Dancing in Odessa

by Ilya Kaminsky

  Traveling Musicians

  Traveling Musicians

  In the beginning was the sea—we heard the surf in our breathing, certain that we carried seawater in our veins.

  A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge mausoleums of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish. In Odessa, language always involved gestures—it was impossible to ask someone for directions if their hands were busy. I did ask once: a man was holding two huge watermelons, one in each arm. But as I asked more questions, his face grew red and ah! one watermelon fell on the ground as he attempted to gesticulate through the conversation. He was not disappointed, a man of fifty staring at the juicy watermelon meat right there on the sidewalk. He laughed like the most serious child I ever knew, telling me the story about the country where everyone was deaf.

  A Farewell To Friends

  after Nikolai Zabolotsky

  Yes, each man is a tower of birds, I write my friends

  into earth, into earth, into earth.

  Here, with lantern in hand,

  a beetle-man greets his acquaintances.

  You stand in white hats, long jackets,

  with notebooks of poems,

  you have for sisters wild carnations, .

  nipples of lilacs, splinters and chickens.

  Go now, I write as the pages turn .

  to the shuffle of your steps across the room.

  Paul Celan

  He writes towards your mouth

  with his fingers.

  In the lamplight he sees mud, wind bitten trees,

  he sees grass still surviving this hour, page

  stern as a burnt field:

  Light was. Salvation

  he whispers. The words leave the taste of soil

  on his lips.

  Paul Celan

  As a youth, he worked in a factory, though everyone said he looked more like a professor of classical languages than a factory worker.

  He was a beautiful man with a slender body that moved with a mixture of grace and sharp geometrical precision. His face had an imprint of laugher on it, as if no other emotion ever touched his skin. Even in his fifties, the nineteen-year-old girls winked at him in trains or trolley-busses, asking for his phone number.

  Seven years after his death, I saw Celan in his old robe dancing alone in his bedroom, humming step over step. He did not mind being a character in my stories in a language he never learned. That night, I saw him sitting on a rooftop, searching for Venus, reciting Brodsky to himself. He asked if his past existed at all.

  Elegy for Joseph Brodsky

  In plain speech, for the sweetness

  between the lines is no longer important,

  what you call immigration I call suicide.

  I am sending, behind the punctuation,

  unfurling nights of New York, avenues

  slipping into Cyrillic—

  winter coils words, throws snow on a wind.

  You, in the middle of an unwritten sentence, stop,

  exile to a place further than silence.

  I left your Russia for good, poems sewn into my pillow

  rushing towards my own training

  to live with your lines

  on a verge of a story set against itself.

  To live with your lines, those where sails rise, waves

  beat against the city’s granite in each vowel,—

  pages open by themselves, a quiet voice

  speaks of suffering, of water.

  We come back to where we have committed a crime,

  we don’t come back to where we loved, you said;

  your poems are wolves nourishing us with their milk.

  I tried to imitate you for two years. It feels like burning

  and singing about burning. I stand

  as if someone spat at me.

  You would be ashamed of these wooden lines,

  how I don’t imagine your death

  but it is here, setting my hands on fire.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Joseph made his living by giving private lessons in everything from engineering to Greek. His eyes were sleepy and small, his face dominated by a huge mustache, like Nietszche's. He mumbled. Do you enjoy Brahms? I cannot hear you, I said. How about Chopin? I cannot hear you. Mozart? Bach? Beethoven? I am hard of hearing, could you repeat that please? You will have a great success in music, he said.

  To meet him, I go back to the Leningrad of 1964. The streets are devilishly cold: we sit on the pavement, he begins abruptly (a dry laugh, a cigarette) to tell me the story of his life, his words change to icicles as we speak. I read them in the air.

  Isaac Babel

  What happiness is? Rembrandt, Petrarch

  the servants of light

  protected by geese, pines.

  Isaac Babel knows: he invents a genre of silence,

  a precise man whose silence lives

  in the bodies

  of others. A precise man,

  a cigarette behind his ear, he drinks

  with a Chief of Police and borrows money

  from his mistress, writes lines—

  difficult—there is fire between them.

  He is making an account of his life,

  I am still inside my body, he is praising

  the dead: Gorki, Maupassant.

  In moments of doubt

  he drinks before their portraits.

  What is happiness? a few stories

  that have fooled censors. He won’t carry

  silence like a candlestick,

  he will say to an ugly girl: you are beautiful,

  you will walk above the earth at eye level.

  Isaac Babel

  There was no mythology: Odysseus hanged himself. Homer drank to death and stank of mud.

  Isaac Babel knew. “I am a dance professor,” he introduced himself. “I know different dances—polka and tango and flamenco, a dance of lust and of joy, of wife or no wife.”

  “Odessa is everywhere,” he said. “But only Odessa can move her hips better than Odessa.” He performed his dances barefoot so that he could “preserve the merchandise.” When drunk, Isaac would stand on the pavement, calling for a taxi.

  “Are you free?” he would ask, opening a door.

  “Yes,” a cabbie would say.

  “Yes? Well get out of the car and go dancing!”

  A tired man, when he laughed he seemed absolutely alone on Earth. As certain women passed on the street, he would turn and quietly say, “What a piece of bread she is, what a warm piece of bread.”

  “What do you think of Marina?” I asked him many times.

  “I think she is a wonderful woman!”

  “Really? She always says that you are an idiot.”

  “Well, perhaps we are both mistaken.”

  For years, my sealed lips kept the intoxicating story of his madness. As he delivered his jokes, I laughed with my lips tight together.

  “Was Isaac drinking last night?” Marina asked.

  “I’m not sure! But when he arrived, he asked for a mirror to see who came home.”

  Marina Tsvetaeva

  In each line’s strange syllable: she awakes

  as a gull, torn

  between heaven and earth.

  I accept her, stand with her, face to face.

  —in this dream: she wears her dress

  like a sail, runs behind me, stopping

  when I stop. She laughs

  as a child speaking to herself:

  “soul = pain + everything else.”

  I bend clumsily at the knees

  and I quarrel no more,

  all I want is a human window

  in a house whose roof is my life.

  Marina Tsvetaeva
<
br />   During the first year of my deafness, I saw her with a man. She wore a purple scarf knotted around her head. Half-dancing, she took his head between her hands and laid it on her breast. And she began to sing. I observed her with devouring attention. I imagined her voice smelling of oranges; I fell in love with her voice.

  She was a woman who lived like a conspirator sending contradictory signals. “Do not eat the apple seeds,” she threatened me, “Not the apple seeds. The branches will grow from your belly!” She touched my ear, fingering it.

  I know nothing of her husband except for his fatal heart attack in a moving bus. There was no strain on her face, but looking at her, I understood the dignity of grief. Returning from his funeral, she took off her shoes and walked barefoot in the snow.

  Praise

  … but one day through the gate left half-open

  there are yellow lemons shining at us

  and in our empty breasts

  these golden horns of sunlight

  pour their songs.

  — Montale

  Praise

  We were leaving Odessa in such a hurry that we forgot the suitcase filled with English dictionaries outside our apartment building. I came to America without a dictionary, but a few words did remain:

  Forgetting: an animal of light. A small ship catches a wind and sails.

  Past: figures coming to the water’s edge, carrying lamps. Water is suspiciously cold. Many are standing on the shore, the youngest throwing hats in the air.

  Sanity: a barrier separating me from madness is not a barrier, really. A huge aquarium filled with water weeds, turtles, and golden fish. I see flashes: movements, names inscribed on the foreheads.

  A swift laugh: she leaned over, intrigued. I drank too fast.

  Dead: entering our dreams, the dead become inanimate objects: branches, teacups, door-handles. I wake and wish I could carry this clarity with me.

  Time, my twin, take me by the hand

  through the streets of your city;

  my days, your pigeons, are fighting for crumbs—

  A woman asks at night for a story with a happy ending.

  I have none. A refugee,

  I go home and become a ghost

  searching the houses I lived in. They say—

  the father of my father of his father of his father was a prince

  who married a Jewish girl

  against the Church’s will and his father’s will and

  the father of his father. Losing all,

  eager to lose: the estate, ships,

  hiding this ring (his wedding ring), a ring

  my father handed to my brother, then took. Handed,

  then took, hastily. In a family album

  we sit like the mannequins

  of school children

  whose destruction,

  like a lecture is postponed.

  Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging

  this dream. Her love

  is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries

  in my mouth.

  On my brother’s head: not a single

  gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son.

  And my father is singing

  to his six-year-old silence.

  This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.

  The darkness, a magician, finds quarters

  behind our ears. We don't know what life is,

  who makes it, the reality is thick

  with longing. We put it up to our lips

  and drink.

  I believe in childhood, a native land of math exams

  that return and do not return, I see—

  the shore, the trees, a boy

  running across the streets like a lost god

  the light falls, touching his shoulder.

  Where memory, an old flautist,

  plays in the rain and his dog sleeps, its tongue

  half hanging out;

  for twenty years between life and

  I have run through silence: in 1993 I came to America.

  America! I put the word on a page, it is my keyhole.

  I watch the streets, the shops, the bicyclist, the oleanders.

  I open the windows of an apartment

  and say: I had masters once, they roared above me,

  Who are we? Why are we here?

  A lantern they carried still glitters in my sleep,

  —in this dream: my father breathes

  as if lighting a lamp over and over. The memory

  is starting its old engine, it begins to move

  and I think the trees are moving.

  On the page’s soiled corners

  my teacher walks, composing a voice;

  he rubs each word in his palms:

  “hands learn from the soil and broken glass,

  you cannot think a poem,” he says,

  “watch the light hardening into words.”

  I was born in the city named after Odysseus

  and I praise no nation—

  to the rhythm of snow

  an immigrant's clumsy phrases fall into speech.

  But you asked

  for a story with a happy ending. Your loneliness

  played its lyre. I sat

  on the floor, watching your lips.

  Love, a one-legged bird

  I bought for forty cents as a child, and released,

  is coming back, my soul in reckless feathers.

  O the language of birds

  with no word for complaint!—

  the balconies, the wind.

  This is how, while darkness

  drew my profile with its little finger,

  I have learned to see past as Montale saw it,

  the obscurer thoughts of God descending

  among a child’s drum beats,

  over you, over me, over the lemon trees.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to the editors of the following publications: Adirondack Review, American Literary Review, Born Magazine, Canary River Review, Chapiteau Press, DMQ Review, HazMat Review, Mars Hill Review, New Republic, Poems From the Heron Clan Anthology, PoetryMagazine.com, Pudding House Publications, Tikkun, Salmagundi, Southeast Review, Southwest Review, Sundress Publications and Web Del Sol.

  Some language in prose fragments in “Musica Humana” is taken from eye-witness accounts of I. Ehrenburg, L. Chukovsky, J. Brodsky, A. Akhmatova. “Musica Humana” is for Carolyn Forché, “Dancing In Odessa” is in memory of Eva Staroselskaya and Victor Kaminsky, “A Toast” is for Rachel Galvin, “A Farewell to Friends” is in memory of Charlie Bernstein, David Kadlec, Rex McGuinn, Marik Naroditsky, Anthony and Ginny Piccione, and Bernard Schuster. “Natalia” and all other love poems in this book are for Katie Farris.

  I am grateful to The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Milton Center, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry, for awards and fellowships that supported the writing of these poems. Gracious thanks also to the English Departments of Georgetown University and the University of Rochester.

  Endless gratitude to Eleanor Wilner for helping this book into the world. I am deeply thankful to Carolyn Forché for her help and friendship, from the very beginning. Heartfelt gratitude also to Anthony Hecht for his kindness and generosity. I am very thankful to Frank Bidart, Li-Young Lee, and Robert Pinsky for their inspiration and encouragement over the years. Grateful thanks also to Franz Wright for his friendship.

  My gratitude to the following persons: John Felstiner, David Gewanter, Barbara Jordan, Robert Hass, William Heyen, Edward Hirsch, Cynthia Hogue, James Longenbach, Mark
McMorris, Anthony Piccione, Jarold Ramsey, David St. John, Thom Ward, Affa Michael Weaver, and Adam Zagajewski, for their help with this manuscript at various stages: thank you.

  I am also very indebted to friends for their support in the making of these poems: Ann Aspell, Jen Chang, Barbara Deakins, Maggie Dietz, Rachel Galvin, Garth Greenwell, Josh Kellar, Ruth Knaffo Setton, Rex McGuinn, Michael Odom, Charlie Pratt, Mary Rakow, Amy Ross, C.J. Sage, Jim Schley, Jane Schuster, Ralf Sneeden, Peter Streckfus, Susan Terris, Katie Towler, Alissa Valles, G.C. Waldrep: thank you.

  Thanks also to Louise Glück for her kind advice in the final stages of this book’s completion. Thanks to Joseph Parisi for awarding me the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and to Henry Taylor for the Milton Center Award, which provided much needed encouragement.

  Thanks to Duff Axsom, Tipu Barber, Todd Beers, Robert and Peggy Boyers, Paloma Capanna, Norm Davis, Rachel Callaghan, Lynn Follet, Joan Houlihan, Larry Jaffe, Wendy Low, Margaret McGuinn, Michael Neff, Mark Ott, Nita Pettigrew, Colleen Royr, Harvey Shepard, Felicia Sullivan, Frank Wilson, Beth Woodcome, Marc Woodworth, Andrena Zawinski, for their presence in my life.

  Thanks to Lydia Cherbina, Yurii Mikhailic and Valentin Moroz for the gift of Russian poetry in Odessa. And to Polina Barskova, Misha Gronus, Olga Meerson, and Valery Petrochenkov for keeping the circle whole.

  Sincere thanks to Laura Halleran, Joan Bouthillier, Jane Shaffelton and most especially Gary Wiener for helping me to learn English language through writing and translation of its poetry.

  I would also like to thank Carolyn, Harry and Sean Mattison for opening their home to me in a time of need. The Farris and Ajootian families for their warmth. Much thanks to Jeffrey Levine and Margaret Donovan of Tupelo Press for their support of this work.

  And a special thanks to Katie Farris, who is present in every line. In Memoriam: Anthony Piccione. I beg forgiveness from everyone I may have overlooked.