David is ashamed of murdering Goliath.
Forgive my silence. Forgive your silence.
City full of statues; only the fountains sing.
The holidays approach, when the heathens go to church.
Via Giulia: magnolia blossoms keep their secret.
A moment of light costs just five hundred lire, which you toss
into a black box.
We can meet on the Piazza Navona, if you want.
Matthew keeps asking himself: was I truly
summoned to become human?
THE SEA
Shimmering among boulders, deep blue at noon,
ominous when summoned by the west wind,
but calm at night, inclined to make amends.
Tireless in small bays, commanding
countless hosts of crabs who march sideways
like damp veterans of the Punic Wars.
At midnight cutters sail from port: the glare
of a single light slices the darkness,
engines quake.
At the beach near Cefalù, on Sicily, we saw
countless heaps of trash, boxes, condoms,
cartons, a faded sign saying ANTONIO.
In love with the earth, always drawn to shore,
sending wave after wave — and each dies
exhausted, like a Greek messenger.
At dawn only whispers reach us,
the low murmur of pebbles cast on sand
(sensed even in the fishing town’s small square).
The Mediterranean, where gods swam,
and the frigid Baltic, which I entered,
a skinny, trembling, twenty-year-old eel.
In love with the earth, thrusting into its cities, Stockholm,
Venice, listening to tourists laugh and chatter
before returning to its dark, unmoving source.
Your Atlantic, busy building up white dunes,
and the shy Pacific hiding in the deeps.
Light-winged gulls.
The last sailing ships, white canvas
billowing on crosses.
Slim canoes are manned by watchful hunters,
the sun rises in great silence.
Gray Baltic,
Arctic Ocean, mute,
the Ionian, world’s origin and end.
READING MILOSZ
I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.
You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
but also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.
Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe — truly—
that every day is sacred,
that poetry — how to put it?—
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.
But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city’s ordinary din resumes—
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.
WALK THROUGH THIS TOWN
Walk through this town at a gray hour
when sorrow hides in shady gates
and children play with great balls
that float like kites above
the poisoned wells of courtyards,
and, quiet, doubting, the last blackbird sings.
Think about your life which goes on,
though it’s already lasted so long.
Could you voice the smallest fragment of the whole.
Could you name baseness when you saw it.
If you met someone truly living
would you know it?
Did you abuse high words?
Whom should you have been, who knows.
You love silence, and you’ve mastered
only silence, listening to words, music, and quiet:
why did you begin to speak, who knows.
Why in this age, why in a country
that wasn’t born yet, who knows.
Why among exiles, in a flat that had been
German, amid grief and mourning
and vain hopes of a regained myth.
Why a childhood shadowed
by mining towers and not a forest’s dark,
near a stream where a quiet dragonfly keeps watch
over the world’s secret wholeness
— who knows.
And your love, which you lost and found,
and your God, who won’t help those
who seek him,
and hides among theologians
with degrees.
Why just this town at a gray hour,
this dry tongue, these numb lips,
and so many questions before you leave
and go home to the kingdom
from which silence, rapture, and the wind
once came.
ORDINARY LIFE
TO CLARE CAVANAGH
Our life is ordinary,
I read in a crumpled paper
abandoned on a bench.
Our life is ordinary,
the philosophers told me.
Ordinary life, ordinary days and cares,
a concert, a conversation,
strolls on the town’s outskirts,
good news, bad—
but objects and thoughts
were unfinished somehow,
rough drafts.
Houses and trees
desired something more
and in summer green meadows
covered the volcanic planet
like an overcoat tossed upon the ocean.
Black cinemas crave light.
Forests breathe feverishly,
clouds sing softly,
a golden oriole prays for rain.
Ordinary life desires.
MUSIC HEARD WITH YOU
MUSIC I HEARD WITH YOU WAS MORE
THAN MUSIC … —CONRAD AIKEN
Music heard with you
will stay with us always.
Grave Brahms and elegiac Schubert,
a few songs, Chopin’s fourth ballad,
a few quartets with heart-
breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia),
the sadness of Shostakovich, who
didn’t want to die.
The great choruses of Bach’s Passions,
as if someone had summoned us,
demanding joy,
pure and impartial,
joy in which faith
is self-evident.
Some scraps of Lutoslawski
as fleeting as our thoughts.
A black woman singing blues
ran through us like shining steel,
though it reached us on the street
of an ugly, dirty town.
Mahler’s endless marches,
the trumpet’s voice that opens the Fifth Symphony
and the first part of the Ninth
(you sometimes call him “malheur!”).
Mozart’s despair in the Requiem,
his buoyant piano concertos—
you hummed them better than I did,
but we both know that.
Music heard with you
will grow still with us.
AT THE CATHEDRAL’S FOOT
In June once, in the evening,
returning from a long trip,
with memories of France’s blooming trees
still fresh in our minds,
its yellow fields, green plane trees
sprinting before the car,
we sat on the curb at the cathedral’s foot
and spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now—
to talk of darkness in that bright shadow.
IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIPS
For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.