Eternal Enemies: Poems (3 page)

Matthew keeps asking himself: was I truly

    summoned to become human?

THE SEA

Shimmering among boulders, deep blue at noon,

ominous when summoned by the west wind,

but calm at night, inclined to make amends.

Tireless in small bays, commanding

countless hosts of crabs who march sideways

like damp veterans of the Punic Wars.

At midnight cutters sail from port: the glare

of a single light slices the darkness,

engines quake.

At the beach near Cefalù, on Sicily, we saw

countless heaps of trash, boxes, condoms,

cartons, a faded sign saying
ANTONIO
.

In love with the earth, always drawn to shore,

sending wave after wave—and each dies

exhausted, like a Greek messenger.

At dawn only whispers reach us,

the low murmur of pebbles cast on sand

(sensed even in the fishing town’s small square).

The Mediterranean, where gods swam,

and the frigid Baltic, which I entered,

a skinny, trembling, twenty-year-old eel.

In love with the earth, thrusting into its cities, Stockholm,

Venice, listening to tourists laugh and chatter

before returning to its dark, unmoving source.

Your Atlantic, busy building up white dunes,

and the shy Pacific hiding in the deeps.

Light-winged gulls.

The last sailing ships, white canvas

billowing on crosses.

Slim canoes are manned by watchful hunters,

the sun rises in great silence.

Gray Baltic,

Arctic Ocean, mute,

the Ionian, world’s origin and end.

READING MILOSZ

I read your poetry once more,

poems written by a rich man, knowing all,

and by a beggar, homeless,

an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go

beyond poetry, above it, soaring,

but also lower, to where our region

begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone

transforms us for a moment,

we believe—truly—

that every day is sacred,

that poetry—how to put it?—

makes life rounder,

fuller, prouder, unashamed

of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,

I lay my book aside,

and the city’s ordinary din resumes—

somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

WALK THROUGH THIS TOWN

Walk through this town at a gray hour

when sorrow hides in shady gates

and children play with great balls

that float like kites above

the poisoned wells of courtyards,

and, quiet, doubting, the last blackbird sings.

Think about your life which goes on,

though it’s already lasted so long.

Could you voice the smallest fragment of the whole.

Could you name baseness when you saw it.

If you met someone truly living

would you know it?

Did you abuse high words?

Whom should you have been, who knows.

You love silence, and you’ve mastered

only silence, listening to words, music, and quiet:

why did you begin to speak, who knows.

Why in this age, why in a country

that wasn’t born yet, who knows.

Why among exiles, in a flat that had been

German, amid grief and mourning

and vain hopes of a regained myth.

Why a childhood shadowed

by mining towers and not a forest’s dark,

near a stream where a quiet dragonfly keeps watch

over the world’s secret wholeness

—who knows.

And your love, which you lost and found,

and your God, who won’t help those

who seek him,

and hides among theologians

with degrees.

Why just this town at a gray hour,

this dry tongue, these numb lips,

and so many questions before you leave

and go home to the kingdom

from which silence, rapture, and the wind

once came.

ORDINARY LIFE

TO CLARE CAVANAGH

Our life is ordinary,

I read in a crumpled paper

abandoned on a bench.

Our life is ordinary,

the philosophers told me.

Ordinary life, ordinary days and cares,

a concert, a conversation,

strolls on the town’s outskirts,

good news, bad—

but objects and thoughts

were unfinished somehow,

rough drafts.

Houses and trees

desired something more

and in summer green meadows

covered the volcanic planet

like an overcoat tossed upon the ocean.

Black cinemas crave light.

Forests breathe feverishly,

clouds sing softly,

a golden oriole prays for rain.

Ordinary life desires.

MUSIC HEARD WITH YOU

MUSIC I HEARD WITH YOU WAS MORE
THAN MUSIC … —CONRAD AIKEN

Music heard with you

will stay with us always.

Grave Brahms and elegiac Schubert,

a few songs, Chopin’s fourth ballad,

a few quartets with heart-

breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia),

the sadness of Shostakovich, who

didn’t want to die.

The great choruses of Bach’s Passions,

as if someone had summoned us,

demanding joy,

pure and impartial,

joy in which faith

is self-evident.

Some scraps of Lutoslawski

as fleeting as our thoughts.

A black woman singing blues

ran through us like shining steel,

though it reached us on the street

of an ugly, dirty town.

Mahler’s endless marches,

the trumpet’s voice that opens the Fifth Symphony

and the first part of the Ninth

(you sometimes call him “malheur!”).

Mozart’s despair in the Requiem,

his buoyant piano concertos—

you hummed them better than I did,

but we both know that.

Music heard with you

will grow still with us.

AT THE CATHEDRAL’S FOOT

In June once, in the evening,

returning from a long trip,

with memories of France’s blooming trees

still fresh in our minds,

its yellow fields, green plane trees

sprinting before the car,

we sat on the curb at the cathedral’s foot

and spoke softly about disasters,

about what lay ahead, the coming fear,

and someone said this was the best

we could do now—

to talk of darkness in that bright shadow.

IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIPS

For example, with someone who no longer is,

who exists only in yellowed letters.

Or long walks beside a stream,

whose depths hold hidden

porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy

with a timid student or the postman.

A passerby with proud eyes

whom you’ll never know.

Friendship with this world, ever more perfect

(if not for the salty smell of blood).

The old man sipping coffee

in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.

Faces flashing by

in local trains—

the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps

for a splendid ball, or a beheading.

And friendship with yourself

—since after all you don’t know who you are.

RAIN DROP

In the drop of rain that stopped

outside my window, dawdling,

an oval, shining shape appears

and I see Mrs. Czolga again,

stuffing a statuesque goose in her kitchen.

Carts, dark and chthonic, carried coal,

rolling over wooden cobbles,

asking—do you want to live?

But after the great war of death

we wanted life so much.

A red-hot iron pressed the past,

at dawn German blackbirds

sang the poems of Georg Trakl,

and we wanted life and dreams.

BUTTERFLIES

It’s a December night, the century’s end, dark and calm,

    draws near.

I slowly read friends’ poems, look at photographs,

    the spines of books.

Where has C. gone? What’s become of bumptious K. and smiling T.?

    What ever happened to B. and N.?

Some have been dead a millennium, while others, debutants, died

    just the other month.

Are they together? In a desert with a crimson dawn?

    We don’t know where they live.

By a mountain stream where butterflies play?

    In a town scented with mignonette?

Die Toten reiten schnell,
S. repeated eagerly (he too

    is gone).

They ride little horses in the steppe’s quiet, beneath a round yellow

    cloud.

Maybe they steal coal at a little railroad stop in Asia and melt

    snow in sooty pots

like those transported in freight cars.

    (Do they have camps and barbed wire?)

Do they play checkers? Listen to music? Do they see Christ?

    They dictate poems to the living.

They paint bison on cave walls, begin building

    the cathedral in Beauvais.

Have they grasped the sense of evil, which eludes us,

    and forgiven those who persecuted them?

They wade through an arctic glacier, soft from the August heat.

    Do they weep? Regret?

Talk on telephones for hours? Hold their tongues? Are they here among us?

    Nowhere?

I read poems, listen to the mighty whisper

    of night and blood.

IN A STRANGE CITY

The faint, almost fantastic

scent of the Mediterranean,

crowds on streets at midnight,

a festival begins,

we don’t know which.

A scrawny cat slips

past our knees,

gypsies eat supper

as if singing;

white houses beyond them,

an unknown tongue.

Happiness.

CAMOGLI

High old houses above the water

and a drowsy cat waiting for fishermen

on furled white nets:

a quiet November in Camogli—

pensioners sunbathe on lounge chairs,

the sun rotates sluggishly

and stones revolve slowly

on the gravelly shore,

but it, the sea, keeps turning landward,

wave after wave, as if wondering

what happened to summer’s plans

and our dreams,

what has our youth become.

BOGLIASCO: THE CHURCH SQUARE

A photographer develops film,

the sexton scrutinizes

walls and trees,

boys play ball,

a dry cleaner purges the conscience

of this quiet town,

three elderly ladies discuss the world’s end—

but evening brings back

the sea’s tumult

and its din

returns the day just past

into oblivion.

STAGLIENO

Don’t linger in the graveyard

where the nineteenth century, dusty, charmless,

still repents; you’ll be received

by doctors in stucco frock coats

buttoned to the throat, in stone cravats,

stone barristers with stony, slightly mournful

smiles (duplicity has outlived itself).

You’ll be received by patresfamilias, professors

and children, marble children, plaster dogs,

always flawlessly obedient.

You’ll see the past, meet

your older brothers, glimpse

Pompeii, submerged

in time’s gray lava.

TWO-HEADED BOY

The fifteen-year-old boy carried a kitten

inside his dark blue windbreaker.

Its tiny head turned,

its large eyes watching

everything more cautiously

than human eyes.

Safe in the warm train,

I compare the boy’s lazy stare

to the kitten’s pupils,

alert and narrow.

The two-headed boy sitting across from me

made richer by an animal’s unrest.

OUR WORLD

IN MEMORIAM W.G. SEBALD

I never met him, I only knew

his books and the odd photos, as if

purchased in a secondhand shop, and human

fates discovered secondhand,

and a voice quietly narrating,

a gaze that caught so much,

a gaze turned back,

avoiding neither fear

nor rapture;

nor rapture;

                     and our world in his prose,

our world, so calm—but

full of crimes perfectly forgotten,

even in lovely towns

on the coast of one sea or another,

our world full of empty churches,

rutted with railroad tracks, scars

of ancient trenches, highways,

cleft by uncertainty, our blind world

smaller now by you.

SMALL OBJECTS

My contemporaries like small objects,

dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,

melancholy stopped clocks, postcards

sent from vanished cities,

and blackened with illegible script,

in which they discern words

like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”

They marvel at dormant volcanoes.

They don’t desire light.

DEFENDING POETRY, ETC.

Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,

but also summer evenings in a small town,

where gardens waft and cats sit quietly

on doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.

SUBJECT: BRODSKY

Please note: born in May,

in a damp city (hence the motif: water),

soon to be surrounded by an army

whose officers kept Hölderlin

in their backpacks, but, alas, they had

no time for reading. Too much to do.

Tone—sardonic, despair—authentic.

Always en route, from Mexico to Venice,

lover and crusader, who campaigned

ceaselessly for his unlikely party

(name: Poetry versus the Infinite,

or PVI, if you prefer abbreviations).