sneaking up their little knees. They cry:
– Chrys – o – lite.
Red moss! Blue caves!
(Feet go deeper. Skies rise higher.)
Mirror boxes. Crystal balls. Something’s
been left behind, something grows closer…
You’re stuck up to the knees! Careful.
– Ah this chrys-o-prase!
The water is shoulder high on
little mice in schoolday clothes.
Little snub-nose, – higher, higher
now the water’s at your throat.
It’s sweeter than bed linen…
– Crystals! Crystals!
In my kingdom: (The flute sounds the gentlest dolce)
Time dwindles, eyes grow larger.
Is that a sea gull? or is it a baby’s bonnet?
Legs grow heavy, hearts grow lighter.
Water reaches to the chin.
Mourn, friends and relatives!
Isn’t this a fine palace
for the Bürgermeister’s daughter?
Here are eternal dreams, words without pathways.
The flute grows sweeter, hearts more quiet.
Follow without thinking. Listen. No need for thought!
The flute becomes sweeter still, hearts even quieter.
– Mutter. Don’t call me in for supper…
Bu-u-bbles!
1925
from POEMS TO A SON
Forget us, children. Our conscience
need not belong to you.
You can be free to write the tale
of your own days and passions.
Here in this family album
lies the salt family of Lot.
It is for you to reckon up
the many claims on Sodom.
You didn’t fight your brothers
my curly headed boy!
So this is your time, this is your day.
The land is purely yours.
Sin, cross, quarrel, anger,
these are ours. There have been
too many funerals held by now
for an Eden you’ve never seen
whose fruit you never tasted.
So now, put off your mourning.
Understand: they are blind
who lead you, but then
our quarrel is not your quarrel,
So as you rush from Meudon
and race to the Kuban
children, prepare for battle
in the field of your own days.
January 1932
Homesickness
Homesickness! that long
exposed weariness!
It’s all the same to me now
where I am altogether lonely
or what stones I wander over
home with a shopping bag to
a house that is no more mine
than a hospital or a barracks.
It’s all the same to me, captive
lion what faces I move through
bristling, or what human crowd will
cast me out as it must
into myself, into my separate internal
world, a Kamchatka bear without ice.
Where I fail to fit in (and I’m not trying) or
where I’m humiliated it’s all the same.
And I won’t be seduced by the thought of
my native language, its milky call.
How can it matter in what tongue I
am misunderstood by whoever I meet
(or by what readers, swallowing
newsprint, squeezing for gossip?)
They all belong to the twentieth
century, and I am before time,
stunned, like a log left
behind from an avenue of trees.
People are all the same to me, everything
is the same, and it may be the most
indifferent of all are these
signs and tokens which once were
native but the dates have been
rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere.
For my country has taken so little care
of me that even the sharpest spy could
go over my whole spirit and would
detect no native stain there.
Houses are alien, churches are empty
everything is the same:
But if by the side of the path one
particular bush rises
the rowanberry…
1934
I opened my veins
I opened my veins. Unstoppably
life spurts out with no remedy.
Now I set out bowls and plates.
Every bowl will be shallow.
Every plate will be small.
And overflowing their rims,
into the black earth, to nourish
the rushes unstoppably
without cure, gushes
poetry…
1934
Epitaph
1
Just going out for a minute –
left your work (which the idle
call chaos) behind on the table.
And left the chair behind when you went where?
I ask around all Paris, for it’s
only in stories or pictures
that people rise to the skies:
where is your soul gone, where?
In the cupboard, two-doored like a shrine,
look all your books are in place.
In each line the letters are there.
Where has it gone to, your face?
Your face
your warmth
your shoulder
where did they go?
2
Useless with eyes like nails to
penetrate the black soil
As true as a nail in the mind
you are not here, not here.
It’s useless turning my eyes
and fumbling round the whole sky.
Rain. Pails of rain-water. But
you are not there, not there.
Neither one of the two. Bone is
too much bone. And spirit is too much spirit.
Where is the real you? All of you?
Too much here. Too much there.
And I won’t exchange you for sand
and steam. You took me for kin,
and I won’t give you up for a corpse
and a ghost: a here, and a there.
It’s not you, not you, not you,
however much priests intone
that death and life are one:
God’s too much God, worm – too much worm!
You are one thing, corpse and spirit.
We won’t give you up for the smoke of
censers
or flowers
on graves
If you are anywhere, it’s here in
us: and we honour best all those who
have gone by despising division.
It is all of you that has gone.
3
Because once when you were young and bold
you did not leave me to rot alive among
bodies without souls or fall dead among walls
I will not let you die altogether.
Because, fresh and clean, you took me
out by the hand, to freedom and brought spring leaves
in bundles into my house I shall not
let you be grown over with weeds and forgotten.
And because you met the status of my
first grey hairs like a son with pride
greeting their terror with a child’s joy:
I shall not let you go grey into men’s hearts.
4
The blow muffled through years of
forgetting, of not knowing:
That blow reaches me now like the song of a
woman, or like horses neighing.
Through an inert building, a song of passion and
the blow comes:
dulled by forgetfulness, by not knowing which is
a soundless thicket.
It is the sin of memory, which has no eyes or
lips or flesh or nose,
the silt of all the days and nights
we have been without each other
the blow is muffled with moss and waterweed:
so ivy devours the
core of the living thing it is ruining
– a knife through a feather bed.
Window wadding, our ears are plugged with it
and with that other wool
outside windows of snow and the weight of spiritless
years: and the blow is muffled.
1935
Readers of Newspapers
It crawls, the underground snake,
crawls, with its load of people.
And each one has his
newspaper, his skin
disease; a twitch of chewing;
newspaper caries.
Masticators of gum,
And who are the readers? old men? athletes?
soldiers? No face, no features,
no age. Skeletons – there’s no
face, only the newspaper page.
All Paris is dressed
this way from forehead to navel.
Give it up, girl, or
you’ll give birth to
a reader of newspapers.
Sway he lived with his sister.
Swaying he killed his father.
They blow themselves up with pettiness
as if they were swaying with drink.
For such gentlemen what
is the sunset or the sunrise?
They swallow emptiness,
these readers of newspapers.
For news read: calumnies.
For news read: embezzling,
in every column slander
every paragraph some disgusting thing.
With what, at the Last Judgement
will you come before the light?
Grabbers of small moments,
readers of newspapers.
Gone! Lost! Vanished! So,
the old maternal terror.
But mother, the Gutenberg Press
is more terrible than Schwarz’ powder.
It’s better to go to a graveyard
than into the prurient
sickbay of scab-scratchers,
these readers of newspapers.
And who is it rots our sons
now in the prime of their life?
Those corrupters of blood
the writers of newspapers.
Look, friends much
stronger than in these lines, do
I think this, when with
a manuscript in my hand
I stand before the face
there is no emptier place
than before the absent
face of an editor
of newspapers’ evil filth.
1935
Desk
1
My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You’ve been with me on
every road I’ve taken.
My scar and my protection.
My loaded writing mule.
Your tough legs have endured
the weight of all my dreams, and
burdens of piled-up thoughts.
Thank you for toughening me.
No worldly joy could pass
your severe looking-glass
you blocked the first temptation,
and every base desire
your heavy oak outweighed
lions of hate, elephants
of spite you intercepted.
Thank you for growing with me
as my need grew in size
I’ve been laid out across you
so many years alive
while you’ve grown broad and wide
and overcome me. Yes,
however my mouth opens
you stretch out limitless.
You’ve nailed me to your wood.
I’m glad. To be pursued.
And torn up. At first light.
To be caught. And commanded:
Fugitive. Back to your chair!
I’m glad you’ve guarded me
and bent my life away
from blessings that don’t last,
as wizards guide sleep walkers!
My battles burn as signs.
You even use my blood to set out
all my acts in lines –
in columns, as you are a pillar
of light. My source of power!
You lead me as the Hebrews once
were led forward by fire.
Take blessings now from me,
as one put to the test, on
elbows, forehead, knotted knees,
your knife edge to my breast.
2
I celebrate thirty years
of union truer than love
I know every notch in your wood.
You know the lines in my face.
Haven’t you written them there?
devouring reams of paper
teaching me only today.
You’ve thrown my important letters
and money in floods together,
repeating: for every single verse
today has to be the deadline.
You’ve warned me of retribution
not to be measured in spoonfulls.
And when my body will be laid out,
great fool! Let it be on you then.
3
The rest of you can eat me up
I just record your behaviour!
For you they’ll find dining tables
to lay you out. This desk for me!
Because I’ve been happy with little
there are foods I’ve never tasted.
The rest of you dine slowly.
You’ve eaten too much and too often.
Places are already chosen
long before birth for everyone.
The place of adventures is settled,
and the places of gratification.
Truffles for you not pencils.
Pickles instead of dactyls
and you express your pleasure
in belches and not in verses.
At your head funeral candles
must be thick-legged asparagus:
surely your road from this world
will cross a dessert table!
Let’s puff Havana tobacco
on either side of you then;
and let your shrouds be made
from the finest of Dutch linen.
And so as not to waste such
fine cloth let them shake you
with left-overs and crumbs
into the grave that waits for you.
Your souls at the post mortem
will be like stuffed capons.
But I shall be there naked
with only two wings for cover.
1933-5
Bus
The bus jumped, like a brazen
evil spirit, a demon
cutting across the traffic
in streets as cramped as footnotes,
it rushed on its way shaking
like a concert-hall vibrating
with applause. And we shook in it!
Demons too. Have you seen
seeds under a tap? We were
like peas in boiling soup,
or Easter toys dancing in
alcohol. Mortared grain!
Teeth in a chilled mouth.
What has been shaken out someone
could use for a chandelier:
all the beads and the bones
of an old woman. A necklace
on that girl’s breast. Bouncing.
The child at his mother’s nipple.
Shaken without reference
like pears all of us shaken
in vibrato, like violins.
The violence shook our souls
into laughter, and back into childhood.
Young again. Yes. The joy of that
being thrown into girlhood! Or
perhaps further back, to become
a tomboy with toothy grin.
It was as if the piper
had led us, not out of town, but
right out of the calendar.
Laughter exhausted us all.
I was too weak to stand.
Enfeebled, I kept on my feet only
by holding your belt in my hand.
Askew, head on, the bus was
crazed like a bull, it leapt
as if at a red cloth,
to rush round a sharp bend
and then, quite suddenly
stopped.
… So, between hills, the creature
lay obedient and still.
Lord, what blue surrounded us,
how everywhere was green!
The hurt of living gone,
like January’s tin.
Green was everywhere,
a strange and tender green.
A moist, uneasy noise of green
flowed through our veins’ gutters.
Green struck my head open,
and freed me from all thinking!