Dancing in Odessa
“This is an intricate, muscular, startlingly powerful collection, one that amazes by image and statement, by its shaped whole, and by the sheer scope of its poetic observation. Kaminsky is truly a descendant of Odysseus, after whom his birth city was named. . . . Inventiveness of language, the investigative passion, praises, lamentation, and a proper sense of the ridiculous are omnipresent. . . .This book is a breathtaking debut.”
—Jane Hirshfield, Ploughshares
“A superb and vigorous imagination, a poetic talent of rare and beautiful proportions, whose work is surely destined to be widely and enthusiastically noticed and applauded. This is the start of a brilliant career.”
—Anthony Hecht
“With his magical style in English, poems in Dancing in Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. . . . Kaminsky’s imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration.”
—American Academy of Arts and Letters’
Citation for the Addison M. Metcalf Award
“Like Joseph Brodsky before him, Kaminsky is a terrifyingly good poet . . . who, having adopted English, has come to put us native speakers to shame. . . . It seemed to take about five minutes to read this book, and when I began again, I reached the end before I was ready. That’s how compulsive, how propulsive it is to read.”
—John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Winners of The Dorset Prize
Ice, Mouth, Song by Rachel Contreni Flynn
Selected by Stephen Dunn
Red Summer by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Selected by Ray Gonzalez
Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky
Selected by Eleanor Wilner
Dismal Rock by Davis McCombs
Selected by Linda Gregerson
Biogeography by Sandra Meek
Selected by the Tupelo Press Editors
Archicembalo by G. C. Waldrep
Selected by C. D. Wright
Severance Songs by Joshua Corey
Selected by Ilya Kaminsky
After Urgency by Rusty Morrison
Selected by Jane Hirshfield
Dancing
In
Odessa
Ilya Kaminsky
TUPELO PRESS
North Adams, Massachussets
Dancing in Odessa.
Copyright 2004 Ilya Kaminsky. All rights reserved.
Print ISBN: 978-1-932195-12-5
EBook ISBN: 978-1-936797-31-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003115523
Cover and text designed by Bill Kuch, WK Graphic Design.
First paperback edition: 2004.
Other than brief excerpts for reviews and commentaries, no part of this book may be reproduced by any means without permission of the publisher. Please address requests for reprint permission or for course−adoption discounts to:
Tupelo Press
P.O. Box 1767, North Adams, Massachusetts 01247
Telephone: (413) 664−9611 / Fax: (413) 664−9711
editor@tupelopress.org / www.tupelopress.org
Tupelo Press is an award−winning independent literary press that publishes fine fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in books that are a joy to hold as well as read. Tupelo Press is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, and we rely on public support to carry out our mission of publishing extraordinary work that may be outside the realm of the large commercial publishers. Financial donations are welcome and are tax deductible.
for my family
Contents
Author’s Prayer
Dancing in Odessa
Musica Humana
Natalia
Traveling Musicians
Praise
Acknowledgments
Author’s Prayer
If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,
I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.
If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man
who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.
Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh
in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.
Dancing in Odessa
Dancing in Odessa
In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows, doves covered the main district, and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbor’s backyard, producing a four-digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to the voice on the line.
My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolley, a one-armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country. Yet my country cannot be found, its citizens meet in a dream to conduct elections. He did not describe their faces, only a few names: Roland, Aladdin, Sinbad.
In Praise of Laughter
Where days bend and straighten
in a city that belongs to no nation
but all the nations of wind,
she spoke the speech of poplar trees—
her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose
composed odes to barbershops, drugstores.
Her soul walking on two feet, the soul or no soul, a child’s allowance,
she loved street musicians and knew
that my grandfather composed lectures on the supply
and demand of clouds in our country:
the State declared him an enemy of the people.
He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat
and danced naked on the table in front of our house—
he was shot, and my grandmother raped
by the public prosecutor, who stuck his pen in her vagina,
the pen which signed people off for twenty years.
But in the secret history of anger—one man's silence
lives in the bodies of others—as we dance to keep from falling,
between the doctor and the prosecutor:
my family, the people of Odessa,
women with huge breasts, old men naive and childlike,
all our words, heaps of burning feathers
that rise and rise with each retelling.
Maestro
What is memory? what makes a body glow:
an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed
when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden
—I write this now and I feel my body’s weight:
the screaming girls, 347 voices
in the story of a doctor saving them, his hands
trapped under a wall, his granddaughter dying nearby—
she whispers I don't want to die, I have eaten such apples.
He touches her mouth as a blind man reading lips
and yells Shut up! I am near the window, I
am asking for help! speaking,
he cannot stop speaking, in the dark:
of Brahms, Chopin he speaks to them to calm them.
A doctor, yes, whatever window
framed his life, outside: tomatoes grew, clouds passed and we
once lived. A doctor with a tattoo of a parrot on his trapped arm,
seeing his granddaughter's cheekbones
no longer her cheekbones, with surgical precision
stitches suffering and grace:
two days pass, he shouts
in his window (there is no window) when rescue
approaches, he speaks of Chopin, Chopin.
They cut off his hands, nurses say he is “doing OK”
—in my dream: he stands, feeding bread to pigeons, surrounded
by pigeons, birds on his head, his shoulder,
he shouts You don’t understand a thing!
he is breathing himself to sleep, the city sleeps,
there is no such city.
Aunt Rose
In a soldier’s uniform, in wooden shoes, she danced
at either end of day, my Aunt Rose.
Her husband rescued a pregnant woman
from the burning house—he heard laughter,
each day’s own little artillery—in that fire
he burnt his genitals. My Aunt Rose
took other people’s children—she clicked her tongue as they cried
and August pulled curtains evening after evening.
I saw her, chalk between her fingers,
she wrote lessons on an empty blackboard,
her hand moved and the board remained empty.
We lived in a city by the sea but there was
another city at the bottom of the sea
and only local children believed in its existence.
She believed them. She hung her husband's
on a different wall. I now see her with that picture, hammer
in her left hand, nail in her mouth.
From her mouth, a smell of wild garlic—
she moves toward me in her pajamas
arguing with me and with herself.
The evenings are my evidence, this evening
in which she dips her hands up to her elbows,
the evening is asleep inside her shoulder—her shoulder
rounded by sleep.
My Mother’s Tango
I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—
she rides a wild pony for my birthday,
a white pony on the seventh floor.
“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”
the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.
At the center of my life: my mother dances,
yes here, as in childhood, my mother
asks to describe the stages of my happiness—
she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:
between the regiments of saucers and towels,
she moves so fast—she is motionless,
opening and closing doors.
But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!
My mother’s past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.
I draw an axis through the afternoon
to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—
young, not young—my mother
gallops a pony on the seventh floor.
She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens
what is shut, shuts what is open.
American Tourist
In a city made of seaweed we danced on a rooftop, my hands
under her breasts. Subtracting
day from day, I add this woman’s ankles
to my days of atonement, her lower lip, the formal bones of her face.
We were making love all evening—
I told her stories, their rituals of rain: happiness
is money, yes, but only the smallest coins.
She asked me to pray, to bow
towards Jerusalem. We bowed to the left, I saw
two bakeries, a shoe store; the smell of hay,
smell of horses and hay. When Moses
broke the sacred tablets on Sinai, the rich
picked the pieces carved with:
“adultery” and “kill” and “theft,”
the poor got only “No” “No” “No.”
I kissed the back of her neck, an elbow,
this woman whose forgetting is a plot against forgetting,
naked in her galoshes she waltzed
and even her cat waltzed.
She said: “All that is musical in us is memory”—
but I did not know English, I danced
sitting down, she straightened
and bent and straightened, a tremble of music
a tremble in her hand.
Dancing in Odessa
We lived north of the future, days opened
letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.
My grandmother threw tomatoes
from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother's face. She understood
loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.
The night undressed us (I counted
its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past
with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter touched my eyelid—I kissed
the back of her knee. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew.
He was an angel, he had no name,
we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought
the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full
of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled,
At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.
At the local factory, my father
took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth.
The sun began a routine narration,
whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving
as the darkness spoke behind them.
It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.
I retell the story the light etches
into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me.
Musica Humana
[an elegy for Osip Mandelstam]
[A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in case they were found by Furies with a search warrant.]
While there is still some light on the page,
he escapes in a stranger’s coat with his wife.
And the cloth smells of sweat;
a dog runs after them
licking the earth where they walked and sat.
In the kitchen, on a stairwell, above the toilet,
he will show her the way to silence,
they will leave the radio talking to itself.
Making love, they turn off the lights
but the neighbor has binoculars
and he watches, dust settling on his lids.
It is the 1930s: Petersburg is a frozen ship.
The cathedrals, cafés, down Nevski Prospect
they move, as the New State
sticks its pins into them.
[In Crimia, he gathered together rich ‘liberals’ and said to them strictly: On Judgment Day, if you are asked whether you understood the poet Osip Mandelstam; say no. Have you fed him?—You must answer yes.]
I am reading aloud the book of my life on earth
and confess, I loved grapefruit.
In a kitchen: sausages; tasting vodka,
the men raise their cups.
A boy in a white shirt, I dip my finger
into sweetness. Mother washes
behind my ears. And we speak of everything
that does not come true,
which is to say: it was August.
August! the light in the trees, full of fury. August
filling hands with language that tastes like smoke.
Now, memory, pour some beer,
salt the rim of the glass; you
who are writing me, have what you want:
a golden coin, my tongue to put it under.
(The younger brother of a cloud,
he walks unshaven in dark-green pants.
In cathedrals: he falls on his knees, praying HAPPINESS!
His words on the floor are the skeletons of dead birds.)
I’ve loved, yes. Washed my hands. Spoke
of loyalty to the earth. Now death,
a loverboy, counts my fingers.
I escape and am caught, escape again
and am caught, escape
and am caught: in this song,
the singer is a clay figure,
poetry is the self—I resist
the self. Elsewhere:
St. Petersburg stands
like a lost youth
whose churches, ships, and guillotines
accelerate our lives.
[In summer 1924 Osip Mandelstam brought his young wife to St. Petersburg. Nadezhda was what the French call laide mais charmante. An eccentric? Of course he was. He threw a student down the staircase for complaining he wasn’t published, Osip shouting: Was Sappho? Was Jesus Christ?]
Poet is a voice, I say, like Icarus,
whispering to himself as he falls.
Yes, my life as a broken branch in the wind
hits the Northern ground.
I am writing now a history of snow,
the lamplight bathing the ships
that sail across the page.
But on certain afternoons