Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden
porcelain cups — and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.
A passerby with proud eyes
whom you’ll never know.
Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).
The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.
Faces flashing by
in local trains—
the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.
And friendship with yourself
— since after all you don’t know who you are.
RAIN DROP
In the drop of rain that stopped
outside my window, dawdling,
an oval, shining shape appears
and I see Mrs. Czolga again,
stuffing a statuesque goose in her kitchen.
Carts, dark and chthonic, carried coal,
rolling over wooden cobbles,
asking — do you want to live?
But after the great war of death
we wanted life so much.
A red-hot iron pressed the past,
at dawn German blackbirds
sang the poems of Georg Trakl,
and we wanted life and dreams.
BUTTERFLIES
It’s a December night, the century’s end, dark and calm,
draws near.
I slowly read friends’ poems, look at photographs,
the spines of books.
Where has C. gone? What’s become of bumptious K. and smiling T.?
What ever happened to B. and N.?
Some have been dead a millennium, while others, debutants, died
just the other month.
Are they together? In a desert with a crimson dawn?
We don’t know where they live.
By a mountain stream where butterflies play?
In a town scented with mignonette?
Die Toten reiten schnell, S. repeated eagerly (he too
is gone).
They ride little horses in the steppe’s quiet, beneath a round yellow
cloud.
Maybe they steal coal at a little railroad stop in Asia and melt
snow in sooty pots
like those transported in freight cars.
(Do they have camps and barbed wire?)
Do they play checkers? Listen to music? Do they see Christ?
They dictate poems to the living.
They paint bison on cave walls, begin building
the cathedral in Beauvais.
Have they grasped the sense of evil, which eludes us,
and forgiven those who persecuted them?
They wade through an arctic glacier, soft from the August heat.
Do they weep? Regret?
Talk on telephones for hours? Hold their tongues? Are they here among us?
Nowhere?
I read poems, listen to the mighty whisper
of night and blood.
IN A STRANGE CITY
The faint, almost fantastic
scent of the Mediterranean,
crowds on streets at midnight,
a festival begins,
we don’t know which.
A scrawny cat slips
past our knees,
gypsies eat supper
as if singing;
white houses beyond them,
an unknown tongue.
Happiness.
CAMOGLI
High old houses above the water
and a drowsy cat waiting for fishermen
on furled white nets:
a quiet November in Camogli—
pensioners sunbathe on lounge chairs,
the sun rotates sluggishly
and stones revolve slowly
on the gravelly shore,
but it, the sea, keeps turning landward,
wave after wave, as if wondering
what happened to summer’s plans
and our dreams,
what has our youth become.
BOGLIASCO: THE CHURCH SQUARE
A photographer develops film,
the sexton scrutinizes
walls and trees,
boys play ball,
a dry cleaner purges the conscience
of this quiet town,
three elderly ladies discuss the world’s end—
but evening brings back
the sea’s tumult
and its din
returns the day just past
into oblivion.
STAGLIENO
Don’t linger in the graveyard
where the nineteenth century, dusty, charmless,
still repents; you’ll be received
by doctors in stucco frock coats
buttoned to the throat, in stone cravats,
stone barristers with stony, slightly mournful
smiles (duplicity has outlived itself).
You’ll be received by patresfamilias, professors
and children, marble children, plaster dogs,
always flawlessly obedient.
You’ll see the past, meet
your older brothers, glimpse
Pompeii, submerged
in time’s gray lava.
TWO-HEADED BOY
The fifteen-year-old boy carried a kitten
inside his dark blue windbreaker.
Its tiny head turned,
its large eyes watching
everything more cautiously
than human eyes.
Safe in the warm train,
I compare the boy’s lazy stare
to the kitten’s pupils,
alert and narrow.
The two-headed boy sitting across from me
made richer by an animal’s unrest.
OUR WORLD
IN MEMORIAM W.G. SEBALD
I never met him, I only knew
his books and the odd photos, as if
purchased in a secondhand shop, and human
fates discovered secondhand,
and a voice quietly narrating,
a gaze that caught so much,
a gaze turned back,
avoiding neither fear
nor rapture;
nor rapture;
and our world in his prose,
our world, so calm — but
full of crimes perfectly forgotten,
even in lovely towns
on the coast of one sea or another,
our world full of empty churches,
rutted with railroad tracks, scars
of ancient trenches, highways,
cleft by uncertainty, our blind world
smaller now by you.
SMALL OBJECTS
My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don’t desire light.
DEFENDING POETRY, ETC
Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,
but also summer evenings in a small town,
where gardens waft and cats sit quietly
on doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.
SUBJECT: BRODSKY
Please note: born in May,
in a damp city (hence the motif: water),
soon to be surrounded by an army
whose officers kept Hölderlin
in their backpacks, but, alas, they had
no time for reading. Too much to do.
Tone — sardonic, despair — authentic.
Always en route, from Mexico to Venice,