Lightness is unavailing.
Catalpas wave and spill
their dull strings across this murk of spring.
I ache, brilliantly.
Only where there is language is there world.
In the harp of my hair, compose me
a song. Death’s in the air,
we all know that. Still, for an hour,
I’d like to be gay. How could a gay song go?
Why that’s your secret, and it shall be mine.
We are our words, and black and bruised and blue.
Under our skins, we’re laughing.
In triste veritas?
Take hold, sweet hands, come on …
Broken!
When you falter, all eludes.
This is a seasick way,
this almost/never touching, this
drawing-off, this to-and-fro.
Subtlety stalks in your eyes,
your tongue knows what it knows.
I want your secrets—I will have them out.
Seasick, I drop into the sea.
1966
JERUSALEM
In my dream, children
are stoning other children
with blackened carob-pods
I dream my son is riding
on an old grey mare
to a half-dead war
on a dead-grey road
through the cactus and thistles
and dried brook-beds.
In my dream, children
are swaddled in smoke
and their uncut hair smolders
even here, here
where trees have no shade
and rocks have no shadow
trees have no memories
only the stones and
the hairs of the head.
I dream his hair is growing
and has never been shorn
from slender temples hanging
like curls of barbed wire
and his first beard is growing
smoldering like fire
his beard is smoke and fire
and I dream him riding
patiently to the war.
What I dream of the city
is how hard it is to leave
and how useless to walk
outside the blasted walls
picking up the shells
from a half-dead war
and I wake up in tears
and hear the sirens screaming
and the carob-tree is bare.
Balfour Street, July 1966
CHARLESTON IN THE 1860’s
Derived from the diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut.
He seized me by the waist and kissed my throat …
Your eyes, dear, are they grey or blue,
eyes of an angel?
The carts have passed already with their heaped
night-soil, we breathe again …
Is this what war is? Nitrate …
But smell the pear,
the jasmine, the violets.
Why does this landscape always sadden you?
Now the freshet is up on every side,
the river comes to our doors,
limbs of primeval trees dip in the swamp.
So we fool on into the black
cloud ahead of us.
Everything human glitters fever-bright—
the thrill of waking up
out of a stagnant life?
There seems a spell upon
your lovers, —all dead of wounds
or blown to pieces … Nitrate!
I’m writing, blind with tears of rage.
In vain. Years, death, depopulation, fears,
bondage—these shall all be borne.
No imagination to forestall woe.
1966
NIGHT WATCH
And now, outside, the walls
of black flint, eyeless.
How pale in sleep you lie.
Love: my love is just a breath
blown on the pane and dissolved.
Everything, even you,
cries silently for help, the web
of the spider is ripped with rain,
the geese fly on into the black cloud.
What can I do for you?
what can I do for you?
Can the touch of a finger mend
what a finger’s touch has broken?
Blue-eyed now, yellow-haired,
beside the track, while you,
and over and over and always you
plod into the deathcars.
Sometimes you smile at me
and I—I smile back at you.
How sweet the odor of the station-master’s roses!
How pure, how poster-like the colors of this dream.
1967
THERE ARE SUCH SPrINGLIKE NIGHTS
From the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky.
There are such springlike nights here,
when a blade of grass pushes up through the soil
and the fresh dawn is a green pillow
under the skeleton of a dead horse.
And all the limbs of a woman plead for the ache of birth.
And women come to lie down like sick sheep
by the wells—to heal their bodies,
their faces blackened with yearlong thirst for a child’s cry.
There are such springlike nights here
when lightning pierces the black soil with silver knives
and pregnant women approach the white tables of the hospital
with quiet steps
and smile at the unborn child
and perhaps at death.
There are such springlike nights here
when a blade of grass pushes up through the soil.
1968
FOR A RUSSIAN POET
1. The Winter Dream
Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot
drags across huge cobblestones, bells
hammer in distant squares.
Everything we stood against has conquered
and now we’re part
of it all. Life’s the main thing, I hear you say,
but a fog is spreading between this landmass
and the one your voice
mapped so long for me. All that’s visible
is walls, endlessly yellow-grey, where
so many risks were taken, the shredded skies
slowly littering both our continents with
the only justice left, burying
footprints, bells and voices with all deliberate speed.
1967
2. Summer in the Country
Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk,
late August, forebodings
under the birches, along the water’s edge
and between the typed lines
and evenings, tracing a pattern of absurd hopes
in broken nutshells
but this year we both
sit after dark with the radio
unable to read, unable to write
trying the blurred edges of broadcasts
for a little truth, taking a walk before bed
wondering what a man can do, asking that
at the verge of tears in a lightning-flash of loneliness.
3. The Demonstration
Natalya Gorbanevskaya
13/3 Novopeschanaya Street
Apartment 34
At noon we sit down quietly on the parapet
and unfurl our banners
almost immediately
the sound of police whistles
from all corners of Red Square
we sit
quietly and offer no resistance
Is this your little boy
we will relive this over and over
the banners torn from our hands
blood flowing
a great jagged torn place
in the silence of complicity
&nb
sp; that much at least
we did here
In your flat, drinking tea
waiting for the police
your children asleep while you write
quickly, the letters you want to get off
before tomorrow
I’m a ghost at your table
touching poems in a script I can’t read
we’ll meet each other later
August 1968
NIGHT IN THE KITCHEN
The refrigerator falls silent.
Then other things are audible:
this dull, sheet-metal mind rattling like stage thunder.
The thickness budging forward in these veins
is surely something other
than blood:
say, molten lava.
You will become a black lace cliff fronting a deadpan sea;
nerves, friable as lightning
ending in burnt pine forests.
You are begun, beginning, your black heart drumming
slowly, triumphantly
inside its pacific cave.
1967
5:30 A.M.
Birds and periodic blood.
Old recapitulations.
The fox, panting, fire-eyed,
gone to earth in my chest.
How beautiful we are,
he and I, with our auburn
pelts, our trails of blood,
our miracle escapes,
our whiplash panic flogging us on
to new miracles!
They’ve supplied us with pills
for bleeding, pills for panic.
Wash them down the sink.
This is truth, then:
dull needle groping in the spinal fluid,
weak acid in the bottom of the cup,
foreboding, foreboding.
No one tells the truth about truth,
that it’s what the fox
sees from his scuffled burrow:
dull-jawed, onrushing
killer, being that
inanely single-minded
will have our skins at last.
1967
THE BREAK
All month eating the heart out,
smothering in a fierce insomnia …
First the long, spongy summer, drying
out by fits and starts, till a morning
torn off another calendar
when the wind stiffens, chairs
and tables rouse themselves
in a new, unplanned light
and a word flies like a dry leaf down the hall
at the bang of a door.
Then break, October, speak,
non-existent and damning clarity.
Stare me down, thrust
your tongue against mine, break
day, let me stand up
like a table or a chair
in a cold room with the sun beating in
full on the dusty panes.
1967
TWO POEMS
Adapted from Anna Akhmatova.
1.
There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:
neither the lover nor the expert sensualist
passes it, though mouths press silently together
and the heart is bursting.
And friends—they too are helpless there,
and so with years of fire and joy,
whole histories of freedom
unburdened by sensual languor.
The crazy ones push on to that frontier
while those who have found it are sick with grief …
And now you know
why my heart doesn’t beat beneath your hand.
2.
On the terrace, violins played
the most heartbreaking songs.
A sharp, fresh smell of the sea
came from oysters on a dish of ice
He said, I’m a faithful friend,
touching my dress.
How far from a caress,
the touch of that hand!
The way you stroke a cat, a bird,
the look you give a shapely bareback rider.
In his calm eyes, only laughter
under the light-gold lashes.
And the violins mourn on
behind drifting smoke:
Thank your stars, you’re at last alone
with the man you love.
1966
THE KEY
Through a drain grating, something
glitters and falters,
glitters again. A scrap of foil,
a coin, a signal, a message
from the indistinct
piercing my indistinctness?
How long I have gone round
and round, spiritless with foreknown defeat,
in search of that glitter?
Hours, years maybe. The cry of metal
on asphalt, on iron, the sudden
ching of a precious loss,
the clear statement
of something missing. Over and over
it stops me in my tracks
like a falling star, only
this is not the universe’s loss
it is mine. If I were only colder,
nearer death, nearer birth, I might let go
whatever’s so bent on staying lost.
Why not leave the house
locked, to collapse inward among its weeds,
the letters to darken and flake
in the drawer, the car
to grow skeletal, aflame with rust
in the moonlit lot, and walk
ever after?
O God I am not spiritless,
but a spirit can be stunned,
a battery felt going dead
before the light flickers,
and I’ve covered this ground too often
with this yellow disc
within whose beam all’s commonplace
and whose limits are described
by the whole night.
1967
PICNIC
Sunday in Inwood Park
the picnic eaten
the chicken bones scattered
for the fox we’ll never see
the children playing in the caves
My death is folded in my pocket
like a nylon raincoat
What kind of sunlight is it
that leaves the rocks so cold?
1967
THE BOOK
For Richard Howard
You, hiding there in your words
like a disgrace
the cast-off son of a family
whose face is written in theirs
who must not be mentioned
who calls collect three times a year
from obscure towns out-of-state
and whose calls are never accepted
You who had to leave alone
and forgot your shadow hanging under the stairs
let me tell you: I have been in the house
I have spoken to all of them
they will not pronounce your name
they only allude to you
rising and sitting, going or coming,
falling asleep and waking,
giving away in marriage or calling for water
on their deathbeds
their faces look into each other and see
you
when they write at night in their diaries they are writing
to you
1968
ABNEGATION
The red fox, the vixen
dancing in the half-light among the junipers,
wise-looking in a sexy way,
Egyptian-supple in her sharpness—
what does she want
with the dreams of dead vixens,
the apotheosis of Reynard,
the literature of fox-hunting?
Only in her nerves the past
sings, a thrill of self-preservation.
I go along down the road
to a house nailed together by Scottish
Covenanters, instinct mortified
in a virgin forest,
and she springs toward her den
every hair on her pelt alive
with tidings of the immaculate present.
They left me a westernness,
a birthright, a redstained, ravelled
afghan of sky.
She has no archives,
no heirlooms, no future
except death
and I could be more
her sister than theirs
who chopped their way across these hills
—a chosen people.
1968
II
Leaflets
WOMEN
For C.R.G.
My three sisters are sitting
on rocks of black obsidian.
For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.
My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.
She is going as the Transparent Lady
and all her nerves will be visible.
My second sister is also sewing,
at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely.
At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.
My third sister is gazing
at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.
Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.
1968
IMPLOSIONS
The world’s
not wanton
only wild and wavering
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary