NEGATIVE SPACE
also by luljeta lleshanaku
Available from New Directions
Child of Nature
Fresco
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
—OSCAR WILDE
CONTENTS
From Almost Yesterday (2012)
Almost Yesterday
Small-Town Stations
The Unknown
History Class
Children of Morality
Night Fishing
Tobacco
Used Books
Negative Space
Mine, Yours
The End of Summer
Via Politica
The Deal
In the Town of Apples
Acupuncture
First Week of Retirement
A Conversation with Charles Simic
The Business of Dying
Metallic
The Body’s Delay
Two by Two
Gloves
I Came, I Saw, I Left . . .
Index
Transit Terminal
Live Music
Ramesses’s Last Journey
From Homo Antarcticus (2015)
Homo Antarcticus
Something Bigger Than Us
Menelaus’s Return
The Railway Boys
Metamorphosis
January 1, Dawn
Aging
Fishermen’s Village
Commit to Memory
Cities
Anatomical Cut
Self-Portrait in Woven Fabrics
Water and Carbon
This Gesture
The Stairs
Lost in Translation
A Perfect Day
One’s Destiny
Inside a Suitcase
Things I Liked About Him
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Landmarks
Cover
from ALMOST YESTERDAY
ALMOST YESTERDAY
Strangers are building a new house next door.
They shout, swear, cheer.
Hammers and a bustle of arms.
They whistle melodies
bookended by hiccups.
Their large window opens to the east.
A lazy boy in sandals
drags a bucket of water half his size.
Sedative.
The world holds its breath for one moment.
The page turns.
Trucks loaded with cement
leave the symbol for infinity in the dirt.
Along the wall, a plumb line measures the height
like a medallion hanging into space
or from someone’s neck whose face
nobody bothers to look at.
They started with the barn.
This is how a new life begins—
with an axiom.
I remember my father
returning sweaty from the fields
at lunch break; he and mother
coming out of the barn
tidying their tangled hair in a hurry,
both flushed, looking around in fear
like two thieves.
Their bedroom was cool and clean
on the second floor of the house.
I still ask myself: “Why in the barn?”
But I also remember
that the harvest was short that year,
the livestock hungry;
we were on a budget
and switched the lights off early.
I was twelve.
My sleep deep, my curiosity numbed,
tossed carelessly to the side
like mounds of snow along the road.
But I remember the barn clearly, as if it were yesterday,
almost yesterday.
You cannot easily forget what you watch with one closed eye—
the death of the hero in the film,
or your first eclipse of the sun.
SMALL-TOWN STATIONS
Trains approach them like ghosts,
the way a husband returning after midnight
slips under the covers,
keeping his cold feet at a distance.
A post office. A ticket booth. The slow clock hanging from a nail.
Some of the passengers have been sitting in the same chairs for a while now.
They know that you must wait for the moment
and that the moment will not wait for you.
Only a few get on; fewer get off.
The man sitting on a bench
kills time reading a local newspaper.
Train platforms are all the same,
except for the boy hiding behind the pole,
the collar of his school uniform askew.
He is not the firstborn, but the prodigal son,
the chosen one for adventure and the parable of return.
Fried dough, candy, mint sodas … !
It’s the wandering vendor who stirs the thick air
with his clumsy voice.
His pockets are empty but deep.
Dust clings freely
on his sticky fingers, along with a strand of hair,
and in the evening, sometimes,
an entire city.
You don’t forget small-town stations easily,
the short stops with ordinary charm.
If you pay attention to every detail,
they will become our alibi for not arriving on time
or for never arriving at all
wherever we had set out to go.
THE UNKNOWN
When a child is born, we name it after an ancestor,
and so the recycling continues. Not out of nostalgia,
but from our fear of the unknown.
With a suitcase full of clothes, a few icons, a knife with a shiny blade,
the immigrant brought along names of places he came from
and the places he claimed he named New Jersey, New Mexico,
Jericho, New York, and Manchester.
The same condition for the unknown above us:
we named planets and stars after capricious, vengeful gods—
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Centaur—
as if making a shield against the cosmos.
Names leap ahead like hunting hounds,
with the belief they clear the road
of the journey’s unexpected obstructions.
And we call “destiny” our common unknown,
a genderless, unconjugated, unspecified name.
Its authority hangs on one shoulder
like the tunic of a Roman senator
leaving only one arm bare and free.
HISTORY CLASS
The desks in the front row were always empty.
I never understood why.
The second row was all smacking lips
of those who recited the lessons by heart.
In the middle were the timid ones
who took notes and stole the occasional piece of chalk.
And in the last row, young boys craning their heads
toward the beauty marks on the blonde girls’ necks.
I don’t remember the teacher’s name, the room,
or the names of the portraits on the wall,
except the irony clinging to the stump of his arm
like foam around the Cape of Good Hope.
When his healthy arm pointed out Bismarck,
his hollow sleeve gestured in an unknown direction.
We couldn’t tell which one of us was the target,
making us question
the tiniest bit of who we thought we were.
Out of his insatiable mouth flew battle dates,
names, causes. Never resolutions or winners.
We could hardly wait for the bell
to write our own history,
as we already knew everything in those days.
But sometimes his hollow sleeve
felt warm and human, like a cricket-filled summer night.
It hovered, waiting to land somewhere. On a valley or roof.
It searched for a hero among us—
not among the athletic or sparkly-eyed ones,
but among those stamped with innocence.
One day, each one of us will be that teacher
standing before a seventeen-year-old boy
or a girl with a beauty mark on her neck.
And the desks in the front row will remain empty,
abandoned by those who are always in doubt.
They’re the missing arm of history
that makes the other arm appear omnipotent.
CHILDREN OF MORALITY
It was the Europeans who taught indigenous people shame,
beginning with the covering up of intimate parts.
Other civilizations were luckier.
inscribed on stone tablets.
Where I grew up, morality had a form, body, and name:
Cain, unremorseful Mary Magdalene, Ruth, Delilah, and Rachel.
Morality was easily pointed at by a seven-year-old’s ink-stained finger.
Perfect examples of vice or virtue
where time lays its eggs on a swamp.
And so I received the first lessons in morality
without chewing them like cough syrup;
other things happened more abstractly
and under a chaste roof.
And strangely, even the second generation didn’t disappoint:
their descendants became another Cain, another Ruth,
another Mary Magdalene who never grew up.
Clichés were simultaneously risky and protective for them,
like trying to use dry snow to make an igloo.
Now I know so much more about morality.
In fact, I actually could be a moralist,
pointing my index finger out as a rhetorical gesture.
But without referring to anyone. Where did everyone go?
A door opened by accident.
Light broke through by force
and, as in a dark room,
erased their silver bromide portraits
which were once flesh and bone.
NIGHT FISHING
He attends funerals. It’s his latest hobby.
Nobody knows who he is
or what connects him to the dead person.
They shake his hand without asking questions
(this isn’t a wedding
where you must have an invitation).
He doesn’t know the dead man’s name,
if he’d been young or old, short or tall,
what his job was, if he left any debts, and especially if,
for him, death was an end or a beginning.
(And why should he know this anyway?)
He follows the row of backs turning toward the exit,
their accidental brush
against the marble angels’ welcoming wings.
Names, dates are whispered,
and koliva trembles in paper cups.*
Headstones mark burial plots
already reserved—
clean and proud
like blank checks.
*
When he was a child,
he eavesdropped on a fisherman
returning to the dock at midnight,
his boat filled with bass he had sold
before catching them.
Crabs are an easy lure for bass at night
and bass for the fisherman
and the fisherman for the shore
drawn to an artificial fly at the end of the line.
Even the shore itself is a lure
for the dark waters, high tides under a full moon,
apotheosis of the universe.
*
“Suddenly, today, he got up before dawn.
Didn’t have any pain anymore. Asked for something to eat.
At that moment, it hit us that he would be gone.”
“What did he ask for?”
“Leftovers from dinner.”
“Do you think he understood?”
“What we don’t know makes us appreciate what little we have.”
“Perhaps … do you know what happens to those on death row?
I heard they can choose their last meal themselves
before being tied to the electric chair.”
“You don’t say!”
*
What is the difference between these people
hurrying toward the exit of the graveyard
and the ten brothers, Jacob’s sons, who threw Joseph into a pit,
in the heart of the desert, leaving him
at the mercy of the first merchant to pass by?
In any case, the living cannot wait to leave and turn away.
Their backs a single starless fabric
like fishing nights,
or like a low cloud of gunpowder
in a temporary ceasefire zone.
*
*Koliva: boiled wheat used liturgically, mainly at funerals, in the Eastern Orthodox church.
TOBACCO
Here, everyone smokes.
In the evening, every wife
recognizes her respective husband
by the faraway glow of his cigarette
at the end of a cobblestone street.
When the pulse of the glow increases, the wives
feel the storm rushing in and hurry to the fire to cook dinner.
But when the glow is scarce and lazy
like the dying fluorescence of a jellyfish on the sand,
they know they should be quiet and leave the men alone.
At the café
where three people smoke around a table
the fourth cannot refuse a cigarette.
(You cannot stand outside a shamanic fire,
is offered with a hand over the heart).
When they talk about women,
the ash of the half-burned cigarette
hangs expectantly
and a thick yellow ribbon of smoke
encircles them like the police tape
at the scene of a crime.
Later, one husband
starts to share how he has just punished his son
by sending him into the mountains with the sheep for two weeks.
Then he goes quiet. His hands dig into his pockets
as he waits for approval, but he only gets tobacco crumbs.
A cigarette.
There’s always a man behind it,
a man once a shepherd who detested his own father
and now savors the solemnity
of being hated in return.
My uncle, too, smokes nonstop.
His ashtray is a navel
stuffed with the fibers of each day
aging on his body.
Outside in the yard
rain and snow make haste
to wipe out whatever discarded cigarette butts
as though they were spent shells
from a civil war devoid of glory.
USED BOOKS
On one of those mornings
when all the clocks’ hands point to the nadir
and graying snow neutralizes heart burn,
the only sound is the ringing of the doorbell:
a book ordered weeks ago left on the front steps.
The postman doesn’t need confirmation.
Geography III, a used book by Elizabeth Bishop.
Packaged carefully. The address clearly printed on the box
and the portrait of a stern politician on three stamps.
A previous owner
has marked several lines, placing
his own geography next to her words:
“… my poor old island’s still
un-rediscovered, un-renameable.
None of the books has ever got it right.”
Who was this reader? A man or woman?
Maybe lying in bed, without anyone around,
heavily underlining, several places in red,
or commenting in blue while
waiting at an airport for a delayed flight.
But the loops that circle words are isobars—
one needs to have reached rock-bottom to understand these marks.
And now it’s my turn to add my own geography.
There’s hardly any space left, not even for shadows.
The black ring of a coffee cup and the careless ash of a cigarette
are my only traces. My fear of clarity.
A future reader might be my daughter (or one of my nieces)
who could prefer darkness and the scent of pencil lead.
She’s left to dog-ear the pages, tear the corners with her lips,
and unknowingly a blonde strand of hair drops onto the page.
And yet another reader
will not leave any traces at all
but simply sell the book to a map collector
and thus create their own geography,
their own religion.
Indeed, none of us will read it to the end,
running away from it abruptly the way one evacuates a house,
leaving everything suspended:
the cat scratching the cabinets for food, an abandoned shoe,
the faucet’s thin trickle, beds still warm,
the TV screen broadcasting a regularly scheduled film,
and time, which needs an audience to exist.
NEGATIVE SPACE
1.
I was born on a Tuesday in April.
I didn’t cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn’t even mad.
I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude
inside the belly for nine months straight.
Two workers welded bunk beds at the end
of the delivery room. One on top of the other.
My universe might have been the white lime ceiling,
or the embodiment of Einstein’s bent space
in the aluminum springs of the bed above
that curved toward the center.
Neither cold, nor warm.
“It was a clear day,” my mother told me.
It’s hard to believe
there were a few romantic evenings
when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina
and red-laced magma
decadently peeling off
a silver candlestick.
Infants’ cries and milk fever
turned to salt from the stench of bleach—
abrasive, unequivocal.
With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick,
the janitor casually extends the negative space
of the black-and-white-tiled floor
like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness