he even bought me clothes
in youth’s camouflage colors
I hadn’t had clothes as nice
since my first communion
short trousers and a shirt
with a great sailor collar
black patent leather shoes
buckles and white socks
the old guy took my hand
and led me off to the ball
there were other boys too
in short trousers like me
their faces clean-shaven
shuffling with their feet
have a good time of it lads
why stand off to the side
—the older men asked—
why not form a mill wheel
but we didn’t want to play
at tag or blindman’s bluff
we had enough of geezers
we were nearly starving
so quickly they sat us down
around a magnificent table
and gave us sweet lemonade
and to each a piece of cake
now boys got to their feet
changed into adult clothes
praising us in deep voices
rapping us on the knuckles
we couldn’t hear a thing
we couldn’t feel a thing
staring with eyes wide
at those pieces of cake
which were melting fast
in our feverish hands
and life’s first sweetness
was lost in a dark sleeve
SUBSTANCE
Not heads snuffed by the sharp shadow of pennants
nor the mangled torsos left behind on a mowed field
nor the hands holding a cold scepter and royal apple
nor the heart of a bell
nor a cathedral’s base
contain everything
those pushing carts in badly-paved outskirts
escaping from a fire with a kettle of borscht
and returning to ruins not to call the dead
but to find the pipe of the iron stove
those who starving—love life
beaten on the face—love life
whom it’s hard to call flowers
but who are of flesh
living plasma that is
two arms to brace the head
two legs hasty in an escape
able to come by food
able to breathe
able to pass life under a prison wall
they perish
who love fine words more than oily smells
but happily there are not too many of them
the people endure
and returning from escape routes with full sacks
raise a triumphal arch
for the beautiful dead
ANSWER
It will be a night of deep snow
thick enough to muffle steps
deep shadow changing bodies
into two puddles of darkness
we’re lying holding our breath
even thought’s lowest whisper
if wolves don’t track us down
or a man in a fur coat cradling
fast-shooting death on his chest
we’ll have to jump up and run
amid a din of short dry salvos
to that longed-for other shore
everywhere earth is the same
it teaches wisdom everywhere
a man is weeping white tears
mothers are cradling children
the moon is beginning to rise
and building us a white house
It will be a night after hard waking
the conspiracy of the imagination
tastes of bread is light as wodka
yet every dream of palm trees
confirms our choice to stay here
the dream is cut off by three tall
rubber-and-iron men who enter
check your name check for fear
and order you down the stairway
not allowing you to take a thing
but a guard’s compassionate face
Hellenic Roman medieval
Indian Elizabethan Italian
probably French above all
a bit of Weimar Versailles
we lug so many homelands
on one back on one earth
but the one homeland I’m sure
to keep in the singular is here
where you’re trod into the mud
or with a proudly ringing spade
they dig a fair hole for longing
TO THE HUNGARIANS
We stand on the border
and hold out our arms
for our brothers for you
we tie a great rope of air
from a broken-off cry
from the fists clenched
a bell is cast a tongue
silent on the lookout
wounded stones plead
murdered water pleads
we stand on the border
we stand on the border
we stand on the border
that is called reason
and we gaze into a fire
and we marvel at death
1956
PROSE POEMS
VIOLIN
A violin is naked. It has skinny little arms. Clumsily it tries to cover itself with them. It sobs for shame and cold. That’s why. Not, as the music reviewers say, to make it more beautiful. That’s simply not true.
BUTTON
The best fairy tales are about how we were little. I most like ones like how I once swallowed an ivory button. My mother was crying.
PRINCESS
What the princess likes best is lying face down on the floor. The floor smells of dust, wax, and God knows what else. In the cracks the princess hides her treasures—a red coral bead, a silver thread, and something else I can’t tell you because I took an oath.
A MOTHER AND HER LITTLE BOY
In a cabin at the edge of the wood there once lived a mother and her little boy. They loved each other. Very much. They watched the sun set together and cultivated domestic hours. They didn’t want to die, either. But Mother died. The boy was left behind. In fact it was an old carpet by the bed.
DRUNKS
Drunks are people who drink to the dregs in one draft. But they wince because in the dregs they see themselves again. Through the glass of the bottle they observe faraway worlds. If they had stronger heads and better taste, they would be astronomers.
HARPSICHORD
In fact it is a cupboard made of walnut in a black frame. You might think that it is used to keep yellowing letters, Gypsy coins, and ribbons—whereas there’s nothing but a cuckoo entangled in a thicket of silver leaves.
OBJECTS
Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.
SHELL
In front of the mirror in my parents’ bedroom there lay a pink shell. I stole up to it on tiptoe and in a swift motion, raised it to my ear. I wanted to catch it when it wasn’t pining with its monotonous sound. Though I was little, I knew that even if you love someone very much, it sometimes happens that you forget all about it.
COUNTRY
In the far corner of this old map there’s a country I long for. It is the homeland of apples, hills, lazy rivers, pungent wine, and love. Unfortunately a great spider spun a web over it and closed off the dream’s border control booths with sticky saliva.
Always the same old story: an angel with a fiery sword, a spider, conscience.
CAT
It’s completely black, but has an electric tail. When it sleeps in the sun it’s the blackest thing you can possibly imagine. Even in its slee
p it catches frightened little mice. You can tell by the claws that grow from its paws. It’s terribly winsome and wicked. It swipes nestlings from the tree before they’re ripe.
DWARFS
Dwarfs grow in the forest. They have a peculiar smell and white beards. They appear alone. If a cluster of them could be gathered, dried, and hung over the door—we might have some peace.
WELL
The well is in the middle of the square among apartment buildings, pigeons, and towers. In a vein of the cold well casing a spring bubbles up. It gurgles anxiously, as if it were about to dry up.
On top there is a carving of a stone dog’s sleep. The sandstone head lies between two paws. Its sleep is profound. It doesn’t give a toss about the end of the world.
EPISODE IN A LIBRARY
A blond girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil sharp as a lance she transfers words onto a white sheet of paper and translates them into lines, accents, caesuras. The fallen poet’s lament now looks like a salamander gnawed by ants.
When we carried him off under fire, I believed his still warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now I see words dying, I know that there is no limit to decay. What will remain after us are fragments of words scattered on the black earth. Accent signs over nothingness and ash.
WASP
When the flowered tablecloth, honey, and fruit were mowed from the table in one fell swoop, the wasp made an attempt to fly off. Wrapped in stifling clouds of net curtain, it went on buzzing for a long time. Finally it made it to the window. Again and again it beat its weakening body against the cold welded air of the pane. In the last movement of its wings there lingered the same faith that the body’s unrest can raise a wind carrying us to longed-for worlds.
You who have stood under a beloved’s window, you who have seen your happiness on display—can you find it in yourselves to extract the sting of this death?
MADWOMAN
Her burning look holds me fast as if in an embrace. She utters words mixed up with dreams. She invites me. You will be happy if you believe and hitch your wagon to a star. She is gentle when breast-feeding the clouds; but when calm abandons her, she runs along the seashore and waves her arms in the air.
Reflected in her eyes I see two angels standing at my shoulders: the pale, malevolent angel of Irony and the mighty, loving angel of Schizophrenia.
THE PARADISE OF THE THEOLOGIANS
Alleys, long alleys bordered by trees which are as carefully trimmed as in an English park. Sometimes an angel passes there. His hair is carefully curled, his wings rustle with Latin. He holds in his hands a neat instrument called a syllogism. He walks quickly without stirring the air or sand. He passes in silence by the stony symbols of virtues, the pure qualities, the ideas of objects and many other completely unimaginable things. He never disappears from sight because here there are no perspectives. Orchestras and choirs keep silent yet music is present. The place is empty. The theologians talk spaciously. This also is supposed to be a proof.
THE DEAD
As a result of being confined in dark and unaired accommodation their faces have been radically changed. They would love to speak but sand devoured their lips. Only occasionally do they clutch the air with their fists and try to raise their heads clumsily like infants. Nothing can cheer them, neither chrysanthemums nor candles. They can’t reconcile themselves to their condition, the condition of things.
CRYPT
I can still adjust the devotional picture so your reconciliation with necessity may be known, and the scarf as well, so that the inscription “to my beloved” might be a cause of tears. But what to do with the fly, the black fly that creeps into the half-closed mouth and carries out the remaining crumbs of the soul?
AFTER THE CONCERT
Above the symphony’s severed head still hangs the iron sword of the tutti. The empty music stands are like bare stems from which a cantilena has fallen, petal by petal. You see three levels of silence: the church like a cooling barrel of thunder; a clutch of basses sleeping against the wall like drunken peasants; and lower down, all the way down, a wooden curlicue shaved off by a bow.
HELL
Counting from the top: a chimney, antennae, a warped tin roof. Through a round window you see a girl trapped in threads whom the moon forgot to draw in and left to the mercy of gossipmongers and spiders. Farther down a woman reads a letter, cools her face with powder, and goes on reading. On the first floor a young man is walking back and forth thinking: how can I go outdoors with these bitten lips and shoes falling apart? The café downstairs is empty; it’s still morning.
Just one couple in a corner. They are holding hands. He says: “We will always be together. Waiter, a black coffee and a lemonade, please.” The waiter goes behind the curtain and once there, bursts out laughing.
HOTEL
The carpet is too soft. The palm tree in the lobby is also implausible. The maître gives us a prolonged look and turns our passports over in his hands. “Those rings under the eyes, those rings. I once knew a merchant from Smyrna, he had a protruding tooth too. In these times you have to be terribly careful—the informers and scorpions are everywhere.”
In the elevator we face a mirror, but at the first rattle we see how silver mildew appears where our faces were.
SEVEN ANGELS
Every morning seven angels appear. They come in without knocking. One of them snatches my heart out of my chest. He brings it to his mouth. The others do the same. Then their wings wither and their faces turn from silver to purple. They go out heavily thumping their clogs. They leave my heart on a chair like a little empty pot. It takes all day to fill it back up so that the next morning the angels don’t leave me silvery and winged.
LITTLE TOWN
By day there are fruits and sea, by night stars and sea. Di Fiori Street is a cone of cheery colors. Noon. The sun beats its white stick on the green shades. In a laurel grove, oxen sing an ode to shadows. At that moment I decided to declare my love. The sea holds its peace and the little town swells like the breasts of the girl selling figs.
WALL
We stand against the wall. Our youth has been taken from us like a condemned man’s shirt. We wait. Before the fat bullet lodges itself in our necks, ten or twenty years pass. The wall is high and strong. Behind the wall there are a tree and a star. The tree is lifting the wall with its roots. The star is nibbling the stone like a mouse. In a hundred, two hundred years there will be a little window.
WAR
A convoy of steel quiffs. Boys painted with chalk. Aluminum filings bring down houses. Deafening missiles are sent into completely crimson air. No one flies off into the sky. The earth attracts bodies and lead.
THE WOLF AND THE LAMB
Gotcha—said the wolf and yawned. The lamb turned its teary eyes to the wolf.—Do you have to eat me? Is that really necessary?
—Sadly, I do. That’s how it goes in all fairy tales: Once upon a time a naughty little lamb strayed away from its mother. In the woods it met a big bad wolf who …
—Excuse me, this is not the woods, just my owner’s yard. I didn’t stray away from my mother. I’m an orphan. My mother was also eaten by a wolf.
—Never mind. After you die the authors of edifying literature will take care of you. They’ll work out the setting, the motives, and the moral. Don’t be hard on me. You have no idea how inane it is to be a bad wolf. If it hadn’t been for Aesop we would be sitting here on our hind legs watching the sunset. I get a kick out of that.
Yes, dear children. The wolf ate the little lamb, then licked his lips. Don’t follow after the wolf, dear children. Don’t sacrifice yourselves for a moral.
BALLAD OF OLD BACHELORS
They shave with a razor. Afterward they scramble around endlessly for their cuff links under the chest of drawers. They tie their ties meticulously and smile at the mirror. Because now it’s soft silk, but at the time of their first loves it was a noose. Well, so what; time heals all wounds. You’ve been around, seen it all. A man cool
s down.
The suspenders hang down behind. If they were children they’d chase those suspenders.—“Rachel, when he …”—that’s whenever they put on their vest. You can count on it.
TOWER
The tower is fifty ells down and the same up. There’s a man kept in the dungeon under the tower. The king has bound him to his conscience with a chain. After a wonderful life he is counting days, but not waiting.
On the top of the tower there lives an astronomer. The king bought him a telescope to bind him to the universe. The astronomer counts the stars, but isn’t afraid. The man on top and the man down below fall asleep full of numbers.
That’s why they understand each other. They have no pigeon, but a black cat carries messages from the dungeon to the top of the tower.
—There goes another day—it says to the astronomer.
To the criminal:
—A star was born.
All three of them have green eyes.
From the long vigil, not from hope.
CAFÉ
Suddenly you notice there’s nothing in your glass; you’re raising an abyss to your lips. Marble tables float away like ice floes. Only mirrors make eyes at mirrors; only they believe in infinity
This is the moment to go, not waiting for the spider’s killer leap. You can come back at night to observe through the lowered bars the ghostly slaughterhouse of furniture. Bestially murdered chairs and tables lie on their backs with their legs sticking into the chalky air.
The Collected Poems Page 8