The Collected Poems (16 page)

That's all you can honestly say about it

 

She waits on the bank of a great slow-moving river
Charon is on the other side The sky glows turbidly
(it isn't a sky at all as it happens) Charon is here
he has just cast the ropes out over a branch
She (this soul) takes out the obol
from under her tongue where it soured only briefly
sits down at the rear end of the empty boat
all this without a word

if only there were a moon
or a dog howling

 

The stone is well-preserved An inscription (bad Latin)
declares Curatia Dionisia lived forty-something years
and raised this modest monument at her own expense
her solitary banquet continues the cup held in midair
the face without a smile The doves are too heavyset
she spent the last years of her life in Brittany
near the wall which brought the barbarians to a halt
in a
castrum
whose foundations and cellars survive

she was engaged in the most ancient female practice
briefly but sincerely mourned by Third Legion soldiers
as well as a certain elderly officer

she told sculptors to lay two pillows under her elbow

the dolphins and sea lions signify travel to distant lands
though from here it was no more than a few steps to hell

 

The gods gathered in a barracks just outside town. Zeus gave his usual long and boring speech. The final conclusion: the organization had to be disbanded; enough silly conspiracies; it was time to enter rational society and somehow make do. Athena was sniveling in a corner.

It should be emphasized that the last proceeds were divided equitably. Poseidon was in an optimistic frame of mind. He bellowed brashly that he would be just fine. It was worst for the guardians of regulated streams and forests felled for lumber. Secretly they were all counting on dreams, but no one wanted to talk about it.

No conclusions were drawn. Hermes abstained from voting. Athena sniveled in a corner.

Late in the evening they traveled back into town, with false documents in their pockets and a handful of copper coins. As they crossed a bridge, Hermes flung himself into the river. They saw him drowning but no one tried to save him.

Opinions were divided on whether this was a bad or, on the contrary, a good omen. In any case it was a point of departure for something new and not yet clear.

 

Clytemnaestra opens the window and mirrors herself in the glass, putting on her new hat. Agamemnon is in the antechamber; he lights a cigarette, waiting for his wife. Aegisthus enters the gate. He doesn't know that Agamemnon returned the night before. They meet on the stairs. Clytemnaestra suggests they go to the theater. From now on they will often go together.

Electra works for a cooperative. Orestes is a pharmacology student. He will soon marry his reckless girlfriend with pale skin and eternally tear-filled eyes.

 

At the profoundest moment before dawn, the first voice resounds, both blunt and sharp like a knife stab. Then rustlings growing from minute to minute bore through the stump of night.

It seems that there is no hope at all.

Whatever is struggling for light is mortally frail.

And when a bloody cross section of a tree appears on the horizon, surreally big and almost painful, let us not forget to bless the miracle.

 

She was doing her hair before going to bed
and before the mirror it took an infinitely long time
between one arm bending at the elbow and the other
epochs passed her hair soundlessly spilled soldiers
of the second legion called Augustus Antoninian's
Roland's comrades artillery gunmen from Verdun
with resilient fingers
she secured the halo over her head
it took so long
that when she
finally began her swaying
march toward me
my heart till now so docile
stood still
and on my skin I felt
coarse grains of salt

 

In appearance a drop of rain on a beloved face, a beetle immobilized on a leaf when a storm approaches. Something which can be enlivened, erased, reversed. Rather a stop with a green shadow than the terminus.

In fact the period which we attempt to tame at any price is a bone protruding from the sand, a snapping shut, a sign of a catastrophe. It is a punctuation of the elements. People should employ it modestly and with a proper consideration as is customary when one gives fate a hand.

 

As long as our watch has in it one ant, two, or three, everything is in order and nothing menaces our time. At the very worst the watch is handed in for cleaning, which in any case is nonsense. Once ants settle in there is no way to exterminate them. They are invisible to the naked eye, red, and very voracious.

After a little while they start rapidly to multiply. It can be said picturesquely that we now wear on our wrist, not a watch, but a heap. The labour of greedy jaws we take for ticking.

In search of nourishment ants plunder our veins. In the evening from the folds of our underlinen we shake out russet balls of blood.

When the work of the ants is completed the watch in general stops. But one can will it to one's children. In that case everything starts all over again.

 

A desert island with the sugary head of a volcano. In the middle of the level water, a fisherman with a line, reeds. Higher up, the island spreading like an apple tree, with a pagoda and a little bridge where lovers meet under the budding moon.

If it ended here, it would be a pretty episode—the history of the world in a word or two. But this is repeated into infinity with senseless, stubborn precision—the volcano, the lovers, the moon.

There is no worse insult to the world.

 

It usually begins innocently enough with an acceleration, unnoticeable at first, of the turning of the earth. Leave home at once and do not bring along any of your family. Take a few indispensable things. Place yourself as far as possible from the centre, near the forests the seas or the mountains, before the whirling motion as it gets stronger from minute to minute begins to pour in towards the middle, suffocating in ghettoes, closets, basements. Hang on forcefully to the outer circumference. Keep your head down. Have your two hands constantly free. Take good care of the muscles of your legs.

 

They have ugly mugs, but their hands are dexterous, accustomed to hammer and nail, iron and wood. They're just now nailing Our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. Loads of work to do; they have to hurry up so everything will be ready at noon.

Knights on horseback as props for the drama. Their faces are impassive. Their long lances mimic trees without branches on that hill without trees.

Able craftsmen are nailing—as was said—Our Lord to the cross. Ropes, nails, a stone for sharpening tools are laid out neatly on the sand. A bustle, but without excessive agitation.

The sand is warm, painted meticulously, grain by grain. Here and there a tuft of grass protrudes stiffly and an innocent white daisy soothes the eye.

We fall asleep on words
and wake up with words

sometimes congenial
simple nouns
forest or ship

they break away from us
the forest rushes off
across the horizon

the ship sails away
without trace or cause

dangerous are the words
dropped out of a whole
scraps of phrases sayings
a beginning of a refrain
from a forgotten anthem

“he shall be saved who …”
“remember to …”
or “like”
a little pricking pin
holding together
the most beautiful lost
metaphor in the world

you must dream patiently
hoping the content will be completed
that the missing words
enter crippled sentences
and the certainty we are waiting for
casts anchor

 

in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition

among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plague
dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest

the Greek colony Amphipolis
fell into the hands of Brasidos
because Thucydides was late with relief

for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile

exiles of all times
know what price that is

generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence

they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds

Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity

what will remain after us
will be like lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wallpaper dawns

What will happen
when hands
fall away from poems

when in the other mountains
I drink dry water

this should not matter
but it does

what will poems become
when the breath departs
and the grace of speaking
is rejected

will I leave the table
and descend into the valley
where there resounds
new laughter
by a dark forest

 

Who wrote our faces chicken pox for sure
marking its o's with a calligraphic pen
but who bestowed on me my double chin
what glutton was it when my whole soul
yearned for austerity why are my eyes
set so closely together it was him not me
waiting in the scrub for the Vened invasion
the ears that protrude two fleshy seashells
no doubt left me by an ancestor who strained for an echo
of the thunderous march of mammoths across the steppes

the forehead not too high it doesn't think very much
—women gold land don't get knocked off your horse
a prince did their thinking for them and a wind bore them along
they tore at walls with their bare fingers and with a sudden cry
fell into the void only to return in me

 

The left leg is normal
you might say optimistic
a little on the short side
laddish
with rippling muscles
and a well-shaped calf

the right
Lord have mercy—
skinny
with two scars
one along the Achilles tendon
the other oval
a pale pink
an ignoble memento of flight

the left
given to leaps
balletic
too fond of life
to put itself at any risk

the right
nobly rigid
mocking danger

and so
on both legs
the left comparable to Sancho Panza
and the right
calling to mind the wandering knight
Mr Cogito
goes
through the world
staggering slightly

 

His face menacing in a cloud over the waters of childhood
(so seldom he held my warm head in his hand)
given to be believed in forgiving no faults
for he felled forests and cleared pathways
he held a lantern high when we went into the night

I thought that I would sit at his right hand
we would part the light from the darkness
and sit in judgment on the living
—it was to be otherwise

a junk dealer carried his throne off on a cart
and a deed of ownership a map of our holdings

he was born a second time tiny very frail
with translucent skin and slight cartilage
he shrank his body that I might receive it

in a lowly place there's a shadow under stone

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little it takes
to be reconciled

 

He fell from her lap like a ball of yarn. He unwound himself in a hurry and beat it into the distance. She held onto the beginning of life. She wound it on a finger hospitable as a ring; she wished to shelter it. He rolled down steep slopes, sometimes labored up mountains. He came back all tangled up and didn't say a word. He will never return to the sweet throne of her lap.

Her outspread arms glow in the dark like an old town.

 

Owing to a negligible age difference childish proximity shared baths the mysteries of fluffy hair and soft skin the little Cogito discovered that he could be his sister (it was as simple as switching their places at the table when his parents were out and Gran let them run wild) and she own his name his bow his boy's bike his nose luckily their noses differed and lack of physical likeness allowed them to avoid a dramatic sequence of events it ended with the sense of touch touch didn't open up and young Cogito remained inside his skin's borders

a seed of doubt subverting
principium individuationis
was deeply lodged in him however and one afternoon
on Legions Street thirteen-year-old Cogito observing
a horse-cab driver
felt he was the man so thoroughly
that he sprouted reddish whiskers
and the cold whip stung his hand

 

Sometimes Mr Cogito calls to mind, not without emotion, his youthful march on perfection, those juvenile gestures
per aspera ad astro.
One time, for example, he was rushing to a lecture when a little pebble got into his shoe. It lodged itself maliciously between the live flesh and the sock. Reason dictated that the intruder be removed, but the principle of
amor fati
commanded the opposite, that it be endured. He chose the second, heroic course.