Poems New and Collected
Page 11
Frozen Motion
This isn’t Miss Duncan, the noted danseuse?
Not the drifting cloud, the wafting zephyr, the Bacchante,
moonlit waters, waves swaying, breezes sighing?
Standing this way, in the photographer’s atelier,
heftily, fleshily wrested from music and motion,
she’s cast to the mercies of a pose,
forced to bear false witness.
Thick arms raised above her head,
a knotted knee protrudes from her short tunic,
left leg forward, naked foot and toes,
with 5 (count them) toenails.
One short step from eternal art into artificial eternity—
I reluctantly admit that it’s better than nothing
and more fitting than otherwise.
Behind the screen, a pink corset, a handbag,
in it a ticket for a steamship
leaving tomorrow, that is, sixty years ago;
never again, but still at nine a.m. sharp.
Certainty
“Thou art certain,* then, our ship hath touch’d upon
the deserts of Bohemia?” “Aye, my lord.” The quote’s
from Shakespeare, who, I’m certain, wasn’t someone else.
Some facts and dates, a portrait nearly done before
his death . . . Who needs more? Why expect to see
the proof, snatched up once by the Greater Sea,
then cast upon this world’s Bohemian shore?
The Classic
A few clods of dirt, and his life will be forgotten.
The music will break free from circumstance.
No more coughing of the maestro over minuets.
Poultices will be torn off.
Fire will consume the dusty, lice-ridden wig.
Ink spots will vanish from the lace cuff.
The shoes, inconvenient witnesses, will be tossed on the trash heap.
The least gifted of his pupils will get the violin.
Butchers’ bills will be removed from between the music sheets.
His poor mother’s letters will line the stomachs of mice.
The ill-fated love will fade away.
Eyes will stop shedding tears.
The neighbors’ daughter will find a use for the pink ribbon.
The age, thank God, isn’t Romantic yet.
Everything that’s not a quartet
will become a forgettable fifth.
Everything that’s not a quintet
will become a superfluous sixth.
Everything that’s not a choir made of forty angels
will fall silent, reduced to barking dogs, a gendarme’s belch.
The aloe plant will be taken from the window
along with a dish of fly poison and the pomade pot,
and the view of the garden (oh yes!) will be revealed—
the garden that was never here.
Now hark! ye mortals, listen, listen now,
take heed, in rapt amazement,
o rapt, o stunned, o heedful mortals, listen,
o listeners—now listen—be all ears—
In Praise of Dreams
In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.
I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.
I drive a car
that does what I want it to.
I am gifted
and write mighty epics.
I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.
My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.
I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.
Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.
I’ve got no problem
breathing under water.
I can’t complain:
I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.
It’s gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.
As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.
I’m a child of my age,
but I don’t have to be.
A few years ago
I saw two suns.
And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
True Love
True love. Is it normal,
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?
Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions, but convinced
it had to happen this way—in reward for what? For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.
Look at the happy couple.
Couldn’t they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends’ sake!
Listen to them laughing—it’s an insult.
The language they use—deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines—
it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!
It’s hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? what renounced?
Who’d want to stay within bounds?
True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.
Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.
Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
Under One Small Star
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from
the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep
today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful
of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the
same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional
thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and
each man.
&nb
sp; I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
from
A LARGE NUMBER
1976
A Large Number
Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is still the same.
It’s bad with large numbers.
It’s still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go blindly by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.
But even a Dante couldn’t get it right.
Let alone someone who is not.
Even with all the muses behind me.
Nonn omnis moriar—a premature worry.
But am I entirely alive and is that enough.
It never was, and now less than ever.
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
I whisper my reply to my stentorian calling.
I can’t tell you how much I pass over in silence.
A mouse at the foot of the maternal mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few signs scratched by a claw in the sand.
My dreams—even they’re not as populous as they should be.
They hold more solitude than noisy crowds.
Sometimes a long-dead friend stops by awhile.
A single hand turns the knob.
An echo’s annexes overgrow the empty house.
I run from the doorstep into a valley
that is quiet, as if no one owned it, already an anachronism.
Why there’s still all this space inside me
I don’t know.
Thank-You Note
I owe so much
to those I don’t love.
The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.
The happiness that I’m not
the wolf to their sheep.
The peace I feel with them,
the freedom—
love can neither give
nor take that.
I don’t wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can’t,
and forgive
as love never would.
From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.
Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.
And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.
They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.
They themselves don’t realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.
“I don’t owe them a thing,”
would be love’s answer
to this open question.
Psalm
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin—still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop
bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant
between the border guard’s left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn’t that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn’t been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.
Lot’s Wife
They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot’s neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn’t so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.