Dancing in Odessa

by Ilya Kaminsky

  the Republic of Psalms opens up

  and I grow frightened that I haven’t lived, died, not enough

  to scratch this ecstasy into vowels, hear

  splashes of clear, biblical speech.

  I read Plato, Augustine, the loneliness of their syllables

  while Icarus keeps falling.

  And I read Akhmatova, her rich weight binds me to the earth,

  the nut trees on a terrace breathing

  the dry air, the daylight.

  Yes, I lived. The State hung me up by the feet, I saw

  St. Petersburg’s daughters, swans,

  I learned the grammar of gulls’ array

  and found myself for good

  down Pushkin Street, while memory

  sat in the corner, erasing me with a sponge.

  I’ve made mistakes, yes: in bed

  I compared government

  to my girlfriend.

  Government! An arrogant barber’s hand

  shaving off the skin.

  All of us dancing happily around him.

  [He sat on the edge of his chair and dreamt aloud of good dinners. He composed his poems not at his desk but in the streets of St. Petersburg; he adored the image of the rooster tearing apart the night under the walls of Acropolis with his song. Locked up in the cell, he was banging on the door: “You have got to let me out, I wasn’t made for prison.”]

  Once or twice in his life, a man

  is peeled like apples.

  What’s left is a voice

  that splits his being

  down to the center.

  We see: obscenity, fright, mud

  but there is joy of shape, there is always

  more than one silence.

  —between here and Nevski Prospect,

  the years, birdlike, stretch,—

  Pray for this man

  who lived on bread and tomatoes

  while dogs recited his poetry

  in each street.

  Yes, count “march,” “july”

  weave them together with a thread –

  it’s time, Lord,

  press these words against your silence.

  —the story is told of a man who escapes

  and is captured

  into the prose of evenings:

  after making love, he sits up

  on a kitchen floor, eyes wide open,

  speaks of the Lord’s emptiness

  in whose image we are made.

  —he is out of work—among silverware

  and dirt he is kissing

  his wife’s neck so the skin of her belly tightens.

  One would think of a boy laying

  syllables with his tongue

  onto a woman’s skin: those are lines

  sewn entirely of silence.

  [Nadezhda looks up from the page and speaks: Osip, Akhmatova and I were standing together when suddenly Mandelstam melted with joy: several little girls ran past us, imagining themselves to be horses. The first one stopped, impatiently asking: “Where is the last horsy?” I grabbed Mandelstam by his hand to prevent him from joining; and Akhmatova, too, sensing danger, whispered: “Do not run away from us, you are our last horsy.”]

  —as I die, I walk barefoot across my country,

  here winter builds the strongest

  solitude, tractors break into centaurs

  and gallop through plain speech:

  I am twenty-three, we live in a cocoon,

  the butterflies are mating.

  Osip puts his fingers into fire; he

  gets up early, walking around

  in his sandals. Writes slowly. Prayers

  fall into the room. Moths

  are watching him from the window. As his tongue

  passes over my skin, I see

  his face from underneath,

  its aching clarity

  —thus Nadezhda speaks,

  standing in an orange light,

  her hands are quiet, talking

  to themselves:

  O God of Abraham, of Isaak and of Jacob

  on your scale of Good and Evil,

  put a plate of warm food.

  When my husband returned

  from Voronezh, in his mouth

  he hid a silver spoon—

  in his dreams,

  down Nevski Prospect, the dictator ran

  like a wolf after his past,

  a wolf with sleep in its eyes.

  He believed in the human being. Could not

  cure himself

  of Petersburg. He recited by heart

  phone numbers

  of the dead.

  O what he told in a low voice!—

  the unspoken words became traces of islands.

  When he slapped

  Tolstoy in the face, it was good.

  When they took my husband, each word

  disappeared in a book.

  They watched him

  as he spoke: the vowels had teeth-marks.

  And they said: You must leave him alone

  for already behind his back

  the stones circle all by themselves and fall.

  [Osip had thick eyelashes, to the middle of his cheeks. We were walking along Prehistenka St., what we were talking about I don’t remember. We turned onto Gogol Boulevard, and Osip said, “I am ready for death.” At his arrest they were searching for poems, all over the floor. We sat in one room. On the other side of the wall, at a neighbor’s, a Hawaiian guitar was playing. In my presence the investigator found “The Wolf” and showed it to Osip. He nodded slightly. Taking his leave, he kissed me. He was led away at 7A.M.]

  At the end of each vision, Mandelstam

  stands with a clod of earth, throwing

  bits at the passers-by. You will recognize him, Lord:

  —he hated Tsarskoe Selo,

  told Mayakovski: “stop reading your verse, you are not

  a Rumanian orchestra.”

  What harmony was? It raveled

  and unraveled; Nadezhda said the snow fell inside her,

  she heard the voice of young chickens all over her flesh.

  Nadezhda, her Yes and No are difficult

  to tell apart. She dances, a skirt tucked between her thighs

  and the light is strengthening.

  In each room’s

  four corners: he is making love to her earlobes, brows,

  weaving days into knots.

  He is traveling across her kitchen, touching furniture,

  a small propeller in his head

  turning as he speaks. Outside,

  a boy pissing against the tree, a beggar

  cursing at his cat—that summer 1938—

  the walls were hot, the sun beat

  against the city’s slabs

  ‘the city that loved to say yes to the powerful.’

  At the end of each vision, he rubbed her feet with milk.

  She opened her body, lay on his stomach.

  We will meet in Petersburg, he said,

  we have buried the sun there.

  Musica Humana

  His name was Osip but, either jokingly or in disguise, we called him Ovid. As the story goes, Ovid was a rose thief. He stole dozens of roses from the public parks at night, hiding them in his coat, then selling them at the train station in the morning. Ovid became famous when he stole the Governor's coat, and then sold it to the city’s Chief Judge. While at the Judge's house, he stole a horse and went back to sell it to the Governor, mentioning that he saw the Judge wearing the stolen coat. The Governor saddled the stolen horse, galloping to its rightful owner to claim his own precious possession. As for Ovid, he moved to Argentina and became a cook. Whil
e soups overheated in a pot engraved with the word “obsession,” he sang himself to sleep between the stove and the table:

  “Cold Mint-Cucumber Soup”

  2 tablespoons butter

  1 cup plain yogurt

  1 onion (chopped)

  1 garlic clove

  3 cucumbers (sliced)

  2 tablespoons rice flour

  2 cups chicken stock

  2 tablespoons fresh mint (chopped)

  Salt and pepper.

  Melt butter in a skillet with garlic, onion, cucumber; cook until soft. Stir in stock. Blend, bring to boil, puree. Blend in mint, chill. Before serving, stir in yogurt. Mix.

  “I will tell you a story,” Ovid would say. I would shake my head, no thank you. “Ah, a romantic boy with a barefoot heart! Never have you been buried in the earth or savored the delicious meat of sacrifice! Listen to a story—

  When, in his fifties, my uncle got sick, his two brothers went around the street with a “list of days.” They asked the neighbors to give him a day or two of their own lives and to sign their names next to it. When they asked Natalia, a young girl next door who was secretly in love with him, she wrote: “I am giving you all my remaining life,” and signed. Even his brothers tried to talk her out of it. They argued, voiced reasons: she would not listen. “All my remaining life,” she said. “That is my wish.”

  The next morning, my uncle was up with a smile on his face while the girl’s body was found at midday breathless in her own sweaty bed. The winter passed and then another winter. One by one the man’s friends began to die, he buried his own brothers. He abhorred his existence. Every Sunday we saw him at the market, trying the fruits with his thumb, buying a peach or a pear, muttering to himself. He only spoke to children. One night, he said, it seemed as if he heard a distant music. Amazed, he understood—it was the day of Natalia's wedding, a choir in which she did not have a chance to sing. A year later, reading the Talmud, he stopped in the middle of a page, hearing a child’s cry. Lord, he whispered, her baby is due today—a happiness she will never know. Her life, hour after hour, steamed before him. He heard music once more, wondering if it was her second marriage or her own daughter's early wedding. How many times he woke at night asking God to grant him death; but he lived. We saw him, each Sunday morning, at the market, buying fruit, counting the singles carefully. Once, in July, getting coins from his pocket to pay for a plum he began, violently, to rub his chest. He sat down on the pavement, whispering that he suddenly heard someone's sickening scream. We understood.

  A Toast

  If you will it, it is no dream.

  —Theodore Herzl

  October: grapes hung like the fists of a girl

  gassed in her prayer. Memory,

  I whisper, stay awake.

  In my veins

  long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come

  right out of the eighteenth century

  Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination

  is the only word.

  Imagination! a young girl dancing polka,

  unafraid, betrayed by the Lord’s death

  (or his hiding under the bed when the Messiah

  was postponed).

  In my country, evenings bring the rain water, turning

  poplars bronze in a light that sparkles on these pages

  where I, my fathers,

  unable to describe your dreams, drink

  my silence from a cup.

  Natalia

  Natalia

  Her shoulder: an ode to an evening, such ambitions.

  I promise I will teach her to ride horses, we will go to Mexico, Angola, Australia. I want her to imagine our scandalous days in Odessa when we will open a small sweets shop—except for her lovers and my neighbors (who steal milk chocolate by handfuls) we will have no customers. In an empty store, dancing among stands with sugared walnuts, dried carnations, boxes upon boxes of mints and cherries dipped in honey, we will whisper to each other our truest stories.

  The back of her knee: a blessed territory, I keep my wishes there.

  As I open the Tristia, evening spreads its nets

  and a woman I love runs from a parking lot.

  “You will run away,” she says, “I already

  see it: a train station, a slippery floor, a seat.”

  I tell her to leave me alone, inside my childhood

  where men carry flags across the street.

  And they tell her: leave us alone,

  as if the power were given to them, but it is not given.

  She attacks with passion, lifts her hand

  and puts it in my hair. On my right side I hide a scar,

  she passes over it with her tongue

  and falls asleep with my nipple in her mouth.

  But Natalia, beside me, turns the pages,

  what happened and did not happen

  must speak and sing by turns.

  My chronicler, Natalia, I offer you two cups of air

  in which you dip your little finger, lick it dry.

  * * *

  This poem begins: “Late January, the darkness is handwritten onto trees.” As I speak of her, she sits at the mirror, combing her hair. From her hair the water pours, the leaves fall. I undress her, my tongue passing over her skin. “Potatoes!” she tells me, “I smell like potatoes!” and I touch her lips with my fingers.

  On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed,

  god’s lips on his brow, Torah in his arms.

  —I unfastened her stockings, worried

  that I have stopped worrying.

  She slept in my bed—I slept on a chair,

  she slept on a chair—I slept in the kitchen,

  she left her slippers in my shower, in my Torah,

  her slippers in each sentence I spoke.

  I said: those I love—die, grow old, are born.

  But I love the stubbornness of her bedclothes!

  I bite them, taste bedclothes —

  the sweet mechanism of pillows and covers.

  A serious woman, she danced

  without a shirt, covering what she could.

  We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

  the people of a book, broken by a book.

  * * *

  I am going to stop this, I am going to stop quoting poems in my mind. She liked that. She carried banners protesting banners. Each night, she gave me beer and stuffed peppers. On a tape—she spoke and spoke and spoke. One button made her still. But her speech raised to my shoulders, my brows.

  “Let me kiss you inside your elbow,

  Natalia, sister of the careful”

  —he spoke of gratitude, his fingers

  trembling as he spoke.

  She unfastened two buttons of his trousers—

  to learn two languages:

  one for ankles, and one for remembering.

  Or maybe she thought it was bad luck

  to have a dressed man in the house.

  With an eyebrow pencil, she painted

  his mustache: it made her

  want to touch him and she didn’t.

  She opened her robe and

  closed it, opened and closed it again,

  she whispered: come here, nervous—

  he followed her on his tiptoes.

  * * *

  “I don’t need a synagogue,” you said, “I can pray inside my body.” You slept without covering yourself. I couldn’t tell departure from arrival. You spoke inside my twice averted words—you yelled when you opened the doors, and opened each door in silence.

  Someone else is on this page, writing. I attempt to move my fingers faster than she.

  We fell in love and eight years passed.

  Eight years. Carefully, I dissect this number:

&
nbsp; we’ve lived with three cats in five cities,

  learning how a man ages invisibly.

  Eight years! Eight! —I chilled lemon vodka, and we kissed

  on the floor, among the peels of lemons.

  And each night, looking up, we saw ourselves:

  a man and a woman, whispering Lord,

  one word the soul destroys to make clear.

  How magical it is to live! it rained at the market,

  with my fingers, she tapped out her iambics

  on the back of our largest casserole,

  and we sang, Sweet dollars,

  why aren’t you in my pockets?

  * * *

  (And suddenly) the joy of days entered me. She only danced under apricot trees in a public park, a curious woman in spectacles whose ambition was limited to apricot trees. I wrote: “Hold fast, my heart, I want to play a fool, I want to rub each day’s dusty coin.” She laughed as she read this, I read over her shoulder. I set my evening clock to the rhythm of her voice.

  Envoi

  You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa.

  —a fortune teller, 1992

  What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,

  the birds force themselves into my lines—

  the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

  I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa

  and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals,

  bless the sky inside his body,

  the sky my medicine, the sky my country.

  I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order.

  The wind, my master

  insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,—

  bless one woman’s brows, her lips

  and their salt, bless the roundness

  of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern

  by which I live my life.

  You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed

  and I am a man arguing with this woman

  among nightstands and tables and chairs.

  Lord, give us what you have already given.