to my own available vocabulary
being spoken through, damozen, lap summer
skirt, rendered blue in the face
by the sonnet form, that liberates
the thousand river names from their anchorage.
I bescribble and I blacken paper
with my smooth domesticated tissue
of images desiring to please a shadow,
to saddle with meanings the traumas of war
by an occasion of wordshed.
Language deserts the self
like the fragility of the outer meaning
playing on the joy in Joyce.
A pillow of old words with old
credentials, never certain that their
passports are quite in order,
nothing with which to express,
nothing from which, no power,
no desire, with the obligation
to find semantic succour, and no
audience—that’s part of one’s death.
A Novel About Patrick
Second or third house on the left coming up,
second floor, window twenty-one, I believe.
Window looking for a window, the window
at your back, sitting on the window-sill,
watching the opposite pavement thick from strain.
As you read, try the word on, kingly plunderer,
to be found stolen in a century. You should stop
using these minimum dreams as fuel,
I so enthustiastically underscore lines of yours,
I haven’t been to the pawnshop in two months.
And right you are, never is, never was,
you just listen, listen—you hit the nail
on the head, you were as good as here, and burst
in you will, as if the presence of a faultless angel:
how two-in-one you are to me,
my soul is not that virgin. So he went on promising,
(page torn) and this over and over, she was crying,
she was undressed by a man with your ring on his hand.
At the city limits she watched eighteen trains go by,
her eyes cannot be paired up, sodden doorways of flame.
I am weary of cranial partitions and fabulously busy
like giving birth for the twelfth time and,
as fate would have it, I have so far been unable
to take my place at that window:
you force yourself through solid crowds
on pilgrimages buying in closed shops, your pocket
swelling with what was left over from the selling
of a medal, pocket lined with smashed eggs
and sunflower seeds. Please don’t think I have designs
on the days of the week, like verbs with holes in them.
The past is ripped off like a shutter in a storm,
a car cries out like a cuckoo, or coughs
like an old man opening desk drawers. Once
the sirens sound I hold on to the edge of my Remington
from early in the morning, gun salvos broke
into our house at any time of the evening.
I was that angel of modesty that heated your flat
with my Greek scent, I would scrupulously
scrape my feet and clean my clothes with a brush
moistened in disinfectant. I opened
the storm windows to air I had ceased breathing
long ago, when I made that gesture of denial
against your hands, with the waiter standing
observing my mouth. New waves of the old feeling.
When the train came to a halt near the porcelain factory
they said there was a storm on the lake, they said there
was no storm. In a photograph I study with the eyes
of two families, the city rises outside
the windows of the Hotel Octobre,
my book smiles at me anew, from the window.
Reading Before Stalin
Friend means action—could you? Hold out?
In the northern capital we were not expected to know
what millennium it was outside Pegasus Stall
in that inconceivable London.
My lips cling together at the top of my voice
like fingers in mittens. As appetizers, cold slices
of marinated mushrooms, then mushroom soup,
and finally the main course, boiled mushrooms
with mushroom fillings.
My party books are dished out as dessert in little
cardboard squares, lilac ice-cream, cloud milk,
wine on the palm, cloud bread and rye-bread book.
The bronze of a sermon through the laziness
of the angels is melted down to a flywheel
with hammers, screws and bolts on a red
marble coffin. I can’t get my hand
into my sleeve, what with the wooden spoon
in my buttonhole, the bluebird on my cheek,
the words across the sky displaying the day’s motto,
a lyrical digression giving orders to the Army
of the Arts from the Commissar of Enlightenment.
Verses Unpublished in the Poet’s Lifetime
Works and Days
Although the blessing of horses
to Saint Florus and Saint Laurus
promised something, a stretch, from the road,
the calico balloon met the sky like John the Baptist—
above one’s head hung not the spring.
Our Days
The tulips became shorter and more abrupt,
the hill had grown taller and drawn in;
books that snaked across the floor vapoured
with the terseness of parable,
engines pounded hotly.
About That
Knives and forks on the terrace took on
a green hue, gatherings à quatre
made their nests high over the gangway
into a voyage on the round nape of the wave
just a station up the line.
Seasonal Mood Picture
Down by Brest Station the redolent express
departed into golden marshland and hillside
nurtured in silver—journeys became possible
to diamond forests, the river too
learned what it was to be renamed.
Sketches for a Fantasy
To put it more gently, I shall work my way
through to him, I shall break myself
for the last time, bewilderedly retracing
my steps and indried thoughts
like a hundred blinding photographs.
Poem of a Kinsman
I understood him as an outline, a contour,
a cast-off skin whose bandages would slacken,
whose youth was marked
by the dawning town that too often
became different, or nothing.
Sympathy for the Twilight
His alter ego, You Will Remain,
hid behind the claret-coloured walls of the cool
and clean museum. Farewell to loving
anything, I carried him away with me
from the boulevard into my life.
Muse of Cinema
It was the middle sister who was the main
object of his interest—that was how
he operated—charred pears at the Café Grec,
her five-petalled gaze an ornate lock,
and little in the way of extra snow.
The Black Goblet
He finally seduces her, and in that instant falls
genuinely in love with her. Then
his mistress Camilla turns up
like a blood-spotted card.
(She lives next to the theatre.)
Dream of a First Love’s Marriage
He privately dedicated his sultry, summery
collection to Natasha, but she did not keep
his letters, and aft
er his death her letters
to him were handed back to her.
(She has herself since died.)
Revenge Against Music
He came from the depths of lyrical space,
alias the summer on the one hand,
to this mustering point, this profusion of lilac lustre,
this home in the autumn borne along
on its own words as though upon a raft.
Your Death
And the town that is now performing itself,
since she had replaced the whole blackened town,
stone by stone, surrounded by fir saplings,
whoever you are, this town is your own invention,
and what, the duty of something unthinkable, went on there.
Synagogue Wedding
A tank cleared up the street like a forest cutting
once and for all, the drawing room over three winters
merged into one, was allowed to freeze up,
with venomous courtesy the first government decrees
made them remove their hats.
Red Cornfield
Everything disposed one to work, polite
social occasions were so few. The skittish
mannerisms of his backbone flute were unpolished,
like oars at rest. Still to him a schoolgirl,
she intended signing on as a nurse.
Rain-Spangled Poem
And she was as good as her word.
They paid her in gold to pass through this atmosphere
of fierce, abstracted, chaotic frost,
of dirty sea and narrow beach by the rail
halt on the winter mail route.
To the Demon’s Memory
But still mountains unlived by anyone.
Noise of a revving motorcycle flooded
the key buildings. October would be withdrawn
into even deeper depths, its frozen
motionless energy a puzzle to the two of them.
The Courtyard
I’ve appointed your meeting with me in a novel,
my brother in the fifth season of the year,
something more than a thousand pages long.
Having breathed its falsehoods for over ten years
I shall not manage this spring.
Lyre of Lyres
Yesterday I began struggling through
the dense shrubbery of your book, your sweeping,
winged script, the aristocratic burr
of your French speech. But nor did I pour away
the ink with which I wrote of famine.
October’s Man of the Moment
Your book sounds its mating call, turns its ten
windmills in a huge wave of love. Splinters
of its lines fly apart and become caught
in ordinary drops—your voice is more mine
than yours, more aspen than birch.
Unextinguished Moon
I stopped reading on the second page
where my family crystallized like stored water,
biographically glittering, deprived of Europe. Unshaken
by the changes down the street, all the elements
of the confusion are in him true.
Samson the Housecat
He is not the only one who can provide
a key to the age in his converse with the country,
its trading and careerisms, like a great mass
of time imagined all at once,
with faith in the reader.
White Guardist Poetess
Simply as sharing the light of your après-ski
attention, to the soul in my soul, that rejoices
for the song that is over my song, comrade
genius, weary equestrienne, I snapped—Good!—
the book to on the third page.
Attempt at a Room
I had not counted on my letter’s having not two
but four destinations, tight-lipped when pressed,
writing the poem about England for the newspapers.
I’ve not a soul to swipe an anthem from.
He always sounded bits of paleness in her universe,
his firmer mouth wandered, though hers was the heavier breath.
Some shred of heart the last vestiges of her mind
would not let go—I am as he is, since he is right.
His gait ringing on the steps, his bestowed weight—
despite his unerring ear all has been taken in advance,
he breathes on me the bitter cold of a possessor,
of whose possessions I am knowingly a part.
My warmth has already lain on the panes of his eternity,
there is always a sort of draught between you and me.
While speaking to a friend she hasn’t seen for years,
oh, are the towels hung up to dry? What is ours
remains ours, I called it happiness, let it be misery
or the same aloneness. I had anticipated the entire
echo, would there ever be one to help us to fullness
again? Did I read you correctly, or just the movement
of your lips, should it be done with the eyes or with the breath?
Double jealousy—single is enough—our both referring
to the sea, the beginning, the northern city, dreary
and prosaic. You might have seemed to be made of an alloy,
on the assumption that you and I were translucent.
Remember, under coverlets of cowardice,
the birds on the ceiling and by the glimmer of memory,
the blizzards on the other side of the river?
Look at the map, the date, the town, out of the well
of wells the bed, back, table, elbow, always stove,
broom, money, none, not to sweep, any more—
the deed and the poem are on my side.
Though much, everything even, remains in the notebook.
Incomplete angel, either can speak for both,
we sit when we should stand, somewhat flushed,
in a secondhand bookshop.
And the blizzard of print increases in ferocity,
the long years are running out,
the gravely ill metaphors must eat their fill
before the hearse carries them to the churchyard.
Her Dislove of Love
Women there are whose perfume
is ruinous and fine—they’re thirty.
After the snarled tangle and cave-in
of the war my hands so seldom want to.
I took you to see your younger sister
beyond the suburb’s brow: just anyone
who feels at home in the hours.
Journey of sacred slowness
to what you mean, my little word.
The woods are mine, pre-sounds
and post-sounds, where I can be
alone with your large photograph.
Last night I stepped out to take down laundry
and took all of the wind, all of the north, in my arms.
The Heart Ghost
A dream stood over me
attracted by the lamplight
out of sight: a shredded face
that came back from the dead
of its own accord
to comfort the living.
Only its head was visible,
the shelves of brow and chin
as if preserved in redness like
a Prussian town now in Poland.
Days in Red Poland
Winter, without journey: I watch too much weather.
The slum clearance has turned old lush gardens to blood,
making noise like a bank in a blizzard
of constant views and surfaces.
From the unhealthy Jewish town within this image
of undamaged city I throw a can of pineapple juice
at a streetlight’s unipolar world—a nested act,
with dragging slipper walk.
And move tha
t sound aside like the earliest known word,
keeping guard over my ear all the time (my system just
has on and off) for cup-muted sounds that tend
to stop half way,
but looking for untasted words, though whispers
have their own key, and seeing everything as if it were
scenery. If I try to drink the paving waves
in the lavender-coloured mirrors,
or hold up the wall in my head with a third
hand, the dream ebbs out of me. I tie my Palestinian
scarf, stained teal-blue, ash and parchment
like that small 45 the Englishman wears.
So Warsaw’s Come to Wait on Us Now
The war kept brewing. On and on.
We were rotting away. Who would
have thought it would last so long?
I wanted to escape to the Old Town.
I felt as if I were in some strange
German city crippled by the stones
under my feet.
I kept going in circles doing nothing.
I had so much to say, I preferred
not to be snared by words.
From early in the morning we heard
artillery and machine guns:
without that ‘music’ we were sad.
We received a spoonful of good jam.
At night we gathered snow.
The mass started at seven instead of midnight
because of the curfew.
I wanted to appear very devout
by walking the six kilometres to church.
Living in the country was the best
medicine, being put up at a new farmhouse
every twenty-four hours.
Zofia had a fall coat,
her place was a crooked shack sunk
into the earth as if for gnomes.
She perched on the packed dirt floor
like a hen, sealing herself with her shawl.
Blaris Moor Page 3
