank,

I thank him now,

before it grows too late

and too quiet.

BALANCE

I watched the arctic landscape from above

and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.

I observed white canopies of clouds, vast

expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness

that can promise one thing only: plenitude—

and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland

bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,

the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,

comic gardens forgotten by their owners,

pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt

a perfect balance between waking and dreams.

But when the plane touched concrete, then

assiduously circled in the airport’s labyrinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness

of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,

the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,

remembers and forgets.

MORNING

Sunday morning, the wind has washed our minds,

the streets are bleak as a monastic regimen.

The young still sleep in their white tents,

and only the elderly head churchwards.

A ginkgo, still clinging to its leaves,

aglow with autumn’s yellow fire,

announces that the moment has arrived.

Sunday morning, above the roofs of palaces and houses,

somber chimes hold conversations

while little bells laugh; Dominicans

and Norbertines exchanging telegrams.

Clad in bronze, the Planty Garden monuments

doubtless long for normal skin,

for flesh and aching heads, but eternity has its demands.

We quarreled here once, do you remember,

I looked for you in evening’s labyrinth;

I held a book, you wore a summer dress

(the book went unread, but the dress spread

like the jacket of a Neoplatonic tract).

A bronze Boy-Zelenski gazed at me, his eyes

retained the image of a firing squad,

that masterpiece of Prussian architecture.

The wind washed minds and streets, it washed the sun.

Georg Trakl died a few hundred yards away,

killed by ecstasy or despair.

And we sat on that bench late one night

and tried to hear the ocean.

The moon was full, the stars ran quietly.

The moment came, after long negotiations,

broken off and taken up, abandoned once again,

when the past, wise and dry as parchments,

decided to make peace with petty day,

with the morning’s improvisation, its damp breath,

my thoughts’ dampness, my unrest,

and a delegation of the dead — poets, but also night watchmen,

experienced students of the darkness, and midwives,

who knew how bodies opened—

agreed that it was high time,

in silence, Sunday morning, when trees

flame peacefully, agreed conditionally

that I should wake and realize that the moment had arrived,

the moment had arrived — and would be gone.

OLD MARX (2)

I try to envision his last winter,

London, cold and damp, the snow’s curt kisses

on empty streets, the Thames’s black water,

chilled prostitutes lit bonfires in the park.

Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night.

The workers spoke so quickly in the pub

that he couldn’t catch a single word.

Perhaps Europe was richer and at peace,

but the Belgians still tormented the Congo.

And Russia? Its tyranny? Siberia?

He spent evenings staring at the shutters.

He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,

reread young Marx for days on end,

and secretly admired that ambitious author.

He still had faith in his fantastic vision,

but in moments of doubt

he worried that he’d given the world

just a new version of despair;

then he’d close his eyes and see nothing

but the scarlet darkness of his lids.

DOLPHINS

The sun sets and prying pelicans fly just above the sea’s smooth skin;

you watch a fisherman killing a caught fish, invincibly convinced of his humanity,

while rosy clouds commence their slow, solemn march to the night’s foothills—

you stay a moment, waiting to see dolphins

— maybe they’ll dance their famous, friendly tango once again—

here, on the Gulf of Mexico, where you find tire marks and mussels along the broad beaches,

and energetic crabs that exit the sand like workers deserting a subterranean factory en masse.

You notice abandoned, rusty loading towers.

You walk along a stone lock and wave to a few anglers,

modest types, fishing not for sport, just in hope

of postponing the last supper.

A vast, brick-red ship from Monrovia sails up the port canal

like some bizarre imaginary beast boasting of its own oddness,

and briefly blocks the horizon.

You think: it’s worth seeking the backwaters, provincial spots

that remember much, but are uncommonly discreet,

quiet, humble places, rich, though, in caches, hidden pockets of memory like hunters’ jackets in the fall,

the bustling town’s outskirts, wastelands where nothing happens, there are no famous actors,

politicians and journalists don’t appear,

but sometimes poetry is born in emptiness,

and you start to think that your childhood halted here,

here, far from long-familiar streets—

since absence after all can’t calculate distance in light-years or kilometers,

instead it calmly waits for your return, doubtless wondering what’s become of you. It meets you without fanfare and says:

Don’t you know me? I’m a stamp from your vanished collection,

I’m the stamp that showed you

your first dolphin on a backdrop of unreal, misty blue. I’m the sign of travel.

Unmoving.

ORGAN TUNING

Someone was tuning the organ in an empty church.

In a Gothic hall a waterfall boomed.

The voices of the tortured and schoolchildren’s laughter

mixed with my vertical breath.

In an empty church someone tuned the organ

and tinkered with the pipes’ wild anarchy,

demolished houses, flung thunderbolts, then built

a city, airport, highway, stadium.

If only I could see the organist!

Catch sight of his face, his eyes!

If I could trace the movements of his hands,

I might understand where he’s taking us,

us and those for whom we care,

children, animals, shadows.

FIREMEN’S HELMETS

I scrutinize firemen’s helmets

which reflect clouds

and a microscopic glider.

The fire will start up soon,

in an hour or so.

Beauty and fear are always paired—

like the time I learned

Marek had died and wandered

through a cold Paris, from which

summer was slowly departing.

A BIRD SINGS IN THE EVENING

Above the vast city, plunged in darkness,

breathing slowly, as if its earth were scorched,

you, who sang once for Homer

and for Cromwell, maybe even

over Joan of Arc’s gray ashes,

you raise your sweet lament again,

your bright keening; no one hears you,

only in the lilac’s black leaves, where

unseen artists hide,

a nightingale stirred, a little envious.

No one hears you, the city is in mourning

for its splendid days, days of greatness,

when it too could grieve

in an almost human voice.

WAIT FOR AN AUTUMN DAY (FROM EKELÖF)

Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly

weary sun, for dusty air,

a pale day’s weather.

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,

etched like an old man’s hands,

for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden

with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains

the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,

for a truce among the clouds,

for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace

and accept the thought that what you’ve lost

is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not

even miss those you loved

who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,

for an hour without doubt or pain.

Wait for an autumn day.

KATHLEEN FERRIER (1912–1953)

It’s just a voice.

It’s just a voice, and we don’t know

if it still belongs to a body,

or to the air alone.

The voice of a girl journeying

to Carlisle in a used Morris.

Just think, how many different voices

sounded in her life’s brief span.

Goebbels’s hysterical cry.

The moaning of the wounded, prisoners’ whispers.

Declamations in school auditoriums

(epics praising the tyrant).

So many lies in our throats.

She died of cancer,

not from hunger like Simone Weil,

not in a camp like Mandelstam.

She never studied in a conservatory

and yet the purest music

speaks through her.

She liked the songs of Schubert and Mahler,

Bruno Walter counseled her.

A girl’s voice,

innocent, sings Handel’s arias.

Listening, you think

here was a chance

for a better human race,

but the record ends

and you return to your usual mistrust—

as if the song promised too much,

more than silence or exhaustion.

LIFE IS NOT A DREAM

In the beginning, freezing nights and hatred.

Red Army soldiers fired automatic pistols

at the sky, trying to strike the Highest Being.

Mother cried, perhaps remembering

the sentimental stories of her childhood.

Coldwater Street ran beside the river

as if trying to outrace it—

or to reach its distant sources,

still pure beyond a doubt,

recalling the dawn’s joy.

If life is a dream,

then the phoenix may actually exist.

But in Krakow life revived

under the sign of common pigeons:

in the Planty Gardens, alongside veterans

clad in the tattered uniforms

of at least three armies,

young beauties made appearances,

and music-loving plane trees donned

their finest new foliage outside Symphony Hall.

Should one honor local gods?

A beggar at the marketplace in Lucca

moved from stand to stand

garnering tributes — proud as Diana.

It’s more difficult to find nymphs

where we live, though,

and great Pan didn’t leave his calling card.

Important memories — stern monuments

to monotheism — were inscribed

only in the trees and on church walls.

We tried courage, since there was no exit.

We tried cunning, but it failed.

We tried patience and fell asleep.

We wrote poems like leaflets and leaflets

like pages from burgeoning epics.

Dreams grew like hibiscus flowers.

Dark wells opened in the night.

We tried cynicism; some of us succeeded.

There was great joy, don’t forget.

We tried time; it was tasteless, like water.

Finally, much later, for unknown

reasons, the clocks began

to revolve ever faster above us,

as in archival, silent films.

And life went on, inevitable life,

so skeptical, so practiced,

coming back to us so insistently

that one day we felt the taste of ordinary failure,

of common tragedy upon our lips,

which was a kind of triumph.

IT DEPENDS

YOU MUST BE SOMEWHERE, RIGHT? — NICK FLYNN

Birds (sandpipers) hop on the beach at Galveston.

“La plupart des hommes meurent de chagrin”—says Buffon

(as quoted in Volume One of Claudel’s diaries).

R. thinks American poets are unintelligent.

— Yet nobleness exists, if only in a painting:

Christ’s face in the Caravaggio at S. Luigi dei Francesi

(I couldn’t tear myself away, I couldn’t go).

It depends who, I answer: I defend American poets.

Summer, endless dusk, and then the stars like lanterns.

We discuss the emptiness of recent French poetry.

But “rien” is such a lovely word! Better than nothing.

Even the ocean seems happy at noon.

Forests burn: resin has its brief moment of bliss.

We eat ice cream on the café terrace. The speakers are playing “Yesterday.”

Notes from a civil war: truce or armistice?

Suddenly I move to Aix-en-Provence, I don’t know how.

Evening crowds on the streets, anticipation.

I push through a dense thicket of onlookers and ask:

What’s happening? God’s coming back. But it’s just a dream.

AMERICA’S SUN (FROM EICHENDORFF, FROM KRYNICKI)

Outside the window, America’s blinding sun.

In a dark room, at a table

sits a man, no longer young,

who thinks about what he’s lost

and what remains.

I am that man.

I try to guess what losses

the future holds.

I still don’t know what I’ll discover.

ANTENNAS IN THE RAIN

I saw the sea and oranges.

First snow — ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s silence please.

Breaking news: Bach woke again and sings.

Time kept its word (it always does).

Reading Milosz by an open window. The swallows’ sudden trill.

Chapels beneath the linden trees in summer; bees pray.

“Carpe diem.” He seized the day, but when he checked his prey that

evening, he found night.

— You really like libraries that much?

Carrots, onions, celery, prunes, almonds, powdered sugar, four large

apples, green are best (your love letter).

Don’t get carried away. To say that Orthodox liturgies lack humor!

The hospital — pale invalids in gowns beside a tanned, smiling surgeon.

Why do you always write about cities?

If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants …

“Periagoge”—Plato’s notion of internal transformation.

The bulging Place de la Bastille — perhaps another Bastille is hiding

underneath.

Peonies like peasant girls in church.

“How can I miss you when you won’t go away?” (country song).

Varieties of longing; the professor counted six.

Sign on a bus: AIR-CONDITIONED. Day trips — Wieliczka, Auschwitz.

The homeless clinging to radiators at a railroad station in December.

Vermeer’s painting with a woman sitting safely on the stoop and

knitting: behind her a dark interior, in front, the street and light.

Irreconcilable.

The sun hurts, says the boy in the park.

B., reproachfully: I lived there, you know, and I’d never say there was

too much of Lvov!

Everything returns. Inspiration wanes and returns. Desire.

Comedy and tragedy; Simone Weil sees only tragedy.

Red poppies and black snow.

The smile of a woman, no longer young, reading on the train to Warsaw.

Oh, so you’re the specialist in high style?

Delphi, full of tourists, open to mysteries.

The sea was angry at midnight: furious, to be frank.

And the Holocaust Museum in Washington — my childhood, my wagons,

my rust.

May evening: antennas in the rain.

Down Kanonicza Street screaming you sonofabitch.

Dolphins near Freeport: their favorite, ancient motion, like the symbol

scholars use for iambs.

A theater too tiny to hold Bergman’s film.

Escape from one prison to the next.

After the announcement “zurückbleiben” at a subway stop in Berlin, a

quiet moment — the sound of absence.

Swifts in Krakow, stirred by summer, whistle loudly.

A weary verb goes back to the dictionary at night.

Mama always peeked at the novel’s last page — to see what happened …

Truth is Catholic, the search for truth is Protestant (W.H. Auden).

Some experts predict that by the twenty-first century’s end people will

no longer die.

Open up.

Pay the phone and gas, return the books, write Clare.

In the plane after dinner two pudgy theologians compare their pensions.

In Gliwice, Victory Street might have led to heaven but stops short, alas.

Will the escalator ever go where it takes us?

From a rushing train we saw fields and meadows — from the forest,

as from dreams, deer emerged.

Marble doesn’t talk to clay (to time).

The salesgirl in a shoe store on the rue du Commerce, Vietnamese,

she tells you kneeling, I come from boat people.

I switched on the shortwave radio: someone sobbing in Bolivia.

Christ’s face in S. Luigi dei Francesi.

One thing is sure: the world is alive and burns.

He read Hölderlin in a dingy waiting room.

Boat people — the only nation free of nationalism.

The spring rain’s indescribable freshness.

Sliced with a knife.

“There are gods here too.”

Fruit bursts.

I ask my father: “What do you do all day?” “I remember.”

Delivery cars on a Greek highway, trademark Metafora.

On the sea’s gleaming surface, a kayak, almost motionless — a compass

needle.

Remember the splendid cellist in a clown’s lounge coat?

At night the lights of a vast refinery — a city where nobody lives.

Why do these moments end so quickly? Don’t talk that way, speak

from within the moments.

Love for ordinary objects, unrequited.

Rowers on a green river, chasing time.

Poetry is joy hiding despair. But under the despair — more joy.

Speak from within.

It’s not about poetry.

Don’t speak, listen.

Don’t listen.