1.
A single post, a point of rusting
tin in the sky
marks the fated place we
move to, he and I
on time as death is
prompt strangely
too smooth the gesture of
his hat to me
menace at the edges of his
eyes his mouth tight
shut strangely too low is the
bow he makes tonight
on time? that false note in
his voice, what
is it the brain alerts to and the
heart drops at?
under that evil sky, that sign of
tin and rust.
Six o’clock. There he is waiting
by the post.
Now we kiss soundlessly, his
lips stiff as
hands are given to queens, or
dead people thus
round us the shoving elbows of
ordinary bustle
and strangely irksome rises the
screech of a whistle
howls like a dog screaming
angrier, longer: what
a nightmare strangeness life is
at death point
and that nightmare reached my waist
only last night
and now reaches the stars, it has
grown to its true height
crying silently love love until
—Has it gone
six, shall we go to the cinema?
I shout it: home!
2.
And what have we come to?
tents of nomads
thunder and drawn swords over
our heads, some
terror we expect
listen houses
collapsing in the one
word: home.
It is the whine of a cossetted
child lost, it is the
noise a baby makes for
give and mine.
Brother in dissipation, cause
of this cold fever, you
hurry now to get home just
as men rush in leaving
like a horse jerking the
line rope down in the dust.
Is there even a building there?
Ten steps before us.
A house on the hill no higher a
house on the top of the hill and
a window under the roof is it
from the red sun alone
it is burning? or is it my life
which must begin again? how
simple poems are: it means I
must go out into the night
and talk to
who shall I tell my sorrow
my horror greener than ice?
—You’ve been thinking too much.
A solemn answer: yes.
3.
And the embankment I hold
to water thick and solid as
if we had come to the hanging
gardens of Semiramis
to water a strip as colourless
as a slab for corpses
I am like a female singer holding
to her music. To this wall.
Blindly for you won’t return
or listen, even if I bend to
the quencher of all thirst, I am
hanging at the gutter of a roof.
Lunatic. It is not the river
(I was born naiad) that makes me
shiver now, she was a hand I held
to, when you walked beside me, a lover
and faithful.
The dead are faithful
though not to all in their cells; if
death lies on my left now,
it is at your side I feel it.
Now a shaft of astonishing light, and
laughter that cheap tambourine.
—You and I must have a talk. And
I shiver: let’s be brave, shall we?
4.
A blonde mist, a wave of
gauze ruffles, of human
breathing, smoky exhalations
endless talk the smell of
what? of haste and filth
connivance shabby acts all
the secrets of business men
and ballroom powder.
Family men like bachelors
move in their rings like middle-aged boys
always joking always laughing, and
calculating, always calculating
large deals and little ones, they are
snout-deep in the feathers of some
business arrangement
and ballroom powder.
(I am half-turned away is this
our house? I am not mistress here)
Someone over his cheque book
another bends to a kid glove hand
a third works at a delicate foot
in patent leather furtively the smell
rises of marriage-broking
and ballroom powder.
In the window is the silver
bite of a tooth: it is the Star of Malta,
which is the sign of stroking of the love
that leads to pawing and to pinching.
(Yesterday’s food perhaps but
nobody worries if it smells slightly)
of dirt, commercial tricks
and ballroom powder.
The chain is too short perhaps even
if it is not steel but platinum?
Look how their three chins shake
like cows munching their own veal
above their sugared necks
the devils swing on a gas lamp
smelling of business slumps
and another powder
made by Berthold Schwartz
genius
intercessor for people:
—You and I must have a talk
—Let’s be brave, shall we?
5.
I catch a movement of his
lips, but he won’t
speak—You don’t love me?
—Yes, but in torment
drained and driven to death
(He looks round like an eagle)
—You call this home? It’s
in the heart.—What literature!
For love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
—A shrine?
or else a scar.
A scar every servant and guest
can see (and I think silently:
love is a bow-string pulled
back to the point of breaking).
Love is a bond. That has snapped for
us our mouths and lives part
(I begged you not to put a
spell on me that holy hour
close on mountain heights of
passion memory is mist).
Yes, love is a matter of gifts
thrown in the fire, for nothing
The shell-fish crack of his mouth
is pale, no chance of a smile:
—Love is a large bed.
—Or else an empty gulf.
Now his fingers begin to
beat, no mountains
move. Love is—
—Mine: yes.
I understand. And so?
The drum beat of his fingers
grows (scaffold and square)
—Let’s go, he says. For me, let’s
die, would be easier.
Enough cheap stuff rhymes
like railway hotel rooms, so:
—love means life although
the ancients had a different
name.
—Well?
A scrap
of handkerchief in a fist
like a fish. Shall we go? How,
bullet rail poison
death anyway, choose: I make no
plans. A Roman, you
survey the men still alive
like an eagle:
say goodbye.
6.
I didn’t want this, not
this (but listen, quietly,
to want is what bodies do
and now we are ghosts only).
And yet I didn’t say it
though the time of the train is set
and the sorrowful honour of leaving
is a cup given to women
or perhaps in madness I
misheard you polite liar:
is this the bouquet that you give your
love, this blood-stained honour?
Is it? Sound follows
sound clearly: was it goodbye
you said? (as sweetly casual
as a handkerchief dropped without
thought) in this battle
you are Caesar (What an
insolent thrust, to put the
weapon of defeat, into my hand
like a trophy). It continues. To
sound in my ears. As I bow.
—Do you always pretend
to be forestalled in breaking?
Don’t deny this, it
is a vengeance of Lovelace
a gesture that does you credit
while it lifts the flesh
from my bones. Laughter the laugh of
death. Moving. Without desire.
That is for others now
we are shadows to one another.
Hammer the last nail in
screw up the lead coffin.
—And now a last request.
—Of course. Then say nothing
about us to those who will
come after me. (The sick
on their stretchers talk of spring.)
—May I ask the same thing?
—Perhaps I should give you a ring?
—No. Your look is no longer open.
The stamp left on your heart
would be the ring on your hand.
So now without any scenes
I must swallow, silently, furtively.
—A book then? No, you give those
to everyone, don’t even write them
books…
So now must be no
so now must be no
must be no crying
In wandering tribes of
fishermen brothers
drink without crying
dance without crying
their blood is hot, they
pay without crying
pearls in a glass
melt, as they run their
world without crying
Now I am going and this
Harlequin gives his
Pierrette a bone like
a piece of contempt
He throws her the honour
of ending the curtain, the last
word when one inch of lead in
the breast would be hotter and better
Cleaner. My teeth
press my lips. I can
stop myself crying
pressing the sharpness
into the softest
so without crying
so tribes of nomads
die without crying
burn without crying.
So tribes of fishermen
in ash and song can
hide their dead man.
7.
And the embankment. The last one.
Finished. Separate, and hands apart
like neighbours avoiding one another. We
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 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?
This is delirium,
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 cafe!
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
ehind their sound lies: emptiness.
Wait! Is it even correct in Serbian or
Croatian? Is it a Czech whim, this word.
Sep aration! To sep arate!
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 us 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.
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 that in my fist.
Male tears are—cruel! They
rise over my head! Weep,
there will soon be others to
heal any guilt towards me.
Fish of identic-
al 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 approaching.
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
gives place to our speech,
infamous birds as we are
Solomon bows to us, for
our simultaneous cries
are something more than a dream!
And into the hollow waves of
darkness—hunched and level—
without trace—in silence—
something sinks like a ship.