my wicker chair with the damaged back.
Another whistled my favorite tune
“What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”
without reaching the refrain.
And yet another envied the basement
—that place I occupied in my father’s heart—
with its elm door hanging by a single hinge.
But the time hasn’t come to leave home just yet,
until your own brother begins to use your shaving kit
and dreams of the same girl.
10.
What shaving kit? Antarctica makes you grow a double-beard,
as if you were a hundred-year-old grave.
And, while you remember wasting time waiting in line at the barber’s,
another beard grows, a red one.
Here, each body part works for itself:
the stomach, hands, intestines, eyes …
The unity of the body is overestimated, too.
Only skin pulls everything together like a sled.
The skin? Which skin? Man loses his first skin
to his first love, like the snake early in spring
on a thorn-apple bush that blocks the way.
From that point on he stops counting the rest.
11.
I don’t know why it was named “Elephant Island,”
when it answered the ocean with the cries of a she-wolf.
We could only make out her sly teats under her belly. After some time,
if she didn’t kill us first, we’d begin to cry like wolves ourselves.
Twenty-two people. Packed next to one another under two inverted boats
like notes in Bach’s “Come, Sweet Death, Come Blessed Rest,”
with more pauses, a dramatic suffocation between breaths.
A dry, hacking cough was a sign of life. Or the delirious mutterings of someone
dreaming aloud of “ice” in the middle of ice,
after they had cut off his toes.
But the hardest moment arrives in the morning,
when, with shut eyes and plugged nostrils,
as if drinking your own urine
you recycle the same lie for four months straight:
“Men, pack up your stuff! The boss might arrive today!”
And they obeyed me. Packed carefully each day from the start,
leaving nothing sharp in the folds of their bags,
nothing that would spoil the line between fact and fiction.
It was a time when
routine grew more powerful than hope.
12.
Fish in the ocean toyed with our citizenship.
On the seventh mile, we left our medals behind, class ranks,
along with the dogs, potatoes, and a camera.
We made fire out of money
and kept only a single metal coin each
so that archaeologists might trace us more easily centuries later.
On Elephant Island, we had to bid farewell even to tobacco,
tobacco which reminded us of village alleyways
and walks home after midnight.
Time glided above us without touching a single strand of our hair—
nonexistent, as if gliding above ancient cities,
exposing the solemnity of our white bones
and crickets on absent walls.
That’s when the Ten Commandments deserted us:
“Do not steal,” “Do not lie,” “Do not covet,”
“Honor your parents” …
save one of them perhaps,
the one about the holiness of Sunday.
We already had nothing. We belonged to no one.
An entirely new species: HOMO ANTARCTICUS.
A scientific proof that “forgotten” and “free”
mean the same thing.
13.
Two years after returning from the world of the dead,
you find your house taken over by another tenant
and the rent tripled,
the commemorative plaque nailed to the gate:
“Here lived F. W.”
And your lover, or better, ex-lover,
for the same reason,
in the arms of another
three times more handsome.
You see your own image sold at an auction.
Artifact. Original. “Brrramp! Sold!” The price so high
you can’t afford it. But even if you could,
you’re an illegal customer,
holding a death certificate in your hand.
And you find your parents turned into winter trees
their eyes fixed on a large cloud of plaster.
They don’t expect visitors. Best not disturb them.
Let their leaves fall quietly where they will
let the crow’s nest remain in the armpit of a branch,
where it has always been.
Perhaps you should take a shortcut, start over.
Or you know what? There’s a war going on nearby, they say.
Go there instead!
But this time die better.
14.
War’s never satisfied with flesh.
Fresh, branded, smoked,
with or without blood,
blue blood, dark, thick, whatever kind.
And frozen blood like yours
could store at minus 40 degrees Celsius,
viruses from 1914 unscathed,
and the map of the old Empire
and Scott’s hurt ego
and old coins minted with the head of Edward VII,
and Browning’s poetry and the epic of the unknown,
like an envelope inside an envelope,
all making you the ideal candidate.
Back on the ship, ammunition everywhere,
sailing through the cold Northern seas
where you had to learn a new language.
A new language is like a fish:
first, you need to remove its spine
in order to chew it.
Unlike in Antarctica,
one’s purpose in war is clear: kill or be killed,
though sometimes it’s the same difference.
Baltic nights gave you what Antarctica refused you:
the other half of the celestial sphere.
You met Vera, the widow of a tea plantation owner,
a character out of a Baroque novel, her pupils blurred with dusk,
and the ritual of mourning fitted perfectly to her body
like a final journey.
15.
A man charmed by a glacier,
who knows too well the flawless forms of her body,
feels her eavesdropping gaze even when asleep,
her clean and distant breath
and her heart, a piece of ice, that melts inside a cigarette case
heated for drinking water,
finds it difficult to marry a real woman,
to marry Vera.
And Africa.
I bought land. Barren. Hundreds of acres. In Zululand.
I didn’t fare well with tobacco. Planted cotton instead,
chose bodily peace rather than meditation.
My nearest neighbor lived forty-five miles away. White, of course.
And my fate, never blended with the blacks,
those beautiful statues, wrapped in straw.
I heard them nod off during lunch break,
like the oars of a boat,
in complete sync.
They knew where they were heading.
But I didn’t.
And I was right. It didn’t take long
before drought, floods, worms
destroyed everything. The bank left me only my own beard
and the malarial shadow of a baobab. Apart from other things,
Vera filled out divorce papers. The woman in the yellow dress,
yellow as quinine, yellow as the sigh of a hinge at dusk,
the woman married to the
hero
who now can’t even manage a small plot of land.
16.
The man in front of me
—my master I call “Boss”—
is newly shaved, and dressed in a striped tie and jacket
as if the Prince of Wales or Fred Astaire,
a style that arrives here two years late.
He asks me to serve whiskey to clients at the bar
and chat them up
using their jargon, gestures,
sentences uninterrupted by mosquitoes,
and the abstract rhetoric of the Depression years.
And, to be frank,
he pays me for the latter.
But what do I know,
what does a survivor know about the art of living,
for which new instincts are needed, new muscles
and other kinds of heart valves?
Furthermore,
how can I obey such a spick-and-span boss,
having known the smoky gods of Antarctica
who recognize each other solely by the nose
and can end rebellions with a glance
and count the deaths as members of the crew?
How can I take orders from a boss whose name isn’t Shackleton?
17.
“Second in command,” “Lieutenant,” “Shackleton’s right-hand.”
What did she see so clearly in me,
my drama teacher in elementary school,
when she’d always assign me the role of Father Joseph,
of Gaspar the Magi offering Jesus frankincense,
or of John the Baptist always there to clear the path?
What did she see in my metallic pupils, baritone voice, infrequent speech
as if scissors, bandage, and iodine
inside a first aid kit?
Under Antarctica’s naked sky, each of us followed his own star.
Even the carpenter, his own heraldic calling.
You didn’t need much to feed them;
just a few crusts of insomnia and the tents’ punctured holes.
My star was weak; you could hardly see it
hidden behind another larger, troubled star
like a calm valley that appears behind jagged peaks
more attractive when absent.
18.
What happened afterward can be told in a few words:
I worked in a mine; earth’s warm heart
happened to be crueler than her frozen brain.
I laid railroad tracks South, always toward the Unknown.
It was like playing only two strings on a violin: joy and sorrow,
fatefully blending at the horizon.
I repaired houses. Another waste of time.
I never understood their weak points,
just as you can’t make out eyes from genitals or mouth
in some underwater creatures.
And when I was left penniless,
I gave lectures about Antarctica,
water gurgling in my gullet every five words, for those few
who listened patiently to an adventure of survival.
Then Bea arrived. Or sweet Beatrice.
It was easy to grant her what I had left in my heart
—that set of heavy museum keys—
with no fear she might lose them.
Tired lungs and liver
could barely follow my split image
of bust and bottle of booze.
Like a prophet in the last circle of Dante’s Inferno
I carried my own decapitated head in hand.
My ashes were lost at the base of a church. No one thought of them.
It was a time of war. Another world war. The second
one not knowing what to do with her own ashes either.
19.
Some of us died in the war. Others took to the sea again,
the gray, cracked waters of the South,
decks perspiring fuel and alcohol.
Our random itineraries. Full-time melancholics.
For months in Antarctica,
we waited for our shadow to return
and consumed that question you ask yourself only once in your lifetime,
the way one consumes chickenpox.
And the rest of the time,
we counted the scars left on our faces,
with a gesture you could call indifferent and epic,
or childlike.
SOMETHING BIGGER THAN US
The Eskimos have numerous different words for “snow”:
the freshly fallen, the stepped on, the aged,
the piled up in heaps, the rotten one
left over from the previous winter.
As if nearsighted,
they’re able to distinguish different shades of white:
the nothingness, the emptiness, the present of an eternity,
and the eternity of the present.
Where I come from,
we have four different words for “evening.”
Funny, but the one that fits best
is borrowed from a foreign language
brought over by invaders, not by spice merchants,
and it rhymes with “lilacs.”
Where I come from,
there’s only one word for “grief” and for “water”
and both take the form of the containers that hold them:
each to their own fate, each to their own grief.
The Greeks have four different words for “love,”
like the four stakes of a tent
that assure you a spot in this world
if not today, maybe tomorrow.
According to anthropologists,
until a century ago, my people
had no word for “love,”
only a clever, naive doubt:
“It’s something bigger than us, right?”
A doubt performed with the rhetorical gesture of a king
who asks questions and expects
answers to arrive only in his dreams.
MENELAUS’S RETURN
After Troy,
no one bothered to mention my return to Sparta—
not Homer, not even the historians.
Somewhere, someone mumbled something about it lasting eight years.
They had no time for me; they were busy with Odysseus’s,
Idomeneo’s, and Agamemnon’s retaliation.
One of them had to kill the conqueror of the throne,
the other his son in order to reward Poseidon,
and the third, with a knife to his back,
would write his wife’s story.
My return ends here,
on this ship with my soldiers
who clench their armor still stinking of smoke,
and with my slaves who don’t care where we go,
or if we’ll ever reach our destination,
and with a lot of pride, my honor regained,
and with Helen there on the deck, constantly seasick.
She’s mine now, but I have no idea what to do with her.
Someone said I came close to Crete, but the winds pushed me off to Egypt
where I waited and waited for the right wind to return.
But it never came.
Someone else said that I returned to Sparta, because Telemachus
had no one else to ask about his father
(undoubtedly, this would make sense on paper).
But the truth is
that I continued to wander on open seas, forgotten,
on history’s waters,
even though, there, in the palace, they waited for me,
my servants uselessly heating up my house, starting over each day,
uselessly slaughtering livestock they consumed themselves.
Patris now doesn’t exist.
Not because of a curse from the gods,
but because with revenge
everything ends. The curtain falls.
And peace is never a m
otif.
Here’s my wish for you, dear reader:
May your revenge arrive as late as possible!
Believe me, afterwards you’ll be forgotten,
forgotten amongst the living and the dead.
THE RAILWAY BOYS
Of course they’re blond, all of them blond,
easy to distinguish one another
among the grease, smoke, and coal dust.
They ride the train’s whistle effortlessly,
as if hunting buffalo.
They know each whistle’s tricks.
From a distance they can tell which train
heads to the cold north
and which to the south; they know
which railcar carries mail, and which
carries passengers who will never return.
When the freight train arrives,
they hurry to climb
and enjoy a piece of the sky
lying on their backs atop wood logs.
This is only half the journey—
now they’re closer to the first star
in the sky than to their homes.
This is the first test of manhood.
Everything else comes later, behind a broken boxcar,
with the girl with rust-colored hair.
Who is she? The first lover with a beautiful buck tooth
has no name of her own—only the one she was christened with.
Same with the second lover … And the third …
No clothes are needed for the one prepared
to wear his own father’s clothes,
not needed for the son of Aaron,
whose only blasphemy
would ban him from the land of milk and honey.
Of course they’re blond, all blond,
the railway boys. For them,
everything is possible. See how the first railcar returns
last, and the last one first,
when the locomotive switches tracks?
“What’s it like up north?”
“The people wear hides and have blue veins.”
“And south? What have you heard?”
“There, people think with their hearts and speak in gestures.”
Over the hot rails, the air, like a concave mirror,
magnifies their slim bodies and the words “hide” and “heart”
grow blurry and quiet.
And against his will, each one of them
will marry the wrong girl,
each girl with eyes full of a long winter.
Among naked trees
it’s impossible to lose the way home.
As time passes,
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