walk away from the river, from my
cries. Falling salts of mercury
I lick off without attention.
No great moon of Solomon
has been set for my tears in the skies.
A post. Why not beat my forehead to
blood on it? To smithereens! We are
like fellow criminals, fearing one
another. (The murdered thing is love.)
Don’t say these are lovers? Going into
the night? Separately? To sleep with others?
– You understand the future is up there?
he says. And I throw back my head.
To sleep! Like newly-weds over their mat!
To sleep! We can’t fall into
step. And I plead miserably: take my
arm, we aren’t convicts to walk like this.
Shock! It’s as though his soul has touched
me as his arm leans on mine. The electric
current beats along feverish wiring,
and rips. He’s leaned on my soul with his arm.
He holds me. Rainbows everywhere. What is more like a
rainbow than tears? Rain, a curtain, denser
than beads. I don’t know if such embankments can
end. But here is a bridge and
– Well then?
Here? (The hearse is ready.)
Peaceful his eyes move
upward. – Couldn’t you see me home
for the very last time?
8
Last bridge I won’t
give up or take out my hand
this is the last bridge
the last bridging between
water and firm land:
and I am saving these
coins for death
for Charon, the price of Lethe
this shadow money
from my dark hand I press
soundlessly into
the shadowy darkness of his
shadow money it is
no gleam and tinkle in it
coins for shadows:
the dead have enough poppies
This bridge
Lovers for the most
part are without hope: passion
also is just
a bridge, a means of connection
It’s warm: to nestle
close at your ribs, to move in
a visionary pause
towards nothing, beside nothing
no arms no legs
now, only the bone of my
side is alive where
it presses directly against you
life in that side
only, ear and echo is it: there
I stick like white to
egg yolk, or an eskimo to his fur
adhesive, pressing
joined to you: Siamese
twins are no nearer.
The woman you call mother
when she forgot
all things in motionless triumph
only to carry you:
she did not hold you closer.
Understand: we have
grown into one as we slept and
now I can’t jump
because I can’t let go your hand
and I won’t be torn off
as I press close to you: this
bridge is no husband
but a lover: a just slipping past
our support: for the
river is fed with bodies!
I bite in like a tick
you must tear out my roots to be rid of me
like ivy like a tick
inhuman godless
to throw me away like a thing,
when there is
no thing I ever prized
in this empty world of things.
Say this is only a dream,
night still and afterwards morning
an express to Rome?
Granada? I won’t know myself
as I push off
the Himalayas of bedclothes.
But this dark is deep:
now I warm you with my blood, listen
to this flesh.
It is far truer than poems.
If you are warm, who
will you go to tomorrow for that?
please say this bridge cannot
end
as it ends.
– Here then? His gesture could
be made by a child, or a god.
– And so? – I am biting in!
For a little more time. The last of it.
9
Blatant as factory buildings,
as alert to a call
here is the sacred and sublingual
secret wives keep from husbands and
widows from friends, here is the full
story that Eve took from the tree:
I am no more than an animal that
someone has stabbed in the stomach.
Burning. As if the soul had been
torn away with the skin. Vanished like steam
through a hole is that well-known foolish
heresy called a soul.
That Christian leprosy:
steam: save that with your poultices.
There never was such a thing.
There was a body once, wanted to
live no longer wants to live.
Forgive me! I didn’t mean it!
The shriek of torn entrails.
So prisoners sentenced to death wait
for the 4 a.m. firing squad.
At chess perhaps with a grin
they mock the corridor’s eye.
Pawns in the game of chess:
someone is playing with us.
Who? Kind gods or? Thieves?
The peephole is filled with an
eye and the red corridor
clanks. Listen the latch lifts.
One drag on tobacco, then
spit, it’s all over, spit,
along this paving of chess squares
is a direct path to the ditch
to blood. And the secret eye
the dormer eye of the moon.
And now, squinting sideways, how
far away you are already.
10
Closely, like one creature, we
start: there is our café!
There is our island, our shrine, where
in the morning, we people of the
rabble, a couple for a minute only,
conducted a morning service:
with things from country markets, sour
things seen through sleep or spring.
The coffee was nasty there
entirely made from oats (and
with oats you can extinguish
caprice in fine race-horses).
There was no smell of Araby.
Arcadia was in
that coffee.
But how she smiled at us
and sat us down by her,
sad and worldly in her wisdom
a grey-haired paramour.
Her smile was solicitous
(saying: you’ll wither! live!),
it was a smile at madness and being
penniless, at yawns and love
and – this was the chief thing –
at laughter without reason
smiles with no deliberation
and our faces without wrinkles.
Most of all at youth
at passions out of this climate
blown in from some other place
flowing from some other source
into that dim café
(burnous and Tunis) where
she smiled at hope and flesh
under old-fashioned clothes.
(My dear friend I don’t complain.
It’s just another scar.)
To think how she saw us off,
that proprietress in her cap
stiff as a Dutch hat…
Not quite remembering, not quite
understanding, we are led away from the festival –
along our street! no longer ours that
we walked many times, and no more shall.
Tomorrow the sun will rise in the West.
And then David will break with Jehovah.
– What are we doing? – We are separating.
– That’s a word that means nothing to me.
It’s the most inhumanly senseless
of words: sep arating. (Am I one of a hundred?)
It is simply a word of four syllables and
behind their sound lies: emptiness.
Wait! Is it even correct in Serbian or
Croatian? Is it a Czech whim, this word.
It is insane unnatural
a sound to burst the eardrums, and spread out
far beyond the limits of longing itself.
Separation – the word is not in the Russian
language. Or the language of women. Or men.
Nor in the language of God. What are we – sheep?
To stare about as we eat.
Separation – in what language is it,
when the meaning itself doesn’t exist?
or even the sound! Well – an empty one, like
the noise of a saw in your sleep perhaps.
Separation. That belongs to the school of
Khlebnikov’s nightingale-groaning
swan-like…
so how does it happen?
Like a lake of water running dry.
Into air. I can feel our hands touching.
To separate. Is a shock of thunder
upon my head – oceans rushing into
a wooden house. This is Oceania’s
furthest promontory. And the streets are steep.
To separate. That means to go downward
downhill the sighing sound of two
heavy soles and at last a hand receives
the nail in it. A logic that turns
everything over. To separate
means we have to become
single creatures again
we who had grown into one.
11
To lose everything at once –
what could be tidier?
This is an end to our days
as we wander in these outskirts,
and to our joys – read burdens –
to our lives, homes and both of us.
Empty dachas. I honour them all,
as I would an old mother.
To abandon home is action.
What is empty can’t be emptied.
(As for dachas which are part empty,
you may as well burn them right away!)
So – do not flinch! When
the wound opens.
You must go into the outskirts
and simply rip out the stitches.
Let me put this plainly: love
is no more than a line of stitches,
a seam, yes, which is no protection.
So don’t beg to be shielded.
These stitches hold the dead to the earth.
that is how we are stitched
and time will show what kind of
stitching: single – or reinforced.
Whichever, rip the stitches out,
friend, leave only shreds.
I’m glad they tear out easily –
better to rip than unravel.
Look under the basting – there:
a living red vein not decay.
Rip and tear, you lose nothing.
Let’s make for the outskirts
Let’s go way out of town!
And divorce our spirits for ever.
There’s a wind in the brain, today:
an execution to witness.
The one who leaves feels no loss
even as dawn is breaking.
I sewed your whole life in a night
perfectly, without basting.
If it’s crooked, don’t complain!
– You can just rip out the stitches.
Ours are untidy souls. Both
are covered with scars.
Let’s make a violent sweep of this:
in the outskirts, out of time.
To the suburbs! The heel of fate
is pressed into wet clay –
So blame my hurried work
friend, or the living thread
which clings, however tangled.
Here is the last street lamp.
*
– Here then? A glance, as if in
conspiracy. A glance. From a lesser race.
A glance – Can we climb the mountain,
for the very last time?
12
Dense as a horse mane is:
rain in our eyes. And hills.
We have passed the suburb.
Now we are out of town,
which is there but not for us.
Stepmother not mother.
Nowhere is lying ahead.
And here is where we fall.
A field with. A fence and.
Brother and sister. Standing.
Life is only a suburb:
so you must build elsewhere.
Ugh, what a lost cause
it is, ladies and gentlemen,
for the whole world is suburb:
Where are the real towns?
Rain rips at us madly.
We stand and break with each other.
In three months, these must be
the first moments of sharing.
Is it true, God, that you even
tried to borrow from Job?
Well, it didn’t come off.
Still. We are. Outside town.
Beyond it! Understand? Outside!
That means we’ve passed the walls.
Life is a place where it’s forbidden
to live. Like the Hebrew quarter.
And isn’t it more worthy to
become an eternal Jew?
Anyone not a reptile
suffers the same pogrom.
Life is for converts only
Judases of all faiths.
Let’s go to leprous islands
or hell anywhere only not
life which puts up with traitors, with
those who are sheep to butchers!
This paper which gives me the
right to live – I stamp. With my feet.
Stamp! for the shield of David.
Vengeance! for heaps of bodies
and they say after all (delicious) the
Jews didn’t want to live!
Ghetto of the chosen. Beyond this
ditch. No mercy
In this most Christian of worlds
all poets are Jews.
13
This is how they sharpen knives on a
stone, and sweep sawdust up with
brooms. Under my hands there is
something wet and furry.
Now where are those twin male
virtues: strength, dryness?
Here beneath my hand I can
feel tears. Not rain!
What temptations can still be
spoken of? Property is water.
Since I felt your diamond eyes under
my hands, flowing.
There is no more I can lose. We have
reached the end of ending.
And so I simply stroke, and
stroke. And stroke your face.
This is the kind of pride we have:
Marinkas are Polish girls.
Since now the eyes of an eagle weep
underneath these hands…
Can you be crying? My friend, my
– everything! Please forgive me!
How large and salty now is the
taste of this in my fist.
Male tears are – cruel! They
rise over my head! Weep,
there will soon be others to
heal any gu
ilt towards me.
Fish of identical
sea. A sweep upward! like
… any dead shells and any
lips upon lips.
In tears.
Wormwood
to taste.
– And tomorrow
when
I am awake?
14
A slope like a path for
sheep. With town noises.
Three trollops approach.
They are laughing. At tears.
They are laughing the full noon of
their bellies shake, like waves!
They laugh at the
inappropriate
disgraceful, male
tears of yours, visible
through the rain like scars!
Like a shameful pearl on
the bronze of a warrior.
These first and last tears
pour them now – for me –
for your tears are pearls
that I wear in my crown.
And my eyes are not lowered.
I stare through the shower.
Yes, dolls of Venus
stare at me! because
this is a closer bond
than the transport of lying down.
The Song of Songs itself