The Collected Poems (20 page)

the bloody curtain

 

Obviously
they who stand at the top of the stairs
they know
they know everything

we on the other hand
sweepers of city squares
hostages of a better future
to whom they at the top of the stairs
appear only rarely
always with a finger held to their lips

we are patient
our wives mend our Sunday shirts
we talk about food rationing
about football the price of shoes
on Saturday we put our feet up
and we drink

we aren't the sort
who make a fist
clank their chains
talk and question
incite to rebellion
seized by a fever
always talking and questioning

here's what they're trying to sell us—
we throw ourselves on the stairs
and take them by force
the heads of those at the top
will tumble down the steps
and finally we will behold
the view from the heights

what future
what void

we don't want the sight
of rolling heads
we know how quickly the heads grow back
and at the top there's always
one man left or three of them
and at the foot a heap of brooms and shovels

at times we dream
those at the top of the stairs
come down
down to us
where we are chewing bread reading the paper
and say unto us

sure they're dreams
they may come true
or not come true
so we will go on
cultivating
our square of earth
our square of stone

with light heads
a cigarette tucked behind an ear
not a drop of hope in our hearts

1956

 

In former times
as we know from history
it left the body
when the heart stood still

with the final breath
it quietly withdrew
to celestial meadows

Mr Cogito tries to vanquish
his base feeling of jealousy

he thinks well of his soul
he thinks of it tenderly

it must have a life
in other bodies too

there are not enough souls
for the whole of humanity

Mr Cogito accepts his fate
he has no other alternative

he even tries to say
—my soul my own—

he thinks of his soul fondly
he thinks of it with tenderness

so when it turns up
quite unexpectedly
he doesn't greet it by saying
—good thing you came back

he merely looks askance
when it sits at the mirror
and brushes its hair
tangled and gray

 

And now she has brown clouds of roots overhead
a rank lily of salt on her temples a rosary of sand
and sails on the bottom of a boat in a foamy mist

a mile away where there is a bend in the river
—visible—invisible—like the light on a wave
she is truly no different—abandoned like us all

 

O river—hourglass of water figure of eternity
I step in your stream more and more changed
so that I might be a cloud a fish or stone cliff
and you are changeless like a clock measuring
the body's metamorphoses and the spirit's fall
the gradual disintegration of tissues and love

I born of clay
want to be your pupil
to know the heart Olympian spring
cool procession murmuring column
bedrock of my faith and my despair

teach me stubbornness and endurance
so that I shall deserve in the last hour
to repose in the shade of a great delta
in a holy triangle of beginning and end

 

The Old Masters
did without names

atheir signatures were
the white fingers of the Madonna

or the pink towers
di città sul mare

also scenes from the life
della Beata Umiltà

they dissolved
in
sogno
miracolo
crocifissione

they found shelter
under angels' eyelids
behind hillocks of cloud
in the thick grass of paradise

drowned completely
in golden firmaments
without a cry of terror
or clamor for memory

their paintings' surfaces
are smooth as a mirror

they are not mirrors for us
but mirrors for the chosen

let pride's serpent scales
fall from me by your aid

let me remain unmoved
by temptations of fame

I invoke you Old Masters

Painter of the Rain of Manna
Painter of the Embroidered Trees
Painter of the Visitation
Painter of the Sacred Blood

 

Lord
I thank You for creating the world beautiful and various

   and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which were not the sites of my daily torments

   —that at night in Tarquinia I lay in the square by the well and a gunmetal pendulum rang out from the tower Your wrath or forgiveness

   and that a little donkey on the island Corkyra sang to me from the unfathomable bellows of its lungs the melancholy of the landscape

   and that in the ugly city of Manchester I discovered kindhearted and sensible people

   nature repeated its wise tautologies: the forest was a forest the sea the sea a cliff a cliff

   stars revolved and it was as it ought to be—
Iovis omnia plena

   —forgive me—that I thought only of myself while the lives of others cruel and inexorable turned around me like the great astrological clock of St Pierre in Beauvais

   that I was lazy distracted too timid in labyrinths and caves

   and forgive me also that I did not fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of oppressed peoples and studied only the rising moon and museums

   —I thank You that works created for Your greater glory yielded to me particles of their mystery and that with great presumption I thought that Duccio Van Eyck and Bellini painted for me also

   and also that the Acropolis which I never fully understood patiently revealed to me its mutilated body

   
—I ask You to reward the gray old woman who unbidden brought me fruit from her garden on the sunburned native island of the son of Laertes

   and Miss Helen of the foggy island of Mull in the Hebrides for offering Greek hospitality and asking me to leave a lamp lit at night in the window facing Holy Iona so that the lights of earth would greet each other

   and also all those who gave me directions and said
kato kyrie kato

   and take under Your protection Mama from Spoleto Spiridion from Paxos the good student from Berlin who saved me from oppression and then when met unexpectedly in Arizona drove me to the Grand Canyon which is like a hundred throusand cathedrals standing on their heads

   —Lord let me not think of my moist-eyed gray deluded persecutors when the sun sets on the truly indescribable Ionian Sea

   let me understand other people other languages other sufferings and above all let me be humble that is to say one who longs for the source

   I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness

 

Mr Cogito
decided to return
to the stony lap
of his fatherland

the decision is dramatic
he will regret it greatly

he can however no longer
stand the colloquial turns
—comment allez-vous
—wie geht's
—how are you

questions apparently simple
require convoluted answers

Mr Cogito will rip off
bandages of kind indifference
he has lost all faith in progress
he cares about his own wound

displays of abundance
fill him with boredom

he grew fond only
of a Doric column
a church in San Clemente
a portrait of a certain lady
a book he never finished
and a few other little items

so he returns
he now sees
the border
a plowed field
murderous watchtowers
a thicket of barbed wire

without a whisper
a bulletproof door
closes slowly behind him

now
he is
alone
in the treasure house
of all misfortune

so why does he return
he is asked by friends
from the better world

he might stay here
somehow settle in

entrust his wound
to the dry cleaner

leave it in the lounge
of an enormous airport

so why does he return

—to childhood waters
—to his tangled roots
—to memory's embrace
—to the hand the face
burned on time's grate

questions apparently simple
require convoluted answers

perhaps Mr Cogito returns
to give an answer

to promptings of terror
to impossible happiness
to a blow out of the blue
to a treacherous question

 

Mr Cogito has never trusted
the tricks of the imagination

the piano at the top of the Alps
played concerts false to his ear

he had no regard for labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with disgust

he lived in a cellarless house
without mirrors or dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were never his homeland

he rarely got carried away
on the wings of a metaphor
he then plunged like Icarus
into the arms of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

a bird is a bird
slavery slavery
a knife a knife
death is death

he loved
a flat horizon
a straight line
earth's gravity

Mr Cogito
will be counted
among the species
minores

he will receive indifferently
the verdict of men of letters

he employed the imagination
for wholly different purposes

he wanted to make of it
an instrument of compassion

he longed to understand fully

—Pascal's night
—the nature of a diamond
—the prophets' melancholy
—the wrath of Achilles
—the fury of mass murderers
—the dreams of Mary Stuart
—the fear of Neanderthals
—the last Aztecs' despair
—Nietzsche's long dying
—the Lascaux painter's joy
—the rise and fall of an oak
—the rise and fall of Rome

in order to revive the dead
and maintain the covenant

Mr Cogito's imagination
moves like a pendulum

it runs with great precision
from suffering to suffering

there is no place in it
for poetry's artifical fires

he wants to be true
to uncertain clarity

 

Romana said you just passed away
as is said of those who stay forever
I envy you your marble face

between us things were pure no letters
no memories nothing to catch the eye
no rings or pitchers
or women's laments
it makes it easier to trust my sudden joy
that you are now just like Attila József
Mickiewicz Lord Byron the handsome ghosts
who always turn up for an appointed meeting

my widower's touch could not get used to it
a predatory love of the concrete demanded tribute
we never filled a dead room with laughter
we never leaned our elbows on a table's rustling oak
we never shared a bottle of wine or the bread of fate
even though we dwelled together
in the hospice of Cross and Rose

the space dividing us is like a shroud
the evening's darkness disperses falls
the noble have faces of water and earth

our further life together will no doubt take shape
more geometrico
—two unbending parallel lines
unearthly patience and inhuman fidelity

 

Not much will remain Ryszard in truth not much
of the poetry of our mad century Rilke Eliot sure
a few other worthy shamans who knew the secret
of word spells time-resistant forms without which
no phrase deserves memory and speech is like sand

our school notebooks subjected to earnest torture
with their traces of sweat tears and blood will be
to the eternal proofreader a song without a score
nobly righteous and all too self-evident

we came too easily to believe beauty does not save
that it leads wantons from dream to dream to death
none of us was able to wake the dryad of a poplar
or to decipher the handwriting of the clouds
that is why no unicorn will stray across our tracks
we'll raise up no ship in the bay no peacock no rose
nakedness was left to us and we stand here naked
on the right the better side of the tryptych
The Last Judgment

we took public affairs onto our lanky shoulders
the battle with tyranny lies the recording of pain
but our foes—you admit—were despicably small
and so was it worth it to bring down holy speech
to rostrum gibberish to a newpaper's black foam

so little joy—sister of the gods—in our poems Ryszard
too few glimmering twilights mirrors wreaths ecstasies
nothing just obscure psalmodies the whine of animulae
urns of ash in a burned-out garden