The Jules Verne Steam Balloon
Page 4
We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory
A city, not Paris. NOTCH, an old woman in a chair made from a barrel, beside a tall porcelain stove, a basket of potatoes in her lap. Kerchief, shawl, ample skirts, boots. POLDEN, a young soldier with lots of brown curly hair, Mongol cheekbones, green uniform with scarlet shoulder tabs.
NOTCH
There was once an Englishman named Vernon.
He was hunting hyenas near Carthage.
This was back in the nineteenth century.
He stumbled and fell into an abyss.
He was surprised, however, going down,
That it seemed indeed to have no bottom
And when one came, it was as if he’d dropped
Down into a great goosefeather mattress.
What’s more, he was coming back up again,
Rising on a steady and busy heave
Which by degrees brought him to the pit’s edge
And rolled him out onto terra firma.
He had fallen into a mass of bats
Which, disturbed from their slumber, had risen
All together out of the deep abyss
And brought the English hunter up with them.
POLDEN
Is that true?
NOTCH
Every beautiful word.
My husband Osip read it in a book.
He was a poet. They took him away.
I have all of his poems off by heart.
POLDEN
Are they published in a book?
NOTCH
No, never.
One of them is about the Old Cockroach
Seeing his face in the shine of his boots.
POLDEN
Did he write a poem about Lenin
Taking a walk in his automobile?
NOTCH
The square. Barracks of the Guard to the north.
Flagpole with flag. Blue sentries pacing there,
Scarlet facings with the odd number nine
In gold threadwork on their tunic collars.
They pace, cold, along the top of the wall,
Pace from the turrets to the tower gate
Where they meet, and about-face with a stomp,
And then tread back to the turrets again.
Below, along the blank wall, another
Pair of cold guards make the same cold movements.
POLDEN
The square, west. Friedrich Engels Institute.
Iron doors. Allegory of Labor.
Classical columns. Red bunting banners
Across the front on anniversaries.
Sometimes, a delegation with roses
From the People’s Republic of China.
The committee from Shqiperija
No longer visits, nor its football team.
The windows are lit at night twice a year
And then you can hear Rimsky-Korsakov.
NOTCH
But not Stravinsky or Francis Poulenc.
The square, south. The Ministry of Culture.
Bicyclists from Czechoslovakia.
Paintings by Aleksandr Deineka.
Sevastopol Dynamo Aquasports
Workers’ Summer Vacation Swimming Pool.
And Lenin Taking a Walk in His Car.
POLDEN
Peasant embroidery from Hungary.
Lenin teaching history to children.
NOTCH
The square, east. Ministry of Peace. The Dom.
Though it is understood that modern men
Do not light candles in Sankt Pavl’s Dom,
They still wear garlic against the Devil
And say nine novenas under their breath
When they have heard an owl hoot at night
Or by evil luck a bootlace has snapped
Or the mirror has fallen from the wall.
Women and children slip into the Dom
Before they have to go and wait in lines.
POLDEN
Old women do talk.
NOTCH
Puppies make doodoo.
Another tale, already. Herr Schriftbild,
A publisher, as soon as he had found
The apartment building specified in
Robert Walser a Swiss writer’s letter,
In a court off a square, both with children
And dogs, also found Walser’s door inside,
And, drawing the pull, heard a bell jangle
On a bouncing coil of wire deep within.
An interval, and the door was opened
By a butler in a swallowtail coat.
POLDEN
Capitalism.
NOTCH
With large liquid eyes,
Military moustache, hair brushed back
With such parallel regularity
That you suspected a pigtail in back.
POLDEN
Imperialism, English navy.
NOTCH
Was this, Herr Schriftbild asked, the apartment
Where Herr Robert Walser the writer lived?
Exactly, Sir, said the butler, taking
Herr Schriftbild’s card.
POLDEN
Decadent plutocrats.
NOTCH
If the Herr Schriftbild would wait a moment,
Herr Walser would be told of his presence,
Which, in very fact, he was expecting.
POLDEN
What a prick.
NOTCH
Herr Schriftbild sat. He took in,
By way of passing the time, the carpet,
Old furniture, strange pictures on the walls,
Probably German, certainly modern,
Some meadow flowers in a blue pitcher,
A paper parrot on a bamboo perch,
A chromolithograph of Palmyra,
A plaster bust of Gottfried von Leibniz,
One of whose eyes had been outlined in red.
A blank brick wall, the view from the window.
Clearly, he thought, it pleases this Walser
To let visitors cool their heels awhile.
Perhaps he was ending a paragraph,
Seeing another visitor, female,
Down the back stairs? Then again, you never
Knew what these writers might not be doing.
Paring their toenails, sitting in a trance,
Reading right through the French dictionary.
And this one, now, could afford a butler.
POLDEN
A pampered bourgeois.
NOTCH
The carpet had lived
At many addresses before this one,
The chairs had ridden through the streets in carts
Pulled by elderly horses. Herr Schriftbild
Avoided the paper parrot’s yellow
And Leibniz’s red eye and gazed instead
At the flyspecked ruins of Palmyra,
And was wondering if that city is
In the Bible or profane history
When the door through which the butler had gone
Opened just enough to admit a man
In rumpled corduroy and blue flannel
Shirt as fancied by British Socialists.
Large liquid eyes, military moustache.
If his bohemian hair were brushed back
With a parallel regularity,
You would suspect a pigtail tied behind.
POLDEN
Imperialism, English navy.
NOTCH
God help us, Herr Schriftbild said to himself,
This is the butler wanting me to think
He’s Walser, who has some frump on his lap,
Or is reading the French dictionary.
The voice, however, greeting Schriftbild
With a familiar and bright nonchalance,
Was wholly different from the butler’s.
You would suspect a pigtail tied behind.
POLDEN
Karl Marx brooding with folded arms, his head
Massive in bronze, Lenin raising his fist,
Exhorting the people.
NOTCH
Walser, you see,
Was his own butler. He could do voices.
A poet. After a while, he gave up
And lived in a lunatic asylum.
Our poets all went into prisons.
POLDEN
His own butler?
NOTCH
The world was like that, then.
Variety. Versatility. O!
The century before ours, the nineteenth,
It was a kind of earthly paradise.
Avenues of lindens and of poplars.
Men, women, and children, horses and dogs.
And now it’s only old women sweeping.
News of tomatoes at a market
Over near Tramstop 6 on the Prospekt.
As soon, ha! believe the clowns at the Cyrk.
They would be gone, anyway, when you came.
POLDEN
In America gangs roam the cities,
Taking the workers’ money at knife point.
The rich, without conscience or character,
Are addicted to narcotics and die
Drunk in hideous automobile wrecks.
Imagine fifty thousand wrecks a year.
The sole policy of the government
Is to suppress freedom and to finance
Fascism all over the world.
NOTCH
Heigh ho.
POLDEN
At Sankt Boris some poets and workers
Staged a protest last Tuesday in the street.
They had a 1917 banner
And some modern paintings done on cardboard.
The Ideal of Life they called one of them
And What Does It All Mean? was the other.
Very ugly, the paintings. Daubs, in fact.
One of the poets was wearing blue jeans
Made in Pinsk, hammer-and-sickle label.
They did not fit and did not have the look
Of Western jeans, and the blue was purple.
The poet shouted a pukey poem
Before the Guard came and took them away.
NOTCH
The Old Cockroach.
POLDEN
And the gypsies are back.
They have made a camp where the synagogue
Used to be. With beautiful white horses.
Why was he his own butler?
NOTCH
For the joke.
People used to do such things. It was fun.
POLDEN
Silver thunder. That was in the poem.
NOTCH
A bust of Pomona, and a cabbage.
A copy of The Red Dawn beside her.
The goods train, when it passed, rattled the cups
And made Pomona shake. The window shook.
And a shiver of light opened her eyes.
That was long ago. In old poetry
She is the spirit of apples and pears,
A tall woman dressed in flowers and leaves.
The clock on the tower no longer works.
Still, it is a fragment of Italy
Here in the gray, in the sameness, the drab.
POLDEN
You live in the past.
NOTCH
I live in my mind.
POLDEN
Her mind.
NOTCH
Where dreams appear in old colors.
Come, shadow, come, and take this shadow up,
Scarlet in the shadow of an orange.
Words.
This oak, this owl, this moon.
There is a
Death in this wind the owl cannot find.
Death in the thistle, white loaf of the moon,
Death in snow, the cricket and wildflowers.
You do not know, Polden Wolf Eyes, what things
There used to be. The thousand-branched oak tree,
With a thousand leaves a branch, red red leaves,
The red oak of Velimir Khlebnikov.
That was red.
Now there are no more cities,
Only distances of stone. Verona
Was yellow, Venice was red. And we had
Urbs et fanum, city and cathedral,
Gorod i khram, and bell sound in the air.
Being’s the gift. It’s difficult to be.
POLDEN
But I am, and you are. What is so hard?
NOTCH
The stitch of things. He had a mind that was
Part centaur and part streets of Megara.
That was a lecture I once heard in school,
About Theognis, ancient Greek poet.
Silver-rooted waters of Tartessos!
You wouldn’t know. He wrote of oiled athletes,
Laws of property, and of irony
And rhythm in behavior, of archers,
Real wealth and vain wealth, loving friends, good talk.
He was critical of democracy,
Muttering that horses were better bred
Than sons and daughters. He fancied the studs
Of both genera, a wide-minded man.
POLDEN
That’s against nature.
NOTCH
Lenin was a prig.
Theognis lived through a revolution
That cost him his books, olive groves and house,
His racehorses.
POLDEN
Good.
NOTCH
And another war
That cost him his Spartan control of self.
He moved from city to city, always Greek,
Writing in a geometry of words
A poem that was to Homer’s beauty
And the verve of Hesiod what later
Apollos modelled on gymnastic slaves
Were to the stiff archaic kouroi.
POLDEN
You remember all this?
NOTCH
Shakespeare and Petrarch.
It keeps coming back. Lensky and Pushkin.
Willows and stars.
POLDEN
Before the Aurora
Flew the red flag. A moment of glory.
NOTCH
There is a woman sweeping the crossing.
You see her: over there.
POLDEN
I see her, yes.
NOTCH
The clock tower and the barracks. Do you
See how they make a perspective for her,
As in a painting by Canaletto?
POLDEN
Italian landscapist. Hermitage.
NOTCH
And the sky above her, dull as a ditch.
What is she thinking of?
POLDEN
Nothing. Lenin.
NOTCH
Save the hectic red, the bilious yellow
Of the flag over the barracks, there is
No color anywhere.
POLDEN
None. Patch of red,
Smitch of yellow. All of the rest is gray.
You are going to make something of it,
As if she could help being a figure
Alone in the square. She is a picture
In your imagination.
NOTCH
Old woman
Is what she is. Events happen again
In memory, knowing, or narrative.
Time rolls up as it goes along, bringing
The past with it. Nothing is left behind.
POLDEN
That old woman with the besom gets paid
Ahead of the commissars in the line.
NOTCH
Rilke and Lou Andreas Salome
Visited at Yasnaya Polyana.
They talked about Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Ah! the music, string quartets. Poetry.
You could meet someone who had seen Monet
At Giverny, beside the lily pond.
Proust. If you knocked on his door his servant
Had the same set speech for everybody:
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Monsieur Proust wants you to know that there is
No waking hour when he is not thinking
Of you, but right now he is too busy
To see visitors. The Boratinskies,
Khlebnikov, Tatlin, Osip Mandelstam.
People who had been to Gertrude Stein’s house.
Who recommended that you come? was what
She asked at the door. What a time that was,
Back then.
POLDEN
Parasites.
NOTCH
Venice, Rome, London.
Every shop had potatoes for sale,
Heaps and hampers of potatoes for sale.
Oranges, grapes, editions of Homer.
And Lenin had the cleanest bicycle
In Zürich. And he did Indian clubs.
One two three, one two three. At the window.
POLDEN
If there had been no Lenin, there would have
Been a Lenin.
NOTCH
And a sealed German train.
Red flags on the locomotive, a crowd
To welcome him at the Finland Station.
Committee of peasants wanting to learn
Hegelian dialectic.
POLDEN
A workers’ brass
Band playing the Internationale.
NOTCH
Springtimes were sweeter, summers were greener.
The apple trees, the singing, and the gold.
There is no kindness now in the years.
POLDEN
But there are years.
NOTCH
Oh yes, the promised years,
Right on time.
Bronze Leaves and Red
He sleeps on an iron cot and his only income is the royalty the State pays him for the use of his portrait on our postage stamps. They say he can sit by the hour regarding a bust of Nietzsche. He likes to chat with his friends on the telephone. The sole decoration he wears is his Iron Cross. That and the armband of the Party are the only accents that alleviate the drab plainness of his uniform. His favorite composer is Anton Bruckner, the strong surge and harmonic progressions of whose symphonies remind him of the old Germany, the forests and the mountains, the coffeehouses with their newspapers, chess games, metaphysical conversations, and scientific journals, the Germany of fine autumns and mists when between the hamlets the little roads are lined with trees whose bronze leaves and red burn with a kind of glory in the afternoon sun.