Map (18 page)

how much vacancy on that side went to make us,

how much silence there for one lone cricket here,

how much nonmeadow for a single sprig of sorrel,

and sun after darknesses in a drop of dew

as repayment—for what boundless droughts?

 

Starry willy-nilly! Local in reverse!

Stretched out in curvatures, weights, roughnesses, and motions!

Time out from infinity for endless sky!

Relief from nonspace in a shivering birch tree's shape!

 

Now or never wind will stir a cloud,

since wind is exactly what won't blow there.

And a beetle hits the trail in a witness's dark suit,

testifying to the long wait for a short life.

 

And it so happened that I'm here with you.

And I really see nothing

usual in that.

 

 

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.

Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five
A.M.

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.

Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.

And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,

forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.

My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Truth, please don't pay me much attention.

Dignity, please be magnanimous.

Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.

 

Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.

My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.

I know I won't be justified as long as I live,

since I myself stand in my own way.

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

 

 

 

 

A LARGE NUMBER

 

1976

 

 

Four billion people on this earth,

but my imagination is still the same.

It's bad with large numbers.

It's still taken by particularity.

It flits in the dark like a flashlight,

illuminating only random faces

while all the rest go blindly by,

never coming to mind and never really missed.

But even a Dante couldn't get it right.

Let alone someone who is not.

Even with all the muses behind me.

 

Non omnis moriar
—a premature worry.

But am I entirely alive and is that enough.

It never was, and now less than ever.

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,

but what I reject is more numerous,

denser, more demanding than before.

A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.

I whisper my reply to my stentorian calling.

I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

A mouse at the foot of the maternal mountain.

Life lasts as long as a few signs scratched by a claw in the sand.

 

My dreams—even they're not as populous as they should be.

They hold more solitude than noisy crowds.

Sometimes a long-dead friend stops by awhile.

A single hand turns the knob.

 

An echo's annexes overgrow the empty house.

I run from the doorstep into a valley

that is quiet, as if no one owned it, already an anachronism.

 

Why there's still all this space inside me

I don't know.

 

 

I owe so much

to those I don't love.

 

The relief as I agree

that someone else needs them more.

 

The happiness that I'm not

the wolf to their sheep.

 

The peace I feel with them,

the freedom—

love can neither give

nor take that.

 

I don't wait for them,

as in window-to-door-and-back.

Almost as patient

as a sundial,

I understand

what love can't,

and forgive

as love never would.

 

From a rendezvous to a letter

is just a few days or weeks,

not an eternity.

 

Trips with them always go smoothly,

concerts are heard,

cathedrals visited,

scenery is seen.

 

And when seven hills and rivers

come between us,

the hills and rivers

can be found on any map.

 

They deserve the credit

if I live in three dimensions,

in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space

with a genuine, shifting horizon.

 

They themselves don't realize

how much they hold in their empty hands.

 

“I don't owe them a thing”

would be love's answer

to this open question.

 

 

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!

How many clouds float past them with impunity;

how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;

how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil

in provocative hops!

 

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers

or alights on the roadblock at the border?

A humble robin—still, its tail resides abroad

while its beak stays home. If that weren't enough, it won't stop bobbing!

 

Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant

between the border guard's left and right boots

blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”

 

Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos

prevailing on every continent!

Isn't that a privet on the far bank

smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?

And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,

would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?

 

And how can we talk of order overall

when the very placement of the stars

leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

 

Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!

And dust blowing all over the steppes

as if they hadn't been partitioned!

And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,

that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!

 

Only what is human can truly be foreign.

The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

 

 

They say I looked back out of curiosity.

But I could have had other reasons.

I looked back mourning my silver bowl.

Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.

So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape

of my husband Lot's neck.

From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead

he wouldn't so much as hesitate.

From the disobedience of the meek.

Checking for pursuers.

Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed His mind.

Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.

I felt age within me. Distance.

The futility of wandering. Torpor.

I looked back setting my bundle down.

I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.

Serpents appeared on my path,

spiders, field mice, baby vultures.

They were neither good nor evil now—every living thing

was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.

I looked back in desolation.

In shame because we had stolen away.

Wanting to cry out, to go home.

Or only when a sudden gust of wind

unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.

It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom

and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.

I looked back in anger.

To savor their terrible fate.

I looked back for all the reasons given above.

I looked back involuntarily.

It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.

It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.

A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.

It was then we both glanced back.

No, no. I ran on,

I crept, I flew upward

until darkness fell from the heavens

and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.

I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.

Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.

It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.

It's possible I fell facing the city.