The Collected Poems (25 page)

and chaos inside
a cuff link
father's old watch
a jewelless ring
shut sea binoculars
dried letters
a gold inscription on a mug
tempting you to the waters
of Marienbad
a bar of wax
a cambric hankie
the sign for a fortress's surrender
a little mildew
a little shadow

Father of the gods and you my patron Hermes
I forgot to ask you
for flighty empty mornings afternoons evenings
for little soul
little conscience
for a light head

and dancing step

 

Once an eagle perhaps
on a great scarlet field
and wind's battle horn

now
out of junk
out of noise
out of sand

still faceless
eyes closed
like a puppy

neither hatred's yellow
nor the purple of glory
nor the green of hope

an empty shield

across a country
of low trees
low words
there crawls

there wends
a snail

on its back
it carries its home

dark

uncertain

 

The moment has come it is time to say farewell
after birds fly off the sudden flight of the green
summer's end—a banal theme for solo guitar

I now live on the slope of a hillside
windows from ceiling to floor so I see clearly
the osier's thick fur naked sallows this is my bank

everything grows in horizontal strips—a lazy river
the other high bank which falls sheerly downward
and reveals at long last what had to be confessed

clay sand limestone cliffs patches of black earth
and a forest thinned out now a forest in mourning

I am happy which is to say deprived of illusions
the sun appears briefly it offers on the other hand
a fine display of sunsets somewhat in Nero's taste

I am at peace it is time to say farewell
our bodies have taken on the color of the earth

 

A windy night and on this lonely road the prince of Parma's army
has left carcasses of horses
on a bald hill the bones of a recently conquered castle are glowing
there's only stone sand waste and a wind without purpose or color

What enlivens the landscape is a moon sharply imprinted on the sky
and a few soiled shadows below
as well as a white gallows for hanging from it are the thin pods
of bodies in which a wind blows life this wind without trees and clouds

 

If you set out on a journey pray that the road is long
a wandering without apparent aim a blind groping
so you come to know earth's harshness not just by sight but by touch
so that you measure yourself against the world with your whole skin

Befriend a Greek from Ephesus an Alexandrian Jew
they will lead you through slumbering bazaars
through cities of treaties clandestine passages
there above a burned out furnace an emerald tablet
Basileos Valens Zosima Geber Filalet sway
(the gold evaporated the wisdom remained)
through the parted veil of Isis
corridors like mirrors framed in darkness
speechless initiations and innocent orgies
by abandoned drifts of myths and religions
you will reach naked gods without symbols
dead gods forever in their creatures' shade

When you come to know don't speak of knowing
learn the world again like an Ionian philosopher
know the taste of water and fire of air and earth
for they will remain when all has passed away
and the journey remains though no longer yours

Then your homeland will seem too small for you
a cradle a boat tied to a branch by a mother's hair
when you remember its name no one by the fire
will know across which mountain it lies
what trees it engenders
when really it needs so little tenderness

repeat before sleep the comic sounds of its tongue
Że—czy—się
smile before sleep at the blind icon
at the burdocks the stream the path the wetlands
your home has passed away
it is a cloud over the world

Discover the meanness of speech the kingly power of gesture
the uselessness of concepts the purity of vowels
with which everything can be expressed pity joy delight anger
but have no anger
accept everything

What is that city bay street river
a cliff rising above the sea needs no name
the earth is as the sky
signposts of the winds lights high and low
the signs have fallen to dust
sand rain and grass have leveled memory
names are transparent and empty as music
Kalambaka Orchomenos Kavalla Levadia
the clock stops and from then on hours are black white or blue
permeated with the thought that your face is losing its features
when the heavens put a mark on your head
what answer can a carved inscription make to thistles
yield the empty saddle without regret
yield the air to another

So if there is a journey pray that it be long
a true journey from which you do not return
a copying of the world an elemental journey

a dialogue with nature an unanswered question
a pact forced after a battle

 

Golden mantles ripple like tents before a storm
a surge of hot purple lays chests and feet bare
the cedar apostles raise their enormous heads
a beard dark as an ax hovers over the heights

The woodcarvers' fingers bloom. A miracle eludes
their grasp so they grasp at air—stormy as strings
Stars grow turbid in the sky they make music too
but it doesn't reach earth it stays high as the moon

And Mary falls asleep. She sinks to the bottom
of surprise. Tender eyes hold her in a fragile net
she falls upward as a stream runs through fingers
and they bend with effort over the building cloud

 

but later on later on
won't you reject us
when children women patient animals go off
because they can't bear to see our wax hands

our movements unsure as a butterfly's flight
our stubborn silence and cougher's idiom
and the moment nears when a world shrunken in the eye
is removed from the eye like a tear and smashed like glass
when suddenly the drawer of memory opens

I am asking
whether then
you will gather us in again
for it will be a return to the lap of childhood
to a great tree to a dark room
an interrupted conversation sorrowless tears

I know
it is a matter of blood
and we lazy mystics dragging our legs
with a rheumatic prayer in bony hands
we listen to sand falling into our veins
and a white church grows in the dark interior
made of salt recollection chalk and unspeakable frailty

once again you will be led
by asthmatic labor of bells
amid flowers set alight
clinging to a wafer's taste to white canvas

if it is hard to make angels of us
transform us into heavenly dogs
mongrels with ruffled hair
moths with gray faces

snuffed eyes of gravel
but do not allow
the inasatiable darkness of your altars
to consume us
tell us one thing
that we will return

 

a long time ago
at the dawn of life in fact
Mr Cogito succumbed
to the seductive charms of music

his mother's singsong bore him
across the groves of childhood

Ukrainian nannies
hummed him to sleep
with a lullaby expansive as the Dnieper

he grew
as if rushed along by sounds
amid chords
dissonances
in a vertiginous crescendo

he received a basic
musical education
albeit incomplete
Let's Play the Piano
(Book One)

he remembers
the hungers of his university years
more piercing than hunger for food
when he waited before the concert
for the divine grace of a free ticket

hard to say
when doubts
scruples

pangs of conscience
began to nag at him

he seldom listened to music
not with his former voracity
with growing embarassment

the spring of joy dried up

this was not the fault
of the masters
of the motet
the sonata
the fugue

the orbit of things
was what changed
the field of gravity
and with it
Mr Cogito's
inner axis

he couldn't
step into the river
of his former joy

Mr Cogito
began to hoard
arguments against music

as if he intended to write
a treatise on hurt feelings

or throttle harmony
with angry rhetoric

throw his own weight
on a violin's slim back

over her bright face
a hood of anathema

Mr Cogito
suspends without answer
his reflections on the nature of music

but the tyrannical power of this art
will give him no peace

the impetus with which
she invades our interior

saddens without reason
gladdens without cause

fills recruits' rabbit hearts
with the blood of heroes

absolves too easily
purges for nothing

—who gave her the right
to yank at anyone's hair
to draw tears from eyes
to stir up for the attack

Mr Cogito
doomed to stony speech
to hoarse syllables
secretly worships
transient lightness

carnival isles and groves
beyond good and evil

the true reason for the separation
is the unworthiness of characters

a different bodily symmetry
different turns of conscience

Mr Cogito
always defended himself
from time's smoke puffs

he valued concrete objects
standing serenely in space

he adored lasting things
things all but immortal

dreams of the tongues of angels
he left in the garden of dreams

he chose
what is subject to
earthly measures and judgments

so that when the hour strikes
he assents without a murmur

to the trial of true and false
to the trial of fire and water

 

What became of Barabbas? I ask but no one knows
Let off his chain he went into the brightly lit street
he could turn to the right go straight turn to the left
spin around in a circle crow cheerfully as a rooster
He the Emperor of his own head and hands
He the Governor of his own breath

I ask because in a sense I took part in the whole thing
Swayed by the crowd in front of Pilate's palace I cried
along with all the others free Barabbas free Barabbas
Everyone was shouting and if I alone had been silent
it would all have happened as it was meant to happen

So perhaps Barabbas went back to his gang of thieves
In the mountains he kills swiftly and plunders deftly
Or maybe he set up a pottery workshop
and now cleans his crime-stained hands
in the clay of creation
He's a water carrier a mule driver a moneylender
a shipowner—a ship of his carried Paul to Corinth
or—the possibility cannot be excluded—
he became a valued spy in Roman pay

Behold and marvel at the vertiginous play of fate
with possibilities power and smiles of fortune

But the Nazarene
was left alone
without alternative
with a steep
pathway
of blood

 

What is he doing
this century-old man
his face like an old book
his eyes dry of tears
his lips pursed tight
guarding memories
history's mutterings

now when
winter hills
are fading
and Fujiyama enters the constellation Orion
Hirohito
a centenarian—emperor god and bureaucrat
—is writing

these are not acts
of pardon
or acts of wrath
nominations
of generals
elaborate tortures
but a piece
for the yearly
traditional poetry competition

the theme
is a wagon
the form: the venerable tanka
five verse lines
thirty-one syllables

“taking a seat on a train
of the state railway line
I meditate on the world

of my grandfather
the emperor Meiji”

a poem
ostensibly mundane
with its breath held
no false posturings

different
from the glibly lachrymal
handiwork of modernity
full of triumphal howling

a scrap
on the railway
devoid of melancholy
of the bustle before a long journey
and even devoid
of pity and hope

I think
of Hirohito
with an aching heart

his stooped shoulders
his frozen head
his old doll's face

I think of his
dry eyes
small hands
slow mind
like the pause between
one screech of the owl
and another

I wonder
with an aching heart
what will be the fate
of traditional poetry

will it pass away
after the emperor's shadow

perishable
negligible

 

With great bounds—
across immense fields
under a sky obscured
by December clouds
from a bright clearing
toward the dark wood
—Leo takes flight