some vast truth about life, ruthless
on the surface, sweet within,
about August nights, when the sea
breathes and shines and sings like a starling,
and about love, ineffable and precious.
We don’t know if she cried when she met darkness.
She left only a few hexameters
and an epigram about a cricket.
OF KINGDOMS
I LIKE TO DREAM OF THOSE
DEAD KINGDOMS — SU TUNG-P’O
I like to dream of those kingdoms
where brass glitters and sings,
and fires flame upward on the hilltops,
and someone’s love dwells in them.
Later afternoon, in November,
I travel by commuter train
after a long walk;
around me are tired office workers
and a mournful old lady
clutching a dachshund.
The conductor, alas,
makes an awkward shaman.
Life strides over us like Gulliver,
loudly laughing and crying.
SYRACUSE
City with the loveliest name, Syracuse;
don’t let me forget the dim
antiquity of your side streets, the pouting balconies
that once caged Spanish ladies,
the way the sea breaks on Ortygia’s walls.
Plato met defeat here, escaped with his life,
what can be said about us, unreal tourists.
Your cathedral rose atop a Greek temple
and still grows, but very slowly,
like the heavy pleas of beggars and widows.
At midnight fishing boats radiate
sharp light, demanding prayers
for the perished, the lonely, for you,
city abandoned on a continent’s rim,
and for us, imprisoned in our travels.
SUBMERGED CITY
That city will be no more, no halos
of spring mornings when green hills
tremble in the mist and rise
like barrage balloons—
and May won’t cross its streets
with shrieking birds and summer’s promises.
No breathless spells,
no chilly ecstasies of springwater.
Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor,
and flawless views of leafy avenues
fix no one’s eyes.
And still we live on calmly,
humbly — from suitcases,
in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains,
and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek an image,
the final form of things
between inexplicable fits
of mute despair—
as if vaguely remembering
something that cannot be recalled,
as if that submerged city were traveling with us,
always asking questions,
and always unhappy with our answers—
exacting, and perfect in its way.
EPITHALAMIUM
FOR ISCA AND SEBASTIAN
Without silence there would be no music.
Life paired is doubtless more difficult
than solitary existence—
just as a boat on the open sea
with outstretched sails is trickier to steer
than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners
after all are meant for wind and motion,
not idleness and impassive quiet.
A conversation continued through the years includes
hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,
but also compassion, deep feeling.
Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces.
Only love and time, when reconciled,
permit us to see other beings
in their enigmatic, complex essence,
unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement
in a valley or among green hills.
It begins from one day only, from joy
and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,
which is like a moist grain;
then come the years of trial and labor,
sometimes despair, fierce revelation,
happiness and finally a great tree
with rich greenery grows over us,
casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.
GATE
TO BARBARA TORUŃCZYK
Do you love words as a shy magician loves the moment of quiet
after he’s left the stage, alone in a dressing room where
a yellow candle burns with its greasy, pitch-black flame?
What yearning will encourage you to push the heavy gate, to sense
once more the odor of that wood and the rusty taste of water from an ancient well,
to see again the tall pear tree, the proud matron who presented us
aristocratically with its perfectly formed fruit each fall,
and then fell into mute anticipation of the winter’s ills?
Next door a factory’s stolid chimney smoked and the ugly town kept still,
but the indefatigable earth worked on beneath the bricks in gardens,
our black memory and the vast pantry of the dead, the good earth.
What courage does it take to budge the heavy gate,
what courage to catch sight of us again,
gathered in the little room beneath a Gothic lamp—
mother skims the paper, moths bump the windowpanes,
nothing happens, nothing, only evening, prayer; we wait …
We lived only once.
NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2004
You’re at home listening
to recordings of Billie Holiday,
who sings on, melancholy, drowsy.
You count the hours still
keeping you from midnight.
Why do the dead sing peacefully
while the living can’t free themselves from fear?
NO CHILDHOOD
And what was your childhood like? a weary
reporter asks near the end.
There was no childhood, only black crows
and tramcars starved for electricity,
fat priests in heavy chasubles,
teachers with faces of bronze.
There was no childhood, just anticipation.
At night the maple leaves shone like phosphorus,
rain moistened the lips of dark singers.
MUSIC HEARD
Music heard with you
was more than music
and the blood that flowed through our arteries
was more than blood
and the joy we felt
was genuine
and if there is anyone to thank,
I thank him now,
before it grows too late
and too quiet.
BALANCE
I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.
I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.
As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.
I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled in the airport’s labyrinth,
I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.