March 2011 - Poetry Foundation · Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati) rather than in Sanskrit, the language...

89

Transcript of March 2011 - Poetry Foundation · Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati) rather than in Sanskrit, the language...

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

March 2011

volume clcvii number 6

CONTENTS

March 2011

kabir 459 Brother, I’ve seen some How do you To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas His death in Benares Chewing slowly Plucking your eyebrows I won’t come Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

sarah lindsay 469 Shanidar, Now Iraq

carolyn forché 470 The Ghost of Heaven

daisy fried 474 Torment

paul hoover 481 House of Cedar, Rafters of Fir The Dry Bones The Watchman of Ephraim

clive james 486 Against Gregariousness

gottfried benn 487 Can Be No Sorrow Little Aster Beautiful Youth Threat Tracing A Shadow on the Wall Think of the Unsatisfied Ones Hymn People Met Last Spring Translated by Michael Hofmann

anna kamienska 503 Industrious Amazement: A Notebook Translated by Clare Cavanagh

contributors 526

cover art by eliana perez“Lamp,” 2010

a publication of thePOETRY FOUNDATION

printed by cadmus professional communications, us

Poetry March 2011 Volume 197 Number 6

Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 444 N. Michigan Ave, Ste 1850, Chicago, IL 60611-4034. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, po 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o!ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, po Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2011 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Indexed in “Access,” “Humanities International Complete,” “Book Review Index,” “The Index of American Periodical Verse,” “Poem Finder,” and “Popular Periodical Index.” Manuscripts cannot be returned and will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope, or by international reply coupons and a self-addressed envelope from writers living abroad. Copying done for other than personal or internal reference use without the expressed permission of the Poetry Foundation is prohibited. Requests for special permission or bulk orders should be addressed to the Poetry Foundation. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the uk. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental.

christian wiman

don share

fred sasaki

valerie jean johnson

lindsay garbutt

christina pugh

winterhouse studio

Editor

Senior Editor

Associate Editor

Managing Editor

Editorial Assistant

Reader

Art Direction

459

kabir

Brother, I’ve seen some

Brother, I’ve seen some Astonishing sights:A lion keeping watch Over pasturing cows;A mother delivered After her son was;A guru prostrated Before his disciple;Fish spawning On treetops; A cat carrying away A dog;A gunny-sack Driving a bullock-cart;A bu!alo going out to graze, Sitting on a horse;A tree with its branches in the earth, Its roots in the sky;A tree with flowering roots.

This verse, says Kabir, Is your key to the universe.If you can figure it out.

460

How do you

How do you,Asks the chief of police,Patrol a cityWhere the butcher shopsAre guarded by vultures;Where bulls get pregnant,Cows are barren,And calves give milkThree times a day;Where mice are boatmenAnd tomcats the boatsThey row;Where frogs keep snakesAs watchdogs,And jackals Go after lions?

Does anyone knowWhat I’m talking about? Says Kabir.

461

To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas

To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas,To idol worshippers and idol smashers,To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites,To Vedic pundits and Faber poets,The weaver Kabir sends one message:The noose of death hangs over all.Only Rama’s name can save you.Say it now.

462

His death in Benares

For Geo! Dyer

his front yardis the true Benares

— Devara Dasimayya, tr. A.K. Ramanujan

His death in BenaresWon’t save the assassin From certain hell,

Any more than a dipIn the Ganges will sendFrogs — or you — to paradise.

My home, says Kabir,Is where there’s no day, no night,And no holy book in sight

To squat on our lives.

463

Chewing slowly

god my darlingdo me a favour and kill my mother-in-law

— Janabai, tr. Arun Kolatkar

Chewing slowly,Only after I’d eatenMy grandmother,Mother,Son-in-law,Two brothers-in-law,And father-in-law(His big family included)In that order,And had for dessertThe town’s inhabitants,

Did I find, says Kabir,The beloved that I’ve becomeOne with.

464

Plucking your eyebrows

Plucking your eyebrows,Putting on mascara,But will that help youTo see things anew?

The one who seesIs changed into The one who’s seenOnly if one is

Salt and the other Water. But you, says Kabir,Are a dead Lump of quartz.

465

I won’t come

I won’t comeI won’t goI won’t liveI won’t die

I’ll keep utteringThe nameAnd lose myselfIn it

I’m bowlAnd I’m platterI’m manAnd I’m woman

I’m grapefruitAnd I’m sweet limeI’m HinduAnd I’m Muslim

I’m fishAnd I’m netI’m fishermanAnd I’m time

I’m nothingSays KabirI’m not among the livingOr the dead

Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

466

Translator’s Note

About Kabir, the facts are few, the legends many. He was born in Benares (now Varanasi) and lived in the fifteenth century, though opinion is divided whether it was in the first or the second half. From his poems we learn that he was a julaha, or weaver, his family per-haps having recently converted to Islam to escape its low status in the Hindu caste system. In several poems, Kabir speaks out against caste, as he does also, with as much vehemence, against Muslim practices:

If you say you’re a BrahminBorn of a mother who’s a Brahmin,Was there a special canalThrough which you were born?

And if you say you’re a TurkAnd your mother’s a Turk,Why weren’t you circumcisedBefore birth?

Kabir’s Muslim birth was something not liked by his Hindu fol-lowers, who, beginning around 1600, concocted legends to gloss over this uncomfortable fact. In one of them, he was a foundling, born to a Brahmin widow and raised in a Muslim household. Similarly, there are stories about his death. In the best-known one, after he died both Hindus and Muslims laid claim to his body. A quarrel broke out but when they lifted the shroud they saw instead of the corpse a heap of flowers. The two communities divided the flowers and performed Kabir’s last rites, each according to its custom.

Kabir belonged to the popular devotional movement called bhakti, whose focus is on inward love for the One Deity, in opposition to re-ligious orthodoxies and social hierarchies. Kabir called his god Rama or Hari, who is not to be confused with the Hindu god Rama of the Ramayana.

Many of the bhakti poets came from the bottom of the Hindu caste ladder. Among them you find a cobbler, a tailor, a barber, a boat-man, a weaver. One, Janabai (see epigraph to “Chewing slowly”),

467

was a maidservant. They wrote in the vernaculars (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati) rather than in Sanskrit, the language of the gods and the preserve of Brahmins. Occasionally, eschewing his abrupt debunking manner, Kabir speaks in riddles. These enigmatic poems (see “Brother I’ve seen some” and “How do you”) are called ulatbamsi or “poems in upside-down language,” in which the inten-tion seems to be to force the reader (or listener) into new ways of thinking and seeing. They each end in a revelation, though exactly what has been revealed is open to question.

The Kabir songs have come down to us in essentially three groups of texts. They are the Bijak or “eastern” tradition, the Rajasthani or

“western” tradition, and the Punjabi tradition centered around the Adi Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs. Kabir may never have traveled outside Benares, but his songs certainly did. To further complicate matters, the Rajasthani manuscripts come in di!erent recensions, so the same song can appear in more than one version. As it passed from singer to singer, the song kept changing, as is the case with blues.

Outside the work done by or commissioned by colonial admin-istrators, some of the earliest English translations of Kabir were made by Ezra Pound. They were based on literal versions supplied by one of Rabindranath Tagore’s young Bengali friends, Kali Mohan Ghose, and published in the Modern Review (Calcutta) in June 1913. The following year Tagore brought out his own One Hundred Poems of Kabir, which became the basis of several European- and Asian-language translations of Kabir as well as of Robert Bly’s reworkings. Both Ghose’s literal version and Tagore’s translation were made from Kshiti Mohan Sen’s Kabir compilation of 1910-11. It gave the Hindi originals along with their Bengali paraphrase. In 1945, in one of the Pisan cantos, Pound recalled his London years: “Thus saith Kabir:

‘Politically’ said Rabindranath.” Subsequent scholarship has shown that of the 341 poems in Sen,

only three are in the pre-1700 manuscripts. And even they are likely to have been composed by someone other than Kabir. An authentic Kabir poem, in the thousands attributed to him, may never be found, nor does it matter. If you catch the spirit, anyone can write an au-thentic Kabir poem. Innumerable anonymous poets have done so in the past and continue to do so even today, adding their voices to his. A researcher in Rajasthan in the nineties looking for Kabir songs in the oral tradition came across one that used a railway metaphor and English words like “engine,” “ticket,” and “line.” Asked how Kabir

468

could have known these words, the singer replied that Kabir, being a seer, knew everything. In “To tonsured monks,” too, Kabir knows everything, including a Jamaican sect and the name of a London publishing house. — akm

469

sarah lindsay

Shanidar, Now Iraq

When bones and flesh have finished their business together,we lay them carefully, in positions they’re willing to keep,and cover them over.Their eyes and ours won’t meet anymore. We hope.

It’s one of the oldest rules we mostly follow.In the deep Stone Age in Shanidar, now Iraq,someone or all of them laid or threw on the grandfather’s chestwhatever was blooming —St. Barnaby’s thistle, yarrow, hollyhock ...His was their only burial before the frost.

For millennia, then, the dead might go under with thistle,quantities of red ocher, a chunk of meat.Now we have everlasting bouquets of plastic;now we have hundreds a day to bag and box and pickleto re-cross the Atlantic.

Light a row of oil wells and kneelon sand too much embroiled for tombs.Regrettably, something of the smellis of bodies suddenly buried in fallen stones.But some is incense, pinches of pulverized Baghdad risingin ceremonial smoke:dust of combatants, onlookers, miscellaneous limbs,contents of hovels, contents of museums,ancient pollen of yarrow and hollyhock.

470

carolyn forché

The Ghost of Heaven

Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,a child herself with child, for whom we searched

through here, or there, amidst bones still sleeved and trousered,a spine picked clean, a paint can, a skull with hair

Sewn into the hem of memory: Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,God not of philosophers or scholars. God not of poets.

Night to night:child walking toward me through burning maizeover the clean bones of those whose fleshwas lifted by zopilotes into heaven.

So that is how we ascend! In the clawed feet of fallen angels. To be assembled again in the work rooms of clouds.

471

She rose from where they found her lyingnot far from a water urn, leaving herself behind on the groundwhere they found her, holding her armsbefore her as if she were asleep.

That is how she appears to me: a ghost in heaven.Carrying her arms in her arms.

Blue smoke from corn cribs, flap of wings.On the walls of the city streets a plague of initials.

Walking through a fire-lit river to a burning house: dead Singersewing machine and piece of dress. Outside a cashew tree wept blackened cashews over lamina.

Outside paper fireflies rose to the stars.

Bring penicillin if you can, surgical tape, a whetstone, mosquito repellent but not the aerosol kind. Especially bring a syringe for sucking phlegm,a knife, wooden sticks, a surgical clamp, and plastic bags.

You will need a bottle of cloud for anesthesia.

472

Like the flight of a crane through colorless dreams.

When a leech opens your flesh it leaves a small volcano.Always pour turpentine over your hair before going to sleep.

Such experiences as these are forgotten before memory intrudes.

The girl was found (don’t say this)with a man’s severed head stu!ed into her where a child would have been.No one knew who the man was. Another of the dead. So they had not, after all, killed a pregnant girl. This was a relief to them.

That sound in the brush? A settling of wind in sorghum.

If they capture you, talk.Talk. Please yes. You heard me right the first time.

You will be asked who you are.Eventually, we are all asked who we are.

473

All who come All who come into the worldAll who come into the world are sent.Open your curtain of spirit.

474

daisy fried

Torment

“I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck,talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children,final semester college seniors, bloodshot,collars undone, gorgeously exhausted, return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky —the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet.

“Something’s fucked with my tie.” He’s right. I see his future, the weight he’ll gain first in his face, then gut and ass, the look of bad luck he’ll haunt his bad jobs with. He tears o! the tie. Elephants on it.

Fatigue, swollen ankles, the midwife said. The worst discomforts of pregnancy. I wrote those down. But she’s wrong: self-pity. Strange dreams, she said. No dreams. Discarded newspapers —business section, money, real estate, auto —sift apart to quartos and folios underfoot.

“Shut up, Justin,” says the girl across from him. I hardly recognize Brianna in her interview hair. She scratches her face, fingers trembling from the day’s aftershocks. “I wanted,” she counts on her fingers, performing the sitcom of her tragedy, “Tribeca loft, expense account, designer clothes so haute they don’t look it, my very own Tesla, summer home in the Hamptons I’m too busy to use.”

“You wanted money,” says Justin.Brianna: “It went down with the towers.”

475

I spent my lopsided day lifting my bellyback towards center, interviewing for adjunct jobs. There’s a half-moon in half-clouds up over the tracks. Justin spreads over three seats, texts with his thumbs, talks: “The Lehman Brothers guy asks me, Did you ever sell anything? Sell me a bottle of water. I’m like fu-uck. To say something I say

‘Why do you like water?’ He says ... ” Justin fixes a diamond stud back in his ear.

“They’ll let me know.” Fifteen responsible childrensigh in disappointed relief. Somebody they knowdidn’t get the job they didn’t get. I sleep. Wake.Beautiful clothes spread bodiless before me!Tailored black suits and skirts, silk ties,ephemera of sheer and filmy stockings deflated over seat backs. Brianna looks around,no conductor coming, squats to peel o!, in one motion, skirt, hose, underpants, step butt-naked into soft chino shorts I’ll neverbe able to a!ord. “Nervous crotch sweat,” she says.

I keep trying to look not-quite-40in a di!erent way than I’m not-quite-40.The woman interviewer looked at my belly.

“As a new mother would you have time to be literary mama to your students?” So I could suewhen they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want.Justin looks up from his iPhone: “Soon-Jigot three o!ers. Fuck.” He flips the curlhis mother’s fingers crimped, first day of pre-Kinto his four-year-old forelock. “He’s guessing he’ll go with Goldman Sachs.” Brianna grabs her neck in living garrote. She high-fives anybody she can reach in gloomy delight. She gobbles

476

snack-pack popcorn, licks her fingers; bits dropyellow from her lips. “My mom will go crazyDeutsche Bank didn’t o!er.” She sees me.

“I didn’t realize that was you with your hair up.Look, Just.” She high-fives me. “It’s Professor.”

Is Brianna crying? “Don’t call me Professor,” I say, dozens of times a semester. “I’m a writer, not a teacher.” Justin grabs a Norton Anthology out of his five-hundred-dollar briefcase. “Fuck.What are we supposed to read for tomorrow?”

“Prufrock, dummy,” Brianna says. “You’re a good professor.” She condescends through tears.

“Poor baby,” mocks Justin, slumping so low in the seat I only see his shoe soles on the arm rest. The train swooshes through suburban tracts. The moon gets smaller. Brianna arrives mornings to workshop in a fake hurry and the sweats she slept in, probably rolls backin bed after. She hands out slight, surprising poems,apologizes, sips cardboard-container co!ee in a recyclable sleeve, turns her BlackBerry to vibrate.It moans like indigestion through class.

I hand her one of my self-pity tissues. My ankles are slim. Brianna hates her name. “So tacky.I’d be a Kelly if I were twenty years older.”I’d like to be able to hate her. I’m turning into my Favorite Teachers — so kind,so industrious, so interested and interesting.

“Sorry I’m late with my portfolio,” she saysthrough sni±es. She dabs her lip. “I had to prepare for,”a breath, “interviews.” A few times a semesterI say “It’s only poetry.” Gumbleeds! nosebleeds!the midwife predicted, and it’s true, my Kleenexes

477

are measled with blood, weird hairs, stretch marks,frequent catnaps, hip joints so loose you must take care walking. The fetus dabs its fingers in the sponge of me, flails. At the second class, Brianna said, “My mom would go crazy. I can’t read all these sex poems. We’re Christian.”I said, “Poems should be about life,part of life is sex.” Two kids wrote that downin notebooks. One was Justin. “But skipany reading that makes you uncomfortable.”Next week, Brianna wrote about hanging onto stall walls in her residence hall bathroom,fucking Princeton boys one by one.Justin’s poem was “Torment,” seven pages long.

Favorite Teachers write poems about students!Reading them is like listening to whorestalk about clients; however contemptuous they sound,everybody knows who’s selling, who’s buying.I’d like to be able to like them. I sleep. Wake.

“Justin’s your boyfriend?” I whisper to Brianna.My cell phone rings, screen says it’s my husband.If I answer, I’ll cry. Voice mail takes it.

“God no,” says Brianna. “We hate each other,right, Just? Never date the competition,you destroy your luck. Besides.” She startsmorosely high-fiving again. “I’m a virgin.”Justin laughs. She wraps her hair around her faceto smell it. “I pay attention in class.Professor Krugman, he’s a real professor.”She points at a headline I just kicked. HousingUpturn Predicted. “He says housing increasesdon’t matter in the long run. It’s a blip,if it’s even a blip. If I don’t get a job, it’s Wharton mba. Or teach English in Japan.

478

But this girl on my floor told me Asian girlsdepilate their whole bodies, even their arms.I can’t be the hairiest person in my life.”

What will I do next year without the jobI don’t want? I sleep. “Hey!” says Brianna.

“I could go back to Spain, smoke Ducadosin okupa cafes. Be a poet! Sorry.” Laughs herself out of last tearsat the idea. “I didn’t mean to get allSylvia Plathy on you. Anyway, my trust fundis safe. Knock plastic.” She reaches to rap the tieJustin hung over the seat. I say, “In Madridworkers smoke Ducados. Reds are for anarchistaEurotrash wannabes.” Brianna lips the cigaretteshe’ll light on the platform. “I’ll have my portfolionext week, promise.” All semester she’s revisedfollowing precisely, appallingly, my suggestions.She says “Think of me as raw talent wasted.”I’m pissed I think of her at all. Justin again,talking at no one: “Merrill Lynch sayswhat interests you in our company? I’m amped. I’m whipped. I’m like ‘Um, I heard you were hiring?’Nah, I’m giving him eight good reasons.He cuts me o! ... ” The train slows, surceaseswith a hiss. Fifteen responsible childrenstand in the aisle. Jizz, jess, fuck, markeredon seats by younger, irresponsible children.

O! the train, Justin jumps into a low Mazda coupe,yellow as Dick Tracy’s hat, parked unticketedat an expired meter, open to the rain. I autodial:

“I’m at the station. Don’t come, I need the walk.” Brianna: “Where’s Soon-Ji anyway? Flying his plane back?God, what’ll we do if nobody wants us?”

479

Justin: “Soon-Ji will fucking keep us I guess. All we have is Dad’s money.”Brianna: “Mine’s Mom’s. Half of it gone in the crash. But Soon-Ji is great-grandfathered in. He’ll be richerthan we’ll ever be if he never gets a job at all.”Justin: “Professor, you hand back comments tomorrow,right? They’re important to me.”

“Fuck you, suck-up,” Brianna says.

Sometimes I forget I’m pregnant till I walk.Brianna vaults into the car, leans out:

“Want a ride, Professor? Cigarette?” She puts one in my mouth, lights itwith a naked boy lighter that squirts fireout his tiny penis. “Beer?” Tears a cano! a six-pack choke-ring, sticks it in a baggieshe pulls from Justin’s glove compartment,pops the top, shoves it in my hand. “Nowyou can’t walk home — pregnant, smoking,carrying a beer? You’d be arrested. Anyway, Soon-Ji is having a party. Cristal! Rappers! He produces them and brings his stable down from Queens. You have to come! He was going to take your workshop, he admires you, but took playwriting instead.”For final relaxation in prenatal yoga, we doour Kegels squatting in a circle, shut-eyed —

“for perineal strengthening,” the teacher said.Then we lie on our sides, breathe in, breathe out,bellies like dropped anchors on the floor.Our muscles tick, smoothing, loosening.The teacher reads an a"rming poem. I tense up.

Brianna: “We always say Krugman’s one of the fewProfessors we’d friend on Facebook.

480

But, Daisy, we’d friend you too.” Memory: Favorite Teachers at our college house parties, slow-dancing with us, doing lines in our bathrooms. When are they going to grow up, we said. I wave, walk, drop the cigarettein the beer, the can in the trash can, relieved to be embarrassed, triumphant, sorry. Justin drives along beside me, Brianna rides shotgunstanding like a surfer on a breaking wave. Justin — “Fuck” — floors it, roars past me, away.I don’t know how to end this poem. On “Torment” I wrote: “You may want to find a way to suggestironic distance between the poet and speaker.”I couldn’t figure out what else,to responsible children, there was to say.

481

paul hoover

House of Cedar, Rafters of Fir

Comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love—Song of Soloman

scent of myrrh on the handles when oil is in the locksilken is his mouth when he is hard upon me

young heart, green bed, his fingers are in the streamhe eats of the bitter honey the sweetness of cherry

sacrament of the blood and of its windingsacrament of arrival and of its binding

expert in earth, eager in flesh he falls upon me and feaststhe watchmen have not seen him nor the owl in her nest

his darkness at noon among the white buildingsa hand that was stone builds the inner temple

sacrament of what is written on the table of the heartblueness of the wound where he has placed his kiss

482

The Dry Bones

My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself— Ezekiel

And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain,there came the shapes of four creatures,and they each had the likeness of a man,and each man had four wings outstretchedand each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open,given to weeping at the worlds they contained:

an eye-world of light, of fire and air,of water and its mirror, heart and its first fear;and in each world were four names,entangled in its forest of letters,whereupon I could read: Dow Jones, Cargill,Chevron, and DeKalb of the frozen seed,bearing but once and giving up its need;

and under each name were discovered four meanings,literal, figurative, rational, dim,and under each meaning a counter-meaning, with its likeness of Freud, Marx, Hegel, and Lacan; and the four figures passed as one overhead,their wingtips linked like molten silver joined.

For I, Ezekiel, had been given to eatthe very substance of God, and my eyes were open and my mouth spake,as spring opens winter and winter closes fall;and the earth turned rightly, to my senses sweet.Son of man, they called me, a proverb and a sign.

483

Say: I am a sign of the city, the cauldronwhere men burn down to desire. Say: I am the proverb of nothing and one,boiling over the fire, rising out of beliefand falling, like a tyrant, out of derision alone.

And lo, a likeness, as of the appearance of fire,the error of presence, of nothing as one,and lo, another likeness, the appearance of water, the error of absence, of something as none;for water surrounds all shapes that enterbut has no shape of its own, and fire is the shape of ruin alone.

For the princes of the sea shall cast their garments upon the land’s end:their scholar’s robes, sharkskin suits, and alligator shoes, their Nikes,Reeboks, and Chuvashian mittensknitted by the children of shepherds, by tinsmiths and ladies’ men, in the dark at the back of the store; for the princes of fire consume what they love, with the reckless ambition of gods.

Yea, as I spake to dry bones that lay upon the earth,they danced into being, and chattered, one and one,down the hallways of my desert, the thresholds of my river.For the Lord builds ruined palaces and plants desolation,he receives what is absent; possesses all that is gone.

484

The Watchman of Ephraim

The workman made it; therefore it is not God — Hosea

Hear the word of the Lord,ye children of Pittsburgh, of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque,ye hierophants and wishbones,teraphim and household plants, for I am a jealous God betrayed.

My lover, whom I uplifted,has fallen to other a!ections.Weep for her outcast state,for I rescind her corn and her fields, her appetites and her husbands, her loom and the cloth of her weaving; yea, as she sleeps in her bed,I will crumble her idols of clay.

I will cause to burn in the nighther barns filled with swallows,her caves of rodents and bats, her racks of sidereal dresses, her stacks of serpentine hats.

The velvet of her touch, once royal, I will scarify with my wrath.for I am a god betrayed; my lovehas reached into my weaknessand turned my heart like a fist.

Therefore, I will strip her nakedand drive her into the field.In her body of filth and feathers,her blood of beasts and men, she ismy desolation and a forgotten name.

485

For my cosmos is contracted. My first world slips from my hands.Tell the people, my prophet Hosea, that I loved her more than love,and she gave not love in return.

My anger flattens and spreadsalong the walls and windows.It glances from my mirrorsand breaks the east wind’s bones.I was a God of such strengththey could not guess my name.And this woman of human warmthsuckled me like a child.

Now I dwell with the mole, blindly,and my voice is thin as a gnat’s.I grieve what grinds in me, heavily.I am but a half note, half sung.

486

clive james

Against Gregariousness

Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrelsTap-dance on the water.They pluck the tuna hatchlingsAs Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry,Might once have picked up pearlsFrom a broken necklace.

Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardinesUp near the surface so the diving shearwatersCan fly down through the bubbles and get at them.Birds from above and big fish from belowRip at the pack until it comes apartLike Poland, with survivors in single figures.

The krill, as singletons almost not thereBut en masse like a cloud of diamond dustAgainst the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling,Are scooped up by the basking shark’s draglineOr sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen —A galaxy absorbed into a boudoirAnd nullified, a deep-space mass extinctionWatched only by the Hubble telescope.

Make your bones in a shark family if you can.If not, be tricky to locate for sheerTranslucence, a slick blip that will become —Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws —A lobster fortified with jutting eavesOf glazed tile, like the castle at NagoyaHoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkwardMouthful like a crushed car. That being done,Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.

487

gottfried benn

Can Be No Sorrow

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died

(it’s there in her museum in Meersburg),on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s,Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland,in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyesrested on white pillows till they looked their last —all of it junk now, or no longer extant,unattributable, anonymousin its insentient and continual disintegration.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods, the gene of death and the gene of love —who separated them, the words and things,who blended them, the torments and the place where they come

to an end, the few boards and the floods of tears,home for a few wretched hours.

Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote, bed and tears too impalpable,no No, no Yes,birth and bodily pain and faith an undefinable surge, a lurch,a power stirring in its sleepmoved bed and tears —sleep well!

488

Little Aster

A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab.Someone had jammed a lavender asterbetween his teeth.As I made the incision up from the chestwith a long knifeunder the skinto cut out tongue and gums, I must have nudged it because it slippedinto the brain lying adjacent.I packed it into the thoracic cavitywith the excelsiorwhen he was sewn up.Drink your fill in your vase!Rest easy,little aster!

489

Beautiful Youth

The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rusheslooked so nibbled.When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey.Finally in a bower under the diaphragmthey found a nest of young rats.One little thing lay dead.The others were living o! kidneys and liverdrinking the cold blood and hadhad themselves a beautiful youth.And just as beautiful and quick was their death:the lot of them were thrown into the water.Ah, will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!

490

Threat

Know this:I live beast days. I am a water hour.At night my eyelids droop like forest and sky.My love knows few words:I like it in your blood.

491

Tracing

i

O those years! The green light of morningand the still unswept pavements of pleasure — summer yelled from every surface of the cityand supped at a hornrefilled from above.

Silent hour. Watery colorsof a pale green eye’s diluted streampictures in that magic green, glass dances,shepherds and streams, a dome, pigeons — woven, dispatched, shining, faded — mutable clouds of happiness!

So you faced the day: the fontwithout bubbles, dawdlingbuildings and staircases; the houseslocked up, it was for you to createthe morning, early jasmine,its yelps, its incipient aboriginalstream — still without end — O those years!

Something unquenchable in the heart,complement to heaven and earth;playing to you from reeds and gardens,evening stormsdrenched the brassy umbels,darkly they burst, taut with seeds,and sea and strands, wimpled with tents,full of burning sand,weeks bronzing, tanning everythingto pelts for kisses landing

492

indiscriminately like cloudburstsand soon over!

Even thena weight overheadgrapes bunchingyou pulled down the boughs and let them bounce up,only a few berriesif you wantedfirst —

not yet so bulging and overhung withplate-sized fruit,old heavy grape flesh —

O those years!

493

ii

Dark days of spring,unyielding murk in the leaves;drooping lilacs, barely looking upnarcissus color, and smelling strongly of death,loss of content,untriumphant sadness of the unfulfilled.

And in the rainfalling on the leaves,I hear an old forest song,from forests I crossedand saw again, but I didn’t returnto the hall where they were singing,the keys were silent,the hands were resting somewhereapart from the arms that held me,moved me to tears,hands from the eastern steppes,long since trampled and bloody —only the forest songin the raindark days of springthe everlasting steppes.

494

A Shadow on the Wall

A shadow on the wallboughs stirred by the noonday windthat’s enough earthand for the eyeenough celestial participation.

How much further do you want to go? Refusethe bossy insistenceof new impressions —

lie there still,behold your own fields,your estate,dwelling especiallyon the poppies,unforgettablebecause they transported the summer —

where did it go?

495

Think of the Unsatisfied Ones

When despair —you who enjoyed great triumphsand walked with confidence and the memory of many gifts of delirium and dawnsand unexpected turns —when despair wants you in its grip,and threatens you from some unfathomable depthwith destruction and the guttering out of your flame:

then think of the unsatisfied ones,with their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions,loyal to a few memoriesthat held out little hope,who still bought flowers,and with a smile of not much luminosity confided secret desiresto their small-scale heavensthat were soon to be extinguished.

496

Hymn

That quality of the great boxersto be able to stand thereand take shots,

gargle with firewater,encounter intoxicationat sub- and supra-atomic levels,to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s liplike Empedocles, and descend,

not say: I’ll be back,not think: fifty-fifty,to vacate molehillswhen dwarves want space to grow,to dine alone,indivisible,and able to renounce your victory —

a hymn to that man.

497

People Met

I have met people who, asked after their names, shyly — as if they had no titleto an appellation all to themselves —replied “Fräulein Christian” and added:

“like the first name,” they wanted to make it easy for the other,not a di"cult name like “Popiol” or “Babendererde” —

“like the first name” — please, don’t burden your memory overmuch!

I have met people who grew up in a single room with their parents and four brothers and sisters, and studied at nightwith their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table,and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses —and innerly gentle and hard-working as Nausicaa,clear-browed as angels.

I have often asked myself and never found an answerwhence kindness and gentleness come,I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.

498

Last Spring

Fill yourself up with the forsythiasand when the lilacs flower, stir them in toowith your blood and happiness and wretchedness,the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,then maybe — just maybe — the hours will carry youinto June, when the roses blow.

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

499

Translator’s Note

Gottfried Benn began as a skinny and larky medical student in a wing collar. The “Morgue” poem cycle of 1912 that made his name was

“written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after” (the most stylish authority on Benn being always Benn). The years then seemed to abbreviate and pad his stature, give him the hooded owls’ eyes — at once twinkling and cruel — the jowls, and overbear-ing cranium of an imperial melancholy; it would be no very great surprise if his name had been Heliogabalus, say. Notoriety was never far. In a splendidly saturnine note in his first collected works of 1921, he wrote:

Now these complete works, one volume, two hundred pages, thin stu!, one would be ashamed if one were still alive. No doc-ument worthy the name; I would be astonished if anyone were to read them; to me they are already very distant, I toss them behind me like Deucalion his stones; maybe human beings will emerge from the gargoyles; but whether they do or not, I shan’t love them.

I don’t know that I have ever seen anything less self-enamored, less parti pris from a poet on his or her own work!

In the event, something of what he so indi!erently predicted did come to pass: “human beings” did emerge from the “gar-goyles” — whether or not Benn loved them hardly matters. The po-ems of his last twenty years or so lost their ferocity, their shock, and their prankish, metallic manipulativeness; became softer, lived-in, improvised, gestured-at, shu±ing or shambling. They still had the same principal two ingredients: corpses — or mortality — and flow-ers; the same groping at one notion or another of a “beautiful youth.” The “lavender asters” return in the form of new flower-complexes, as “lilacs ... / narcissus color, and smelling strongly of death,” as pop-pies, as forsythias and lilacs again, this time with hope of roses. The beautiful or unbeautiful, loved or unloved cadavers have turned into Benn himself, anxiously remembering his salad days, his green youth — “Tracing” is drenched in the color; or holding on, into June

500

(of the year of his death — he died on July 7); or in one of his last poems (the first one here, “Can Be No Sorrow”), thinking about the deaths of poets, put together from wood and tears and pain and spasm, the “sleep well” at once a close echo and a world away from the cyni-cal early “rest easy.” The hardness of the early style is replaced by human tenderness, empathy, puzzlement, a kind of unfocused but unavoidable sadness. It is as though the poems themselves — and this strikes me as extremely rare in poetry, Eugenio Montale’s late, ret-robottega poems another instance — are old; have undergone an aging process, cellular and organic, like flesh (the title, incidentally, of a 1917 volume of Benn’s); their resources — a mild, as it were stoical, plaintiveness, a burbling, flaccid syntax, an unsolicited melancholy, a heaping of negatives — are those of age; as though breathing and humming and carpet slippers and “Juno” cigarettes and murmuring and pain and a human smell have gone into them — not mere dime-a-dozen words.

Like most descriptions of poems, “getting” Benn is a sort of im-possibility: frail structures carrying heaviness of heart; misanthropic, even solipsistic, but full of fellow-feeling; ethereal (“A Shadow on the Wall”), but always with some minimal roughage; they concede little in the way of paraphraseable content, but at the same time, in Seamus Heaney’s valuable words, they “do not waver / into language. Do not waver in it.” The poems are as they are, are as they want to be; the opposite of art, Benn always argued, is not nature, but pleas-ingness.

Somehow, quite without my realizing it, I seem to have spent half my life with Benn; in his centenary year, 1986, I reviewed the two-volume edition of his poems and Holthusen’s biography of him. He has influenced me, not only to translate him in the first place, but also while not translating him. Over the years, thanks in part to Benn, my own sentences have become more indeterminate, my language more musical, my diction more — no pun intended — florid. There is a sort of murmurous, mi-voix, halblaut quality in poems that I adore, and — languidly — strive for. I was all the time quietly being readied for a task I hardly dared suppose I would ever take on. — mh

503

anna kamienska

Industrious Amazement: A Notebook

I exchange my life for words.

Weak, uncertain currency.

* * *

Saint Augustine calls the kingdom of the saved “Jerusalem,” and the kingdom of the damned “Babylon.” Maybe that’s what Norwid has in mind when he says “I write from Babylon to Jerusalem — and the letters get through.”

* * *

As a spring makes its way to the light, to air. Its toil, its drudgery, its dark transit, like despair.

That’s how the poet works for words. Through muscles, move-ments. That’s how J.* wrote poems. He paced, he muttered, he waved his arms as though gathering and grasping words.

* * *

I wasn’t looking for God at all.

I sought my Dead One.

I’ll never cease repeating this, amazed.

* * *

Another eschatological dream. I never dream of J. dead. But here I am at the cemetery and his grave opens. I see him whole, lying un-touched by decay. But his body is completely covered with fishes. I see their dead white bellies. Only his head is bare. He opens his eyes.

* Kamienska’s husband, poet Jan Spiewak, who died of cancer on December 22, 1967.

504

They’re clear, blue. I run back and forth, calling his name until I’m hoarse. He doesn’t notice me, he doesn’t hear, as if he’s absorbed in something else. Finally someone comes up to him. And suddenly his head changes into the head of another bearded man, who smiles and extends his hands — to a doctor, a surgeon, an apothecary?

Still in the dream. I’m coming back with Pawel. I say, it’s as if he wanted to show that di!erent people are made of the same material. Yes, he answers, that dumb Kaniewska said the same thing a second ago. It’s obvious.

On the dream’s peripheries, right beside it, a cross with a figure of Jesus has been knocked down, it’s lying there. Suddenly its arms come to life. Christ crawls out from the mounds of earth and carries his cross onward.

* * *

Dante places the sorrowful in hell, those who refused to rejoice in the sunlight.

* * *

Photographs die. After a while they scarcely remind us of the dead. At first each snapshot is a shock. Then something happens to the pic-tures, they reveal only a blueprint of the face, not its truth.

* * *

Sartre: To look at another person is to strike him, to subjugate him; you strive to immobilize him as you see him.

“Seized” by your gaze, a person ceases to be a freedom, he is fixed in the moment of attack, the act of aggression. Hence the person in this conception is a “threat,” an “executioner,” “hell” for others.

Those who submit to this “predatory” concept of others are stricken at once by creative paralysis.

* * *

G.L. calls me — a blind man whom I met a couple of years back. He remembers my every word. The loneliness of the blind.

He’s freed from his loneliness by the word. Isn’t that the point of

505

poetry? Breaking through the walls of solitude. Poetry is the great S.O.S. of loneliness.

G.S. tells me he is a beggar always pleading for human help.I say, “I wish that you could see the world more clearly”— and sud-

denly realize the absurdity of my words. I’m speaking to a blind man.

He takes my hand. He sees only with his hand.“Mercy flows through touch alone,” from my poem “Body.”

* * *

Philosophies as sui generis “security systems” (Péguy) — forms of domestication.

* * *

“There are angels of Silence and angels of Anger and angels of Intellect.”

* * *

People don’t like poetry in Poland. Why is that? Perhaps in part be-cause we link poetry with slavery. We used it to compensate for all we’d lost in a century of subjugation.

For too long it was everything and now it must be nothing.

* * *

The problem of time seen through the example of music. Music is returning time. The taut springs of time. Time coursing through certain creative personalities, and so personal time. The time of Beethoven, the time of Brahms, Chopin’s time, Mozart’s time.

These individual times, so varied in their movement, their tem-peraments, their energies — are subject just the same to the general laws of time. There are always two inclines leading into the present: the past and the future. For all that, though, music taken as a whole holds hints of eternity, of permanence.

The raw material of music is time.Time is the raw material of our lives, too, although each of us

molds something di!erent from it.

506

Time as a gift, as something given to us — to use, to fulfill, as one fills a glass of wine. It’s given like the coin in the Gospel parable, to be multiplied. And how could time be multiplied except through eternity and outside eternity.

When I listen to music, I feel how time passes, I hear it passing. Time is intensified, revitalized, recharged.

* * *

There’s no art in giving what you have. The art is giving what you haven’t got. The gift of empty hands.

* * *

Tu fui, ego eris.

I was you — you will be me.

Czechowicz paraphrased it brilliantly:

“I was what you are

I am what you will be.”

* * *

Communion with the dead gives a foretaste of God. But why do we put God in the land of the dead? Why do we make Him our Hades?

* * *

Again the temptation to take leave. Never. Never.

* * *

What is this valley that you must climb to reach?What is this mountain to which you must descend?

* * *

507

What are you doing here, handful of clay, why do you stay on?

* * *

I dreamed of Father J. presiding over a funeral mass for Adam Mickiewicz’s soul, with an Orthodox priest and a Protestant minister assisting. An ecumenical dream, says Father J.

* * *

God doesn’t dwell in great things, but He embraces every insignif-icance. This adjusts our notions of large and small. Maximum and minimum. The macrocosmos and microcosmos of physics confirm this.

* * *

In Pedro Arrupe’s book on Japan I find useful comments on shooting with a bow. A Japanese man instructs a missionary:

Holy Father, you must not think about the target, the target has no meaning here. And you must not worry about hitting it. Above all you must strive to become one with the target, and only then do you calmly release the arrow. The arrow will fly straight to the target. But if you tighten your nerves instead of the string, you may be sure that it will never reach the goal.

This advice comes in handy in many situations. Since the goal is reached only in passing.

When I want to write a poem, I sit and struggle and nothing comes of it. When it’s beside the point, the poem arrives on its own.

* * *

A Chinese proverb: “When you drink water, think of the spring from which it comes.”

* * *

508

My child, the confessor says, what did you expect? Every day we get up, wash, eat soup. So likewise every day we sin, and keep repeating the same sins ad nauseam.

* * *

Accidents are the atoms of life, its thread is spun from them, whether up or down.

The “script” of accidents is di"cult to decipher.

* * *

He died of excess humility.

* * *

A horrid dream with cows and bulls. Where does it all come from? Where do our dreams go when we’re not sleeping?

* * *

Some sort of beetles turned up on the floor. They come when I shut o! the light. No poison works on them. They leave their larvae in the form of tidy, lacquered packages. They multiply on the ruins of our family home.

* * *

What will my death mean?

The end of these notes.

* * *

Is it possible that God is?

It’s even more unlikely that He isn’t.

You have two impossibilities to choose from.

509

* * *

The body is not just our muscles and bones. It’s much more. Through food, water, the body’s exhalations, the universe becomes an exten-sion of our body. From this angle, the notion of resurrection looks di!erent, more perfect. Waters and lakes, hills and valleys, clouds and seas, animals and plants: all are resurrected with us. And in them — the whole human being is resurrected, larger than himself.

“And he became man.”

* * *

I think about this notebook. It’s not a memoir. It lacks important things. I don’t note events, I don’t write about people and books, or only about those with whom at a given moment I become one, I see through their words. These are just signs, signals, scratchings on sand, water, air. Shavings, slivers. A snail’s trace.

* * *

At the cemetery. Some great comfort in this leveling of all. I lit candles not just on “my” grave, but on my friends’: Lec, Pietak, Mach ...

Transformation is one of life’s gifts. When I look in the mirror now, I see Mother and Grandma united in my face. As though they’d returned. This is how we’re transformed. Through returns. They both come back to me in dreams now, Mother and Grandma. One always wants me to be better than I am. The other demands nothing, only loves, understands, brings tender medicine.

Grandma was our doctor in childhood. She brought us onions, garlic on wheat bread, bitter gentian, wormwood. She bought apples with her last pennies: the cheapest, withered. You ate them whole, stems and all.

* * *

Pietak thanked God for every poem. He scribbled his thanks on the margins of his drafts. And he was an atheist.

* * *

510

I walk on faith as on crutches, hobbling.

* * *

A prayer that last things would become first things for us, like bread and fire. That children who have grown and gone would return to their mothers. To be like Socrates, who, when sentenced to death, learned to play the lyre.

* * *

The apocryphal gospel of the Ebionites: “Lift a stone and you will find me beneath it, cut a tree and you will find me there.”

* * *

She was perfectly poor. She went with only her rosary. She left be-hind an estate made up of a cane shedding its black lacquer and a worn missal with an old-fashioned reckoning of sins, for example, how to treat servants and serfs. At least we’ve got less to worry about in that department.

* * *

I hobble along on poems.

* * *

Poems crystallize from the substance of time. A cluster of moments, like bees dangling from the hive’s mouth.

A poem’s salt takes a long time settling to the bottom.

* * *

Each of us has our own eschatology, if even we don’t realize it, or at least suspect it.

* * *

511

Water again in my dreams. Clean, clean, flowing along the sand, so transparent you can see eels swimming on the bottom.

* * *

A house full of scraps of poems, unused ideas. A nest of thoughts, the wood chips from an industrious carpenter of the word. Their abun-dance, like froth, around my existence, excess, boiling over. I don’t know why I sentenced this or that poem to non-being, to silence; why I wrote down this, but not that thought. All froth.

* * *

When everything falls silenteven eternal restand things no longer weep for us

* * *

I dreamed of my dead in silver masks.

* * *

We speak of “this world” and “the next world.” “Believers” are those who supposedly believe in “the next world,” its reality.

I don’t believe in the next world. The world is one. One reality. Death isn’t a gateway to the next world, maybe just the opening of blind eyes.

* * *

Poetry as a cemetery. A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cem-etery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jas-mine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt o!erings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.

Cemeteries of sunsets, running with arms spread, a child’s short dress, winter, snowstorms, footsteps on the stairs, tears, a letter with a serious confession, silver faces, the shoemaker’s stall, parting, pain, sorrow.

512

Everything preserved, buried in amber tombs of words. The sea, grief trickling from someone’s eyes, parting; faith in God, arrivals and departures, loneliness heavier than death, sweet as death. Anxiety and peace. The streets of cities. A monk’s belly bumps up against a tourist in catacombs. First communion. First love. First storm at sea. First night.

A dog’s eyes, eyes of the beloved, unclosed eyes of a dead man, glazed with one tear. Barrows of memory. Mummies, the amputated hands and feet of statues. A deer emerges from the grove, stops and stares. A footbridge across the river in the flutter of geese and bare feet, flowering fields. Grandfather’s death, his moustache in the cof-fin. A dog’s howl.

Since the priest doesn’t come running with his holy oil every time a leaf falls. The collective grave of childhood, where apple cores lie, lit-tle skeletons, a dead friend. Basia Bartmanska, her father’s angry brow, the grandfather’s hand given to kiss, the longing for holiness, nettles, a country outhouse, spiders, boys’ tickling on a suburb’s dark steps.

That sun and that rain, mama, mama, that sky and trees. The springs are ever more tightly wound, I can’t turn them to the end.

My mother, who dies in my childhood dream, my mother who dies and I watch as she dies, and I remain alive, whole, almost indi!erent.

Kindhearted Mother, protectoress of people.And so many lives, like the rings of a tree, like geological strata.

I lost God in the darkness of my twenty years. Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, help me find my lost Lord God! Saint Anthony, stand in the courtyard and gather alms for the poor.

* * *

Insomnia. The insomnia that startled me in grandma.

Thomas Moore’s prayer (quoted by Zychiewicz in “The Letters of St. Malachy”): “Give me good digestion, Lord, and something to digest.”

The entrancing sobriety of holiness.

* * *

A river slowly returning to its sources. Until it drinks from them, it can’t rest, it can’t entrust itself to the sea’s dark depths.

513

I wrote a poem about that river, wondering how it suddenly turned up. “Industrious amazement” — an apt definition of poetry for all kinds of reasons.

* * *

Every poem brought such happiness, as if we’d just had a child. Now the poems are born posthumously, orphaned. No one rejoices, no one lifts them on high, like a father. The paternal divinity of that gesture.

* * *

In my family — like the litany of all saints. Mother — patron saint of principles and faith, grandma — saint of remedies and darning (no one darns stockings these days), uncle on my mother’s side — saint of valerian and nerves, uncle on my father’s side — saint of rumpled girls in haystacks, aunt — saint of threshing, sister — saint of unhappy love and non-love, father — saint of eternal rest, and I myself — saint of great hunger.

* * *

Christ of sorrowmultiplied by all the hands of country woodcuttersrising always new from their humbleness like dustgrowing from their faith like spruces I pray to you with shriveled fingerswith sawdust shavingsthe wise resistance of the woodChrist of sorrowthink on me some dayhewn as you are from my clumsy faithfrom my doggedness my desirefrom the stubbornness of my summonsToss a sheaf of light into my room littered with wordslet the words fall stilllet the poems fadelet the room be bright and empty when I go

514

* * *

Rozewicz always writes about the “death of poetry” (a great cadaver), about the “new” fall of man. Such notions strike me as betraying a certain historical naivete. How often have we proclaimed the death of poetry and the world’s end! Every era has its disasters. Everything has always crumbled, everything has died, by the standards of what-ever the world was at the time. Our age has nothing to boast about on that score, though this may not feed its perverse vanity.

* * *

From the whole liturgy my favorite words are those of the centurion, repeated before communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.” They have the power of poetry. Humility, trust, and desire — making faith. For ages humanity has built this experience, but stupid people like me must discover it all again, must touch it for themselves.

* * *

“A clay vessel” — the human body.

* * *

The past doesn’t vanish at once. It dies slow, with great di"culty. After all we keep dreaming of our childhood, fetal waters, the emblems of tribal knowledge, unknown animals. The past, always recreated, is our present. The past is the present made human.

* * *

Entering a second youth. I need to see a doctor. It’s not normal. An influx of energy from an unseen star.

* * *

Jastrun says: Yes, fall is like the spring. But winter, now that’s another story.

515

* * *

The multiplicity of realities. Expanses through which humans pass, which they inhabit. Pity the poor souls confined to the four walls of a single reality. A normal person passes from one reality to another as if from room to room.

Likewise within us the four walls of our various realities abut one another. All my realities surround me like glass halls, since I manage to be simultaneously in them all. In the same way God’s reality is beyond us and within us, as in Mickiewicz’s poem:

I talk with you who reigns in heaven,But also visits in my spirit’s home.

* * *

Trains, always trains in dreams. What did people dream about before they invented trains?

* * *

At the beginning of a new notebook I copy a quote from Simone Weil, which captures me completely: “Don’t insist on understanding new things, but try with your whole self, with patience, e!ort and method, to comprehend obvious truths.”

This quote conducts a polemic with the ceaseless, barbaric pursuit of novelty and disdain for obvious, primary truths.

And so all my notes, all these snail’s traces, are the realization of Simone’s one thought. I won’t and can’t discover anything, I want only with my whole self to reach the heart of obvious truths.

* * *

He died. At least he can’t do that again!

* * *

Wlodzimierz Slobodnik’s story: I had a Jewish friend who killed him-self. He tied a noose around his neck. He comes to me in my dreams. I don’t dream about my father, my mother, my brother. I dream of

516

him. He envies me, that I write, publish, talk, and he doesn’t. There must be a soul after death, why else would he keep coming back?

* * *

Accidents often change the course of science. But you need someone who can read the “accidents’” meanings. It’s just the same with life’s accidents. You need to decode their script.

* * *

Many letters in the house. One broken teacup. There’s nobody home.

* * *

Before Freud or Jung, wise Norwid discovered the existence of a col-lective unconscious and archetypes that come to us in dreams:

Hence: though I sleep, I don’t dream what I dream,Half the globe’s humanity co-dreams with me.

—From Cradle of Song

* * *

And then a dream took pity on me again. I got up before dawn. When I went back to bed it was dark. I sensed he was beside me, he’d crossed the room. He lay down next to me. We talked entwined. “What’s it like there?” “There’s God and there are birds,” he said. Maybe he meant to say “angels”? God and birds. He left, went through the wall and jumped into a passing truck. He opened his mouth as if he were shouting something.

* * *

A story of the Hasidim: Rabbi Moses from Kobryn said, “When you speak a word before God, enter into that word with your whole self.” One of his listeners asked, “How on earth can a big man enter a little word?” “Anyone who thinks he’s bigger than a word,” the Tzadik replied, “is not the person of whom we speak.”

517

* * *

When the Rabbi Isaac Meir was still a boy, his mother took him with her to Kozienice. There someone turned to him and said, “Isaac Meir, I’ll give you a guilder if you tell me where God is.” Isaac answered,

“I’ll give you two if you tell me where He’s not.”

* * *

Yesterday I heard, “He’s gone now. His body has decomposed. He’s gone. He’s not coming back.” I must still have illusions since those words still hurt. There are people who’d like to kill you in me. Don’t be frightened. You’re still alive, you won’t die. You can come back without fear.

* * *

Endo, Silence: “When Gampe was with me, we shared our fear like bread.”

* * *

Umberto Eco, the Italian aesthetician, introduces the term “open work,” a work that wants to make its audience a co-creator.

* * *

And my philosopher once more:

The inability to tolerate su!ering signals a refusal to participate in the real human community, which is conscious of its bound-aries, conscious of all the potentials for conflict it contains, ready to submit its boundaries to the test ... The anesthetizing of life is an enemy to the human community.

* * *

Pascal, who caused me to lose my faith and then helped me to find it. Saint Pascal, pray for us.

518

* * *

Poem-formulas. Poem-prayers.

* * *

Poems to be written:

Stolen Mother of God

To exist after death

Dream — I saw myself on the inner side of my eyelids

Poetry — an elongated arm

Deafness — Beethoven

Prayer for silence

* * *

Silencefertile raincomefill our earswith the vast stillnessof your instruments

* * *

When I think of my childhood, I realize that Grandma was the one who truly loved me. Mother had too many of us, and besides she had her own dead, her husband and son. The dead absorb us more than the living, because we always think there’s still time. Preoccupied with building their posthumous life inside us, we sometimes neglect the living.

* * *

519

When J. died I was forty-seven. I try death on for size as women try on a friend’s hat.

* * *

I broke a crystal goblet.Lost in thought, I passed my bus stop. I took a cab. It got a flat tire.

I had to get out half-way. While cooking an egg I got caught up in a book. A shot from the scorched saucepan brought me round.

It’s only afternoon. What will happen by tonight?Next I nearly got hit by a car. Sometimes I think that if I did, I’d

just walk o! without noticing.

* * *

Rhythm in poetry and life alike — it’s not just an external conven-tion, a structure of style. It also reflects the inner rhythms of feeling, imagination, secret impulses, nerves. Rhythm is also rigor. And rigor is a moral concept. So we can speak of the morality of rhythm.

* * *

The grace of people, that they are. It doesn’t matter if they are for me. Just that they are. Zofia Malynicz. Zofia Mikulska. Zofia Koreywo. Zofia Wojcik. All Zofias. I say them like a rosary.

* * *

Tamed tigers sleep on the sofasthe time has come to tame terrifying things goods and chattelsterrifying because we know they’ll outlast ustame the floor and the wall above the bedwith a damp spot like a sparrow hawktame the cups and platesthe chair we mount on our way to the Crusadesall the corners and there are more than fivethe ceiling where ideas are bornwhere dreams drop like thunder from clear skiesthe bed wherewe die cozily until dawn

520

beneath the evening spider’s eye and may the milkman’s clatternot waken us too soon

* * *

In the Gospels: “At that time ...” “That time” ... You could write an epic about those words.

* * *

At that time wells creakeddust rose along the roadrain fellsomeone was born someone diedsomeone played the fluteand howled from the yard’s darknesssomeone got drunk and lay like a log beneath a fencesomeone bartered for a dove canvas basket fishAt that time the fig’s fruit swelledmules bent their spinesdrank the west reflected in the waterthe lake splashed silverthe boat hid safely in the reeds

* * *

Rojkowa asks if I’ve already turned sixty! It’s not old age, it’s loneliness that bakes my face in its oven.

* * *

Did it hurt the lepers to be cleansed? Since the cleansing You send us stings like an open wound.

* * *

In a dream J. says to me, “You su!er because of me.” “You know,” I answer in the dream, “love is made of joy and pain. I’d rather seek joy in pain than pain in joy.” Precise dialectics as far as dreams go.

521

I knew that he would leave, that he was already going, that he doesn’t belong to me. The wisdom of dreams.

* * *

A return to Saint Augustine. Dialogues and philosophical letters. “We must admit that a crying man is better than a laughing worm, although I could, without a word of falsehood, deliver an extended speech in the worm’s praise.”

I personally would be happy to hear a speech praising worms.

* * *

A man stands over someone’s grave and thinks, “Why can’t I know if there’s life on the other side?” A worm wends his way through the earth and thinks, “I wonder if there’s life up there.”

* * *

Now when I write my Great Small Things, I see clearly that my child-hood is an unhealed wound. That’s why it’s so hard for me to write, even though this is just a naive little children’s book, only partly autobiographical ...

Childhood for me was not a time of happiness, a paradise lost.When I hear violin music, I feel a painful clutch at my heart. I

didn’t understand that pain. It’s my father playing the violin. I didn’t understand his death, I couldn’t accept it. But the blow hit hard, it left scars.

Is this consciousness therapeutic? I don’t think so. It reawakens all the later pains and sorrows anchored in that childish lament. It was the prototype of all the su!ering foretold for my entire life. I walk through life with steps of death: father, brother, mother, grandma, husband. The whole tribe dropping along the roadside — into the void all around.

* * *

The dimensions of being. Like a shirt size.

* * *

522

Holy nothingness, have mercy on us.

* * *

I dreamed of a synagogue like a musical instrument, a harp sound-ing in the air. On the pediment bows, batons, trumpets rose and fell. I could draw it.

* * *

Human hands are sometimes more intelligent than faces.

* * *

An unloved person doesn’t die. He withers like an unused hand.

* * *

P. Valéry: “the kingdom of transparency.”

* * *

P.V.: “A god born of words returns to words.”

* * *

P.V.: “The machine killed patience.”

* * *

There are formally stupid objects and wise objects. Some stupid household objects bother me. The thing’s form is its word. This is why we possess the paradoxical possibility of translating things into words.

* * *

Joanna P. says that poetry shouldn’t be “pure” in and of itself. It must pass through sand, silt, stones to be purged. But there are also poets who reject distilled poetry and leave only the sand and silt.

523

* * *

Husserl: “A recognized object is the density of being.”

* * *

A saint from seven solitudes.

* * *

A poet is a person translated into words.

* * *

When I read that God or the Holy Spirit wants such and such, I shut the book. The author decidedly knows too much.

* * *

Today is the day of Guardian Angels.

* * *

An old, used-up calendar. This whole domestic archive makes no sense. Time to get rid of it. Time to burn paper bridges behind us.

* * *

I’m as patient as the patron saint of toothaches.

* * *

“Each of us has strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.”

* * *

The menagerie inside us: despair, melancholy, insomnia, sorrow, vanity. Beasts of the Apocalypse.

* * *

524

A Christ without arms. Like a tiny violin.

* * *

Here’s how it is: Crying doesn’t cryDying doesn’t dieLaughter doesn’t laughSighing doesn’t sighPain is painless

* * *

I’d like to find my father’s violin. J. wrote, “I’d like to find my father’s cane, I’d take it for a walk.”

* * *

I dreamed about a beautiful silver fish dancing on the table.

* * *

A strange, long dream, extended like a film, full of details, about the afterlife.

A child, a big girl already, comes into my room. I know she’s the spirit of a dead child. I make the sign of the cross on her forehead and chest. She sees it as a!ection, she’s pleased, she leaves unwill-ingly. Suddenly the room is filled with the dead. Lec is among them, smiling as always, kind and a little ironic. We kiss. I ask him what this all means — so many dead people in a dream.

“It’s an omen,” he says.“Death?” He nods.“I’m going to die?” He nods again, looking in my eyes. I feel a rush

of joy. I awaken in the night and see some kind of strange light run-ning through the kitchen and the entry. I run out. A short circuit, all the sockets have burned out. I open the bathroom door. A gaping hole. The bathroom has collapsed, the bathtub hangs down, through the fallen floor I see children sleeping in the room below, already flooded with water. I dress quickly to go save them. Someone’s waking the children, getting them out, the water subsides. A boy is playing with

525

a lamp and falls down dead, charred. I hear a cry.I walk upwards along some rafters and climb a strange little tower.

Suddenly the tower trembles and falls on me. I’m killed. I feel a great numbness throughout my body. I rise, get out of the dead body, but for some reason, there are always two people, as if the body were keeping me company. We leave. We go through the world, road, street, city, gray sky.

I say, “Well, look, there’s everything in the afterlife.” We’re sur-prised. Children fly through the sky. I learn to fly as they do, I can fly, but only down low for now. My companion struggles.

Flying through a gate. Like a concentration camp. Wild dogs and foxes. It’s terrible, but it ends.

The heaven or hell of writers. A crowd. It keeps getting bigger. Finally it dawns on me that I’ll find J. here. I tell someone his birth year, 1908. He should be here. But I don’t see him. I call his name. And suddenly he’s here! He’s sitting farther o! and comes up to me. We rush at each other and hug.

“I missed you so much!” I tell him.“I know. I know everything. We’ve been through a lot.” We enter

each other through our hug. Finally we’re one person.I want to see Mama. But she’s not a writer.

“No problem,” someone says. “Mine came here too.” I go and look. There’s Grandma with a su!ering, pained face, but Mama’s not here. I yell, I call: “Mama! Mama!” I enter an unexpected open space. I clamber through white tombstones, and there, up above, I catch sight of a great shining sea. Three large stone heads emerge from the sea. Peace. I know that soon ... End of dream.

I’m walking next to some priest. I say: “It’s strange, I don’t need to pray to God here.”

“Because you were thinking about Him at the moment of your death.”

“No, I died suddenly,” I tell him.

* * *

On a shattered tombstone a single word remains: always. The sun makes light of it, strikes it out with a shining finger.

Selected and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

526

gottfried benn (1886 – 1956) served in the German army’s medi-cal corps during wwi and used his clinical experiences as inspiration for his first collections of poetry, Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912) and Fleisch (1917).

clare cavanagh is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Poli-tics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press, 2009). Her translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s latest volume is Here (Harcourt 2010). She teaches Slavic and comparative literatures at Northwest-ern University.

daisy fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Get-ting Arrested Again (2006) and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (2000), both from University of Pittsburgh Press.

michael hofmann’s translations of Gottfried Benn will be pub-lished this year or next, possibly as “Impromptus: Selected Poems, and Some Prose.”

paul hoover’s most recent publications are Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009); Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai (Counterpath Press, 2010), edited and translated with Nguyen Do; and Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008).

clive james’s latest books are a collection of essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum (2010), and a fifth volume of memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity (2009), both published by Picador.

kabir was one of the great North Indian devotional or bhakti poets whose poems have been sung for half a millennium. Thousands of poems have been ascribed to him, though none with absolute cer-tainty. He was a weaver by profession.

anna kamienska (1920 – 1986) was a poet, translator, critic, essay-ist, and editor. She published numerous collections of her own work and translated poetry from several Slavic languages, as well as sacred texts from Hebrew and Greek.

527

sarah lindsay, a Lannan Literary Fellowship recipient, is the au-thor of Primate Behavior (1997), Mount Clutter (2002) — both from Grove Press — and Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

arvind krishna mehrotra is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Transfiguring Places (Ravi Dayal, 1998), and sev-eral edited volumes. His Songs of Kabir is just out from nyrb Classics. He lives in Allahabad and Dehra Dun.

eliana perez* makes drawings, books, and, most recently, flip-book style animations for stereoscopic 3-d video. She is an associated artist of the Booklyn Artists Alliance, a collective dedicated to exhibiting, distributing, and publishing artists’ books.

* First appearance in Poetry.

POETRYDISCUSSION GUIDE

Every month the Poetry Foundation publishes a free discussion guide to the current issue of Poetry magazine. Visit our website for this month’s guide, and to sign up for a half-price

student subscription.

where great writing begins

Incarnality,

Incarnality

The Innisfree Poetry Journal

T h e C o l l e c t e d Po e m s

Incarnality

The Innisfree Poetry Journal

$

Poetry PodcastEditors Christian Wiman and Don Share go inside

the pages of Poetry, talking to poets and critics,

debating the issues, and sharing their poem selections.

Listen in at poetry foundation.org.

f o u n d e d i n 1 9 1 2

For more information and to apply:1.800.565.9989 | 403.762.6180 www.banffcentre.ca/[email protected]

Writing With Style (Fall) Elizabeth Philips, program director

September 11 - 17, 2011

Application deadline: June 15, 2011

Poetry faculty: Gerald Hill

Wired Writing Studio Fred Stenson, program director

October 3 - 15, 2011 (2 week on-site residency in Banff)

October 31, 2011 - March 30, 2012 (20-week online residency)

Application deadline: June 15, 2011

Poetry faculty: Barry Dempster, Karen Solie

The Banff Centre

Literary Arts ProgramsSteven Ross Smith, director

Self-directed Residencies, Leighton Artists’ Colony, and other writing programs available. Apply now!

No cooking, cleaning, or interruptions -just mountains of inspiration!

R E C E N T W I N N E R SHorse and RiderM E L I S S A R A N G E$21.95 cloth | 978-0-89672-702-1

LeapE L I Z A B E T H H A U K A A S$21.95 cloth | 978-0-89672-647-5

T E X A S T E C H U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

2 0 1 1 WA LT M C D O N A L D F I R S T !B O O K S E R I E S I N P O E T R Y W I N N E R

VanitasPoemsJ A N E M C K I N L E Y$21.95 cloth | 978-0-89672-684-0

The poems of Vanitas shape a landscape of drama and dream, where past and present intersect and converse, where interrupted

lives insist upon completion. McKinley’s poems will pull you in, and leave you breathless. ! A N N T O W N S E N D

w w w. t t u p r e s s . o r g | t t u p @ t t u . e d u

Wild Flight CHRISTINE RHEIN The Clearing PHILIP WHITE Burning Wyclif THOM SATTERLEE Slag MARK SULLIVAN Keeping My Name CATHERINE TUFARIELLO Strange Pietà GREGORY FRASER Skin APRIL LINDNER Setting the World in Order RICK CAMPBELL Heartwood MIRIAM VERMILYA Into a Thousand Mouths JANICE WHITTINGTON A Desk in the Elephant House CATHRYN ESSINGER Stalking Joy MARGARET BENBOW An Animal of the Sixth Day LAURA FARGAS Anna and the Steel Mill DEBORAH BURNHAM The Andrew Poems SHELLY WAGNER Between Towns LAURIE KUTCHINS The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas CATHY SMITH BOWERS

POE2011

R O B E R T A . F I N K , S E R I E S E D I TO R

C E L E B R AT I N G T W E N T I E T H A N N U A L W I N N E R

ATTENTION TEACHERS,

STUDENTS, AUTODIDACTS!

V I S I T T H E N E W P O E T RY L E A R N I N G L A B AT P O E T RY F O U N DAT I O N.O R G / L E A R N I N G L A B

P O E M G U I D E S , W R I T I N G I D E A S

G L O S S A RY O F P O E T I C T E R M S T E AC H I N G T I P S , D I S C U S S I O N QU E S T I O N S

AU D I O A N D V I D E O P O E M S A N N OTAT E D P O E M S , P O E T I C S E S S AY S

A N D M U C H M O R E !

Readings in Contemporary PoetryCo-organized by poet and author Vincent Katz and Dia curator Yasmil Raymond

John Ashbery and Paolo JavierThursday, March 10, 2011, 6:30pm

Michael Lally and Brenda IijimaThursday, April 21, 2011, 6:30pm

For reservations email [email protected]

Admission $6 general, $3 for Dia members, students and seniors

Dia Art Foundation535 West 22nd Street 5th Floor New York Citybetween 10th and 11th Avenues

www.diaart.org 212 989 5566

2011 Ruth LillyPoetry FellowshipsFive Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships are awarded annuallythrough a national competition open to young poets. Each fellowship is in the amount of $15,000.

Complete rules and application forms will be available on February 1 at poetryfoundation.org/fellowship.

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG

CONGRATULATIONSto Joshua Harmon, winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize. His book, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, is now available. Natashe Sajé will judge the 2011 Akron Poetry Prize. In addition to publication, the winner also receives a $1,500 prize.

NEW RELEASESOrphan, Indiana by David Dodd Lee and Nothing Fatal by Sarah Perrier.

FORTHCOMING TITLESAmerican Busboy by Matthew Guenette and Hurricane Party by Alison Pelegrin

NEW SERIESThe !rst book in the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, The Monkey and the Wrench is available. The editors are Mary Bid-dinger and John Gallaher.

BELLDAY BOOKS ANNOUNCES THE 2011 BELLDAY POETRY PRIZE

Bellday Books will publish the winning book and

award $2,000 and 25 copies of the book to the winning author.

CONTEST FINAL JUDGE: ELAINE EQUI

Elaine Equi has published 11 books of poetry including her most recent

work Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (2007) and Voice-Over

(1999) which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award. Her work is

widely anthologized and appears in Postmodern American Poetry: A

Norton Anthology and in The Best American Poetry (1989, 1995, 2002).

She lives in New York with her husband and teaches creative writing in

the Master of Fine Arts programs at City College of New York and The

New School.

Submission Deadline: Postmarked March 15, 2011 Submit manuscript of 60-90 pages of original poetry in English. The manuscript must not have been published in book or chapbook, but may contain poems that have appeared in print or on the Internet. Manuscript must contain 2 title pages: Name and contact information should appear on first title page only. Name should not appear anywhere else in manuscript. Manuscript should be typed, single-spaced, paginated, and bound with spring clip. Include a table of contents page, but no acknowledgements. Enclose SASE for announcement of the winner. Manuscripts cannot be returned. Complete rules:

Check or money order for $25 reading fee, payable to Bellday Books. Mail entries: Bellday Books, Inc., P.O. Box 3687, Pittsburgh, PA 15230. Bellday Books reserves the right not to select an award winner, in which case all fees will be refunded.

Order from your favorite bookseller or call 800-421-1561www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Save 30% when you use discount code W301 on your web order

This project was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Money ShotRae Armantrout “In a world of real justice, all speech would be sifted in Rae Armantrout’s gold pan. In what may be her best book yet, the poems of Money Shot sort our sorry tropes and reveal the fool’s gold with which we’ve smitten ourselves once again.” —Susan Wheeler

Cloth $22.95

POETRY OFF THE SHELFLUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

Luis J. Rodriguez is the author of fourteen books of poetry, memoir, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. He is renowned for his work in gang in-tervention and has won many awards for his writing, including the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. His latest poetry collection is My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems. Co-sponsored

with Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

wednesday, march 16, 5:30 pm jane addams hull-house museum

800 s halsted street free admission

»