Nothing by Design (6 page)

though elsewhere men were laughing;

and the sea mew would sing

though elsewhere men drank mead.

Storms beat against the stone

cliffs, and the ice-feathered

tern called back, and often

the sea-sprayed eagle too.

No kinsman can console

or protect a sorry soul.

In fact, a city dweller

who revels and swills wine

far from travel’s perils,

barely could believe

how often, wearily,

I weathered the sea paths.

The shadows of night deepened,

snow fell from the north,

and on the frost-bound earth

hail fell like the coldest grain.

For all that, my heart’s thoughts

pound now with the salt

wave’s surging; on high seas

my spirit urges me

forward, to seek far

from here a foreign land.

The truth is that no man—

however generous

in gifts, however bold

in youth, however brave,

however loyally

his own lord may attend him—

is ever wholly free

in his seafaring from worry

at what is the Lord’s will.

No, it is not for him,

the harp’s song, nor the rings

exchanged, nor pleasure in women,

nor any worldly glory,

nothing but welling waves;

the longing of seagoing

man is what he has.

Groves break into blossom,

the towns and fields grow fair

and the world once more is new:

all of this spurs on

the man whose mind and spirit

are eager for the journey,

who yearns to steer his course

far across the sea.

Mournfully the cuckoo’s

voice cries out in warning,

the harbinger of summer

bitterly foretells

in song the soul’s distress.

To the wealthy warrior

blessed with worldly fortune,

this is all unknown—

what we face who follow

the vast and alien way.

And now my thought roams far

beyond my heart; my mind

flows out to the water,

soars above the whale’s path

to the wide world’s corners

and returns with keen desire;

the lone bird, flying, shrieks

and leads the willing soul

to the whale road, and over

the tumbling of the waves.

The joys of the Lord can kindle

more in me than dead

and fleeting life on land.

I do not believe the riches

of this world will last forever.

Always, without fail,

of three things one will turn

uncertain for a man

before his fatal hour:

sickness, age, or the sword

will rip the life right out

of the doomed and done for.

So it is for every man:

the best praise will come after,

from people who outlive him;

today, then, he must toil

against enemies and the Devil;

undaunted he must dare

so that sons of men extol him,

that in time to come his fame

endures amid the angels,

and his glory goes on, ceaseless,

among the celestial hosts.

The days are dwindling now

of the kingdoms of this earth;

there are no kings or Caesars

as before, and no gold givers

as once, when men of valor

performed great deeds and lived

majestically among

themselves in high renown.

Their delights too are dead.

The weakest hold the world

in their hands, and wear it out

with labor, while all splendor,

like the earth, grows older;

its noble aspect withers

as man does everywhere.

Age creeps up on him,

his face grows pale; his head,

gray-haired, bewails old friends,

sons of princes, already

given to the earth.

As his body fails,

life leaks away, he tastes

sweetness in things no more,

nor feels pain, nor can move

his hand, nor use his mind.

When a kinsman dies, he wants

to strew the grave with gold,

or bury with the dead

treasures he amassed.

But no, it cannot be;

gold once hid and hoarded

in life is no good now

for the soul full of sin

before the force of God.

Terrible and great

is the Lord, and the very world

turns from Him in awe.

He made the firm foundations,

the earth’s face and the heavens.

Foolish is he who does not fear

his Lord; death comes to him

though he is unprepared.

Blessed is he who lives in all

humility; what comes to him

in Heaven is forgiveness.

God gave to him that spirit

to bow to all His power.

A man must steer his passions,

be strong in staying steady;

keep promises, be pure.

He must be wise and fair

with foes as much as friends,

well-tempered in himself.

He dreads to see a dear one

engulfed in flames, yet patience

tells him to trust the sway

of Fate, and that God’s might

is greater than we know.

Let us ponder where our true

home is, and how to reach it.

Let us labor to gain entry

into the eternal,

to find the blessedness

of belonging to the Lord

joyfully on high.

Thanks be to God who loved us,

the endless Father, the Prince

of Glory forever. Amen.

VII

LOST ORIGINALS

VOICE OF AMERICA

I sit at my desk

My life is grotesque.

                                        —
JOSEPH BRODSKY

    1.
Open to the Public

Hard labor? But you’d claim it wasn’t hard.

You sat in your log cabin, ably sketching

another cabin, and some chickens scratching

out their appointed living in the yard.

A farmhand reading poems by kerosene,

you plotted carefully the coup d’état

of yourself, and boiled another cup of tea;

a well-turned sentence made you feel serene.

I sit in Russia’s National Library,

rifling through folders of your private stuff.

They came easily—or not easily enough,

illiterate as I am in the very

language which to you was the first god.

Your faintly ruled, cheap spiral notebooks hatched

fresh images, new chickens came unlatched

from their coop, and from a corner, a man’s head—

a twenty-something profile. That was yours.

You doodled, and you knew your keepers well.

You studied English, though you couldn’t spell;

you daydreamed in unguarded metaphors.

Well, here’s one for you, touching and grotesque.

After you died, a citizen of the States,

they shipped some furniture of yours in crates

to Petersburg: your velvet couch, your desk—

actually two of them—from your South Hadley

room and a half. Or so your house had seemed,

those maple floors as slippery as in the dreamed

Leningrad apartment; brightly, sadly,

you’d write your parents, who had watched you jammed

into a taxi, snapped in a photograph,

and lost forever. Your desk sent
here
? I’d laugh,

if it were funny, studying a framed

Madonna and child, a cat, a Mandelstam,

an Auden; a pocket-sized address book, still

open to the last call; your manual

typewriter, outdated as a ham

radio no one again can operate.

The last icon is you. Incredible.

That’s you in tuxedo tails, with your Nobel,

in a video that loops as if your fate

had always been a hero’s. Applause and cheers

repeat on the TV screen within a house

that once was your old friend Akhmatova’s:

hero without a poem for years and years.

    2.
Tears at the Fountain House

Out in the garden, where for years her spies

chain-smoked while she sat indoors and nearly starved,

an art show. Wine and cheese are being served.

Today’s the opening, and a viewer’s eyes

are free to interpret anyhow, it appears.

Hung as if on cobwebs, or on memories

of traumas left unspoken, from the trees

giant water balloons droop like the tears

in your poetry that welled and wouldn’t land.

(Your mother told you weeping was for grave

occasions: obedient, you were brave.)

Don’t touch the tears.
I brush one with my hand,

stroll about the grounds, and though I doubt

you’d love the installation, you’d round up

some artsy types—high-booted girls and hip

boyfriends in ripped jeans—and ask them out

to a smoky bar nearby, if you were here.

But you never will be. Never came back to grill

the next generation, shame them, crush their will—

or that’s how your taunts and teasing, your severe

quizzing came off, exiled to the warm

and fuzzy American classroom. Coeds cried.

You shrugged and tried again: identified

lines where native speakers missed the poem.

“Ms. Salter? Andrew Marvell. Tell the class.”

I heard my heart pound loudly in my head.

Tell them what? Declaim “An Horatian Ode

upon Cromwell’s Return …” perhaps? What an ass

I was—or maybe you were; I wasn’t sure.

Now it occurs to me: the poem of his

to recite into these flower beds would be less

“The Garden” than the twining “Eyes and Tears,”

where “all the jewels which we prize,” he wrote,

“melt in these pendants of the eyes”; and “happy they

whom grief doth bless, that weep the more, and see

the less.” Lovely; but the tears stayed in the throat,

or were meted out in rhyming drops of ink.

Lament was Russian, roughly; in the English

of Marvell, Hardy, Frost, you got your wish

for irony’s containments. You could think.

    3.
Border Crossing

You had them in your head—Pushkin, Gogol,

Dostoevsky. Best memory I ever met.

Nobody learns by rote now; quotes come out

from under the patchwork overcoat of Google—

a development you’d have found unnerving,

at least until you found some figure for it.

In Venice, you wrote, “a gigantic china teaset”

was heard vibrating when church bells were serving

“on a silver tray” their peals to the “pearl-gray sky.”

Your mind, a gondola on the lagoon

of time, skimmed the reflections in your own

outlandish, errant, metaphysical eye,

as if everything in the world could be amassed

on a single page in white with words in black,

although a tear might drop to it, a “throwback,

a tribute of the future to the past.”

Somebody boarded up, because they could,

the door from your parents’ room to yours. Or yours

to your parents’; but to me it hardly matters:

the living border crossing to the dead

is what I’m after. I stepped onto a plane

because I could, and joined your friend who’d taken

snapshots of your departure; though I’m shaken

to be standing in their one room—mute and plain,

erased of bed and table, of evidence

of birthday parties, songs at the piano,

piled-up cups and saucers, the radio

from which state “drivel” flowed like water once—

I don’t need much, only to turn and walk

down warped linoleum in the communal hall

where the black phone still cowers on the wall,

to see you—overheard—pick up and talk.

    4.
Watermark

The Foundation’s conference room. Tea and coffee,

biscuits, sugar, brisk handshakes, respect,

and quick interpreters for the select

Americans invited to a country

some of us know little of. Academician

Likhachev, they tell us, would have liked

to meet us all.
Your fellowships, in fact
,

our conversations here, were his late mission
,

he whose life would closely coincide

with the twentieth century; who bore the stamp

of public servant, scholar, and of camp

prisoner. A miracle he hadn’t died

at Solovki, where he heard three hundred gunned

down as he hid, three hundred on the dot—

he was to be among them, but was not
,

which meant that someone else…
The thought-of sound

reverberates on walls washed with the sun.

This was his radio.
Mid-century relic,

midsized, ordinary, somehow orphic.

Likhachev marked it—see the painted line

dripping down the tuner? That’s the Voice

of America. Others marked the BBC.

This was a sign we wanted you to see…

The hardened teardrop holds its frequency.

ENGLISH COUNTRY DOLLHOUSE

Which scholar among the dolls

that stepped out from this room

(in volume, like one volume

of the
O.E.D.
)

needed spectacles?

A wire-rimmed, folded pair—

like a glossy insect

crushable in one swat—

lies lenses-up, not seeing

but wanting to be seen

as a letter, a giant
B