You want to silence her, abduct her
to our chilly life behind the scenes?
To our Siberian steppes of stopped-up sinuses,
frogs in all throats, eternal hems and haws,
where we, poor souls, gape soundlessly
like fish? And this is what you wish?
Oh nay! Oh nay! Though doom be nigh,
she’ll keep her chin and pitch up high!
Her fate is hanging by a hair
of voice so thin it sounds like air,
but that’s enough for her to take
a breath and soar, without a break,
chandelierward; and while she’s there,
her vox humana crystal-clears
the whole world up. And we’re all ears.
Bodybuilders’ Contest
From scalp to sole, all muscles in slow motion.
The ocean of his torso drips with lotion.
The king of all is he who preens and wrestles
with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels.
Onstage, he grapples with a grizzly bear
the deadlier for not really being there.
Three unseen panthers are in turn laid low,
each with one smoothly choreographed blow.
He grunts while showing his poses and paces.
His back alone has twenty different faces.
The mammoth fist he raises as he wins
is tribute to the force of vitamins.
Poetry Reading
To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds?
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare—
it’s time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining,
the rest are relatives. O Muse.
The women here would love to rant and rave,
but that’s for boxing. Here they must behave.
Dante’s Inferno is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.
Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet,
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life,
for lack of muscles forced to show the world
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.
In the first row, a sweet old man’s soft snore:
he dreams his wife’s alive again. What’s more,
she’s making him that tart she used to bake.
Aflame, but carefully—don’t burn his cake!—
we start to read. O Muse.
Epitaph
Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses,
the authoress of verse. Eternal rest
was granted her by earth, although the corpse
had failed to join the avant-garde, of course.
The plain grave? There’s poetic justice in it,
this ditty-dirge, the owl, the burdock. Passerby,
take out your compact Compu-Brain and try
to weigh Szymborska’s fate for half a minute.
Prologue to a Comedy
He made himself a glass violin so he could see what music looks like. He dragged his boat to the mountain’s peak and waited for the sea to reach his level. At night, he got engrossed in railway schedules: the terminals moved him to tears. He grew rozes with a “z.” He wrote one poem to cure baldness, and another on the same subject. He broke the clock at City Hall to stop the leaves from falling once and for all. He planned to excavate a city in a pot of chives. He walked with the globe chained to his leg, very slowly, smiling, happy as two times two is two. When they said he didn’t exist, he couldn’t die of grief, so he had to be born. He’s already out there living somewhere; he blinks his little eyes and grows. Just in time! The very nick of time! Our Most Gracious Lady, Our Wise and Sweet Lady Machine will soon have need of a fool like this for her fit amusement and innocent pleasure.
Likeness
If the gods’ favorites die young—
what to do with the rest of your life?
Old age is a precipice,
that is, if youth is a peak.
I won’t budge.
I’ll stay young if I have to do it on one leg.
I’ll latch onto the air
with whiskers thin as a mouse’s squeak.
In this posture I’ll be born over and over.
It’s the only art I know.
But these things will always be me:
the magic gloves,
the boutonniere left from my first masquerade,
the falsetto of youthful manifestos,
the face straight from a seamstress’s dream about a croupier,
the eyes I loved to pluck out in my paintings
and scatter like peas from a pod,
because at that sight a twitch ran through the dead thighs
of the public frog.
Be amazed, you too.
Be amazed: for all of Diogenes’ tubs,
I still beat him as conceptualist.
Pray
for your eternal test.
What I hold in my hands
are the spiders that I dip in Chinese ink
and fling against the canvas.
I enter the world once more.
A new navel blooms
on the artist’s belly.
* * *
I am too close for him to dream of me.
I don’t flutter over him, don’t flee him
beneath the roots of trees. I am too close.
The caught fish doesn’t sing with my voice.
The ring doesn’t roll from my finger.
I am too close. The great house is on fire
without me calling for help. Too close
for one of my hairs to turn into the rope
of the alarm bell. Too close to enter
as the guest before whom walls retreat.
I’ll never die again so lightly,
so far beyond my body, so unknowingly
as I did once in his dream. I am too close,
too close. I hear the word hiss
and see its glistening scales as I lie motionless
in his embrace. He’s sleeping,
more accessible at this moment to an usherette
he saw once in a traveling circus with one lion
than to me, who lies at his side.
A valley now grows within him for her,
rusty-leaved, with a snowcapped mountain at one end
rising in the azure air. I am too close
to fall from that sky like a gift from heaven.
My cry could only waken him. And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues. And I possessed
the gift of vanishing before astonished eyes,
which is the richest of all. I am too close,
too close for him to dream of me.
I slip my arm from underneath his sleeping head—
it’s numb, swarming with imaginary pins.
A host of fallen angels perches on each tip,
waiting to be counted.
The Tower of Babel
“What time is it?” “Oh yes, I’m so happy;
all I need is a little bell round my neck
to jingle over you while you’re asleep.”
“Didn’t you hear the storm? The north wind shook
the walls; the tower gate, like a lion’s maw,
yawned on its creaking hinges.” “How could you
forget? I had on that plain gray dress
that fastens on the shoulder.” “At that moment,
myriad explosions shook the sky.” “How could I
come in? You weren’t alone, after all.” “I glimpsed
colors older than sight itself.” “Too bad
you can’t promise me.” “You’re rig
ht, it must have been
a dream.” “Why all these lies; why do you call me
by her name; do you still love her?” “Of course,
I want you to stay with me.” “I can’t
complain. I should have guessed myself.”
“Do you still think about him?” “But I’m not crying.”
“That’s all there is?” “No one but you.”
“At least you’re honest.” “Don’t worry,
I’m leaving town.” “Don’t worry,
I’m going.” “You have such beautiful hands.”
“That’s ancient history; the blade went through
but missed the bone.” “Never mind, darling,
never mind.” “I don’t know
what time it is, and I don’t care.”
Dream
My fallen, my turned to dust, my earth,
assumes the shape he has in the photograph:
with a leaf’s shadow on his face, with a seashell in his hand,
he sets out toward my dream.
He wanders through darknesses extinguished since never,
through emptinesses opened to themselves forever,
through seven times seven times seven silences.
He appears on the other side of my eyelids,
in the one and only world that he can reach.
His shot heart beats.
A first wind stirs from his hair.
A meadow unspreads between us.
Skies come flying with clouds and birds,
mountains rise silently on the horizon
and a river spurts downward, searching for the sea.
You can see so far, so far,
that day and night turn simultaneous,
and all seasons of the year occur at once.
A four-quartered moon unfolds its fan,
snowflakes swarm beside butterflies,
fruit falls from the blossoming tree.
We draw closer. In tears,
in smiles, I don’t know. Just one step more
and we’ll listen to your shell together,
to the roar of a thousand orchestras,
to the roar of our wedding march.
Water
A drop of water fell on my hand,
drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,
from hoarfrost ascended to heaven off a seal’s whiskers,
from jugs broken in the cities of Ys and Tyre.
On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn’t landlocked,
and the Pacific is the Rudawa’s meek tributary,
the same stream that floated in a little cloud over Paris
in the year seven hundred and sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three A.M.
There are not enough mouths to utter
all your fleeting names, O water.
I would have to name you in every tongue,
pronouncing all the vowels at once
while also keeping silent—for the sake of the lake
that still goes unnamed
and doesn’t exist on this earth, just as the star
reflected in it is not in the sky.
Someone was drowning, someone dying was
calling out for you. Long ago, yesterday.
You have saved houses from fire, you have carried off
houses and trees, forests and towns alike.
You’ve been in christening fonts and courtesans’ baths.
In coffins and kisses.
Gnawing at stone, feeding rainbows.
In the sweat and the dew of pyramids and lilacs.
How light the raindrop’s contents are.
How gently the world touches me.
Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on waters of Babel.
Synopsis
Job, sorely tried in both flesh and possessions, curses man’s fate. It is great poetry. His friends arrive and, rending their garments, dissect Job’s guilt before the Lord. Job cries out that he was right-eous. Job does not know why the Lord smote him. Job does not want to talk to them. Job wants to talk to the Lord. The Lord God appears in a chariot of whirlwinds. Before him who had been cloven to the bone, He praises the work of His hands: the heavens, the seas, the earth and the beasts thereon. Especially Behemoth, and Leviathan in particular, creatures of which the Deity is justly proud. It is great poetry. Job listens: the Lord God beats around the bush, for the Lord God wishes to beat around the bush. Job therefore hastily prostrates himself before the Lord. Events now transpire in rapid succession. Job regains his donkeys and camels, his oxen and sheep twofold. Skin grows over his grinning skull. And Job goes along with it. Job agrees. Job does not want to ruin a masterpiece.
In Heraclitus’s River
In Heraclitus’s river
a fish is busy fishing,
a fish guts a fish with a sharp fish,
a fish builds a fish, a fish lives in a fish,
a fish escapes from a fish under siege.
In Heraclitus’s river
a fish loves a fish,
your eyes, it says, glow like the fishes in the sky,
I would swim at your side to the sea we will share,
O fairest of the shoal.
In Heraclitus’s river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish,
a fish kneels to the fish, a fish sings to the fish,
a fish begs the fish to ease its fishy lot.
In Heraclitus’s river
I, the solitary fish, a fish apart
(apart at least from the tree fish and the stone fish),
write, at isolated moments, a tiny fish or two
whose glittering scales, so fleeting,
may only be the dark’s embarrassed wink.
Poem in Honor
So he once was. He invented zero.
In an uncertain country. Under a star
now perhaps gone dark. Between dates
to which no one will swear. Without even
a questionable name. Without leaving
beneath his zero any pearls of wisdom
about life, which is like what. Or a legend
that one day he scribbled zero
on a plucked rose and bound it in a bouquet.
That before he died he took to the desert
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