POEMS
translated by Richard Burns and the author
* * *
The Garden of Selene
I
I was watching the moon rise on the sky
losing myself in that dark plateau
and the sound of its shining came back to me
from the blue plain covering my childhood years.
In the whispering light from the house across the road
it’s me walking, and outside it’s autumn
returned like a dead man possessed to haunt the garden.
The soil of the old land rose up to my eyes
and I saw the hills encircled by fires
and from the north, horses descending the slopes
with the reins of dusk
and mirrors reflecting from their golden eyes
and, after many years, once again the scent
of grass wounded in darkness.
Over the waste that opens to the depths of these houses
the same sky reappears, a blue expanse
with its birds soaring and diving.
II
When birds drink water they see the wind
and the wind surveys the blue green plain
that mirrors the sky with its very own image,
its red ships, its flying fish,
its birds swimming over the soil,
its poplars nailed to the ground like banners of stony silver
billowing higher into the pulse of the breeze.
III
The night I left among musty fumes of trains
a damp image slithered over the window pane
and my thoughts went staggering off into darkness,
blind streetlamps along the tracks,
dark water cisterns in orchards and gardens,
one last glimpse of a ruined sentry post,
blackened grass on top of the pillbox
and, with rifle slung over his shoulder,
a guard patrolling under the moon.
In my face flickered a light like this one
now lengthening the shadows in this garden,
houses before me flashing past in the window
and high in the sky the city’s shadow
mirroring an image I hardly knew.
The past poured away like water
from the cracked jar of dreams.
IV
Red and blue, the rocks on the mountains,
wings of birds and whispers of leaves,
diamonds of morning on the skyline
and along the paths wolves and deer
picking their way beneath a constellation of stone.
Autumn a momentary sea
bearing the ancient badge of the sun.
V
I was watching the moon rise on the sky,
many-notched disk of time,
eye escaped from some country of the blind –
tonight the moon will tell the story.
On one side of the wind the sea
and on the other a deserted plain.
In the sea the past rises and sets.
VI
I don’t know if lightning is faster
than the wind. A stone in the garden is speaking
to the grass and the rising moon
is scattering silver calyxes into dark corners.
Playing with the light
in our eyes the world shrank.
VII
I was watching the moon rise on the sky,
nymph of fire and ice.
Among its shadows the black tulip memory
opened petals of cloud
and images of forever bloomed.
Here my face is a blue mask
far from the eyes of others, far
from that darkened track. And here, I touch
the deepest part of myself, a mold that contains
the damp casting of a breath of grass.
In this garden, just as on that old road,
faces pass at the far end
and the light vanishes with them
along with the faint smile that renders time resplendent.
I among these and behind me clouds,
before me trees of water and crystal,
flocks of birds describing the air,
time multiplying itself,
the wind widening space,
I was watching the moon bring in the tide,
I watched the moon:
most radiant apple of the Hesperides.
1968
The evening sank into the river,
a half moon rose behind the grass,
wind blasted into the curtain rails,
and the window a dead crater
watched the shadow, watched the blind man,
the tobacco leaves drying in the shelter.
I am a part of all that I have met,
I am the star that jumps out of the boat,
the music that flows and billows in the mind,
the river’s dream and the mirror’s shadow.
Manhattan 1984
Huge river, river-shadows,
bridges over water gleaming,
cloud-swaddled moon –
buildings talking to the night.
Foundations as if in the sky,
red helicopters, high on winds,
imaginary wings lifting curtains,
opening on time, an emerald giant
among chasms, lakes and phantoms.
Headlights biting cold boulevards,
in gulfs above, in the skies’ depths,
in blues, reds, dark purples,
and in the mirroring moon,
and steel grins, blackness is whitened,
and the island rolls into the ocean
sheds materials, discharges stone,
vomits forth yellow darknesses.
And stone is devoured with the mud in the waters,
with geometries, with ancient surveyors,
and compasses, sextants and rice-paper,
and night the iron emperor
and tomorrow waving rags.
With fear and weeping, with crowds and myths,
with ash falling, with eyes looking up,
eyes that construct horizons.
Buildings shoot firebursts that spatter the void.
The hours go by. The sea whitens.
A dawn of snow and ice will come,
the dawn of the ant, the dawn of the dead,
dawn of the black planet.
Old Stories
Once poets dreamed
of waters and diamonds, of tears and roses,
but in my sleep I see burnt cities
and the last rags of their inhabitants
fluttering from gutted windows.
At this century’s end it’s difficult
to pass from day to dream, to the magic mountain
where the electric fireflies zoom.
No more is the foot of the devil cleft
(as John Donne might have put it).
May the flow stop dead and the mouths of sound
and the gates of fire and the diagrams
of death be deadened.
May the earth’s magnetic field be reversed
and a solar wind descends on all the parliaments.
May the garbage of the nations be dumped upon the scrapheap
And harbors without lights sink into the depths of night.
May the mind’s motor be restarted by the sun.
We are the children of armed peace.
TV’s shine like stars in our living rooms.
Where do chaffinch, woodpecker and skylark belong?
May mist descend upon the mountains and the aerials.
Look at the universe if you’ll learn
the age of time.
In my sleep cities are burning,
their ashes glimmering like rabbit fur.
Yet I have longed for the red of the russet fox
who saw the fire and understood
that multiplication tables are nonsense and lies,
that our cities are mirrors of the mind,
haunted factories, blocks of the dead,
squares that have been buried by light
opening up into a vast trench –
in which who knows how many lie lost.
By unwinding the spool backwards
you shall not find the beginning of the cosmos
but the end of a darkened dream.
If the earth’s magnetic field is reversed
perhaps we shall even be able to fly
without wings without anchors
deep into the sea of stars
while far behind us will fade away
the Death Marches
the Lost Causes
the Realms of the Rat
the Lights of Auschwitz.
After the Battle
The battle raged on till the setting of the sun.
When darkness came they lay themselves down to sleep
the living alongside the dead
and then they turned on their cool glaring searchlights.
Tatters of darkness were fluttering
in the dust raised up by the wind.
The sounds of a wedding waltz
issued forth from the highest window.
The night was lit up
by a corpse in the ditch.
In the central square there landed
a firefly made of steel
out of which climbed Pylades
along with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
In the eyes of the pilot I recognised Orestes
as he glanced up at the sky
and then later they all disappeared together
among the deathly pallor of the searchlights.
We lived beneath the star of death.
We ate black bread.
Leaden forests
sprouted and thickened within our sleep
Light, thick and filthy.
Days, of mud and insects.
The insects took control of our homes,
they founded empires in our bedrooms,
they invaded our cemeteries,
they stood guard over our dead,
they built their mausoleums in the earth’s bowels,
within the cities of Hades.
Out of the eye of water
was born the sun.
I shall give you my voice,
I shall give you eyes and skin,
I shall speak to you with the voice of the hawk,
in the flight of the sparrow
and in the tok-tok of the woodpecker.
The enemy entered by the north gate.
The rites of surrender were fulfilled.
We handed over our flags, our keys and our women.
There were a great many of them.
We called them the Usurpers of Time.
|
