English had put out her memory like a broom on a fire. The snows
drift to the roof of the house, so it is no longer possible to open the door.
She tells us that on this night in her village, they would carry home
a live carp wrapped in paper that had just been swimming in a barrel.
The fish would silver the snow and have its life taken by a sharp ax.
The potatoes that had grown eyes in the cellar would be brought up
and baked with the fish, and there would be beet soup, bread, and wine
made from mulberries. Something would be given to each of them,
a thing they needed but didn’t want, and then they would sleep
as if in a boat at sea with the bright carp swimming through the snow
of their thoughts. Then she would be off, tunneling through the drifts
as only a spirit could tunnel, leaving behind a coin purse, a crystal broach,
a holy card with her own birth and death dates so we would know
she hadn’t visited us, that her satin-pillowed coffin lay still in the ground.
Nevertheless, the tinsel flickered as she passed, the lighthouse sent
its signal to the boats, and the sheep bounded over the fir branch
tufted with wool, and in every glass bulb, there we were—
children descended from her on a winter night.
IN TIME OF WAR
And so we stayed, night after night awake
until the moon fell behind the blackened cypress,
and bats returned to their caverns having gorged
on the night air, and all remained still until the hour
of rising, when the headless woman was no longer seen
nor a ghostly drum heard, nor anyone taking
the form of mist or a fiddler, and the box never opened
by itself, nor were there whispers or other sounds, no rustling
dress or pet ape trapped in a secret passage, but there was
labored breathing, and unseen hands leafing through
the pages of a visitor’s book, and above the ruins a girl
in white lace, and five or more candles floating,
and someone did see a white dog bound into a nearby
wood, but there were neither bagpipes nor smiling skull,
no skeletons piled in the oubliette, and there was,
as it turned out, no yellow monkey, no blood
leaking from a slit throat, and no one saw
a woman carrying the severed head,
but there were children standing on their own
graves and there was the distant rumble of cannon.
LOST POEM
I’m searching for a poem I read years ago. It was written by Cavafy, I thought, but reading through Cavafy again I can’t find this poem. I don’t recall the title, but there is a road in the poem, and a bridge, and a city near the sea. There are many souls and hungers, figs, demons, imaginary silence, and hidden phrases that have to do with secret assignations. The poem is said to have been written on the uncut pages of a dream. In one version, the olive trees go up in smoke but the bridge survives. In another, the city itself is lost, and there is no road. It is a war poem then, and that is why it is not to be found in the collected works of Cavafy.
CHARMOLYPI
It begins with a word as small as the cry of Athena’s owl.
An ache in the cage of breath, as when we say can hardly breathe.
In sleep, we see our name on a stone, for instance.
Or while walking in the rain among graves we feel watched.
Others are still coming into our lives. They come, they go out.
Some speak quietly beside us on the bench near where koi swim.
At night, there is a light sound of wings brushing the walls.
Not now is what it sounds like. Or two other words.
But they are the same passerines as live in the stone eaves,
as forage in the air toward night. To see them one must not be looking.
SOUFFRANCE
I think of you in that sea of graves beyond the city,
where many stones have been left, among them,
mine: a little piece of dolomite to weigh down a slip of paper.
I would have put your gloves and umbrella in the coffin,
along with one more morning in Berlin with Tanya, an hour
of pigeons rising around you, lilacs wrapped in news
stories, a minute at the barricades, another riding
on your father’s shoulders through the garlic fields, even cigarettes
left over from the occupation I would have placed there.
Instead, this notebook, a pen full of ink, and that short
poem by Hölderlin you loved, so you could go up in smoke
together: you, the notebook, the pen, the poem by Hölderlin.
In the aftermath, you are emulsion on paper, a corpse listening beneath
the ground to a train passing through a polaroid of clouds.
It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once.
You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.
SANCTUARY
Ce voyage, je voulais le refaire—
This journey, I would like to make again—
Light pealed, bell-like, through the canopy. Long ago or seems so.
Then the ghost of a deer and crows flapping through smoke.
She made a poultice for me of herbs and mud to suck the poison from the boil.
And then she went into a mahogany coffin. As there were then.
Mornings, horses cantered through ground fog having broken loose.
So I would go out for them, bridles in hand, with no one awake.
The closer I came to them, the further they moved away.
Following them through the clouds is a journey I would make again.
UNINHABITED
night moaning in an open flue
wings along the chimney wall
the house as it was, as winter drew
frost’s white face on the glass
and you, as then you were
as old as you would ever be,
playing Schubert in the air,
on the invisible keys
of a piano that wasn’t there—
for the one who vanished near Voronezh
for “shovels of smoke in the air”
for the wristwatch missing in the river
from the walker who slipped from the edge
for a suitcase left in the Pyrenees
for spectacles crushed at Portbou
for the shawl of stars that was night
when the last of them spoke to you.
CLOUDS
A whip-poor-will brushed
her wing along the ground
a moment ago, fifty years
in the orchard where my father
kept pear and plum,
a decade of peach trees
and Antonovka’s apples
whose seeds come
from Russia by ship
under clouds islanding
a window very past
where also went
the soul of my mother
in a boat with blossoming
sails like apple petals
in wind fifty years at once.
PASSAGE
a boat in snow
a boat with a cargo
of refuse moored on a field
water chiming into a bowl
the long hum of a gong in wind
and from the sickroom a death rattle
a falling back as if through clouds
someone in the room
seen only by the dying one
there, just there, in the room
in the past, the window sash raised,
the curtain flared
as a girl’s skirt in wind
there would be a pitcher
of water on the night table—
some kind of game the children
would be playing would be heard
like a call from tree to tree
during apple harvest
LIGHT OF SLEEP
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink
on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book,
from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence
to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having
to do with aerial leaflets, air raid papers,
bills of mortality, birth certificates and blotting papers,
child lost-and-found forms, donor cards, erratum slips,
execution broadsides “liberally spattered with errors of all kinds”
sold by vendors at public hangings, funeralia, with drawings
of skeletons digging graves and inviting us to accompany
the corpse of x to the church of y, gift coupons, greeting cards,
housekeeping accounts, ice papers to place in windows
for the delivery of blocks of ice, jury papers, keepsakes,
lighthouse dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,
marriage certificates, news bills, notices to quit, oaths, paper
dolls, plague papers, playing cards, quack advertisements,
ration papers, razor blade wrappers, reward posters,
slave papers, songbooks, tax stamps, touring maps,
union labels and vice cards left in telephone boxes,
warrants and watch papers used to keep the movements
of the pocket watches under repair free of dust,
wills and testaments, xerography, yearbooks, and the zoetrope
disk, also known as the wheel of life, wherein figures painted
in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster,
whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.
THEOLOGOS
For a third year, we are living on AERIA THASSOS, island of marble and pines,
marble the quietest of stones, pines the first tree after a fire.
Marble the stone of the dead, the stone of the sleeping face.
This is an island of exiles and therefore pure,
its sea flocked with boats in the day hours.
In the swells the Evanthoulla rises and falls, a boat alive and awake.
In a clear dawn the islands of Samothraki, Limnos, and Lesvos are visible.
Later in the morning there is too much light.
You may catch birds in nets, the first poet wrote, but you cannot in nets
catch their song.
These fragments of Archilochus were found on a slip of paper used
to wrap a mummy.
He lived here, it was said, on an island that lies in the sea / like the backbone of an ass,
making the first iambs.
He wrote sparks in wheat.
And it seems, from accounts, he fought and fornicated mostly.
Later in the day, Kyrios Stamatis takes the boat
to think with him on open sea, setting his nets.
Sea-wind fills the olives.
A ship crosses the seam of air and sea.
Hillocks and canyons of cloud,
light-strewn, castle-walled, shore and cirrus.
This is where the skinned goat turned on the spit.
This is where we knelt on walnut leaves to be blessed.
MOURNING
A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond
the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea,
blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove.
As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup,
listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead
in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights
hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet,
as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines,
whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces
clear of night, putting the music out with morning
light, and for the breadth of an hour it is possible
to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember
that there was no word for blue among the ancients,
but there was the whirring sound before the oars
of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world,
through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until
they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens,
troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought—
then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts,
the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there:
not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme,
a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those
in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains
scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now
a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look
into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain
with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain,
then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped
into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words
of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears
in the writings of Herodotus:
How the waves of the sea kiss the shore!
For if the earth is a camp and the sea
an ossuary of souls, light your signal fires
wherever you find yourselves.
Come the morning, launch your boats.
TRANSPORT
Oxen-yoked carts go with us, and also bicycle rickshaws,
three-wheeled carts, small trucks, taxis and cooled private cars,
human-yoked carts piled with tea and textiles, and along
the way they toot their horns. To pass on the right,
you toot your horn, also to pass on the left or pull ahead.
Even the loping oxen understand the music.
We are told—is it true?—that if our driver struck
a man on foot, we should run away before the car
is torched by the crowd and its driver killed.
This thought became taxis burning in sleep.
The newness of the car determines our distance from the world.
Behind smoked windows, with the air on,
it is possible to travel at great distance
from all that is about us: bathers by the roadside pouring
cold pails over soaped flesh, smoke rising from long metal
stoves, women stirring pots, sadhus and other holy ones,
with their infinite paths to God. On foot then. Go on foot.
EARLY CONFESSION
If I had never walked the snow fields, heard the iced birch,
leant against wind hard toward distant houses, ever distant,
wind in the coat, snow over the boot tops, supper f
ires
in windows far across the stubbly farms, none of them
my house until the end, the last, and late, always late, despite how early
I’d set off wearing gloves of glass, a coat standing up by itself.
If I had never reached the house, but instead lain down in the drifts
to finish a dream, if I had finished, would I have
reached the rest of my life, here, now, with you whispering:
must not sleep, not rest, must not take flight, must wake.
TOWARD THE END
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen ships, a year
passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standing in the aftermath
who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition,
and then just like that—gone, and no one for hours, a sound you thought you heard
but in the waking darkness is not heard again, two sharp knocks on the door, death
it was, you said, but now nothing, the islands, places you have been, the sea the uncertain,
full of ghosts calling out, lost as they are, no one you knew in your life, the moon above
the whole of it, like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air
where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered
to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and murk, you could see
everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place you have been,
without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would be one person again.
WHAT COMES
J’ai rapporté du désespoir un panier si petit, mon amour, qu’on a pu le tresser en osier.
I brought from despair a basket so small, my love, that it might have been woven of willow.
RENÉ CHAR
to speak is not yet to have spoken,
the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left
neither for itself nor another
a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been