Map (17 page)

A fire that can't come up with anything better

than burning the Master's trustful finger one more time?

Is this the definitive, actual world:

scattered wealth that can't be gathered,

useless luxury, forbidden options?

 

“No,” the Master cries, and stomps all the feet

he can muster—for such great despair

that beetle's six legs wouldn't be enough.

 

 

Life, you're beautiful (I say),

you just couldn't get more fecund,

more befrogged or nightingaley,

more anthillful or sproutspouting.

 

I'm trying to court life's favor,

to get into its good graces,

to anticipate its whims.

I'm always the first to bow,

 

always there where it can see me

with my humble, reverent face,

soaring on the wings of rapture,

falling under waves of wonder.

 

Oh how grassy is this hopper,

how this berry ripely rasps.

I would never have conceived it

if I weren't conceived myself!

 

Life (I say), I've no idea

what I could compare you to.

No one else can make a pine cone

and then make the pine cone's clone.

 

I praise your inventiveness,

bounty, sweep, exactitude,

sense of order—gifts that border

on witchcraft and wizardry.

 

I just don't want to upset you,

tease or anger, vex or rile.

For millennia, I've been trying

to appease you with my smile.

 

I tug at life by its leaf hem:

will it stop for me, just once,

momentarily forgetting

to what end it runs and runs?

 

 

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.

It abandons one self to a hungry world

and with the other self it flees.

 

It violently divides into doom and salvation,

retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

 

An abyss appears in the middle of its body

between what instantly become two foreign shores.

 

Life on one shore, death on the other.

Here hope and there despair.

 

If there are scales, the pans don't move.

If there is justice, this is it.

 

To die just as required, without excess.

To grow back just what's needed from what's left.

 

We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true.

But only into flesh and a broken whisper.

Into flesh and poetry.

 

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,

quiet, quickly dying out.

 

Here the heavy heart, there
non omnis moriar
—

just three little words, like a flight's three feathers.

 

The abyss doesn't divide us.

The abyss surrounds us.

 

—In memoriam Halina Poświatowska

 

 

This isn't Miss Duncan, the noted danseuse?

Not the drifting cloud, the wafting zephyr, the bacchante,

moonlit waters, waves swaying, breezes sighing?

 

Standing this way, in the photographer's atelier,

heftily, fleshily wrested from music and motion,

she's cast to the mercies of a pose,

forced to bear false witness.

 

Thick arms raised above her head,

a knotted knee protrudes from her short tunic,

left leg forward, naked foot and toes,

with 5 (count them) toenails.

 

One short step from eternal art into artificial eternity—

I reluctantly admit that it's better than nothing

and more fitting than otherwise.

 

Behind the screen, a pink corset, a handbag,

in it a ticket for a steamship

leaving tomorrow, that is, sixty years ago;

never again, but still at nine
A.M.
sharp.

 

 

“Thou art certain,
^*
then, our ship hath touch'd upon

the deserts of Bohemia?” “Aye, my lord.”
The quote's

from Shakespeare, who, I'm certain, wasn't someone else.

Some facts and dates, a portrait nearly done before

his death . . . Who needs more? Why expect to see

the proof, snatched up once by the Greater Sea,

then cast upon this world's Bohemian shore?

 

 

A few clods of dirt, and his life will be forgotten.

The music will break free from circumstance.

No more coughing of the maestro over minuets.

Poultices will be torn off.

Fire will consume the dusty, lice-ridden wig.

Ink spots will vanish from the lace cuff.

The shoes, inconvenient witnesses, will be tossed on the trash heap.

The least gifted of his pupils will get the violin.

Butchers' bills will be removed from between the music sheets.

His poor mother's letters will line the stomachs of mice.

The ill-fated love will fade away.

Eyes will stop shedding tears.

The neighbors' daughter will find a use for the pink ribbon.

The age, thank God, isn't Romantic yet.

Everything that's not a quartet

will become a forgettable fifth.

Everything that's not a quintet

will become a superfluous sixth.

Everything that's not a choir made of forty angels

will fall silent, reduced to barking dogs, a gendarme's belch.

The aloe plant will be taken from the window

along with a dish of fly poison and the pomade pot,

and the view of the garden (oh yes!) will be revealed—

the garden that was never here.

Now hark! ye mortals, listen, listen now,

take heed, in rapt amazement,

O rapt, O stunned, O heedful mortals, listen,

O listeners—now listen—be all ears—

 

 

In my dreams

I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

 

I speak fluent Greek

and not just with the living.

 

I drive a car

that does what I want it to.

 

I am gifted

and write mighty epics.

 

I hear voices

as clearly as any venerable saint.

 

My brilliance as a pianist

would stun you.

 

I fly the way we ought to,

i.e., on my own.

 

Falling from the roof,

I tumble gently to the grass.

 

I've got no problem

breathing under water.

 

I can't complain:

I've been able to locate Atlantis.

 

It's gratifying that I can always

wake up before dying.

 

As soon as war breaks out,

I roll over on my other side.

 

I'm a child of my age,

but I don't have to be.

 

A few years ago

I saw two suns.

 

And the night before last a penguin,

clear as day.

 

 

True love. Is it normal,

is it serious, is it practical?

What does the world get from two people

who exist in a world of their own?

 

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,

drawn randomly from millions, but convinced

it had to happen this way—in reward for what? For nothing.

The light descends from nowhere.

Why on these two and not on others?

Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.

Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,

and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

 

Look at the happy couple.

Couldn't they at least try to hide it,

fake a little depression for their friends' sake!

Listen to them laughing—it's an insult.

The language they use—deceptively clear.

And their little celebrations, rituals,

the elaborate mutual routines—

it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

 

It's hard even to guess how far things might go

if people start to follow their example.

What could religion and poetry count on?

What would be remembered? what renounced?

Who'd want to stay within bounds?

 

True love. Is it really necessary?

Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,

like a scandal in Life's highest circles.

Perfectly good children are born without its help.

It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,

it comes along so rarely.

 

Let the people who never find true love

keep saying that there's no such thing.

 

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

* * *

 

 

 

Nothingness unseamed itself for me too.

It turned itself wrong side out.

How on earth did I end up here—

head to toe among the planets,

without a clue how I used not to be.

 

O you, encountered here and loved here,

I can only guess, my arm on yours,