Poems New and Collected
Page 6
Even if you break me to pieces,
we’ll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won’t let you in.”
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I’ve come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don’t have much time.
My mortality should touch you.”
“I’m made of stone,” says the stone,
“and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don’t have the muscles to laugh.”
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.
Admit you don’t know them well yourself.”
“Great and empty, true enough,” says the stone,
“but there isn’t any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you’ll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away.”
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I don’t seek refuge for eternity.
I’m not unhappy.
I’m not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I’ll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe.”
“You shall not enter,” says the stone.
“You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.”
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I haven’t got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof.”
“If you don’t believe me,” says the stone,
“just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don’t know how to laugh.”
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.”
“I don’t have a door,” says the stone.
NO END OF FUN
1967
The Joy of Writing
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence—this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.
Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.
They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.
Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
Memory Finally
Memory’s finally found what it was after.
My mother has turned up, my father has been spotted.
I dreamed up a table and two chairs. They sat.
They were mine again, alive again for me.
The two lamps of their faces gleamed at dusk
as if for Rembrandt.
Only now can I begin to tell
in how many dreams they’ve wandered, in how many crowds
I dragged them out from underneath the wheels,
in how many deathbeds they moaned with me at their side.
Cut off, they grew back, but never straight.
The absurdity drove them to disguises.
So what if they felt no pain outside me,
they still ached within me.
In my dreams, gawking crowds heard me call out Mom
to a bouncing, chirping thing up on a branch.
They made fun of my father’s hair in pigtails.
I woke up ashamed.
So, finally.
One ordinary Friday night
they suddenly came back
exactly as I wanted.
In a dream, but somehow freed from dreams,
obeying just themselves and nothing else.
In the picture’s background possibilities grew dim,
accidents lacked the necessary shape.
Only they shone, beautiful because just like themselves.
They appeared to me for a long, long, happy time.
I woke up. I opened my eyes.
I touched the world, a chiseled picture-frame.
Landscape
In the old master’s landscape,
the trees have roots beneath the oil paint,
the path undoubtedly reaches its goal,
the signature is replaced by a stately blade of grass,
it’s a persuasive five in the afternoon,
May has been gently, yet firmly, detained,
so I’ve lingered, too. Why, of course, my dear,
I am the woman there, under the ash tree.
Just see how far behind I’ve left you,
see the white bonnet and the yellow skirt I wear,
see how I grip my basket so as not to slip out of the painting,
how I strut within another’s fate
and rest awhile from living mysteries.
Even if you called I wouldn’t hear you,
and even if I heard I wouldn’t turn,
and even if I made that impossible gesture
your face would seem a stranger’s face to me.
I know the world six miles around.
I know the herbs and spells for every pain.
God still looks down on the crown of my head.
I still pray I won’t die suddenly.
War is punishment and peace is a reward.
Shameful dreams all come from Satan.
My soul is as plain as the stone of a plum.
I don’t know the games of the heart.
I’ve never seen my children’s father naked.
I don’t see the crabbed and blotted draft
that hides behind the Song of Songs.
Wh
at I want to say comes in ready-made phrases.
I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine,
only given to me for safekeeping.
Even if you bar my way,
even if you stare me in the face,
I’ll pass you by on the chasm’s edge, finer than a hair.
On the right is my house. I know it from all sides,
along with its steps and its entryway,
behind which life goes on unpainted.
The cat hops on a bench,
the sun gleams on a pewter jug,
a bony man sits at the table
fixing a clock.
Family Album
No one in this family has ever died of love.
No food for myth and nothing magisterial.
Consumptive Romeos? Juliets diphtherial?
A doddering second childhood was enough.
No death-defying vigils, love-struck poses
over unrequited letters strewn with tears!
Here, in conclusion, as scheduled, appears
a portly, pince-nez’d neighbor bearing roses.
No suffocation-in-the-closet gaffes
because the cuckold returned home too early!
Those frills or furbelows, however flounced and whirly,
barred no one from the family photographs.
No Bosch-like hell within their souls, no wretches
found bleeding in the garden, shirts in stains!
(True, some did die with bullets in their brains,
for other reasons, though, and on field stretchers.)
Even this belle with rapturous coiffure
who may have danced till dawn—but nothing smarter—
hemorrhaged to a better world, bien sûr,
but not to taunt or hurt you, slick-haired partner.
For others, Death was mad and monumental—
not for these citizens of a sepia past.
Their griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast,
their vanishing was due to influenza.
Laughter
The little girl I was—
I know her, of course.
I have a few snapshots
from her brief life.
I feel good-natured pity
for a couple of little poems.
I remember a few events.
But
to make the man who’s with me
laugh and hug me,
I dig up just one silly story:
the puppy love
of that ugly duckling.
I tell him
how she fell in love with a college boy;
that is, she wanted him
to look at her.
I tell him
how she once ran out to meet him
with a bandage on her unhurt head,
so that he’d ask, oh just ask her
what had happened.
Funny little thing.
How could she know
that even despair can work for you
if you’re lucky enough
to outlive it.
I’d give her some change: go buy a cookie.
I’d give her more: go see a show.
Go away, I’m busy now.
Can’t you see
the lights are out?
Don’t you get it,
the door is locked?
Stop fiddling with the knob—
the man who laughed
and hugged me
is not your college boy.
It’d be better if you
went back where you came from.
I don’t owe you anything,
I’m just an ordinary woman
who only knows
when to betray
another’s secret.
Don’t keep staring at us
with those eyes of yours,
open too wide
like the eyes of the dead.
The Railroad Station
My nonarrival in the city of N.
took place on the dot.
You’d been alerted
in my unmailed letter.
You were able not to be there
at the agreed-upon time.
The train pulled up at Platform 3.
A lot of people got out.
My absence joined the throng
as it made its way toward the exit.
Several women rushed
to take my place
in all that rush.
Somebody ran up to one of them.
I didn’t know him,
but she recognized him
immediately.
While they kissed
with not our lips,
a suitcase disappeared,
not mine.
The railroad station in the city of N.
passed its exam
in objective existence
with flying colors.
The whole remained in place.
Particulars scurried
along the designated tracks.
Even a rendezvous
took place as planned.
Beyond the reach
of our presence.
In the paradise lost
of probability.
Somewhere else.
Somewhere else.
How these little words ring.
Alive
These days we just hold him.
Hold him living.
Only the heart
still pounces on him.
To the dismay
of our distaff cousin, the spider,
he will not be devoured.
We permit his head,
pardoned centuries ago,
to rest upon our shoulder.
For a thousand tangled reasons
it’s become our practice
to listen to him breathe.
Hissed from our mysteries.