I took out our little pillow
which had lost half its feathers,
and next to it I folded over
many times my one and only dress.
Halina cut out a blouse for me
and some underwear from a pillowcase.
I sewed them up quickly.
We tried using our tongues
to wet each other’s lips
with the fresh surface of water.
On the third day
we looked through our Lilliputian window
at a field of mute bricks.
Yes, he said, with his woven band
à la Tirol, this train belongs to me.
Armed with a pistol, with the safety off,
for the last time I fired a few shots
at the nouveau-riche smugglers
frequenting the coffee shops.
Antipersonnel Mine
Only 19-years-old, but I was called ‘Father’
by a dying German soldier. He was old and fragile,
he did not have a weapon.
He lay twisted around his right leg
but when he saw the red crosses on my arms and helmet
his mouth stretched as if shrieks
were coming out, he reached for me
and cried ‘Vater!’
I bared the wound at mid-thigh,
put sulfa powder on the exposed bone,
covered it with a compress, tied a loose
tourniquet. He was greying fast.
I stuck morphine in, he wasn’t eased,
I gave him another eighth of a grain
and watched him lapse into shock.
I felt as if I too had been shot
and yearned to be dead.
*
Gordon got ripped by a machine gun
through the right waist. We were cut off
in foxholes by ourselves.
I tried to knock him out.
I took off his helmet, held his jaw up,
and whacked it as hard as I could.
I hit him with his helmet
but that didn’t work. Nothing worked.
He slowly, slowly, froze.
*
I knew of shelters built inside
transformer housings covered
with metal-plated doors marked
with warning signs featuring
a skull and crossbones.
The people would drape
high-voltage cables over the iron doors,
in front of which they would place wet leads,
they were warm enough for someone to lie
on the floor even during sub-zero weather.
*
We don’t have water. Everyone wants to drink.
People are simply burning up.
By chance I found a litre
while I was clearing away rubble.
Edka and I each had a little bit,
and then I took it back, practically full,
to our room for the others.
Lana came over—she is terribly thirsty.
I gave her the bottle and said,
‘You drink first.’ Marius came over.
Lana drank a third and asked him,
‘Do you want a little water? Drink some and leave
some for Rena.’ He drank
and put down the bottle.
There was not a drop left.
Skirt of a Thousand Triangles
It was minus 27. The city was drowning in flags.
We closed our still normal windows in order
not to hear the bells. All around the Market Place
enormous white poles had been planted
every one and a half metres, from which fluttered
bloody banners many metres long,
embroidered with a white circle. That same night
more than sixty persons were registered
as having committed suicide.
Having quickly sat down with my back
to the window I could only count the shots,
not the unravelled scarves. While I was binding
bandages, with my common-or-garden nerves,
she told me how precisely to knock upon the door
when a house was ‘liberated’.
The first two days we spent
sitting on our suitcases.
When the porcelain isolators spaced at intervals
began to gleam white over the same forest-in-spring
she suddenly stopped addressing me as ‘Sister’
and, looking desperately English, began kissing
both my hands alternately at high speed:
near perfume, the flowering
of my hands and fingers …
Her dress contains many skirts, one in-between skirt
of upside-down shapes, and geometrically
red endings—long, leafy, earthy ends.
At times she picks up to her northern shoulder
whole armfuls of her skirt to free her feet,
its soft, ladylike materials, its deceiving sash.
We exchanged a short, almost rough,
kiss on the march. You have to back out
of the cell as you leave, and tread on a rag
on the splintering floor, to draw the others
after you. To truly rebuild flowers of globe mallow,
hands outstretched towards the camp.
Notice
People selected for transport must leave their homes
in complete order. One piece of luggage
weighing sixty kilograms, and hand baggage
of a maximum of ten kilograms, will be allowed
per person. The remaining effects must be left
where they are in the home, e.g. curtains,
carpets, table lamps, wall mirrors, wash basins,
pieces of furniture, tablecloths, two towels,
and on the beds, mattress, bed linen,
and at least one pillow and bedcover,
all freshly made up.
Luggage must not be wrapped in carpets
or coverlets. If on inspection
it is observed that these instructions
have not been obeyed the person concerned
will not be taken on the transport
but will be sent to the interior to work.
The military has requested me to make it known
that under no circumstances may food supplies
be assembled among the local inhabitants
in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war.
Those who violate this command and nevertheless
try to circumvent this blockade
to allow something to come to the prisoners
place themselves in danger of being shot.
Special individual cases, contributions of near
relatives, will be negotiated through the commander.
I request you accordingly to make every effort
to stop possible collection and to explain
to the local inhabitants in suitable terms
about the facts of the matter—by order,
signed,
The President of the Government, May 1945.
District Behind the Lines
I carefully arranged the mask of buckram
curtains on my swan-pit features
like a blue-collar archangel who has turned
herself into a pet heron.
My father’s old tied flat shorn of its partitions—
Mama reading, lamplit, sitting by the rose—
the necessary table set for six people—
a sip of two days’ ago’s tea:
fellow-traveller, the content may be ours
but the voice is theirs—‘Northern Elegies’—
books interleaved with crumbled rice paper,
never-ending marks of uncomradely respect.
What difference in touch, white on green,
between the fur smell and the moss smell,
the flower value and the rose relaxed,
had you in mind? The hedge of clipped maple
as yet unringed with winter wreaths.
Black Re-partition
The black bird that has been with me all my life
comes and sits on my shoulder and whets its beak
like a woman with perfume, always adding touches.
Touches of red, all stillborn.
I always had a set of dayclothes by my bed.
Our look is what kept the icy-cold pages unread.
Tie the petticoat tighter, as I was kissed yester e’en
by a man from whom pure spirit flashes from time to time:
taking a kiss outside time, a small fence of kisses.
Moon, bird and flower watcher, I picked out his rooftop
on the wrists of each day, all the rooms but one
without light, far more threatened than birds.
They call September the part in the hair, they call
the season ten, depending on how the joints
of the year are going. From a single family
of lightly travelled streets, from the guncotton
dried there, a second thread moon
in a sky of German blue falls on the elbow
of our opened river. Is cuma liom.
I walk impossibly uphill
with the collar hurting my decayed aura.
Our mothers thought by eights instead of tens.
Rowe’s Fawn
When Ireland was a cloud in the west
that could flex with the waves it was not
unknown for women to keep the Host
in their mouths in order to win a kiss:
falls of high-protein manna,
much of it gnaws at Ireland from afar.
Make of your left hand
not two triangles stitched together
but a throne for your right,
like the darnel—like the arm
of St Gertrude emerging from her shrine
to receive offerings.
Honeycross
The clouds set immediately after the sun,
that merchant of astonishment, leaving the lower
branches scorched. The moon like the hand
of earth’s clock, unlocked an innermost door
into a past garden.
Fifteen years ago, on Holy Thursday,
they left his corpse on a lonely road. The bloodier
newspapers showed the exact spot in his throat,
greyness of heaped paving stones, triangular danger-signal,
a confessional turned on its side, nicely exposing
his heart, red carnations dropped there.
I have more than once
ducked my head from the sound, it seemed incredible
that a woman was hanging linen up to dry
where rifles dipped their cranes in salute
like ill-groomed palm trees across the faded
vermilion roofs of the thickset city. Grandmother
back from the longer rigmarole of vespers.
Holy Trinity approaching, yet nowhere was there sign
of paint on shutters, weathered to a silver.
The earth was being pulled through some undrawn line
of rose-coloured farms and pearl-grey villages
to plants in their unhurried flow beneath the land,
standing on tiptoe: Christmas flowers that only seem
to live in moonlight, bruisewort, or common daisy,
the Warden pear, now our Black Worcester,
sweet woodruff for Corpus Christi, narcissi
which folk call ‘Laus Tibi’, rosemary, husband
of lavender, the seven spotted ladybird, Our Lady’s
Bird, all guarded by Saint Dorothy of the Cherries,
a German garden saint.
At the Hand and Pen
The large river the city does not have
but would be stopped by nothing flowed
towards the jail at the edge so everyone could
tell themselves, I went.
How many times had they closed the university,
shut down the lecture series? The horizons
had all been pleated like doubt-peacocks
shooed away. Like Fay,
cut in two by bombs, holding her little girl
low-breaking by the hand, or the ones shot
at crossroads. She sprinkled holy water
where the pavement was uneven.
He took his ballot out of his pocket,
raised it to his forehead, then traced
the sign of the cross with it over his chest
and placed it in the box.
Telltale
The city was covered as if by a spider’s web.
To get to the centre one had to go past
at least fifty street sentries.
A simple trip required as much
as two hours through barricades,
checkpoints and tank traps.
A leg, its foot in a boot still attached,
a vast pool of dark blood
washed over the back of the market,
coursing around the cabbages, potatoes
and shopping bags. Cars doubled
as ambulances.
Pedestrian walkways were riddled with cavities
left by mortar and artillery strikes.
And after the war some were filled
as a telltale, with bright red plastic.
The Makeover
Four thousand acres of roses and carnations
leave the upgraded airport within hours
of being picked. The connectivity
of the most connected city is the television
sitting like an eyesore covered
with a global garment.
Private, non-world, three-speed city, to meet
and be seen, for whose beautification
perfume the colour of urine is sold
at traffic lights, whose vehicles slide
through vast excavations and monsoon-stains
for the under road flyover that will cut
the ring road’s travel time.
On grilled balconies and languid seafronts
we sip Singapore Slings as though
the carnage had nothing to do with us.
The car he drove was so big it couldn’t
come anywhere near where we live.
Everybody knows who killed him.
I know. If someone falls ill at night
there is a birdsong of mobile phones
in which I am always listening for her,
a serious girl who does not know her age.
My Angelism
Our fifty-year-old linden trees
have put on another sign—
in smooth weather a blizzard
of red snowflakes, red cockerels.
In this landscape of untended woods
the oddly regular pattern
of young pines, flowerless
but trembling, bristles and turns
over a floor of field
where their trunks are drilled
into an avenue. The navy blue
police with their white armbands
without the number of life
square their fists off the outlawed
pavement. Sea stings the wall bearing
the mural and shallow-floods the rice.
The decayed sun closes its eyes,
a golden wash-beetle:
I’ll praise the girl’s slow looks
with the yellow of the gorse.
The Barns of Joseph
Normalization: the square’s new polished look,
the light as it passes between the buildings
moves parallel to the ground’s honeyed marble
and fir-green mottling, finding themselves
on the street together. Sudden double red
of a cloud separates the losses to blue,
a second brown u
nderlies the conceiving
black opening between the leaves.
This half-peace war is here
showing its peaceful face.
It has its front line of souls hovering
at knee-height in the indistinct dawn,
only two-thirds divine,
crozier-shaped wind heads.
The Goddess of Smallpox
It’s all-the-year-round Christmas
and, oh, come let Him adore you,
the astral linkings of the house
cooling, leaving the one superghost.
What with the magnificent art
of living, in the doubt of the extreme
game, the shroud of language
brings a silence full of certainty
pretending that language caused
the world—such an afternoon
world, poised between the crisis
of yesterday’s sunset and the dying
snowflakes, festivals of the mind.
Death, they say, is not even winter,
a mere punctuation mark, as we listen
for her fragrance in the ice which her breath
has become. In some complete history
a universe might have these instant
meadows, might de-flesh or dress in new
bodies if dew in fact covered
both sides of their leaves.
But this slow-release enchantment,
from eternity’s claustrophobic organic
spaces, must be God and his mental
events, his unconstrained imagination
and choice. Waking Him up
might make her vanish with her lime-
topped sword, her bedraggled peacock whisk.
House Private
Single rose,
simplicity,
single dahlia, treachery and instability.
The entire clothing used about the person
should be put into a tub of cold water
and kept outside the house for twenty-four hours.
Ladder fern, sincerity and sorrow,
holly, foresight,
ivy, attachment.
The house floors and woodwork
should be cleansed with hot water,
the walls limewashed, and every apartment
fumigated with chloride and vitriol.
Climbing roses,
unfailing love,
wild geranium, steadfast piety.
The personal clothes should be dried
before a strong fire, the bed,
if of straw, chaff, or shavings
Blaris Moor Page 4
