Eternal Enemies: Poems

THE DICTION TEACHER RETIRES FROM THE THEATER SCHOOL

Tall, shy, dignified

in an old-fashioned way,

She bids farewell to students, faculty,

and looks around suspiciously.

She’s sure they’ll mangle their mother tongue

ruthlessly and go unpunished.

She takes the certificate (she’ll check

for errors later). She turns and vanishes offstage,

in the spotlights’ velvet shadows,

in silence.

We’re left alone

to twist our tongues and lips.

IN A LITTLE APARTMENT

I ASK MY FATHER, “WHAT DO YOU

DO ALL DAY?” “I REMEMBER.”

So in that dusty little apartment in Gliwice,

in a low block in the Soviet style

that says all towns should look like barracks,

and cramped rooms will defeat conspiracies,

where an old-fashioned wall clock marches on, unwearied,

he relives daily the mild September of ’39, its whistling bombs,

and the Jesuit Garden in Lvov, gleaming

with the green glow of maples and ash trees and small birds,

kayaks on the Dniester, the scent of wicker and wet sand,

that hot day when you met a girl who studied law,

the trip by freight car to the west, the final border,

two hundred roses from the students

grateful for your help in ’68,

and other episodes I’ll never know,

the kiss of a girl who didn’t become my mother,

the fear and sweet gooseberries of childhood, images drawn

from that calm abyss before I was.

Your memory works in the quiet apartment — in silence,

systematically, you struggle to retrieve for an instant

your painful century.

THE ORTHODOX LITURGY

Deep voices beg insistently for mercy

and have no self-defense

beyond their own glorious singing — though no one

is here, just a disc spinning

swiftly and invisibly.

One soloist recalls the voice

of Joseph Brodsky reciting his poems

before Americans, unconvinced

by any sort of resurrection,

but glad that somebody believed.

It’s enough — or so we think—

that someone believes for us.

Low voices still sing.

Have mercy on us.

Have mercy on me too,

unseen Lord.

ROME, OPEN CITY

A March day, the trees are still naked, plane trees patiently

await the leaves’ green heat,

churches caked in dust, vermilion, ocher, sienna, and bordeaux,

broad stains of cinnamon.

Why did we stop talking?

In the Barberini Palace fair Narcissus gazes at his own face,

lifeless.

Brown city ceaselessly repeating: mi dispiace.

Brown city, entered by weary Greek gods

like office workers from the provinces.

Today I want to see your eyes without anger.

Brown city, growing on the hills.

Poems are short tragedies, portable, like transistor radios.

Paul lies on the ground, it’s night, a torch, the smell of pitch.

Impatient glances in cafés, someone yells, a small heap of coins

lies on the table.

Why? Why not?

The roar of cars and scooters, hubbub of events.

Poetry often vanishes, leaving only matchsticks.

Children run above the Tiber in funny school cloaks

from the century’s beginning:

nearby, cameras and spotlights. They’re running for a film, not for you.

David is ashamed of murdering Goliath.

Forgive my silence. Forgive your silence.

City full of statues; only the fountains sing.

The holidays approach, when the heathens go to church.

Via Giulia: magnolia blossoms keep their secret.

A moment of light costs just five hundred lire, which you toss

into a black box.

We can meet on the Piazza Navona, if you want.

Matthew keeps asking himself: was I truly

summoned to become human?

THE SEA

Shimmering among boulders, deep blue at noon,

ominous when summoned by the west wind,

but calm at night, inclined to make amends.

Tireless in small bays, commanding

countless hosts of crabs who march sideways

like damp veterans of the Punic Wars.

At midnight cutters sail from port: the glare

of a single light slices the darkness,

engines quake.

At the beach near Cefalù, on Sicily, we saw

countless heaps of trash, boxes, condoms,

cartons, a faded sign saying ANTONIO.

In love with the earth, always drawn to shore,

sending wave after wave — and each dies

exhausted, like a Greek messenger.

At dawn only whispers reach us,

the low murmur of pebbles cast on sand

(sensed even in the fishing town’s small square).

The Mediterranean, where gods swam,

and the frigid Baltic, which I entered,

a skinny, trembling, twenty-year-old eel.

In love with the earth, thrusting into its cities, Stockholm,

Venice, listening to tourists laugh and chatter

before returning to its dark, unmoving source.

Your Atlantic, busy building up white dunes,

and the shy Pacific hiding in the deeps.

Light-winged gulls.

The last sailing ships, white canvas

billowing on crosses.

Slim canoes are manned by watchful hunters,

the sun rises in great silence.

Gray Baltic,

Arctic Ocean, mute,

the Ionian, world’s origin and end.

READING MILOSZ

I read your poetry once more,

poems written by a rich man, knowing all,

and by a beggar, homeless,

an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go

beyond poetry, above it, soaring,

but also lower, to where our region

begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone

transforms us for a moment,

we believe — truly—

that every day is sacred,

that poetry — how to put it?—

makes life rounder,

fuller, prouder, unashamed

of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,

I lay my book aside,

and the city’s ordinary din resumes—

somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

WALK THROUGH THIS TOWN

Walk through this town at a gray hour

when sorrow hides in shady gates

and children play with great balls

that float like kites above

the poisoned wells of courtyards,

and, quiet, doubting, the last blackbird sings.

Think about your life which goes on,

though it’s already lasted so long.

Could you voice the smallest fragment of the whole.

Could you name baseness when you saw it.

If you met someone truly living

would you know it?

Did you abuse high words?

Whom should you have been, who knows.

You love silence, and you’ve mastered

only silence, listening to words, music, and quiet:

why did you begin to speak, who knows.

Why in this age, why in a country

that wasn’t born yet, who knows.

Why among exiles, in a flat that had been

German, amid grief and mourning

and vain hopes of a regained myth.

Why a childhood shadowed

by mining towers and not a forest’s dark,

near a stream where a quiet dragonfly keeps watch

over the world’s secret wholeness

— who knows.

And your love, which you lost and found,

and your God, who won’t help those

who seek him,

and hides among theologians

with degrees.

Why just this town at a gray hour,

this dry tongue, these numb lips,

and so many questions before you leave

and go home to the kingdom

from which silence, rapture, and the wind

once came.

ORDINARY LIFE

Our life is ordinary,

I read in a crumpled paper

abandoned on a bench.

Our life is ordinary,

the philosophers told me.

Ordinary life, ordinary days and cares,

a concert, a conversation,

strolls on the town’s outskirts,

good news, bad—

but objects and thoughts

were unfinished somehow,

rough drafts.

Houses and trees

desired something more

and in summer green meadows

covered the volcanic planet

like an overcoat tossed upon the ocean.

Black cinemas crave light.

Forests breathe feverishly,

clouds sing softly,

a golden oriole prays for rain.

Ordinary life desires.

MUSIC HEARD WITH YOU

MUSIC I HEARD WITH YOU WAS MORE

THAN MUSIC … —CONRAD AIKEN

Music heard with you

will stay with us always.

Grave Brahms and elegiac Schubert,

a few songs, Chopin’s fourth ballad,

a few quartets with heart-

breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia),

the sadness of Shostakovich, who

didn’t want to die.

The great choruses of Bach’s Passions,

as if someone had summoned us,

demanding joy,

pure and impartial,

joy in which faith

is self-evident.

Some scraps of Lutoslawski

as fleeting as our thoughts.

A black woman singing blues

ran through us like shining steel,

though it reached us on the street

of an ugly, dirty town.

Mahler’s endless marches,

the trumpet’s voice that opens the Fifth Symphony

and the first part of the Ninth

(you sometimes call him “malheur!”).

Mozart’s despair in the Requiem,

his buoyant piano concertos—

you hummed them better than I did,

but we both know that.

Music heard with you

will grow still with us.

AT THE CATHEDRAL’S FOOT

In June once, in the evening,

returning from a long trip,

with memories of France’s blooming trees

still fresh in our minds,

its yellow fields, green plane trees

sprinting before the car,

we sat on the curb at the cathedral’s foot

and spoke softly about disasters,

about what lay ahead, the coming fear,

and someone said this was the best

we could do now—

to talk of darkness in that bright shadow.

IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIPS

For example, with someone who no longer is,

who exists only in yellowed letters.

Or long walks beside a stream,

whose depths hold hidden

porcelain cups — and the talks about philosophy

with a timid student or the postman.

A passerby with proud eyes

whom you’ll never know.

Friendship with this world, ever more perfect

(if not for the salty smell of blood).

The old man sipping coffee

in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.

Faces flashing by

in local trains—

the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps

for a splendid ball, or a beheading.

And friendship with yourself

— since after all you don’t know who you are.

RAIN DROP

In the drop of rain that stopped

outside my window, dawdling,

an oval, shining shape appears

and I see Mrs. Czolga again,

stuffing a statuesque goose in her kitchen.

Carts, dark and chthonic, carried coal,

rolling over wooden cobbles,

asking — do you want to live?

But after the great war of death

we wanted life so much.

A red-hot iron pressed the past,

at dawn German blackbirds

sang the poems of Georg Trakl,

and we wanted life and dreams.

BUTTERFLIES

It’s a December night, the century’s end, dark and calm,

draws near.

I slowly read friends’ poems, look at photographs,

the spines of books.

Where has C. gone? What’s become of bumptious K. and smiling T.?

What ever happened to B. and N.?

Some have been dead a millennium, while others, debutants, died

just the other month.

Are they together? In a desert with a crimson dawn?

We don’t know where they live.

By a mountain stream where butterflies play?

In a town scented with mignonette?

Die Toten reiten schnell, S. repeated eagerly (he too

is gone).

They ride little horses in the steppe’s quiet, beneath a round yellow

cloud.

Maybe they steal coal at a little railroad stop in Asia and melt

snow in sooty pots

like those transported in freight cars.

(Do they have camps and barbed wire?)

Do they play checkers? Listen to music? Do they see Christ?

They dictate poems to the living.

They paint bison on cave walls, begin building

the cathedral in Beauvais.

Have they grasped the sense of evil, which eludes us,

and forgiven those who persecuted them?

They wade through an arctic glacier, soft from the August heat.

Do they weep? Regret?

Talk on telephones for hours? Hold their tongues? Are they here among us?

Nowhere?

I read poems, listen to the mighty whisper

of night and blood.

IN A STRANGE CITY

The faint, almost fantastic

scent of the Mediterranean,

crowds on streets at midnight,

a festival begins,

we don’t know which.

A scrawny cat slips

past our knees,

gypsies eat supper

as if singing;

white houses beyond them,

an unknown tongue.

Happiness.

CAMOGLI

High old houses above the water

and a drowsy cat waiting for fishermen

on furled white nets:

a quiet November in Camogli—

pensioners sunbathe on lounge chairs,

the sun rotates sluggishly

and stones revolve slowly

on the gravelly shore,

but it, the sea, keeps turning landward,

wave after wave, as if wondering

what happened to summer’s plans

and our dreams,

what has our youth become.

BOGLIASCO: THE CHURCH SQUARE

A photographer develops film,

the sexton scrutinizes

walls and trees,

boys play ball,

a dry cleaner purges the conscience

of this quiet town,

three elderly ladies discuss the world’s end—

but evening brings back

the sea’s tumult

and its din

returns the day just past

into oblivion.

STAGLIENO

Don’t linger in the graveyard

where the nineteenth century, dusty, charmless,

still repents; you’ll be received

by doctors in stucco frock coats

buttoned to the throat, in stone cravats,

stone barristers with stony, slightly mournful

smiles (duplicity has outlived itself).

You’ll be received by patresfamilias, professors

and children, marble children, plaster dogs,

always flawlessly obedient.

You’ll see the past, meet

your older brothers, glimpse

Pompeii, submerged

in time’s gray lava.

TWO-HEADED BOY

The fifteen-year-old boy carried a kitten

inside his dark blue windbreaker.

Its tiny head turned,

its large eyes watching

everything more cautiously

than human eyes.

Safe in the warm train,

I compare the boy’s lazy stare

to the kitten’s pupils,

alert and narrow.

The two-headed boy sitting across from me

made richer by an animal’s unrest.

OUR WORLD

I never met him, I only knew

his books and the odd photos, as if

purchased in a secondhand shop, and human

fates discovered secondhand,

and a voice quietly narrating,

a gaze that caught so much,

a gaze turned back,

avoiding neither fear

nor rapture;

nor rapture;

and our world in his prose,

our world, so calm — but

full of crimes perfectly forgotten,

even in lovely towns

on the coast of one sea or another,

our world full of empty churches,

rutted with railroad tracks, scars

of ancient trenches, highways,

cleft by uncertainty, our blind world

smaller now by you.

SMALL OBJECTS

My contemporaries like small objects,

dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,

melancholy stopped clocks, postcards

sent from vanished cities,

and blackened with illegible script,

in which they discern words

like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”

They marvel at dormant volcanoes.

They don’t desire light.

DEFENDING POETRY, ETC

Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,

but also summer evenings in a small town,

where gardens waft and cats sit quietly

on doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.

SUBJECT: BRODSKY

Please note: born in May,

in a damp city (hence the motif: water),

soon to be surrounded by an army

whose officers kept Hölderlin

in their backpacks, but, alas, they had

no time for reading. Too much to do.

Tone — sardonic, despair — authentic.

Always en route, from Mexico to Venice,

lover and crusader, who campaigned

ceaselessly for his unlikely party

(name: Poetry versus the Infinite,

or PVI, if you prefer abbreviations).

In every city and in every port

he had his agents; he sometimes sang his poems

before an avid crowd that didn’t catch

a word. Afterwards, exhausted, he’d smoke a Gauloise

on a cement embankment, gulls circling overhead,

as if above the Baltic, back home.

Vast intelligence. Favorite topic: time

versus thought, which chases phantoms,

revives Mary Stuart, Daedalus, Tiberius.

Poetry should be like horse racing;

wild horses, with jockeys made of marble,

an unseen finish line lies hidden in the clouds.

Please remember: irony and pain;

the pain had lived long inside his heart

and kept on growing — as though

each elegy he wrote adored him

obsessively and wanted

him alone to be its hero—

but ladies and gentlemen — your patience,

please, we’re nearly through — I don’t know

quite how to put it; something like tenderness,

the almost timid smile,

the momentary doubt, the hesitation,

the tiny pause in flawless arguments.

SELF-PORTRAIT, NOT WITHOUT DOUBTS

Enthusiasm moves you in the morning,

by evening you lack the nerve

even to glance at the blackened page.

Always too much or too little,

just like those writers

who sometimes bother you:

some so modest, minimal,

and underread,

that you want to call out—

hey, friends, courage,

life is beautiful,

the world is rich and full of history.

Others, proud and serious, are distinguished

by their erudition

— gentlemen, you too must die someday,

you say (in thought).

The territory of truth

is plainly small,

narrow as a path above a cliff.

Can you stick

to it?

Perhaps you’ve strayed already.

Do you hear laughter

or apocalyptic trumpets?

Perhaps both,

a dissonance, ungodly grating—

a knife that skates

along the glass and whistles gladly.

CONVERSATION

A chat with friends, sometimes

about nothing, TV or the movies,

or more important conversations, earnest talk

on torture, suffering, and hunger,

but also on easy amorous adventures,

“she said this, so he thought that.”

Perhaps we talk too much,

like the French tourists I overheard

on a Greek mountain’s steep slope,

careless in the Delphic labyrinth

(caustic comments on the hotel dinner).

We don’t, we can’t know,

if we’ll be saved,

if our microscopic souls,

which have committed no evil

and likewise done no good,

will answer a question posed in an unknown tongue.

Will poetry’s epiphany suffice,

delight in the staccato of past music,

the sight of a river and air entering

August’s warm towers,

and longing for the sea, always fresh, new.

Or moments of celebration and the sense

they bring, that something has suddenly

returned and we can’t live without it (but we can),

do they outweigh the years of emptiness and anger,

months of forgetfulness, impatience—

we don’t know, we can’t know,

if we’ll be saved

when time ends.

OLD MARX

He can’t think.

London is damp,

in every room someone coughs.

He never did like winter.

He rewrites past manuscripts

time and again, without passion.

The yellow paper

is fragile as consumption.

Why does life race

stubbornly toward destruction?

But spring returns in dreams,

with snow that doesn’t speak

in any known tongue.

And where does love fit

within his system?

Where you find blue flowers.

He despises anarchists,

idealists bore him.

He receives reports from Russia,

far too detailed.

The French grow rich.

Poland is common and quiet.

America never stops growing.

Blood is everywhere,

perhaps the wallpaper needs changing.

He begins to suspect

that poor humankind

will always trudge

across the old earth

like the local lunatic

shaking her fists

at an unseen God.

TO THE SHADE OF ALEKSANDER WAT

Newly arrived at infinity — which turned out to resemble an elongated, vastly improved Wolomin Street — he received, upon entering, a gift in the shape of Schumann’s music, bursting with rapture and chaos (the first movement of the first sonata for violin and piano as performed by two insufferable, but, we must concede, very gifted cherubim).

Later a certain learned rabbi parsed the distinctions between a silken and a stony death, and the famed theologian P. gave a lengthy lecture on “The Old, New, and Even Newer Testaments in Wat’s Postwar Opus.”

“Pain as a Pivotal Experience” and “An Inborn Gift for Synthesizing Unlike Objects” were the topics of other talks, which were received less attentively since afterward eternity was scheduled to perform and an orchestra of swarthy gypsies in snug tuxes played without pausing, without end.

NIGHT IS A CISTERN

Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads

with the loud rustling of endless grief.

Who are you, walking in this worried crowd.

And who will you become, who will you be

when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round.

Night is a cistern. The last pairs dance at a country ball.

High waves cry from the sea, the wind rocks pines.

An unknown hand draws the dawn’s first stroke.

Lamps fade, a motor chokes.

Before us, life’s path, and instants of astronomy.

STORM

The storm had golden hair flecked with black

and moaned in a monotone, like a simple woman

giving birth to a future soldier, or a tyrant.

Vast clouds, multistoried ships

surrounded us, and lightning’s scarlet strands

scattered nervously.

The highway became the Red Sea.

We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.

You drove; I watched you with love.

EVENING, STARY SACZ

The sun sets behind the market square, and nettles reflect

the small town’s imperfections. Teapots whistle in the houses,

like many trains departing simultaneously.

Bonfires flame on meadows and their long sighs

weave above the trees like drifting kites.

The last pilgrims return from church uncertainly.

TV sets awaken, and instantly know all,

like the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces.

Knives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings.

The sky grows darker; angels used to hide there,

but now it’s just a police sergeant on his departed motorcycle.

Rain falls, the cobbled streets grow black.

Little abysses open between the stones.

BLAKE

I watch William Blake, who spotted angels

every day in treetops

and met God on the staircase

of his little house and found light in grimy alleys—

Blake, who died

singing gleefully

in a London thronged

with streetwalkers, admirals, and miracles,

William Blake, engraver, who labored

and lived in poverty, but not despair,

who received burning signs

from the sea and from the starry sky,

who never lost hope, since hope

was always born anew like breath,

I see those who walked like him on graying streets,

headed toward the dawn’s rosy orchid.

NOTES FROM A TRIP TO FAMOUS EXCAVATIONS

You suddenly surface in a city that no longer is.

You turn up abruptly in a vast city

that isn’t really there.

Three scrawny cats meow.

You notice campaign slogans on the walls

and know that the elections ended long ago,

emptiness was victorious and reigns

alongside a lazy sun.

Tourists wander nonexistent streets,

like Church Fathers — afflicted, alas,

by deepest acedia.

Bathhouse walls are bone-dry.

The kitchen holds no herbs,

the bedroom is sleepless.

We enter homes, gardens,

but no one greets us.

It seems we’re stranded in a desert,

faced by the dry cruelty of sand

— just as in other places

that don’t exist,

the native city

you never knew, will never know.

Even the death camps are lifeless.

Some friends are gone.

Past days have vanished,

they’ve hidden under Turkish tents,

in stasis, in a museum that’s not there.

But just when everything is gone

and only lips move timidly

like a young monk’s mouth,

a wind stirs, a sea wind,

bearing the promise of freshness.

A gate in the wall leans open,

and you glimpse life stronger than oblivion;

at first you don’t believe your eyes—

gardeners kneel, patiently

tending the dark earth while laughing servants

cart great piles of fragrant apples.

The wooden wagons rattle on thick stones,

water courses through a narrow trough,

wine returns to the pitchers,

and love comes back to the homesteads

where it once dwelled,

and silently regains its absolute

kingly power

over the earth and over me.

Look, a flame stirs from the ashes.

Yes, I recognize the face.

ZURBARÁN

Zurbarán painted by turns

Spanish saints

and still lifes,

and thus the objects

lying on heavy tables

in his still lifes

are likewise holy.

NOTO

TO GEORGIA AND MICHAEL

Noto, a town that would be flawless

if only our faith were greater.

Noto, a baroque town where even

the stables and arbors are ornate.

The cathedral’s cupola has collapsed, alas,

and heavy cranes surround it

like doctors in a hospital

tending the dangerously ill.

Afternoons town teenagers

gather on the main street

and bored stiff, whistle

like captive thrushes.

The town is too perfect

for its inhabitants.