BEARS
Bears can be divided into brown and white, paws, head and torso. They have jovial snouts and small eyes. They have a tendency to gluttony. They never feel like going to school, but dozing in the forest—anytime. When they’re running out of honey they clutch their heads with their paws and are so woeful, so woeful I can’t even tell you. Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would do anything for them, but a hunter stalks the woods and aims his rifle between those two little eyes.
HARP
The water is shallow. In the water the light is golden and flat. In silver reeds, the wind’s fingers clasp the one salvaged column.
A black girl clasps a harp. Her great Egyptian eye swims among strings like a mournful fish. A long way behind it, little fingers.
PIRATES
Pirates are bowling. Meanwhile the sky is red. Completely. When the king sways, sliced by a bullet, white ships appear on the horizon. You can hear booming laughter and thunderbolts.
GRANDFATHER
He was kind. He loved canaries, children, and long masses. He ate marshmallows. Everyone said: grandfather has a golden heart. Until the heart misted over one day. Granddad died. He abandoned his kind, concerned body and became a ghost.
CROSSING GUARD
His name is 176 and he lives in a big brick with one window. He comes out—a little acolyte of motion—and salutes the trains flying by with arms heavy as dough.
For many miles around there’s nothing to be seen. A plain with one elevation and a copse of lonely trees in the middle. You don’t have to have lived here thirty years to know there are seven of them.
FROM THE END
And then a great table was set and a splendid wedding feast was held. That day the princess was even more beautiful than usual. Music played. Girls lovely as the moon danced downstairs.
All right, but what came before that? Oh, let’s not even think about it. A dark fortune-teller knocks at the window like a moth. Forty thieves lost their long knives and beards during their flight and the dragon turned into a May bug is sleeping peacefully on an almond leaf.
ON THE ROAD TO DELPHI
It was on the road to Delphi. I was just passing a red rock when I saw Apollo coming from the opposite direction. He was walking fast, not paying attention to anything. When he came near, I noticed that he was playing with the Medusa’s head, shrunken and dry with age. He whispered something under his breath. If I heard correctly, he was saying over and over: “A conjuror must plumb the depths of cruelty.”
THE WIND AND THE ROSE
Once in a garden there grew a rose. A wind fell in love with her. They were completely different, he—light and fair; she—immobile and heavy as blood.
There came a man in wooden clogs and with his thick hands he plucked the rose. The wind leapt after him, but the man slammed the door in his face.
—O that I might turn to stone—wept the unlucky one—I was able to go round the whole world, I was able to stay away for years at a time, but I knew that she was always there waiting.
The wind understood that, in order really to suffer, one has to be faithful.
HEN
The hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing unutterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
The hen brings to mind certain poets.
CLASSIC
A great wooden ear lined with cotton wool and the tedium of Cicero. A great stylist—so they say. Nowadays no one writes sentences that long anymore. And what erudition. He can even read stone. Only he never figures out that the veins in the marble of Diocletian’s baths are the burst blood vessels of slaves from the stone quarries.
PAINTER
Under walls white as a birch forest grow the ferns of paintings. Amid smells of turpentine and oils Miron reconstructs the drama of a lemon condemned to share its life with green drapes. There’s also a female nude.
—My fiancée—Miron says.—She posed for me during the occupation. It was a winter without bread and coal. Under her white skin blood collected in blue spots. Then I painted a warm rosy background.
RAILWAY LANDSCAPES
On iron branches the red and green fruits of signals are ripening. There are quiet platforms with miniature gardens of Semiramis hanging in flower boxes.
But the nasturtium and lost bee are no good. When the round guillotine of minutes indicates 12:31, all this is devoured by a black monster coming closer in a hiss of white atmospheres.
HERMES, DOG AND STAR
Hermes is going along in the world. He meets a dog.
—I’m a god—Hermes introduces himself politely.
The dog sniffs his feet.
—I feel lonely. People betray the gods. But mortal animals without self-consciousness, that’s what we want. In the evening after traveling all day we’ll sit down under an oak. Then I’ll tell you I feel old and want to die. It’ll be a lie necessary to get you to lick my hands.
—Sure—the dog replies casually—I’ll lick your hands. They’re cold and they smell strange.
They go along and after a while they meet a star.
—I’m Hermes—the god says—and produces one of his most handsome faces.—Would you by any chance feel like coming with us to the end of the world? I’ll try to work it so that it’s scary there and you have to lean your head on my arm.
—OK—says the star in a glassy voice. I don’t care where I go. But your saying the end of the world is pure naïveté. Sadly, there is no end of the world.
They go along. The dog, Hermes, and the star. Holding hands. Hermes thinks to himself: the next time he goes out looking for friends, he won’t be so sincere.
SEAMSTRESS
It has been raining all morning. The woman from across the street is to be buried. The seamstress. She dreamed of a wedding ring but died with a thimble on her finger. Everyone thinks this is funny. Respectable rain is darning the sky to the earth. But nothing will come of that either.
BOTANICAL GARDEN
It’s a boardinghouse for plants, run very strictly like a convent school. Grasses, trees, and flowers grow decently without any vegetational extravagance, shunning forbidden intimacies with bumblebees. They are continually embarrassed by their own Latin dignity and by the fact that they have to serve as examples. Even roses keeps their lips sealed. They dream of the herbarium.
Elderly folks come here with books and doze off under the sluggish ticking of the sundials.
FOREST
A path runs barefoot through the forest. In the forest there are a lot of trees, a cuckoo, Hansel and Gretel, and other small animals. There aren’t any dwarfs; they got out in time. When it gets dark the owl locks the forest with a big key, because if a cat got in there, then there would be some damage done.
EMPEROR
Once upon a time there was an Emperor. He had yellow eyes and a predatory jaw. He lived in a palace full of statuary and policemen. Alone. At night he would wake up and scream. Nobody loved him. Most of all he liked hunting game and terror. But he posed for photographs with children and flowers. When he died, nobody dared to remove his portraits. Take a look, perhaps still you have his mask at home.
SOLDIER
A soldier is going off to war. He wears a purple sash across his chest. He has tied the end of his saber to his stirrups with strings of sparks. A cap with three feathers on his light head. The soldier goes off singing.
He meets a peasant bringing a horse to market. The plucky soldier buys the horse for the price of a stout fist and one feather from his cap.
At night he robs a girl of her sleep and leaves her with hope sprouting in her heart and one feather from his cap.
At dawn he kills a soldier
with a blue sash. By the side of the road the nitwit was a sitting duck.
That’s what the war was like. For the greatest of causes. Whether banners should be sewn from purple silk or blue.
Until once at a crossroads he spots a bony old lady. He doffs his cap and is pained to see the third and last feather slowly floating to the ground.
ELEPHANT
In truth, elephants are extremely sensitive and high-strung. They have a wild imagination which allows them sometimes to forget about their appearance. When they go into the water, they close their eyes. At the sight of their own legs they weep with frustration.
I knew an elephant who fell in love with a hummingbird. He lost weight, got no sleep, and in the end died of a broken heart. Those ignorant of the elephant’s nature said: he was so overweight.
STILL LIFE
With deliberate carelessness, shapes violently torn from life are scattered on the table: a fish, an apple, a bunch of vegetables mixed with flowers. A still leaf of light was added and a little bird with a bloodied head. That bird clutches a little planet in its stony claws, composed of nothingness and stolen air.
FISH
The sleep of fish is beyond imagination. Even in the darkest corner of a pond, among the reeds, their rest is a waking: they hold the same position for an eternity; and it is absolutely impossible to say of them: their heads hit the pillow.
Their tears too are like a cry in the wilderness—numberless.
Fish can’t express their despair with a gesture. This justifies the blunt knife that skips along their spine ripping the sequins of scales.
LIFE OF A WARRIOR
He stood on the threshold of the room in which lay his dead father wrapped like a silkworm in waxen silence—and shouted. That’s how it began.
He clung to the roar and climbed upon it higher and higher, for he knew that silence means death. Rhythm of hobnailed boots, hoofbeats on a bridge—blue galligaskins of a hussar. Thunder of drums as musketeers march into a cloud of smoke—silver sword of an officer. Roar of cannon, the earth groans like a drum—triangular shako of a field-marshal.
Thus, when he died, his faithful soldiers want him to ascend to heaven by the ladder of tumult. A hundred bell-towers rocked the town. At the moment when the town swings closest to the sky, the gunners fire. But they are unable to chip off enough blue glaze to slip in the field-marshal complete with his sword and triangular shako.
Now he comes loose again and falls on the face of the earth. His faithful soldiers pick him up and once again fire at the sky.
FUNERAL OF A YOUNG WHALE
Sea horses with fat rumps and ironic eyes and horses dressed in orange horse blankets lead the procession—a black sugar bowl scattering house slippers as it goes, with a big suede pearl sewn onto a dark background.
He is drawn along an avenue of gorges amid the rustling of measureless water seeping through drop by drop, amid numberless infinities of stars and sand, sand and stars and sand.
The sun ties the air in little bows. Butterflies watch the deceased so he doesn’t fly off. They hold the flowers’ strings, so that he doesn’t float out of the hearse’s lagoon.
Sea grasshoppers—made of chitin but sensitive to the problem of existence—are weeping: what harm was there in his making good-natured fun of ships, liking the whirlwind’s voice and having a box full of drowned men he played with as if they were tin soldiers? What harm was there in that?
He is drawn across vast fields bathed in lemony light, across flat expanses from which white oxygen escapes like an unsealed view.
Only now do the bells arrive. They install a great loom in the heights. They weave a tenebrous sheet for the whole procession, the body of the deceased, and even a bit of the grief.
I fling the beginning of an epic on that sheet:
O rosy mountain of sweet flesh—adieu
O melon cut too soon
from the glassy branch of the oceans—
THE SACRIFICE OF IPHIGENIA
Agamemnon is closest to the pyre. He has thrown his cloak over his head but hasn’t closed his eyes. He thinks that through the fabric he will be able to make out the flare melting his daughter like a hairpin.
Hippias stands in the first row of soldiers. He sees only Iphigenia’s little mouth, shattered by weeping, just as when he made a terrible scene over her pinning flowers in her hair and allowing herself to be accosted in the street by unknown men. Hippias’s view lengthens disproportionately, and Iphigenia’s little mouth fills an enormous space from the sky to the earth.
Calchas, his eyes touched by leucoma, sees everything with the dim sight of an insect. The only things that truly move him are the drooping sails of the ships in the bay, which make the sorrow of old age seem to him just now impossible to endure. He therefore raises his arm to give the sign for the sacrifice to begin.
The chorus placed on the hillside takes in the world in its true proportions. The small thicket of the pyre, the white priests, the purple kings, the resounding copper, and the miniature fires in the soldiers’ helmets, all of it against a background of glaring sand and the fathomless color of the sea. The view is magnificent, if you call to your aid the appropriate perspective.
THE PALACE OF LAUGHTER
A swing, a whirlabout, a shooting-gallery—these are the amusements of common people. Subtle intellects, reflective natures prefer the Palace of Laughter. Its lofty and secret purpose is to prepare us for the worst. Here in one mirror is shown our body taken down from the wheel—a misshapen sack of broken bones, in another our body taken down from the meat-hook after a long dry distillation in the air.
Visit the Palace of Laughter. Visit the Palace of Laughter. This is the vestibule of life, the anteroom of torture.
IN THE CUPBOARD
I always suspected that the city was a falsification. But it was only on a foggy afternoon in early spring, when the air smells of starch, that I discovered the nature of the fraud. We are living inside a cupboard, in the lowest depths of oblivion, among broken poles and shut boxes. Six brown walls, the trouser legs of clouds above our heads, and what until recently we took for a cathedral but which is really a swarthy bottle of evaporated perfume.
O poor nights, when we pray to the passing comet of a moth.
SUICIDE
He was so theatrical. He stood in front of the mirror in a black suit with a flower in his lapel. He raised the gun to his mouth, waited for the barrel to warm up, and, smiling distractedly at his reflection, pulled the trigger.
He fell like a coat flung from the shoulders, but his soul remained standing for a while, shaking its head, getting lighter and lighter. Then it reluctantly entered the body, bloody at the top end, at the moment when its temperature was sinking to the level of an object’s temperature, which—as we know—is an omen of longevity
EQUILIBRIUM
It was a bird, or rather a pitiful remnant of a bird, eaten away by parasites. Stripped of its feathers, its bluish skin shuddering with pain and disgust, it still tried to defend itself by picking with its beak at the white worms covering it in a milling mass.
I wrapped it in a handkerchief and took it to a naturalist I knew. He examined it for a moment, then said:
It’s all right. The worms eating it carry parasites invisible to the eye, and in the cells of the parasites an intensified metabolic process is probably taking place. It is therefore a classic example of a closed system with an infinite particle of antagonistic interdependencies which are the condition for the equilibrium of the whole. Contrary to appearances what we see is a blushing fruit or if you like, the crimson rose of life.
We must see to it that the thick fabric of breathing and suffocation doesn’t burst anywhere, because then we would witness something considerably worse than death and more terrifying than life.
WRINGER
The inquisitors are in our midst. They live in the basements of huge tenement houses and only the shop-sign WRINGER HERE betrays their presence.
Tables with fle
xed bronze muscles, powerful rollers, crushing slowly but with precision, a driving-wheel, which knows no mercy—are waiting for us.
The bed-sheets, which they carry out of the wringer-shop, are like empty bodies of witches and heretics.
FROM THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS
In our present state of knowledge only false tears are suitable for treatment and regular production. Genuine tears are hot, for which reason it is very difficult to remove them from the face. After their reduction to a solid state, they have proved to be extremely fragile. The problem of commercially exploiting genuine tears is a real headache for technologists.
False tears before being quick-frozen are submitted to a process of distillation, since they are by nature impure, and they are reduced to a state in which, with respect to purity, they are hardly inferior to genuine tears. They are very hard, very durable and thus are suitable not only for ornamentation but also for cutting glass.
JAPANESE TALE
Princess Izanaki is fleeing a dragon with four purple and four golden claws. Prince Itanagi is sleeping under a tree. He doesn’t know what danger threatens the little feet of Izanaki.
The Collected Poems Page 9