The Collected Poems (28 page)

and reflects reality faithfully
uncanny two-legged mirror

and so we know well
the dives of Apuleius
medieval Londinium
Don Quixote's wilds
sentimental journeys
forays into the jungle

at times art reflects mirages
northern lights
the ecstasy of the possessed
feasts of gods
abysses

takes on history too
with mixed results

attempts to domesticate it
to give it human meaning

hence ballets
orchestras
lifelike pictures
motley novels
poems

here's a ballet

Svetlana
sur la pointe
rises high into the air
and hangs there a cloud of tulle
on the caught breaths of delight

all this in a winter palace
an ancient dungeon a circus
where yesterday it swarmed
with men herded to slaughter

a ballet on ice—
eternal returns
a circle opens
and is closed

the classical pas de deux of victim and victor
the last of the Romanovs
dances with a handsome officer of the Cheka

a circus—

bells

the pit of the air

the juggler Unknown
with his standard bill

the (apolitical) beasts
are just being let out

the public yell bravo
from fright as usual
and that it can't be

 

My friend from the anthology of Slavonic rhymesters
(I don't remember his poems just that they were moist)
he was even famous in his time and fame was his game
nothing wrong with that but what was his entelechy
let's say he was a hybrid a bit of everything mixed in
spirit and flesh up and down now Marxist now Catholic
cock and hen and to top it all off half-Russian half-Pole

At the beginning and end of his art there is wonder
that he was born that Khodasevich came into being
under the stars It was worse with his other wonders
about his identity and community about his roots
he himself didn't quite know who Khodasevich was
he floated like seaweed on tempest-tossed waves
throughout the universe from his birth to his death

Khodasevich wrote poems some beautiful
some bad the latter may find favor as well
they have everything you want—melancholy
pathos a lyrical turn the experience of danger
sometimes a great flame rises from one of them
but over many hangs the spirit of the occasional

Khodasevich wrote prose as well—Lord help us
about his childhood—that was even nicely done
but he was much too invested in Swedenborg's
riddles followed Hegel and hell knows who else
read always the same books badly like a student

He was an émigré by nature as some are born
let's say as bastards saints or artists Himself
a second-rate nobleman he had a relative
who in turn was a baron or something along those lines
and so Khodasevich spoke of him very warmly

and admired his sulks his reveries his writing
in French living in Paris and having mistresses

Emigration as a form of existence an odd thing
pitching your tent without friends and family
living without sanction duties we all will agree
our homeland weighs heavily on our shoulders
our murky history atavisms despair it's better
to live in mirrors without angst Merezhkovsky
babbles in his sleep Zinaida shows shapely legs

 

In his youth
Mr Cogito prided himself
on an unheard-of wealth
of friends

some beyond the mountains
rich in talents and goodness
others
like the devoted Wladyslaw
poor as church mice

but all of them
what are called
friends

common tastes
ideals
twin characters

and back then
in the primordial times
of happy bloody youth
Mr Cogito
had reason to think
that the black-rimmed letter
informing them of his death
would touch them
to the quick

they would come
from all directions
old-fashioned as if out of an old journal

dressed
in starched grief

they would
go with him
along a path
strewn with pebbles
amid
cypresses
box hedge
pine trees

and would throw
damp sand
a bouquet
on the heap

with the inexorable
passing of years
his count of friends
shrank

they went off
in pairs
in groups
one by one

some paled like wafers
lost earthly dimensions
and suddenly
or gradually
emigrated
to the sky

others
chose maps
of rapid navigation
or chose safe ports
and from then on
Mr Cogito
lost them
from his field of vision

Mr Cogito
doesn't blame anyone for it

he knew that's how it had to be
it's the natural order of things

(he could add speaking of himself
that the lapse of enduring feelings
raw history
and the necessity of clear choices
determined
the end of some friendships)

Mr Cogito
isn't grumbling
isn't complaining
isn't blaming anyone

things are a little
lonelier

But clearer as well

Mr Cogito
easily accepted
the departure of many friends

as if it were
a natural law
of extinction

there are still a few left
tried by fire and water

with those who left
the walls of the Empirical Empire
for good
he maintains close and enduringly
warm relations

they stand at his back
watching him intently
absolute but kindly

if they went
Mr Cogito
would fall
into the pit
of loneliness

it's as if they form a backdrop
and from that living backdrop
Mr Cogito
emerges by a half step
a half step and no more

in religion there's a term
the communion of saints

Mr Cogito
being far from saintly
keeps his step
motionless

and they are like a chorus

against the backdrop of that chorus
Mr Cogito
intones
his farewell
aria

 

Mr Cogito
at times flips through
his old pocket-size
appointment books

then he sets off
as if on a white steamer
for the past perfect tense

on the edge of the horizon
of his own elusive essence

Mr Cogito is unsettled by
notes of a personal nature

Hala.
Meet Leopold.
Passport application.

but descending deeper
into the self's recesses
Mr Cogito
discovers months
left without marks

not a single note
even a banal one
like—underwear to laundry
—buy chives

no sign
no phone number
no address

Mr Cogito
knows what
ominous silence
can mean

he knows well
the weight
of blank
faded
pages

he could destroy that void
write in anything he wants

Mr Cogito
carefully preserves
gray-blue booklets

—like empty ammunition shells

—the chart of an absurd illness

—like the diary of a pogrom

 

When Achilles pierced Penthesilea's breast with his short sword, he twisted it—as is proper—three times in the wound, and saw—in a sudden exaltation—that the queen of the Amazons was beautiful.

He laid her carefully on the sand, took off her heavy helmet, shook her hair loose, and delicately laid her hands on her chest. However, he did not have the courage to close her eyes.

He looked at her once more with a valedictory gaze and, as if compelled by a strange force, began to weep—as neither he himself nor any other hero of that war had ever wept—with a voice subdued and incantatory, low-pitched and helpless, resounding with lamentation and a cadence of remorse unknown to the son of Thetis. The vowels of that lament fell on Penthesilea's neck, breast, and knees like leaves and wrapped themselves around her cooling body.

She herself was preparing for the Eternal Hunt in forests beyond. Her eyes not yet closed looked from far off at the victor with stubborn, clear blue—loathing.

 

Where is Dionysus sailing across a sea as red as wine
what islands does he seek under the sign of grapevines
The wine-drunk one doesn't know—so nor do we—
where downstream the agile beechwood boat is sailing

 

Above San Francisco Bay—the lights of the stars
at dawn mist which divides the world in two parts
who knows which is better weightier which worse
one must not think even in secret they're the same

Angels descend from heaven
Halleluia
when he sets down
his slanted
azure-spaced
letters

 

Rovigo station. Vague associations. A Goethe play
or something from Byron. I passed through Rovigo
so many times and just now for the umpteenth time
I understood in my inner geography it is a singular
place though it is certainly no match for Florence.
I never put a living foot down there. Rovigo was
always coming closer or receding into the distance

I lived then in the throes of a passion for Altichiero
of the San Giorgio Oratorium in Padua and also
for Ferrara which I loved because it reminded me
of the plundered city of my fathers. I lived torn
between the past and the present moment
crucified many times by time and by place

But nonetheless happy with a powerful faith
that the sacrifice would not be made in vain

Rovigo was not marked by anything in particular
it was a masterpiece of averageness straight roads
ugly houses but—depending on the train's direction
just before or just after the city a mountain suddenly
rose up from a plain cut across by a red stone quarry
like a holiday cut of meat draped in sprigs of parsley
apart from that nothing to please hurt catch the eye

But it was after all a city of blood and stone like others
a city where a man died yesterday someone went mad
someone coughed hopelessly all night

AMID WHAT BELLS DO YOU APPEAR ROVIGO

Reduced to its station to a comma a crossed-out letter
nothing just the station—
arrivi—partenze

and that is why I think of you Rovigo Rovigo

 

my most saintly grandmother
in a long tight-fitting dress
buttoned up
with a countless number
of buttons
like an orchid
an archipelago
a constellation

I sit on her lap
and she tells me
the universe
from Friday
to Sunday

spellbound
I know everything—
—the one thing about herself
she won't tell is her ancestry
grandmother Maria née Balaban
Maria of Bitter Experience

she tells me nothing
about the massacre
of Armenia
the Turkish massacre

she doesn't want to deprive me
of a few more years of illusion

she knows I will live
to find out for myself
without words curses or tears

the rough
surface
and the pit
of the word

 

Lord,

I give thanks to You for this whole jumble of life in which I have been drowning helplessly from time immemorial, dead set on a constant search for trifles.

Praise be to You, that you gave me unobtrusive buttons, pins, suspenders, spectacles, ink streams, ever hospitable blank sheets of paper, transparent covers, folders patiently waiting.

Lord, I give thanks to You for syringes with needles thick and hair-thin, bandages, every kind of Band-aid, the humble compress, thank you for the drip, for saline solutions, tubes and above all for sleeping pills with names like Roman nymphs,

which are good, for they invite, imitate, substitute for death.

 

Lord,

grant me the ability to compose a long sentence, whose line, customarily from breath to breath, is a line spanned like a suspension bridge like a rainbow the alpha and omega of the ocean

Lord, grant me the strength and agility of those who build sentences long and expansive as a spreading oak tree, like a great valley; may they contain worlds, shadows of worlds, and worlds of dreams