and argued about the Paris Commune of ‘71, the Budapest
Commune of 1919. I joined the underground Party
but I was expelled for Trotskyist leanings.
Every winter I watched the snow gather in the streets
as the wind stripped down the stark December trees
and every year I spluttered like a village idiot
during the first hard agonies of another spring.
Every day I watched the same sun struggle out of three
smokestacks with the same smoke nestled in its arms
and every night I watched another wide moon
congealing in the clouds. I was always hungry.
One year I ate every other morning, one year
I ate every other afternoon. My darling and I
shared a double fever and slept on a narrow couch.
One night she tried to swallow a bottle of lye
and I raved against God like a blunt descendant
of Satan, or the gaunt edge of an old sickle.
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m a nail or a hammer,
a handcuff or a pen, a secret or a blind omen.
I’m like a sad bear dancing in an empty forest.
I’d give my legs for a salary of two hundred pengös.
I’ve pawned everything but my own flesh and blood.
Today when I stood at the blank window, I discovered
a thousand wooden crosses blooming in the cemetery
and when I stared at my own reflection I realized
that my mother was a young woman when she died.
I know that I am Freud’s deviant, starving son
and my button-down shoes are four sizes too big,
my pockets are filled with weightless blue pebbles.
When the Health Service sent me to a rural sanatorium
I fell in love with my analyst. I bellowed and moaned,
I invoked the faithfulness of dogs, the fatigue
of slaves, but nothing helped. And I came home.
I admit that I’m desperately in need of a job
and I’ll agree to anything: I’m honest, I’m
an excellent typist, I can speak French and German,
I can take dictation and crawl on all fours.
I’m a gymnast of the dialectic and I can sing
the startled green lyrics of a prisoner’s song.
This is a promissory note and a curriculum vitae,
this is a last will and testament: On April 11, 1905,
I was sentenced to thirty-two years of hard labor,
but I was innocent. Where is that freight train?
I am cutting off my right sleeve with a scissors.
I am leaving my right arm to a strange god.
Paul Celan: A Grave and Mysterious Sentence
Paris, 1948
It’s daybreak and I wish I could believe
In a rain that will wash away the morning
That is just about to rise behind the smokestacks
On the other side of the river, other side
Of nightfall. I wish I could forget the slab
Of darkness that always fails, the memories
That flood through the window in a murky light.
But now it is too late. Already the day
Is a bowl of thick smoke filling up the sky
And swallowing the river, covering the buildings
With a sickly, yellow film of sperm and milk.
Soon the streets will be awash with little bright
Patches of oblivion on their way to school,
Dark briefcases of oblivion on their way to work.
Soon my small apartment will be white and solemn
Like a blank page held up to a blank wall,
A message whispered into a vacant closet. But
This is a message which no one else remembers
Because it is stark and German, like the silence,
Like the white fire of daybreak that is burning
Inside my throat. If only I could stamp it out!
But think of smoke and ashes. An ominous string
Of railway cars scrawled with a dull pencil
Across the horizon at dawn. A girl in pigtails
Saying, “Soon you are going to be erased.”
Imagine thrusting your head into a well
And crying for help in the wrong language,
Or a deaf mute shouting into an empty field.
So don’t talk to me about flowers, those blind
Faces of the dead thrust up out of the ground
In bright purples and blues, oranges and reds.
And don’t talk to me about the gold leaves
Which the trees are shedding like an extra skin:
They are handkerchiefs pressed over the mouths
Of the dead to keep them quiet. It’s true:
Once I believed in a house asleep, a childhood
Asleep. Once I believed in a mother dreaming
About a pair of giant iron wings growing
Painfully out of the shoulders of the roof
And lifting us into away-from-here-and-beyond.
Once I even believed in a father calling out
In the dark, restless and untransfigured.
But what did we know then about the smoke
That was already beginning to pulse from trains,
To char our foreheads, to transform their bodies
Into two ghosts billowing from a huge oven?
What did we know about a single gray strand
Of barbed wire knotted slowly and tightly
Around their necks? We didn’t know anything then.
And now here is a grave and mysterious sentence
Finally written down, carried out long ago:
At last I have discovered that the darkness
Is a solitary night train carrying my parents
Across a field of dead stumps and wildflowers
Before disappearing on the far horizon,
Leaving nothing much in its earthly wake
But a stranger standing at the window
Suddenly trying to forget his childhood,
To forget a black trail of smoke
Slowly unraveling in the distance
Like the victory-flag of death, to forget
The slate clarity of another day
Forever breaking behind the smokestacks.
In a Polish Home for the Aged (Chicago, 1983)
It’s sweet to lie awake in the early morning
Remembering the sound of five huge bells
Ringing in the village at dawn, the iron
Notes turning to music in the pink clouds.
It’s nice to remember the flavor of groats
Mixed with horse’s blood, the sour tang
Of unripe peppers, the smell of garlic
Growing in Aunt Stefania’s garden.
I can remember my grandmother’s odd claim
That her younger brother was a mule
Pulling an ox cart across a lapsed meadow
In the first thin light of a summer morning;
Her cousin, Irka, was a poorly planted tree
Wrapping itself in a dress of white blossoms.
I could imagine an ox cart covered with flowers,
The sound of laughter coming from damp branches.
Some nights I dream that I’m a child again
Flying through the barnyard at six a.m.:
My mother milks the cows in the warm barn
And thinks about her father, who died long ago,
And daydreams about my future in a large city.
I want to throw my arms around her neck
And touch the sweating blue pails of milk
And talk about my childish nightmares.
God, you’ve got to see us to know how happy
We were then, two dark caresses of sunlight.
Now I wake up to the same four walls staring
At me blankly, and the same bar
e ceiling.
The morning starts over in the home:
Someone coughs in the hall, someone calls out
An unfamiliar name, a name I don’t remember,
Someone slams a car door in the distance.
I touch my feet to the cold tile floor
And listen to my neighbor stirring in his room
And think about my mother’s peculiar words
After my grandmother died during the war:
“One day the light will be as thick as a pail
Of fresh milk, but the pail will seem heavy.
You won’t know if you can lift it anymore,
But lift it anyway. Drink the day slowly.”
Leningrad (1941–1943)
1
For some of us it began with wild dogs
Howling iike dirges in the early morning
And crazed wolves answering in the distance.
It began with the shrieking of peacocks
And three mad sables roving through the streets
And a sound of donkeys screeching like children.
Some of us heard the polar bears wailing
And two African giraffes whining in terror
At the death throes of a baby elephant
And we knew it had begun in earnest.
But some people refuse to imagine zebras
Careening around in hysterical circles,
Or cheetahs smashing their cages, or bats
Clinging to crippled leopards and then
Floating over their heads in a broad light.
Some people need to see the sky speaking
German, and the night wearing a steel helmet,
And the moon slowly turning into a swastika.
2
But then we saw the stomach of the city
Burning in the distance, all the charred
Sugar and fresh meats, all the white flour
And dark grains flaming on the far horizon
In oily black clouds of smoke tinged
With ember-reds and soiled brown mauves.
It was like seeing hundreds of waves of
Blood rolling over the city at dusk and then
Hanging in heavy layers under the stars.
No one cried out or screamed in pain
To see our crumbling wooden depots of food
Climbing in swollen clouds into the sky
But a few children who were already hungry
And an old man who saw his own small intestine
Drifting like a balloon over his wife’s head.
That’s how in Peter the Great’s white showcase
Built on a vast swamp on the northernmost
Fringe of Europe, we began to starve.
3
It’s to lie in the dark at four a.m.
Thinking about the sweetness of surrender,
What the mind yields to a mattress in fatigue
And the body forgets to remember, what
The reluctant night yields to a cold room
Where windows are boarded with plywood
And light searches for a crack in the roof.
It’s to remember the women with bright parasols
Strolling down the wide Parisian boulevards
And the men cruising in black limousines.
It’s to forget the words “typhoid” and “cholera,”
The sirens that go on wailing in your sleep.
There are days when dying will seem as
Easy as sitting down in a warm, comfortable
Overstuffed chair and going back to sleep,
Or lying in bed for hours. But you must
Not sit down, you must spend your life digging
Out trenches with a shovel, staying awake.
4
So whoever will eat must work and whoever
Will survive must fight. But the sick
Civilians shiver on narrow gray stretchers
In the dark in unheated hospital rooms,
The soldiers respect the terror of their wounds.
There is no water, no warmth, and no light
And the bodies keep piling up in the corridor.
A red soldier tears his mouth from a bandage
And announces to a young nurse, “Darling,
Tanks are what we need now, beautiful tanks,
Beloved tanks rolling over the barren fields
And playing their music in the pink sky.”
No one pays attention, but a volunteer regrets
That trolleys have stopped running to the front:
He’ll have to walk the distance. Meanwhile,
The bodies keep piling up in the corridor
And a dazed girl keeps shouting, “But I can
Fight the Nazis!” Whoever can fight will eat.
5
I have lanced the boils on every finger
And sucked the warm pus; I have eaten
A thin jelly made of leather straps,
And swallowed the acrid green oil cakes,
And tasted a cold extract of pine needles.
I have stared at the flayed white trees
And watched my children chasing a scrawny
Cat through the streets at dawn, and smelled
The dead cat boiling in my own kitchen.
I have tried to relinquish judgment,
To eat the cat or the dog without disgust.
I have seen starved women begging for rations
Sun, and I have turned my back slowly.
I have waited in a thousand lines for bread,
But I won’t gouge at another human body;
I won’t eat the sweet breasts of a murdered
Woman, or the hacked thighs of a dying man.
6
After we burned the furniture and the books
In the stove, we were always cold, always:
But we got used to icicles in our chests.
We got used to the fires falling from the sky
At dusk, spreading across the scorched roofs.
And we got used to the formula of edible
Cellulose and cottonseed cakes and dry meal dust
And a pinch of corn flour for our dark bread.
We got used to our own stomachs bulging with air.
And then one day the bodies started to appear
Piled on the bright sleds of little children,
Bundled up in thick curtains and torn sheets
And old rags and sometimes even in newspapers.
We saw the staircases jammed with corpses,
The doorways and the dead-end alleys, and smelled
A scent of turpentine hanging in the frosty air.
We got used to leaving our dead unburied,
Stacked like cordwood in the drifts of snow.
7
Somehow we lived with our empty stomachs
And our ankles in chains, somehow we managed
With a heavy iron collar wrapped tightly
Around our necks. Sometimes the sun seemed
Like a German bomber, or an air-raid warden,
Or a common foot soldier speaking German.
We saw houses that had been sliced in two
From the attic to the cellar and large buildings
That had been blown apart like small windows.
We saw a soldier cradling a kneecap in his palms
And children watching the soft red fluids
Of their intestines flowing through their fingers.
We saw a girl tearing out clumps of hair
And surgeons who tried to scratch out their eyes
Because they couldn’t stand to see their hands.
Slowly we touched a sharp razor to our necks
And scraped away the useless blue skin
And the dead flesh. Somehow we lived.
4
Recovery
It was as if the rain could feel itself
falling through the air today, as if
the air
could actually feel its own dampness, the breeze
could hear a familiar voice explaining the emptiness
to the dark elms that swayed unconsciously along
the wet road, the elms that could still feel
their own branches glistening with rain.
It was as if the sky had imagined a morning
of indigos and pinks, mauves and reddish-browns.
The smiling young nurse who helped you into the car
was wearing two colorful ribbons in her auburn hair and
somehow they looked precisely like ribbons gleaming
in the hair of a woman helping you into a car.
I believe I had never seen ribbons before.
And suddenly I was staring at asphalt
puddled with rainwater. And bluish letters
purpling on a white sign. And sliding electric
ENTRANCES & EXITS. And statues bristling with color.
The yellow sunlight filtered through the clouds
and I believe I had never seen a street lamp
shimmer across a wavy puddle before.
The road home was slick with lights
and everything seemed to be crying, just
this, just this, nothing more, nothing else!—
as if the morning were somehow conscious of itself.
When you leaned over and touched me on the arm
it was as if my arm needed to be touched
in that way, at exactly that time.
Three Journeys
Whoever has followed the bag lady
on her terrible journey past Food Lane’s Super-Market,
and Maze’s Records, and The Little Flowering Barbershop