After a Long Dry Spell
The summer is gray now strange evening.
Rain creeps down from the sky
and lands on the field silently
as if it intended to overpower a sleeper.
Circles swam on the fjord’s surface
and that is the only surface there is right now—
the rest is height and depth
to rise and to sink.
Two pine trunks
shoot up and continue in long hollow signal-drums.
Cities and the sun gone off.
In the high grass there is thunder.
It’s all right to telephone the island that is a mirage.
It’s all right to hear the gray voice.
To thunder iron ore is honey.
It’s all right to live by your own code.
A Place in the Woods
On the way there a couple of startled wings fluttered, and that was all. One goes there alone. It is a lofty building made entirely of open spaces, a building which sways all the time, but is never able to fall. The sun, changed into a thousand suns, drifts in through the open slivers. And an inverse law of gravity takes hold in the play of light: this house floats anchored in the sky, and what falls falls upward. It makes you turn around. In the woods it is all right to grieve. It’s all right to see the old truths, which we usually keep packed away in the luggage. My roles down there in the deep places fly up, hang like dried skulls in an ancestor hut on a remote Melanesian island. A childlike light around the terrifying trophies. Woods are mild that way.
Street Crossing
Cold wind hits my eyes, and two or three suns
dance in the kaleidoscope of tears, as I cross
this street I know so well,
where the Greenland summer shines from snowpools.
The street’s massive life swirls around me;
it remembers nothing and desires nothing.
Far under the traffic, deep in earth,
the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.
It seems to me that the street can see me.
Its eyesight is so poor the sun itself
is a gray ball of yarn in black space.
But for a second I am lit. It sees me.
Below Freezing
We are at a party that doesn’t love us. Finally the party lets the mask fall and shows what it is: a shunting station for freight cars. In the fog cold giants stand on their tracks. A scribble of chalk on the car doors.
One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.”
I work the next morning in a different town. I drive there in a hum through the dawning hour that resembles a dark blue cylinder. Orion hangs over the frost. Children stand in a silent clump, waiting for the school bus, the children no one prays for. The light grows as gradually as our hair.
Montenegro
At the next bend the bus broke free from the cold mountain
shadow,
turned its nose toward the sun, and crept in a roar upward.
We were all cramped. The dictator’s bust was present too,
wrapped in newspaper. A bottle went from mouth to mouth.
The birthmark of death grows at a different pace with each of us.
Up on top the blue sea caught up with the sky.
Boat, Town
A Portuguese fishing boat, blue, the wake rolls back the Atlantic
always.
A blue dot far out, but still I am there—the six on board do not
notice that we are seven.
I saw a boat like that being built, it lay like a huge lute without
strings
in the Gap of the Poor, the town where women keep washing and
washing in rage, in patience, in sadness.
People blackened the beach. It was a meeting just breaking up,
loudspeakers being carried away.
Military police escorted the speaker’s Mercedes through the
crowd, words hit the steel carsides.
Start of a Late Autumn Novel
The boat has the smell of oil, and something whirrs all the time like an obsessive thought. The spotlight is turned on. We are approaching the pier. I’m the only one who is to get off here. “Would you like the gangplank?” No. I take a wobbly step right out into the night, and find myself standing on the pier, on the island. I feel soggy and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept from the cocoon, the plastic clothes-bags in my hands like misshapen wings. I turn and watch the boat go away with its lit windows, then grope my way up to the house I know so well that has been empty. All the houses at this landing are empty now … It is lovely to sleep here. I lie on my back, unsure if I’m asleep or awake. A few books I’ve just read sail by like schooners on the way to the Bermuda Triangle, where they will disappear without a trace. I hear a sound, reverberating, like a drum with poor memory. A thing that the wind thumps again and again against some other object the earth is holding tight. If the night is not just the absence of light, if night really is something, it has to be this sound. The sound of a slow heart heard through the stethoscope, it beats, falls silent a moment, comes back. As if its being went in a zigzag over the Border. Possibly someone is there, inside the wall, thumping, someone who belongs to the other world, but got left here anyway, he thumps, wants to go back. Too late. Wasn’t on time down here, wasn’t on time up there, didn’t make it on board in time … The other world is also this one. The next morning I see a rustly branch with gold and brown leaves hanging on. A root body thrown upward. Stones with faces. The forest is full of monsters that I love left behind when the ship sailed.
From the Winter of 1947
Daytime at school: the somber swarming fortress.
In the dusk I went home under signboards.
Then the whispering without lips: “Wake up, sleepwalker!”
And all the things were pointing to the Room.
Fifth floor, facing the backyard.
The lamp burned in a terror circle every night.
I sat without eyelids in my bed, watching
the thoughts of the insane run on videotape.
As if this had to be …
As if my last childhood had to be smashed
into pieces so it could pass through the bars …
As if this had to be …
I read books of glass but see only the Other.
The stains that pushed their way through the wallpaper!
Those stains were the dead still alive
who wanted to have their portraits painted.
Until dawn, when the garbagemen arrived
and started banging cans five floors down.
Those peaceful bells of the alley
sent me each morning off to sleep …
The Clearing
In the middle of the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can only be found by those who have gotten lost.
The clearing is surrounded by a forest that is choking itself. Black trunks with the lichen’s bristly beard. The jammed trees are dead all the way to the top, there a few solitary green branches touch the light. Underneath: shadows sitting on shadows, the marsh increasing.
But in the clearing the grass is curiously green and alive. Big stones lie around as if placed that way. They must have been foundation stones for a house, maybe I’m wrong. Who lived there? No one can help with that. The name sleeps somewhere in the archive no one opens (only archives remain young). The oral tradition is dead, and with it the memories. The gypsy tribe remembers, but those who can write forget. Write it down and forget it.
This little house hums with voices. It is the center of the world. But the people in it die or move away. The history ends. The place st
ands empty year after year. And the crofter’s house becomes a sphinx. At the end everything has gone away except the foundation stones.
I’ve been here before somehow, but it’s time to leave. I dive in among the briary underbrush. To get through it you have to take one step forward and two steps to the side, like a chess piece. Slowly it thins out and the light increases. My steps grow longer. A path wiggles its way toward me. I am back in the communications net.
On the humming high voltage pole a beetle sits in the sun. Under his gleaming shoulders his flight wings are lying, folded as ingeniously as a parachute packed by an expert.
Schubertiana
I.
Outside New York, a high place where with one glance you take
in the houses where eight million human beings live.
The giant city over there is a long flimmery drift, a spiral galaxy
seen from the side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are being pushed across the desk,
department-store windows beg, a whirl of shoes that leave no
trace behind.
Fire escapes climbing up, elevator doors that silently close, behind
triple-locked doors a steady swell of voices.
Slumped-over bodies doze in subway cars, catacombs in motion.
I know also—statistics to the side—that at this moment in some
room down there Schubert is being played, and for that person
the notes are more real than all the rest.
II.
The immense treeless plains of the human brain have gotten
folded and refolded till they are the size of a fist.
The swallow in April returns to its last year’s nest under the eaves
in precisely the right barn in precisely the right township.
She flies from the Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks
over two continents, navigates toward precisely this one
disappearing dot in the landmass.
And the man who gathers up the signals from a whole lifetime
into a few rather ordinary chords for five string musicians
the one who got a river to flow through the eye of a needle
is a plump young man from Vienna, his friends called him “The
Mushroom,” who slept with his glasses on
and every morning punctually stood at his high writing table.
When he did that the wonderful centipedes started to move on
the page.
III.
The five instruments play. I go home through warm woods where
the earth is springy under my feet,
curl up like someone still unborn, sleep, roll on so weightlessly
into the future, suddenly understand that plants are thinking.
IV.
How much we have to take on trust every minute we live in order
not to drop through the earth!
Take on trust the snow masses clinging to rocksides over the town.
Take on trust the unspoken promises, and the smile of agreement,
trust that the telegram does not concern us, and that the sudden
ax blow from inside is not coming.
Trust the axles we ride on down the thruway among the swarm of
steel bees magnified three hundred times.
But none of that stuff is really worth the trust we have.
The five string instruments say that we can take something else on
trust, and they walk with us a bit on the road.
As when the lightbulb goes out on the stair, and the hand
follows—trusting it—the blind banister rail that finds its way
in the dark.
V.
We crowd up onto the piano stool and play four-handed in
F minor, two drivers for the same carriage, it looks a little
ridiculous.
It looks as if the hands are moving weights made of sound back
and forth, as if we were moving lead weights
in an attempt to alter the big scale’s frightening balance: happiness
and suffering weigh exactly the same.
Annie said, “This music is so heroic,” and she is right.
But those who glance enviously at men of action, people who
despise themselves inside for not being murderers,
do not find themselves in this music.
And the people who buy and sell others, and who believe that
everyone can be bought, don’t find themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody line that remains itself among
all its variations, sometimes shiny and gentle, sometimes rough
and powerful, the snail’s trace and steel wire.
The stubborn humming sound that this instant is with us
upward into
the depths.
The Gallery
I spent the night at a motel on the freeway.
My room had a smell I had known before,
the part of the museum that had the Asian collection:
Tibetan and Japanese masks on a white wall.
This time it isn’t masks but faces
that push their way through the white wall of forgetfulness
in order to breathe, ask me about something.
I lie awake and watch them fight
and vanish and return.
Some borrow features from another, switch faces
deep inside me
where forgetfulness and memory make their deals.
They push their way through the second coat of forgetfulness
the white wall
they vanish and return.
Here is a sorrow that won’t call itself sorrow.
Welcome to the true galleries!
Welcome to the true galleys!
The true jail bars!
The karate boy who paralyzed a man
goes on dreaming of quick profits.
That woman keeps buying more and more things
in order to throw them into the jaw of nothing
that wiggles around behind her.
Mr. X doesn’t dare to leave his room.
A dark stockade of equivocal people
stands between him
and the steadily disappearing horizon.
This one escaped from Karelia
and was able to laugh then …
She reappears now
but dumb, petrified, a statue from Sumeria.
As when I was ten years old and came home late.
The lamps were out on the stair
but the elevator where I stood had lights and it rose
like a diver’s bell through black depths
floor after floor while imaginary faces
pressed against the bars …
But these faces are not imagined, they are real.
I lie stretched out like a cross street.
Many people climb up from the white mist.
We managed to touch one another, once, we did!
A long lit corridor that reeks of carbolic acid.
A wheelchair. The teenage girl
learning to talk after the car crash.
The man who tried to shout under the water
and the world’s chill mass forced its way in
through his nose and mouth.
Voices spoke into the microphone: speed is power
speed is power!
Start it rolling, the show must go on!
Following our career we walk stiffly step by step
as in a Noh play
with masks, a high-pitched singing: here I am, here I am!
The loser
is represented by a rolled-up blanket.
One artist said: when younger I was a planet
with its own dense atmosphere.
The descending rays of light broke into rainbows.
Constant thunderstorms raged inside …
Now I am extinct and dry and opened.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
But no rainbows.
I spent the night in the thin-walled house.
Many others wanted to penetrate the walls
but most of them can’t make it.
They are shouted down by the white noise of forgetfulness.
Anonymous songs of the drowned in the walls.
Modest rappers who wish not to be heard
long long sighs
my old replies that creep around homeless.
Hear society’s mechanical self-attacks
voices like large fans
the artificial wind in the mine tunnels
1,800 feet down.
Under the bandages our eyes remain open.
If at least I could just get them to grasp
that this quivering underneath us
means that we are walking on a bridge …
Often I have to stand absolutely still.
I am the knife-thrower’s partner!
The Half-Finished Heaven Page 6