fields are fanning green scarves
meadows are fanning motley scarves
you are melting away between grass and bumblebees
the road rises and descends again
you go and will not return – the hands of a windmill
are waving when you are already on the other side of the hill
when we all are we all will be
everyday life hair grows even after death
free time motorcycles cathalepsy
paraplegy anabiosis crimes and punishments
we shall all be free we shall see
what it really is it will anyway have an end
and we have enough time do not go before us wait
some time some mile on the king’s dismal plain
in the land of burnt tanks and turning wheels
because we must find the way
long sandy straight openings
to put your head on the naked knees of the forest
and sleep until the end
when you forget us and smile to the windmill on the hillside
and go away who will help us
to the gate and say to them there
that we are back
white rivers are lost in white sand
yellow rivers are lost in yellow sand
in the blue eyes of my child
the land beyond forests shines
home shelter courtyard well
rooster’s crow opening buds
all awake with all all together with all
but nothing is ready yet
nothing will ever be ready
in the long dreams of the children
is God Himself dreaming of His dreams
the windmill is playing with wind the road rises and descends again
do not go yet remain
remain with us for we do not yet know a thing
a red cloud cuts the sun into halves
the sky is full of marlets
*
Every dying man
is a child:
in trenches, in bed, on a throne, at a loom,
we are tiny and helpless
when black velvet bows our eyes
and the letters slide from the pages.
Earth lets nobody loose: it all
has to be given back – breath, eyes, memory.
We are children when the earth
turns with us through the night towards morning
where there are no voices, no ears, no light, no door,
only darkness and movement
in the soil and its thousands
of mouths, chins, jaws, and limbs
dividing everything so that
no names and no thoughts remain
in the one who is silent lying in the dark
on his right side, head upon knees.
Beside him, his spear, his knife
and his bracelet, and a broken pot.
*
They are standing up to their knees in blood and mud,
up to their knees, not on their knees,
at the gas chambers, not gas stoves,
saying that life is beautiful…
I cannot, I cannot once more…
The world is a dark surface,
a polished surface aslant, aslant,
a world aslant towards Auschwitz,
aslant my town,
my town, my home, my wife and child
high up on the thin edge – below,
only smooth polished wood,
black wood, and high up
you, me, all of us
and looking down one feels
his heart falling, his blood flowing straight down,
down – no one is strong enough,
nobody demolished the gas chambers,
nobody made peace:
this all exists from the beginning,
war in peace, peace in war. All in all,
how long can we stand here, how long
believing life is beautiful,
that everyone gets his due, that work makes us free?
Under millions of eyes that are ashes
we are standing on a sleek thin board
above millions of eyes that are ashes.
Only together with them might one be happy,
and they are looking at me with millions of eyes
and my pale blood is flowing straight down
hoping to find a pure hope, a handful of pure land
under the sun’s distorting mirror, under this slanting land,
these white clouds and the jubilant endless indifference
of the last skylarks.
My love, I am again falling on my eyes
into the ashes of those I could have been,
on my eyes into their burnt eyes
as if it were not painful enough to be born
on white sheets under a dark light
to become executioner or victim. I know
that everything is
only lightning reflected in dewdrops, suffering
the more distant, the more real, what was forgotten
returns in this way, towers breaking, railways melting,
fishes drowning – my eyes, why
do you not help me – dead,
why do you not help me to live – the Creator
has not yet said his first word? But
has the end not ended, the beginning not begun?
Everything is something else for him
who writes and reads, but no one of us
speaks truth when he says he knows why,
whither, with what, to whom, how long
we are said, written, shaped
to have a meaning. – Even that
is too much for words. PEACE
is too big. In peace
there is room for everything. But how
can I be there together with those that are not,
how can killers be together with the killed
meaning one and the same thing. TOO MUCH
you are to me, world, why
didn’t you leave me in your unconscious
flowering clover?
*
Everything is inside out, everything is different –
colourless, nameless, voiceless –
the sky overhead is an axe-blade. No one knows
that what mirrors the stars and the Milky Way is an axe.
Only those who love see, and remain silent
while in the sky the mirror-blade gets loose and falls
through us, a black starry dark
falling through a blacker dark, and nothing can stop it.
It falls no matter how we turn, always,
it hits us and divides head from body.
The sound of the abyss rises like clouds through us.
Twin stars are overhead: one light, one dark.
Everything else is illimitable void and distant,
dust motes whirling through a dark cathedral, everything else
is a black shawl where the fine old fire has written our names too.
*
Sleep covers us too much for one, too little for two.
Your toes are naked in defiance of the winter night.
Red foxes move like flames in the mountains,
Pentatonics: your little finger is little,
and on your closed eyelids the middle and elder brothers
slide back into the fairytale.
But some day much later, I will recall the shore,
awakening beside you after death in a dream.
There are broken trees and splinters of ships
and crosses for the departed who, perhaps, have arrived.
Once, the sheet will glide from us. Once, the eyes will stiffen
and a common grave will hold the brothers. If then, too,
if then too, what then? Why? What, my love?
*
Non-being pervades everything and being is full of peace.
Your tran
slation of Lao-tse can be right or wrong – an open book
speaks today as an open butterfly and in the pollen
movement meets immobility in the same way.
The spring breeze flows through our hair and clothes.
If I speak, it is because the consolation is so much more
than ourselves waiting for it: waters breaking in from everywhere,
the tent-roof taking flight in the clear night of Lappland,
necklaces falling shattered: phrases, life and wisdom.
So this is it, this is you. The eyes are melting
in the white clouds, it is love, love that cuts us
from squared paper and lets the fire warm us
and the rain come through us until between the earth and us
the last borderlines vanish. This is love: the leaves of trees
and the light like ourselves full of evidence of the infinite.
We shall be and we shall be what is not,
we shall remain what belongs to no one.
*
No one can put me back together again
fingering broken strings you thought perhaps of something else
all cells and scales are silent, ready to answer to questions
which see through, come through, us, objects, fields, rays
which are united by nothing other than truth, the empty word, the sea, the ocean
where we were constructed, put together bone by bone, cell by cell, syllable by syllable
is he who writes poetry nightly me
with aching back, with grey hair, with your name, with thought only of you
and you come and stand in my room in my eyes in me
and your hands are warm, salty, most beloved
hands which wipe the dust from old letters for the knowledge that
we have been, we have died, we have been born of the dark people
of whom there are so few words and so many graves’ heavy stones
that he who rests would have peace on the ash and on the splinters of bone, what, what
were you thinking, girl opening the doors of the promontory with the keys of fairytales
and asking me for the palmar lines of the megaliths
what were you thinking, Love, fingering my broken fingers by candlelight
*
And when the sea retreats from here before or after the splitting of the personality
we may still go to be there, to step in the sandpiper’s tracks
remain in the wind, remain in the rain in the summer and winter in freedom
because another you and I do not exist and the horizon remains always behind the horizon
to share all the bread that remains, the joy, the snow which does not preserve or forbid
the sun’s turning around the equinoctial dark apple trees in gardens
for you, for me, for me who half this life has twined rope and performed under someone’s name
trusted flags and entropy plucked out dead nettles
dreaming of wings, wings,
who stands with eyes wide open in a coloured room which you tied
from my fingers with your fingers into one
*
Night comes and extinguishes the numbers and the year
lifts us from the past and brings away
from the checkerboard table from among kings queens and knights
the wind’s silence and the source the seventh witness
which is a tiny beginning, roots, our infinite roots
wakening still sleeping still in stone crevices in soil
without knowing oneself even without understanding who he is who is woven into them
through the dark earth thus the trees meet all at once in the upper and lower world through mother’s mute flesh
fingers with fingers, leaves with leaves, loins with loins,
silently blood and earth fall from between us
your young body bursts into flames under dry leaves
*
Once more spring pulls young leaves from buds
and the earth hides its tears under primrose.
But a man is only a ship anchored in himself, in his history,
his time, a big ship decaying on the village pond
forgetting there are other beings, other societies and worlds:
fishes building nests or surfacing to breathe,
caravans of penguins arriving on the shore,
ants walking their ancient trails – the soil is alive and moves
its endless feet, flagella, mouth, appendages and antennae.
But a man should be clear, a mirror reflecting everything:
this spring, these birds returning, these triangles, open
and closed sets, and hierarchies –
a man is curved, a closed surface reflecting only himself,
the ancient darkness in his vaults
where even candlelights are weary and names written with soot
cover one another. Everyone wants to perpetuate himself,
one conquers, one discovers, one wins: all looking for
themselves, for their sooty names, suitable place
on the walls and under the vaults of history.
The darkness is deep. And cold carbonic acid gas is rising
and white eyeless fishes are stirring in their pools,
niches in sandstone, everywhere mummies and pyramids of bones,
too little space for the living.
Small indeed is the consolation from what once was said
by another buried alive, small consolation from churches
and castles, from painting and classical music.
A man finds himself moved far away from the living:
beside him, above him, beneath him.
He is closed in himself and has invented his own reflection
and the reflection of that reflection: culture, literature,
architecture. But even this is hopelessly, hopelessly little.
But then? But then, as from another space, from a world
from under other suns, the language of the bees, the intelligence
of dolphins, a little understanding, satori, some open space
in the catacombs of our minds. A little consolation
in the oxygen deficiency.
Some wind in the grey lobes in the sclerotic vessels see
something bursting like a spring in the fossa sylvii
hippocampus the little sea horse skipping in its paradise of algae
before the windows are locked with bars and the city escapes
into its soot and noise. My leaves are too white,
too futile to compare with the green, a petty testimony
compared to the sparrow’s song, a testimony of the truth
that eyes are proof of seeing, ears are proof of hearing,
and no alphabet, no code, no axiom. Never. And nowhere.
*
Light
reminds us
of something
through
the roof of
the old barn
even
when the young
grass is
already grown
through the wings
ant-path
on the eyes
your ashes
our ashes
wandering
with the rains
of centuries:
irrevocably
bound
*
Oven
alone
in the corner
grandmother
alone
in the graveyard
the same
big grey
handmill:
the wind
of May
rolls
over us
*
What woke us
was indeed nothing
but a dancing pea
in a turning cathedral
a little turning
girl blowing
dandelion-paratroopers
into every wind
and walls looking
towards her through
walls and the voice
returns to the beginning
*
Night and earth
breathing in the warmth
of the past day
as yours is only
what will not
be left to you
a day a thought a life
handful of foam
trembling on the sand
in wind into wind
under the seventh lock
a bird’s voice
is singing
of something else
but no key
to it
in any
human tongue
wind
lick clean
stones and
our eyes
with your warm
moist
salty tongue
*
To be
Icarus
and fall
wings aflame
into
the burning
buttercups
which
recapture
your own
nameless
fatherland
some passage
some island
some Utopia
gets
your name
*
Honeybees
through
sunshine
rising
dancing
falling
dust:
a moment of
being
so full
of joy
even
without
any wish
that everyone
read
Selected Poems Page 2
