Dear mermaids, it was bound to happen.
Beloved fauns and honorable angels,
evolution has emphatically cast you out.
Not that it lacks imagination, but
you with your Devonian tail fins and alluvial breasts,
your fingered hands and cloven feet,
your arms alongside, not instead of, wings,
your, heaven help us, diphyletic skeletons,
your ill-timed tails, horns sprouted out of spite,
illegitimate beaks, this morphogenetic potpourri, those
finned or furry frills and furbelows, the couplets
pairing human/heron with such cunning
that their offspring knows all, is immortal, and can fly,
you must admit that it would be a nasty joke,
excessive, everlasting, and no end of bother,
one that mother nature wouldn't like and won't allow.
And after all she does permit a fish to fly,
deft and defiant. Fach such ascent
consoles our rule-bound world, reprieves it
from necessity's confines more
than enough for the world to be a world.
And after all she does permit us baroque gems
like this: a platypus that feeds its chicks on milk.
She might have said no - and which of us would know
that we'd been robbed?
But the best is that
she somehow missed the moment when a mammal turned up
with its hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen.
Good morning, lord and master,
what will you give me
for not taking anything from me?
How will you reward me for your own magnanimity?
What price will you set on my priceless head
for the poses I strike to make you smile?
My good lord is gracious,
my good lord is kind.
Who else could bear such witness if there were
no creatures unworthy of death?
You yourselves, perhaps?
But what you've come to know about yourselves
will serve for a sleepless night from star to star.
And only we few who remain unstripped of fur,
untorn from bone, unplucked of soaring feathers,
esteemed in all our quills, scales, tusks, and horns,
and in whatever else that ingenious protein
has seen fit to clothe us with,
we, my lord, are your dream,
which finds you innocent for now.
I am a tarsier - the father and grandfather of
tarsiers
a tiny creature, nearly half of something,
yet nonetheless a whole no less than others,
so light that twigs spring up beneath my weight
and might have lifted me to heaven long ago
if I hadn't had to fall
time and again
like a stone lifted from hearts
grown oh so sentimental:
I, a tarsier,
know well how essential it is to be a tarsier.
So he's got to have happiness,
he's got to have truth, too,
he's got to have eternity
did you ever!
He has only just learned to tell dreams from
waking;
only just realized that he is he;
only just whittled with his hand ne' fin
a flint, a rocket ship;
easily drowned in the ocean's teaspoon,
not even funny enough to tickle the void;
sees only with his eyes;
hears only with his ears;
his speech's personal best is the conditional;
he uses his reason to pick holes in reason.
In short, he's next to no one,
but his head's full of freedom, omniscience, and the Being
beyond his foolish meat -
did you ever!
For he does apparently exist.
He genuinely came to be
beneath one of the more parochial stars.
He's lively and quite active in his fashion.
His capacity for wonder is well advanced
for a crystal's deviant descendant.
And considering his difficult childhood
spent kowtowing to the herd's needs,
he's already quite an individual indeed -
did you ever!
Carry on, then, if only for the moment
that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
One wonders what will become of him,
since he does in fact seem to be.
And as far as being goes, he really tries quite hard.
Quite hard indeed - one must admit.
With that ring in his nose, with that toga, that sweater.
He's no end of fun, for all you say.
Poor little beggar.
A human, if ever we saw one.
Beloved Brethren,
we have before us an example of incorrect proportions.
Behold the dinosaur's skeleton looms above -
Dear Friends,
on the left we see the tail trailing into one infinity,
on the right, the neck juts into another
Esteemed Comrades,
in between, four legs that finally mired in the slime
beneath this hiHock of a trunk -
Gentle Citizens,
nature does not err, but it loves its little joke:
please note the laughably small head -
Ladies, Gentlemen,
a head this size does not have room for foresight,
and that is why its owner is extinct -
Honored Dignitaries,
a mind too small, an appetite too large,
more senseless sleep than prudent apprehension
Distinguished Guests,
we're in far better shape in this regard,
life is beautiful and the world is ours -
Venerated Delegation,
the starry sky above the thinking reed
and moral law within it -
Most Reverend Deputation,
such success does not come twice
and perhaps beneath this single sun alone -
Inestimable Council,
how deft the hands,
how eloquent the lips,
what a head on these shoulders -
Supremest of Courts,
so much responsibility in place of a vanished tail -
Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaily,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.
I'm trying to court life's favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I'm always the first to bow,
always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.
Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren't conceived myself!
Life (I say) I've no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone's clone.
I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order - gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.
I just don't want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I've been trying
to appease you with my smile.
I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.
An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.
Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.
If there are scales, the pans don't move.
If there is justice, this is it.
To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what's needed from what's left.
We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.
The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.
Here the heavy heart, there non omnis mortar -
just three little words, like a flight's three feathers.
The abyss doesn't divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks
I prefer Dickens
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimm's fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of
stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.
An endless rain is just
Into the ark, for where
you poems for a single voice,
private exultations,
unnecessary talents,
surplus curiosity,
short-range sorrows and fears,
eagerness to see things from all six sides.
Rivers are swelling and bursting their banks.
Into the ark, all you chiaroscuros and half-tones,
you details, ornaments, and whims,
silly exceptions,
forgotten signs,
countless shades of the color gray,
play for play's sake,
and tears of mirth.
As far as the eye can see, there's water and
hazy horizon.
Into the ark, plans for the distant future,
joy in difference,
admiration for the better man,
choice not narrowed down to one of two,
outworn scruples,
time to think it over,
and the belief that all this
will still come in handy someday.
For the sake of the children
that we still are,
fairy tales have happy endings.
That's the only finale that will do here, too.
The rain will stop,
the waves will subside,
the clouds will part
in the cleared-up sky,
and they'll be once more
what clouds overhead ought to be:
loffy and rather lighthearted
in their likeness to things
drying in the sun -
isles of bliss,
lambs,
cauliflowers,
diapers.
Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is still the same.
It's bad with large numbers.
It's still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go blindly by,
never coming to mind and never
But even a Dante couldn't get it
Let alone someone who is not.
Even with all the muses behind me.
Non omnis moriar - a premature worry.
But am I entirely alive and is that enough.
It never was, and now less than ever.
My choices are rejections, since there is no
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
I whisper my reply to my stentorian calling.
I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.
A mouse at the foot of the maternal mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few signs scratched by a claw in the
sand.
My dreams - even they're not as populous as
they should be.
They hold more solitude than noisy crowds.
Sometimes a long-dead friend stops by awhile.
A single hand turns the knob.
An echo's annexes overgrow the empty house.
I run from the doorstep into a valley
that is quiet, as if no one owned it, already an anachronism.
Why there's still all this space inside me
I don't know.
As a short subject before the main feature -
in which the actors did their best
to make me cry and even laugh -
we were shown an interesting experiment
involving a head.
The head
a minute earlier was still attached to...
but now it was cut off.
Everyone could see that it didn't have a body.
The tubes dangling from the neck hooked it up to a machine
that kept its blood circulating.
The head
was doing just fine.
Without showing pain or even surprise,
it followed a moving flashlight with its eyes.
It pricked up its ears at the sound of a bell.
Its moist nose could tell
the smell of bacon from odorless oblivion,
and licking its chops with evident relish
it salivated its salute to physiology.
A dog's faithful head,
a dog's friendly head
squinted its eyes when stroked,
convinced that it was still part of a whole
that crooks its back if patted
and wags its tail.
I thought about happiness and was frightened.
For if that's all life is about,
the head
was happy.
The world would rather see hope than just hear
its song. And that's why statesmen have to smile.
Their pearly whites mean they're still full of cheer.
The game's complex, the goal's far out of reach,
the outcome's still unclear - once in a while,
we need a friendly, gleaming set of teeth.
Heads of state must display unfurrowed brows
on airport runways, in the conference room.
They must embody one big, toothy "Wow!"
while pressing flesh or pressing urgent issues.
Their faces' self-regenerating tissues
make our hearts hum and our lenses zoom.
Dentistry turned to diplomatic skill
promises us a Golden Age tomorrow.
The going's rough, and so we need the laugh
of bright incisors, molars of good will.
Our times are still not safe and sane enough
for faces to show ordinary sorrow.
Dreamers keep saying, "Human brotherhood
will make this place a smiling paradise."
I'm not convinced. The statesman, in that case,
would not require facial exercise,
except from time to time: he's feeling good,
he's glad it's spring, and so he moves his face.
But human beings are, by nature, sad.
So be it, then. It isn't all that bad.
The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen
twenty.
Now it's just thirteen sixteen.
There's still time for some to go in,
and some to come out.
The terrorist has already crossed the street.
The distance keeps him out of danger,
and what a view - just like the movies:
A woman in a yellow jacket, she's going in.
A man in dark glasses, he's coming out.
Teen-agers in jeans, they're talking.
Thirteen seventeen and four seconds.
The short one, he's lucky, he's getting on a scooter,
but the tall one, he's going in.
Thirteen seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, she's walking along with a green ribbon in her hair.
But then a bus suddenly pulls in front of her.
Thirteen eighteen.
The girl's gone.
Was she that dumb, did she go in or not,
we'll see when they carry them out.
Thirteen nineteen.
Somehow no one's going in.
Another guy, fat, bald, is leaving, though.
Wait a second, looks like he's looking for something in his
pockets and
at thirteen twenty minus ten seconds
he goes back in for his crummy gloves.
Thirteen twenty exactly.
This waiting, it's taking forever.
Any second now.
No, not yet.
Yes, now.
The bomb, it explodes.
Up the verdantest of hills,
in this most equestrian of pageants,
wearing the silkiest of cloaks.
Toward a castle with seven towers,
each of them by far the tallest.
In the foreground, a duke,
most flatteringly unrotund;
by his side, his duchess
young and fair beyond compare.
Behind them, the ladies-in-waiting,
all pretty as pictures, verily,
then a page, the most ladsome of lads,
and perched upon his pagey shoulder
something exceedingly monkeylike,
endowed with the drollest of faces
and tails.
Following close behind, three knights,
all chivalry and rivalry,
so if the first is fearsome of countenance,
the next one strives to be more daunting still,
and if he prances on a bay steed
the third will prance upon a bayer,
and all twelve hooves dance glancingly
atop the most wayside of daisies.
Whereas whosoever is downcast and weary,
cross-eyed and out at elbows,
is most manifestly left out of the scene.
Even the least pressing of questions,
burgherish or peasantish,
cannot survive beneath this most azure of skies.
And not even the eaglest of eyes
could spy even the tiniest of gallows -
nothing casts the slightest shadow of a doubt.
Thus they proceed most pleasantly
through this feudalest of realisms.
This same, however, has seen to the scene's
balance:
it has given them their Hell in the next frame.
Oh yes, all that went without
even the silentest of sayings.
My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely that she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as Peter
Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.
My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.
There are many families in which nobody writes
poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.
My sister has tackled oral prose with some
success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.
In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own
good."
In her depiction of the sky, one detects a
certain helplessness,
the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,
she is startled by the planets' lifelessness,
and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)
a question soon arises:
whether we are, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone.
In spite of all the laws of probability!
And today's universally accepted assumptions!
In the face of the irrefutable evidence that may fall
into human hands any day now! That's poetry for you.
Meanwhile, our Lady Bard returns to Earth,
a planet, so she claims, which "makes its rounds without
eyewitnesses,"
the only "science fiction that our cosmos can afford."
The despair of a Pascal (1623-1662, note mine)
is, the authoress implies, unrivalled
on any, say, Andromeda or Cassiopeia.
Our solitary existence exacerbates our sense of obligation,
and raises the inevitable question, How are we to live et
cetera?,
since "we can't avoid the void."
"'My God,' man calls out to Himself,
'have mercy on me, I beseech thee, show me the way...'"
The authoress is distressed by the thought of
life squandered so freely,
as if our supplies were boundless.
She is likewise worried by wars, which are, in her perverse
opinion,
always lost on both sides,
and by the "authoritorture" (sic!)
of some people by others.
Her moralistic intentions glimmer throughout the poem.
They might shine brighter beneath a less naive pen.
Not under this one, alas. Her fundamentally
unpersuasive thesis
(that we may well be, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone)
combined with her lackadaisical style (a mixture
of loffy rhetoric and ordinary speech)
forces the question: Whom might this piece convince?
The answer can only be: No one. Q. E. D.
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight
and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them
instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the leff the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.
The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can't be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a
bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the
sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief - a mouse tail, a pigtail - is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star's ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never
wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.
Poets and writers.
So the saying goes.
That is poets aren't writers, but who -
Poets are poetry, writers are prose -
Prose can hold anything including poetry,
but in poetry there's only room for poetry -
In keeping with the poster that announces it
with a fin-de-siecle flourish of its giant P
framed in a winged lyre's strings
I shouldn't simply walk in, I should fly -
And wouldn't I be better off barefoot
to escape the clump and squeak
of cut-rate sneakers,
a clumsy ersatz angel -
If at least the dress were longer and more
flowing
and the poems appeared not from a handbag but by sleight of hand,
dressed in their Sunday best from head to toe,
with bells on, ding to dong,
ab ab ba -
On the platform lurks a little table
suggesting seances, with gilded legs,
and on the little table smokes a little candlestick -
Which means
I've got to read by candlelight
what I wrote by light of an ordinary bulb
to the typewriter's tap tap tap -
Without worrying in advance
if it was poetry
and if so, what kind
The kind in which prose is inappropriate
or the kind which is apropos in prose -
And what's the difference,
seen now only in half-light
against a crimson curtain's
purple fringe?
Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.
Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and affer,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it's just a room away.
Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones -
real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.
Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.
Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among those landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.
The commonplace miracle:
that so many common miracles take place.
The usual miracle:
invisible dogs barking
in the dead of night.
One of many miracles:
a small and airy cloud
is able to upstage the massive moon.
Several miracles in one:
an alder is reflected in the water
and is reversed from left to right
and grows from crown to root
and never hits bottom
though the water isn't deep.
A run-of-themill miracle:
winds mild to moderate
turning gusty in storms.
A miracle in the first place:
cows will be cows.
Next but not least:
just this cherry orchard
from just this cherry pit.
A miracle minus top hat and tails:
fluttering white doves.
A miracle (what else can you call it):
the sun rose today at three fourteen a. m.
and will set tonight at one past eight.
A miracle that's lost on us:
the hand actually has fewer than six fingers
but still it's got more than four.
A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.
An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.
An odd planet, and those on it are odd, too.
They're subject to time, but they won't admit it.
They have their own ways of expressing protest.
They make up little pictures, like for instance this:
At first glance, nothing special.
What you see is water.
And one of its banks.
And a little boat sailing strenuously upstream.
And a bridge over the water, and people on the bridge.
It appears that the people are picking up their pace
because of the rain just beginning to lash down
from a dark cloud.
The thing i5, nothing else happens.
The cloud doesn't change its color or its shape.
The rain doesn't increase or subside.
The boat sails on without moving.
The people on the bridge are running now
exactly where they ran before.
It's difficult at this point to keep from
commenting.
This picture is by no means innocent.
Time has been stopped here.
Its laws are no longer consulted.
It has been relieved of its influence over the course of events.
It has been ignored and insulted.
On account of a rebel,
one Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being who, by the way,
died long ago and in due course),
time has tripped and fallen down.
It might well be simply a trifling prank,
an antic on the scale of just a couple of galaxies,
let us, however, just in case,
add one final comment for the record:
For generations, it's been considered good
form here
to think highly of this picture,
to be entranced and moved.
There are those for whom even this is not
enough.
They go so far as to hear the rain's spatter,
to feel the cold drops on their necks and backs,
they look at the bridge and the people on it
as if they saw themselves there,
running the same never-to-be-finished race
through the same endless, ever-to-be-covered distance,
and they have the nerve to believe
that this is really so.
Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Poije and Guernica.
There's a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Cheronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmospheric front.
There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on their sunlit decks.
So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands,
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green
on Maciejowice's fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal with grass.
Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don't cower
under a bush but squat behind it.
What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only the blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.
On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can't help
laughing at that.
They're both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they'd never met before, they're sure
that there'd been nothing between them.
But what's the word from the streets, staircases, hallways -
perhaps they've passed by each other a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don't remember -
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a "sorry" muttered in a crowd?
a curt wrong number" caught in the receiver?
but I know the answer.
No, they don't remember.
They'd be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn't read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood's thicket?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
Why after all this one and not the rest?
Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
Why on earth now, on Tuesday of all days,
and why on earth, pinned down by this star's pin?
In spite of years of my not being here?
In spite of seas of all these dates and fates,
these cells, celestials, and coelenterates?
What is it really that made me appear
neither an inch nor half a globe too far,
neither a minute nor aeons too early?
What made me fill myself with me so squarely?
Why am I staring now into the dark
and muttering this unending monologue
just like the growling thing we call a dog?
My apologies to chance for calling it
necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the
first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the
depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being
asleep today
at five a. m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful
of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same
cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, 0 mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional
thread
from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
If there are angels,
I doubt they read
our novels
concerning thwarted hopes.
I'm afraid, alas,
they never touch the poems
that bear our grudges against the world.
The rantings and railings
of our plays
must drive them, I suspect,
to distraction.
Off-duty, between angelic -
i. e., inhuman - occupations,
they watch instead
our slapstick
from the age of silent film.
To our dirge wailers,
garment renders,
and teeth gnashers,
they prefer, I suppose,
that poor devil
who grabs the drowning
or, starving, devours his
with gusto.
man by his toupee
own shoelaces
From the waist up, starch and aspirations;
below, a startled mouse
runs down his trousers.
I'm sure
that's what they call real entertainment.
A crazy chase in circles
ends up pursuing the pursuer.
The light at the end of the tunnel
turns out to be a tiger's eye.
A hundred disasters
mean a hundred comic somersaults
turned over a hundred abysses.
If there are angels,
they must, I hope,
find this convincing,
this merriment dangling from terror,
not even crying Save Me Save Me
since all of this takes place in silence.
I can even imagine
that they clap their wings
and tears run from their eyes
from laughter, if nothing else.
If we'd been allowed to choose,
we must have gone on forever.
The bodies that were offered didn't fit,
and wore out horribly.
The ways of sating hunger
made us sick.
We were repelled
by blind heredity
and the tyranny of glands.
The world that was meant to embrace us
decayed without end
and the effects of causes raged over it.
Individual fates
were presented for our inspection:
appalled and grieved,
we rejected most of them.
Questions naturally arose, e. g.,
who needs the painful birth
of a dead child
and what's in it for a sailor
who will never reach the shore.
We agreed to death,
but not to every kind.
Love attracted us,
of course, but only love
that keeps its word.
Both fickle standards
and the impermanence of art works
kept us wary of the Muses' service.
Each of us wished to have a homeland
free of neighbors
and to live his entire life
in the intervals between wars.
No one wished to seize power
or to be subject to it.
No one wanted to fall victim
to his own or others' delusions.
No one volunteered
for crowd scenes and processions,
to say nothing of dying tribes -
although without all these
history couldn't run its charted course
through centuries to come.
Meanwhile, a fair number
of stars lit earlier
had died out and grown cold.
It was high time for a decision.
Voicing numerous reservations,
candidates finally emerged
for a number of roles as healers and explorers,
a few obscure philosophers,
one or two nameless gardeners,
artists and virtuosos -
though even these livings
couldn't all be filled
for lack of other kinds of applications.
It was time to think
the whole thing over.
We'd been offered a trip
from which we'd surely be returning soon,
wouldn't we.
A trip outside eternity -
monotonous, no matter what they say,
and foreign to time's flow.
The chance may never come our way again.
We were besieged by doubts.
Does knowing everything beforehand
really mean knowing everything.
Is a decision made in advance
really any kind of choice.
Wouldn't we be better off
dropping the subject
and making our minds up
once we get there.
We looked at the earth.
Some daredevils were already living there.
A feeble weed
dung to a rock,
trusting blindly
that the wind wouldn't tear it off.
A small animal
dug itself from its burrow
with an energy and hope
that puzzled us.
We struck ourselves as prudent,
petty, and ridiculous.
In any case, our ranks began to dwindle.
The most impatient of us disappeared.
They'd left for the first trial by fire,
this much was clear,
especially by the glare of the real fire
they'd just begun to light
on the steep bank of an actual river.
A few of them
have actually turned back.
But not in our direction.
And with something they seemed to have won in their hands.
From trapeze to
to trapeze, in the stillness after
after the suddenly hushed drumroll, through
through the astonished air, more quickly than
than the weight of the body, which again
again has failed to fall.
Alone. Or even less than alone,
less, because defective, for he lacks
lacks wings, lacks them very much,
a lack which forces him
to bashful soarings on unfeathered
by now just bare attention.
With laborious ease,
with patient agility,
in calculated inspiration. Do you see
how he crouches to spring into flight, do you know
how he plots from head to foot
against such as he; do you know, do you see
how shrewdly he threads himself through his former shape and
so as to grasp in hand the swaying world
how he pulls from himself the newborn arms -
beautiful above all else at just this
at just this - now it's gone - moment.
This is what I see in my dreams about final
exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking
disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away --
but when it's clear I don't know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty
robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Will he grow up to be an L.L.D.?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride?
Maybe to the Buergermeister's daughter?
Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey
bun.
While he was being born, a year ago,
there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper.
Then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream.
A dove seen in a dream means joyful news--
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartschen knocking.
A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Sh-h-h, let's not start crying, sugar,
The camera will click from under that black hood.
The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunen.
And Braunen is a small but worthy town--
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to entry your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fiil of you."
"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I've come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My morality should touch you."
"I'm made of stone," says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscle to laugh."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."
"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
In the old master's landscape,
the trees have roots beneath the oil paint,
the path undoubtedly reaches its goal,
the signature is replaced by a stately blade of grass,
it's a persuasive five in the afternoon,
May has been gently, yet firmly, detained,
so I've lingered, too. Why, of course, my dear,
I am the woman there, under the ash tree
Just see how far behind I've left you,
see the white bonnet and the yellow skirt I wear,
see how I grip my basket so as not to slip out of the painting,
how I strut within another's fate
and rest awhile from living mysteries.
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were
the first.
You were saved because you were
the last.
Alone.
With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of
the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
They say I looked back out of
curiosity,
but I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver
bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal
strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at
the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I
dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
He would
vacation in a mountain boarding home, he would
come down for lunch, from his
table by the window he would
scan the four spruces, branch to branch,
without shaking off the freshly fallen snow.
Goateed, balding,
gray-haired, in glasses,
with coarsened, weary features,
with a wart on his cheek and a furrowed forehead,
as if clay had covered up the angelic marble - he wouldn't
know himself when it all happened.
The price, after all, for not having died already
goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would
pay that price, too.
About his ear, just grazed by the bullet
when he ducked at the last minute, he would
say: "I was damned lucky."
While waiting to be served his noodle soup, he
would
read a paper with the current date,
giant headlines, the tiny print of ads,
or dram his fingers on the white tablecloth, and his hands would
have been used a long time now,
with their chapped skin and swollen veins.
Sometimes someone would
yell from the doorway: "Mr. Baczynski, phone call for
you" -
and there would be nothing strange about that
being him, about him standing up, straightening his sweater,
and slowly moving towards the door.
At this sight no one would
stop talking, no one would
freeze in mid-gesture, mid-breath
because this commonplace event would
be treated - such a pity -
as a commonplace event.
You can't move an inch, my dear Marcus Emilius,
without Aborigines sprouting up as if from the earth itself.
Your heel sticks fast amidst Rutulians.
You founder knee-deep in Sabines and Latins.
You're up to your waist, your neck, your nostrils
in Aequians and Volscians, dear Lucius Fabius.
These irksome little nations, thick as flies.
It's enough to make you sick, dear Quintus Decius.
One town, then the next, then the hundred and
seventieth.
The Fidenates' stubbornness. The Feliscans' ill will.
The shortsighted Ecetrans. The capricious Antemnates.
The Laricanians and Pelignians, offensively aloof.
They drive us mild-mannered sorts to sterner measures
with every new mountain we cross, dear Gaius Cloelius.
If only they weren't always in the way, the
Auruncians, the Marsians,
but they always do get in the way, dear Spurius Manlius.
Tarquinians where you would least expect them,
Etruscans on all sides.
If that weren't enough, Volsinians and Veientians.
The Aulertians, beyond all reason. And, of course,
the endlessly vexatious Sapinians, my dear Sextus Oppius.
Little nations do have little minds.
The circle of thick skulls expands around us.
Reprehensible customs. Backwards laws.
Ineffectual gods, my dear Titus Vilius.
Heaps of Hernicians. Swarms of Murricinians.
Antlike multitudes of Vestians and Samnites.
The farther you go, the more there are, dear Servius Follius.
These little nations are pitiful indeed.
Their foolish ways require supervision
with every new river we ford, dear Aulus Iunius.
Every new horizon threatens me.
That's how I'd put it, my dear Hostius Melius.
To which I, Hostius Melius, would reply, my dear
Appius Papius: March on! The world has got to end somewhere.
No one in this family has ever died of love.
No food for myth and nothing magisterial.
Consumptive Romeos? Juliets diphtherial?
A doddering second childhood was enough.
No death-defying vigils, love-struck poses
over unrequited letters strewn with tears!
Here, in conclusion, as scheduled, appears
a portly, pince-nez'd neighbor bearing roses.
No suffocation-in-the-closet gaffes
because the cuckold returned home too early!
Those frills or furbelows, however flounced and whirly,
barred no one from the family photographs.
No Bosch-like hell within their souls, no wretches
found bleeding in the garden, shirts in stains!
(True, some did die with bullets in their brains,
for other reasons, though, and on field stretchers.)
Even this belle with rapturous coiffure
who may have danced till dawn - but nothing smarter -
hemorrhaged to a better world, b i e n s u r,
but not to taunt or hurt y o u, slick-haired partner.
For others, Death was mad and monumental -
not for these citizens of a sepia past.
Their griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast,
their vanishing was due to influenza.
Die - you can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.
Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.
Every closet has been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken,
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.
Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.