All yours! Now you’re one of us!
Welcome to the kingdom of water and carbon!
When they recruit you they give your naked body a check-up.
You have to be healthy, the impeccable lamb of the herd
for a sacrifice in the name of your country.
Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.
But you’re unsure what to cover with your hands.
Between your genitals and shaved head
you choose your genitals
forgetting that the mane
is precisely what makes a lion king.
“To protect what? Where my territory begins and ends?”
Nothing is yours.
Attack and invade. Use trickery like the knight in a chess game:
two squares horizontally, one vertically.
Ambush your fate, face to face, or from behind,
when it least expects you.
And don’t forget: as soon as you plant your feet somewhere,
hang a torn shirt or a pair of ragged pants outside on a clothesline,
enough to frighten the crows.
This is your passport—
poverty makes you a citizen anywhere you go;
poverty makes you indigenous.
3.
Your body throws you under the bus; your body betrays you.
Your body is simply water and carbon.
I was seventeen one morning in my prison cell
when after a night of delirium, running a 107-degree fever
caused by bronchopneumonia,
I woke up drenched in my own urine.
I was neither a child nor a man anymore.
Then in the labor camp, out in the marsh,
I saw the theologian gathering rotten bits of cigarettes,
smelling the butts, trying to take a single drag.
But when I saw the former Sorbonne professor
secretly digging through the trash and pick up a piece of watermelon rind,
which he then wiped on his pants and swallowed whole without chewing,
I knew I witnessed five thousand years of civilization
extinguished in one moment.
Of course, it’s always the fault of the witness,
the wrong eyes at the wrong place.
Without a witness we wouldn’t even have crematoriums
and only white fumes would leak out of history’s nostrils.
4.
He had such dignity, the old man who hung himself
(rejected here on earth and now also in heaven),
his bare feet like a saint’s, his body a frozen planet
revolving one last time around itself,
his head drooped to one side,
as if he were refusing to witness even his own death …
But it didn’t end here; they plucked out his gold teeth
as if removing three generations of his history.
Declassed, disgraced, even among the dead.
How can a toothless man protect himself at the Last Judgment?
How could he formulate his arguments?
The dead would laugh; angels would shake their heads.
And so he too would be forgotten.
Simply water and carbon like everyone else.
The living went back to work, eyes cast down as if at their own funeral.
The whips against their joints and back
gave them no time to think much.
You can’t be last in line—this was the goal,
morning to night.
But where was our country at that moment? Where was Caesar?
5.
“They stripped us naked
and beat us under cold tap water
with Soviet boots. We fainted. But …”
“But?”
“But the next day all four of us were still alive at roll call.
And the officers made a bet for a case of beer on the boy from Tropoja
having left him outside in the snow all night long
naked as the day he was born.
But …”
“But?”
“But one of them lost the bet.”
“… ?”
“When they beat the old man like a child, slapping him in the face,
I did nothing to help him …”
“… ?”
“Then I knew that even death didn’t give a damn about us. It approached us like a dog,
sniffed us then left us alone …”
“…”
“We were simply femur bones, without marrow.”
And his eyes suddenly beamed, as if he had just found
a nail on the wall where he could hang a painting:
“However, Sergeant Halim was a good man …”
“What good things did Sergeant Halim do?”
“He didn’t do anything good,
but he didn’t do anything bad either.”
6.
Then one day you became one with suffering,
as it transformed into a limb
that must be treated generously like your other limbs:
wash it, clean it, cut its nails carefully, keep it warm,
feel its numbness
like when you placed your arm beneath your head late at night,
dumping all your sleepless weight onto it, and the searchlight
scanned the camp
moving cunningly across the brown blankets
like the eye of a jackal preying on the weakest animal in the herd.
Nothing and no one came between you and your suffering.
One dissolved into another like salt in water
(and now you can’t remember which one of you preceded the other).
And you quit complaining.
From your lungs carbon streams out freely.
7.
“I’m tired of listening to you. Enough now.
Tell me just one thing: Why did you tolerate all this?”
asks his brother from an ocean away
groomed by Hudson’s breeze.
He lives in a country where the right to pursue happiness
is guaranteed by the constitution.
“And what should we have done according to you?”
“Some of you should have been killed
so the rest could live with dignity.”
But this doesn’t follow chemistry’s laws.
The sole mission of water and carbon
is to stay alive at all costs.
And to stay alive they simply need their basic instincts,
as basic as the words and phrases in the small pocket dictionary
tourists carry in foreign lands.
Like for example: “bread” “water” “How do you get to the nearest town?”
“Do you have a vacant room for tonight?” “I can pay cash.”
Because of these instincts
some of us returned home alive
with a pair of borrowed shoes.
We built a hut of reeds and mud where we could begin again
under a sky where a colorless porridge cooked in a pot
with all the leftover seeds
like Noah’s porridge.
We were guns without latches.
We softened walls with our shadows.
And we bore children, two-dimensional children,
like ribbons of light that enter through the crack of a door
or through the torn tarp on a roof.
Daydreaming children, the children of survival
who noticed only the bonny haunches of the farm oxen,
and at night, like a secret sect,
gathered around Dickens.
8.
You can’t conquer evil. Evil ends on its own.
No matter how great, every evil has its moment of saturation:
murderous sharks, wars, inquisition fires,
cholera and the plague, destructive glaciers too …
Even dictatorships reach their saturation point
And blessed is the one destined to live through the Epoch of Saturation:
like paradise in those illustrated religious flyers
where tigers and humans bask peacefully together under the sun,
in an apple orchard by a river of honey, co-sufferers and co-citizens.
Fault is not a feature of water or carbon.
Fault doesn’t exist.
9.
Children, yes,
but adults never abandon their toys.
Among tin bowls and aluminum spoons,
coats and clogs of the same size, among shaved heads
we were identified by our lost causes:
one believed in “the republic,” one in “the monarchy,”
one in “the revolution,” one in “the truth,”
and one simply in “health.”
(A little too much faith there in thirteen square feet of space).
And the one who used to talk to himself or to a corner of the wall
once got a little carried away when he claimed to be Constantine the Great.
Mind separate from body,
he was more akin to the Constantine Colossus
with two right hands in the Palazzo dei Conservatori.
You have no right to occupy two places in this world;
even in prison there is no space for two selves.
So one day they took him away, all of his pieces,
to who knows where; whichever piece ended up in court
and whichever in the madhouse …
And he was only twenty-five years old.
Observed from above
we were simply part of a museum—
somewhere a millwheel shone, somewhere a parchment yellowed,
and somewhere else a horseman’s costume hung
without a horseman in sight.
10.
Water is recyclable.
Nature is a good housewife and lets nothing go to waste.
They say the one who posed for Jesus’s portrait in The Last Supper
was the same person who posed for Judas’s four years later,
though this time not the soft-skinned, golden-haired choir boy
anymore, but the man in a prison in Rome, convicted of serious crimes.
Water
can do wonders in four years—
it can freeze, turn cloudy or stale, flow out of its bed—
wonders that even da Vinci’s eagle eye
couldn’t predict.
And so each of us could have four lives.
In the most fortunate case
we could be recycled from a balloon into cleaning gloves,
then into a car seat, and in the end into the synthetic snow
that falls on a romantic Christmas scene shoot in mid-July
until the director is satisfied and yells, “Cut!”
Where there’s hope, there’s compromise.
But what can be said of the man
who willingly chose to die of starvation?
Ecce homo they shouted mockingly—people in uniform,
the materialists who couldn’t wait to wash their hands.
Because dignity, if not inherited, can be contagious.
11.
Water has a short memory.
From Palm Sunday to Good Friday there were five blessed days;
the one they welcomed as triumphant into Jerusalem
was nailed as “faithless” on the fifth day.
“But, if we’re only water and carbon,
then what is love? How do we know it’s love?”
You can’t know but others can;
when they see you roofless, they think:
“There was a fire there!”
At the camp, when mail arrived on Tuesdays—letters from wives,
fiancées, lovers—one of us always ended up empty-handed;
“No letters for you!” meaning, “She left you.”
In that moment all eyes seized you
and conjugated the verb “to leave” into all the tenses, forms, persons
beyond etymologies, all the way to Salome
and the “Dance of the Seven Veils” …
Never before did you feel so naked,
so naked that they could count the hairs and pores on your body,
the nerves firing under your skin like frantic moles.
They could easily make out your heart
a late tomato on the vine, unripe, green,
so green you were stunned.
From war and love
you return even more ignorant
than when you first set out.
12.
“You are free,” they told him after forty-five years.
“Where will you go now?”
They could’ve been asking someone on death row,
“What song do you want to hear?” Or more precisely,
“Do you know what you’ve lost?”
A second punishment, a second execution.
It was the end of June. The sky opened its mouth ear to ear
and laughed brazenly, exposing a cluster of clouds
above some lonely mountain peaks,
and the ticket seller her wisdom teeth
when he asked, “A ticket to the sea, please!”
The journey was long,
the longest our kind of water and carbon could ever take,
in a boxcar that smelled of freshly baked buns and sweat.
He stopped at the wrong station.
Traveled the rest of the journey on foot.
The breeze from the poplars blew softly against his neck;
he felt like a newlywed entering the bedroom for the first time,
not knowing if that gesture was meant to be congratulatory or consoling.
And here’s the sea!
How can man hide such a miracle from man?
How can you hide water from water?
Where had he seen that white ship leaving the dock before?
In the dreams of the father, grandfather, great-grandfather?
Around him circled men and women in speckled bathing suits
and joyous children with sunburned shoulders.
He was the only one in the wrong season—
late, premature.
He was the only one fully clothed, from head to toe,
as if a black piano shut in the corner of a hall
around which the world revolves undisturbed.
He touched the sand—
only a single grain finds its way into the belly of an oyster
with time and pain, to be transformed into a pearl.
THIS GESTURE
Look what we have here:
some books bought with a little savings,
as if land purchased for a house
that you might never build. Plato, Hegel, The Marxist Movement,
heavy cloth covers. Sideways, behind Aristotle, rests Art Nouveau,
like the head of a woman nodding off on the train,
your shoulder still out of politeness.
Books in foreign languages, bought with the last change
from shops you’ll never visit again:
Tarkovsky’s Techniques, exchanged for five food vouchers;
Bergman, Hitchcock, Louis Buñuel reveal only part of the wall,
each the end of a misleading path inside a pyramid.
African Masks, Aztec Culture, Egyptian Gods
all bought on a rainy day perhaps, as an excuse to stay indoors.
And again the visual arts albums
labelled Ars in Latin like medicinal bottles
that camouflage a bitter taste.
Hugo, Turgenev, Stendhal …
relics of first love, second love, of …
A dark empty space
and further, Dostoyevsky’s White Nights
with its green irony on the cover that says,
“Throw a coat ove
r your shoulders first …”
And lower, Gaudí and other architectural books …
A smooth transition between what you wanted
and what you were able to attain.
Encyclopedias, temples without roofs.
Shakespeare exchanged for a noisy Soviet radio.
Poetry books: thin, sly, bought at discounted prices,
breaking apart like crumbled bread thrown at swans in the park.
The only ones arranged horizontally
are The Erotic Art of the Middle Ages, The Ethical Slut, and Tropic of Cancer—
easy to find when feeling around in the dark,
like slippers under the bed.
In a corner, the holy books, the Gospels.
They’ve arrived here by themselves—you didn’t spend a cent to buy them.
Each volume almost never opened. How can you believe something
that doesn’t ask for anything in exchange?
And on the very bottom, The Barbarian Invasion, history, science …
Time to read with glasses. Linear reading. Andropause.
To show someone your library is an intimate gesture,
like giving him a map, a tourist map of the self
marked with the museums, parks, bridges, galleries, hotels, churches, subway …
and the graveyards that appear regularly
at the edges of every town, at the beginning of every epoch.
THE STAIRS
My father was obsessed with stairs.
All his life he’d build one set and destroy another,
sometimes indoors, sometimes outdoors,
never finding the perfect way to go up.
I feel the same way.
There’s a different view from above: streets
become tightropes; gardens hide behind houses
like bite marks on a lover’s neck; cosmic dust conceals
the rotation of pedestrians around a star and themselves.
Whereas the railroad track with its yellow-and-black lines
isn’t the rattlesnake that makes your skin crawl …
Whenever I chose the quick stairs of the elevator,
I got stuck between floors, an irrational number.
What happened next isn’t worth mentioning.
And then the escalators
that deliver you
intact
like a postal package to another era
without knowing what’s inside you. You don’t know either.
Poetry, too, is a way of moving up,
temptation through denial, via negativa,
Negative Space Page 7
