and the cracked skin of cities,
you are not on our side,
eye never seeking our eyes,
shedding its griefs like stars
over our hectic indifference,
whispered monologue
subverting space with its tears,
mourning the mournable,
nailing the pale-grey woolly flower
back to its ledge.
3.
The power of the dinosaur
is ours, to die
inflicting death,
trampling the nested grasses:
power of dead grass
to catch fire
power of ash
to whirl off the burnt heap
in the wind’s own time.
4.
A soldier is here, an ancient figure,
generalized as a basalt mask.
Breathes like a rabbit, an Eskimo,
strips to an older and simpler thing.
No criminal, no hero; merely a shadow
cast by the conflagration
that here burns down or there leaps higher
but always in the shape of fire,
always the method of fire, casting
automatically, these shadows.
5.
Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,
a great wall: no temporary shelter.
Did you tell yourself these beams would melt,
these fiery blocs dissolve?
Did you choose to build this thing?
Have you stepped back to see what it is?
It is immense; it has porches, catacombs.
It is provisioned like the Pyramids, for eternity.
Its buttresses beat back the air with iron tendons.
It is the first flying cathedral,
eating its parishes by the light of the moon.
It is the refinery of pure abstraction,
a total logic, rising
obscurely between one man
and the old, affective clouds.
1965
MOTH HOUR
Space mildews at our touch.
The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—
aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?
A million insects die every twilight,
no one even finds their corpses.
Death, slowly moving among the bleached clouds,
knows us better than we know ourselves.
I am gliding backward away from those who knew me
as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.
I can be replaced a thousand times,
a box containing death.
When you put out your hand to touch me
you are already reaching toward an empty space.
1965
FOCUS
For Bert Dreyfus
Obscurity has its tale to tell.
Like the figure on the studio-bed in the corner,
out of range, smoking, watching and waiting.
Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable
making of a jar of pencils, a typewriter keyboard
more than they were. Veridical light …
Earth budges. Now an empty coffee-cup,
a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on
their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand
of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind.
O secret in the core of the whetstone, in the five
pencils splayed out like fingers of a hand!
The mind’s passion is all for singling out.
Obscurity has another tale to tell.
1965
FACE TO FACE
Never to be lonely like that—
the Early American figure on the beach
in black coat and knee-breeches
scanning the didactic storm in privacy,
never to hear the prairie wolves
in their lunar hilarity
circling one’s little all, one’s claim
to be Law and Prophets
for all that lawlessness,
never to whet the appetite
weeks early, for a face, a hand
longed-for and dreaded—
How people used to meet!
starved, intense, the old
Christmas gifts saved up till spring,
and the old plain words,
and each with his God-given secret,
spelled out through months of snow and silence,
burning under the bleached scalp; behind dry lips
a loaded gun.
II
Translations from
the Dutch
MARTINUS NIJHOFF
THE SONG OF THE FOOLISH BEES
A smell of further honey
embittered nearer flowers,
a smell of further honey
sirened us from our meadow.
That smell and a soft humming
crystallized in the azure,
that smell and a soft humming,
a wordless repetition,
called upon us, the reckless,
to leave our usual gardens,
called upon us, the reckless,
to seek mysterious roses.
Far from our folk and kindred
joyous we went careering,
far from our folk and kindred
exhuberantly driven.
No one can by nature
break off the course of passion,
no one can by nature
endure death in his body.
Always more fiercely yielding,
more lucently transfigured,
always more fiercely yielding
to that elusive token,
we rose and staggered upward,
kidnapped, disembodied,
we rose and vanished upward,
dissolving into glitter.
It’s snowing; we are dying,
homeward, downward whirled.
It’s snowing; we are dying;
it snows among the hives.
HENDRIK DE VRIES
MY BROTHER
My brother, nobody knows
the end you suffered.
Often you lie beside me, dim, and I
grow confused, grope, and startle.
You walked along that path through the elms.
Birds cried late. Something wrong
was following us both. But you
wanted to go alone through the waste.
Last night we slept again together.
Your heart jerked next to me. I spoke your name
and asked where you were going.
Your answer came:
“The horror! … there’s no telling …
See: the grass
lies dense again, the elms
press round.”
HENDRIK DE VRIES
FEVER
Listen! It’s never sung like that! Listen!
The wallpaper stirred,
and the hairs of the heavy-fringed eye.
What flew
Through the rooms?
Tomorrow it will be
as if all night the whips hadn’t lashed so.—
See, through the blinds,
The spirits in their cold ships!
Boughs graze the frame
of the window. Far off, a whistle
sounds, always clearly, along the fields.
The beasts on the walls
fade away. The light goes out.
GERRIT ACHTERBERG
EBEN HAËZER
(Hebrew for “Stone of Help”; a common old name for farmhouses in Holland.)
Sabbath evening privacy at home.
Mist-footsteps, prowling past the shed.
At that hour, not another soul abroad;
the blue farmhouse a closed hermitage.
There we lived together, man and mouse.
Through cowstall windows an eternal fire
f
ell ridged from gold lamps on the threshing-floor,
stillness of linseed cakes and hay in house.
There my father celebrated mass:
serving the cows, priestlike at their heads.
Their tongues curled along his hands like fish.
A shadow, diagonal to the rafters.
Worship hung heavy from the loftbeams.
His arteries begin to calcify.
GERRIT ACHTERBERG
ACCOUNTABILITY
Old oblivion-book, that I lay open.
White eye-corner rounding the page.
Gold lace slips out under the evening,
Green animals creep backwards.
Lifelessness of the experimental station.
Added-up, subtracted sum.
Black night. Over the starlight skims
God’s index finger, turning the page.
Death comes walking on all fours
past the room, a crystal egg,
with the lamp, the books, the bread,
where you are living and life-size.
GERRIT ACHTERBERG
STATUE
A body, blind with sleep,
stands up in my arms.
Its heaviness weighs on me.
Death-doll.
I’m an eternity too late.
And where’s your heartbeat?
The thick night glues us together,
makes us compact with each other.
“For God’s sake go on holding me—
my knees are broken,”
you mumble against my heart.
It’s as if I held up the earth.
And slowly, moss is creeping
all over our two figures.
LEO VROMAN
OUR FAMILY
My father, who since his death
no longer speaks audibly
lies sometimes, a great walrus
from nightfall to daybreak
his muzzle in my lap
in the street from his chin down.
The light of morning feeds
through his hide, thinned to parchment,
and his slackened features dwindle
to a line creeping off among the chairs;
if I rise to peer at him
he winces away to a dot
In the daytime there’s nothing to see
but an emphatically vanished
absence where moments ago
the sun too was just shining.
Where my father has stood
it now just quivers,
rippling by handfuls through
my little daughter’s light hair
while on the sunny grass
she slowly scampers forward.
Her little snoot is so open
you could easily spread it out
with a teaspoon or your finger
on a slice of fresh white bread
or, if need be,
you could mold it into a pudding.
Her little voice itches like a fleece;
it wriggles gaily into my ear
and can’t get out when it laughs;
with plopping fishfins
it folds itself struggling up
into my head. Where it spends the night.
And here, this taller child
is Tineke, my wife.
She hums a nursery rhyme
to the hair on her third breast,
which whimpers, being a baby,
and a thirsty baby at that.
I have such a gentle family,
it kisses, goes on eight legs,
but it has no moustache:
my father has vanished,
and they too are all going to die:
too soft, if they turn into air,
to swing a weathercock;
if turned into water, too slight
to fill a gutter; if into light
to make one live cock crow.
CHR. J. VAN GEEL
HOMECOMING
The sea, a body of mysterious calls
is almost motionless.
I know a beach, a tree stands there
in which women are singing,
voluptuous, languid.
In harbors ships are steaming
full of honey from the sea. Drizzle hangs
like eyelashes over the landscape.
Behind the seadike, breathing invisibly
in the mist, sleep the cows.
The hobble of a horse drags along the fence,
holding still where I stand with sweet words.
Listen, the sea calls,
claps her hands.
The ships running out in the wet
come like children—one drags
a sled into the garden.
CHR. J. VAN GEEL
SLEEPWALKING
(next to death.)
Sleep, horns of a snail
Out of the black and white bed, floors of red glaze,
mornings in the careful garden
on paths suitable rubbish slowly buried
and without urgency overgrown with grass
with ivy and sometimes a flower
just as we dream
to see unseen, to listen unattended.
The twigs of the moon
in indifferent white,
horns upright, wood with-
out leaf and seeking bees
sadness down to the ground.
Like silence always and from afar
lisps the water
never, by no one possessed.
Dead trees in green leaf.
What to do but among bushes,
what to see but underbrush.
On this sun time sharpens itself
to brilliance.
A stone of untouchable fire
on which time breaks its tooth.
Time caught no hour: loafing next to
a blaze.
In the darkened town the old groped
with their sticks.
The rays of the sun are tired,
the beetles rot in the wood,
only the sea….
In the earth of the dead
earth covers leaf, leaf covers leaf.
Heartbeat of the wild creeper,
hammer between wing-lashes,
butterflies hammer at the sun.
Now you must get to the institution
with a mask on, your little feet
tarred, an iron crown on your head.
You awake there a python,
a boa constrictor,
after seven-and-twenty years,
after six-and-twenty years,
fair sleep, fair sleepers.
You strike the prince twice
a youth wasted with waiting
for your serpent eyes and
you unfold your scaly tail.
Now you must get to the institution
with a mask on, your little feet
tarred, an iron crown on your head.
Night blows away from the sun,
sky in fresh wind,
the sea kicks off its surf.
The moon scorches, a cloud of steam.
Driving water torn to shreds,
sunny twilight, fruitless field.
Tamed sea, muscular
to the temples, stoop where no coast
is, under the familiar blows,
stand where you cannot stand,
night is embraced on the sun.
A scared hind in a wood of one tree.
Whether the dead live, how they rest or
decay, leaves me cold, for cold for good and all
is death.
Poor is the frontier of life, to die blossoms
away over the graves.
Every existence competes in every
lost chance of life for death.
Of always fewer chances, one moved
and drove over her, naked standing by her child
death.
Residing in a thunderstorm,
sky h
oists sun, night cuts light.
The wind’s wings are at home.
Whistle now out of the nights
sparks of burnt paper.
Whisper fire in the days
dried by the sun, your desires
are lightened, curled to ash.
Flowers for hunger,
the darkest, the blue,
of ash, of grey granite,
black ice,
room without window,
abacus without beads,
room without a person,
the eaten past
gnaws,
the teeth out of the comb,
the funeral wreath emptily devoured,
a stone.
Whatever I may contrive—
and I contrive it—death’s
private roads are the coldest night.
That I shall not be with her—
not with her—
that nothing shall glimmer
except danger.
Trees of ash, trees of ice,
the light frozen.
Summer and winter are
constructed of one emptiness.
The boughs of the wind are dead.
Must I dejected and contemplating death
now that above the sea a cloudless night
empties the sky, let treason and false laughter