Easy,
to put up with fetid air
if it isn’t soiled by outsiders!
It was old, of course, and
rotting, but still… Not a hostel room!
I don’t know about being born
but this is for dying in!
1922
Prince, let’s have no more disturbing
these wormy flower-beds. Look at
the living rose, and think of a woman
snatching a single day – from the few left to her.
Prince Hamlet, you defile the Queen’s
womb. Enough. A virgin cannot
judge passion. Don’t you know Phaedra
was more guilty, yet men still sing of her,
and will go on singing. You, with your blend
of chalk and rot, you bony
scandalmonger, how can you ever
understand a fever in the blood?
Beware, if you continue… I can
rise up through flagstones into the grand bed-chamber
of so much sweetness, I myself, to defend her.
I myself – your own undying passion!
1923
1
Along these singing lines that run
from pole to pole, supporting heaven
I send along to you my portion
of earthly dust.
From wires
to poles. This alley sighs
the telegraphic words: I lo-o-ve
I beg. (No printed form would
hold that word! But wires are simpler.)
Atlas himself upon these poles
lowered the racetrack
of the Gods.
Along these files
The telegraphic word: g-oo-dbye…
Do you hear it? This last word
torn from my throat: Forg-i-ve…
Over these calm Atlantic fields
the rigging holds. And higher, higher.
All the messages fuse together
in Ariadne’s web: Ret-u-rn…
and plaintive cries of: I won’t leave…
These wires are steely guards upon
voices from Hell,
receding… far into that distance
still implored for some compassion.
Compassion? (But in such a chorus
can you distinguish such a noise?)
That cry, arising as death comes –
through mounds – and ditches – that last
waft of her – passion that persists –
Euridice’s: A-a-alas
and not – a –
17 March 1923
2
If I spoke to you directly – not like this,
crushed into lines and rhymes –
but from my whole heart, even Racine
or Shakespeare could not cope with it!
Everyone wept, with poison in their blood.
They wept to see a snake among the roses.
But Phaedra had only one Hyppolitus,
and Ariadne only wept for Theseus –
while in losing you, I have lost
everything I love, I am adrift,
there is no shore, no boundary to pain –
everyone who ever lived is forfeit.
What can I hope for now? The very air
I breathe is so accustomed to you.
My own bones have grown into a prison,
lonely as Naxos – my blood is the Styx.
Vanity! In me – and everywhere!
To close my eyes against it has no meaning
– since there is no daylight – and besides
the date on the calendar is lying…
and when you – break off like this –
I am no Ariadne, no Phaedra.
Only loss!
Over which seas, in what cities
shall I look for you? (A blind
search for the invisible.) I must
rely on wires, and weep at every pole.
18 March 1923
3
Sorting through everything, throwing out
whatever I can, I reject first of all
the semaphore, that wildest discord
– though a whole chorus rushes to the rescue,
with sleeves like banners, still
I throw them all out – shamelessly.
A lyric drone of wires hums
above as if I were in traction.
The telegraph! Could we not communicate
more quickly? The sky is still above us,
a constant dispenser of emotion,
as tangible as lips…
The heavens arch above me
with dawn on the horizon,
even at this distance I can weave
a thread to reach you.
Across the harshest years of this epoch,
over disgusting piles of tackle and gear,
here fly my unpublished sighs
my raging passions – they are
simpler than a telegram (loyal, urgent
even hackneyed) they will cross
the space between us along
these wires as gutters flood in spring.
19 March 1923
4
A camp of freedom!
Telegraph wires carry
this cry of passion from
my womb to the winds.
A magnetic spark from my heart
has torn these rhythms open:
‘Metre and measure?’ The fourth
dimension announces itself!
Hurry – over dead metres – and
over false witness – whistling!
Hush… when suddenly your head
begins to ache (there are wires
everywhere) you will recognise
all this obscure verbiage is only
the song of a strayed nightingale who sings
– without the one you love the world is empty! –
for the lyre in your hands, beloved,
and the Leila of your lips.
20 March 1923
5
Patiently, as tarmac under hammers,
patiently, as what is new matures,
patiently, as death must be awaited,
patiently, as vengeance may be nursed.
So I shall wait for you. (One look down to earth.
Cobblestones. Lips between. And numb.)
Patiently, as sloth can be prolonged,
patiently, as someone threading beads.
Toboggans squeak outside, the door answers
Now the wind’s roar is inside the forest.
What has arrived is writing, whose corrections
are lofty as a change of reign, or a prince’s entrance.
And let’s go home!
This is inhuman –
yet it’s mine.
25 March 1923
6
At the very hour my dearest brother
passed beyond the last elm
(with a formal wave of the hand)
my tears were larger than my eyes.
In the hour when my dearest friend
sailed round the last Cape
(my whole being sighed: Come back!)
and the wave of my hand stretched
after him – from my shoulders –
my lips – followed – entreating
but my speech lost all sound,
my hands lost their fingers.
This is the hour when we approach
with gifts – nobler than the Tsars.
The hour when I come down the mountain.
And the mountain understands.
Wishes have gathered in a circle.
Destinies have shifted. Don’t complain!
In this hour, hands are invisible.
And souls begin to see.
In the hour when my dear guest
left me – Look, look at us!
Our tears were larger than human
eyes – and wider than the Atlantic
… – Stars!
26 March 1923
8
Wherever you are, I can reach you
to summon up – or send you back again!
Yet I’m no sorceress. My eyes grew sharp in
The white book of the distant River Don.
From the height of my cedar I see a world
where court decisions float, and all lights wander
yet from here I can turn the whole sea upside down
to bring you from its depths – or send you under!
You can’t resist me. Since I’m everywhere
as daylight, underground, in breath and bread
I’m always present. That is how I shall procure
your lips – as God will surely claim your soul –
In your last breath, even in that choking hour
I’ll be there at the great Archangel’s fence
To put these bloodied lips up against the thorns
of Judgement – and to snatch you from your bier!
Surrender! This is no fairy tale
Surrender! Any arrow will fall back on you.
Surrender! Don’t you know no one escapes
the power of creatures reaching out with
breath alone? (That’s how I soar up
with my eyes shut and mica round my mouth.)
Be careful, the prophetess tricked Samuel.
Perhaps I’ll hoodwink you. Return alone,
because another girl is with you. Now on Judgement Day
there’ll be no litigation. So till then
I’ll wander. And yet I’ll have your soul
As an alchemist knows how to win your
lips…
27 March 1923
9
Spring makes us sleepy. So let’s sleep.
We are apart, but separation
can be healed by sleeping. Perhaps
we may meet each other in a dream.
An all-seeing eye knows into whose
hand I will next place my palm;
to whom I will reveal this sorrow
and share my unhappiness
which is eternal (no child,
no father expects it to end).
It is the misery of those who cry,
without a shoulder to lean on,
about memory slipping through
fingers, like a stone from a bridge…
about the way all places are taken,
all hearts already rented.
It concerns serving – endlessly – having
to live – without happiness –
written off – before recognition – in archives
– that Paradise of the crippled –
it is about you and I, like quiet streams
running deeper than precious metal –
about everything stitched by a seamstress:
drudgery – drudgery – drudgery.
5 April 1923
10
With other people – in heaps
of roses – in bits of weeks
only guessed at…
I remain
yours, like a chosen bundle,
even as the wind picks me up
like sand or gravel, and the rails
– overhearing me – send my dust
out to breadless provinces.
Do you recognise this shawl? Hotter
than Hell gates when pulled across
a freezing body –
look, I fling it open.
Below the hem: the miracle of a child.
It is Song itself! And with this first-born,
greater than any Rachel, with –
my own imagination I dislodge
this stubborn sediment.
11 April 1923
Young men, don’t ride away! Sand
stifled the soul of the
last one to disappear and now
he’s altogether dumb.
To look for him is useless.
(Young men, I never lie.)
That lost one now reposes
in a reliable grave.
He once rode into me as if
through lands of
miracles and fire, with all
the power of poetry, and
I was: dry, sandy, without day.
He used poetry
to invade my depths, like those of
any other country!
Listen to this story of two
souls, without jealousy:
we entered one another’s eyes
as if they were oases –
I took him into me as if he were
a god, in passion,
simply because of a charming tremor
in his young throat.
Without a name he sank into me. But now
he’s gone. Don’t search for him.
All deserts forget the thousands of
those who sleep in them.
And afterwards the Sahara in one
seething collapse will
cover you also with sand like sprinkled
foam. And be your hill!
1923
1
A poet’s speech begins a great way off.
A poet is carried far away by speech
by way of planets, signs, and the ruts
of roundabout parables, between yes and no,
in his hands even sweeping gestures from a bell-tower
become hook-like. For the way of comets
is the poet’s way. And the blown-apart
links of causality are his links. Look up
after him without hope. The eclipses of
poets are not foretold in the calendar.
He is the one that mixes up the cards
and confuses arithmetic and weight,
demands answers from the school bench,
the one who altogether refutes Kant,
the one in the stone graves of the Bastille
who remains like a tree in its loveliness.
And yet the one whose traces have always vanished,
the train everyone always arrives
too late to catch
for the path of comets
is the path of poets: they burn without warming,
pick without cultivating. They are: an explosion, a breaking in –
and the mane of their path makes the curve of a
graph cannot be foretold by the calendar.
2
There are superfluous people about in
this world, out of sight, who
aren’t listed in any directory; and
home for them is a rubbish heap.
They are hollow, jostled creatures:
who keep silent, dumb as dung, they are
nails catching in your silken hem,
dirt imagined under your wheels.
Here they are, ghostly and invisible, the
sign is on them, like the speck of the leper.
People like Job in this world who
might even have envied him.
1 comment