Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems

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Gabriel Preil

SUNSET POSSIBILITIES AND OTHER POEMS

Translated and with an introduction by ROBERT FRIEND With a preface by T. CARMI

Varda Books

5761 / 2001 s k o k i e, i l l i n o i s, u s a

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JEWISH POETRY SERIES Pamela White Hadas IN LIGHT OF GENESIS

Avoth Yeshurun THE SYRIAN-AFRICAN RIFT AND OTHER POEMS

Else Lasker-Schuler HEBREW BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS

Moyshe-Leyb Halpern IN NEW YORK: A SELECTION

Dan Pagis POINTS OF DEPARTURE

T. Carmi AT THE STONE OF LOSSES

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Copyright © 2001 by Varda Books Copyright © 1985 by Gabriel Preil Translation © 1985 by Robert Friend All rights reserved First edition The Hebrew poems are from Nair Mool Cochavim, copyright © 1954 by Bialik Institute; Mapat Erev, copyright © 1961 by Dvir; Ha-Aish ve Hadmamah, copyright © 1968 by Massada; Shirim M'Shnai Haktzavot, copyright © 1976 by Schocken; Mi-toch Z'man ve-Nof, copyright © 1972 by Bialik Institute; and Adiv 1'Atzmi, copyright © 1980 by Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Several of the translations first appeared in Ariel, The Jerusalem Post, Jewish Frontier, The Jewish Spectator, Literary Review, Micromegas, Midstream, Modern Poetry in Translation, Pequod, Present Tense, and Triquarterly; and in Anthology of Modern Hebrew Poetry, Vol. II, copyright © 1966 by the In­ stitute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and Israel Universities Press, Contemporary Israeli Literature, copyright © 1977 by The Jewish Publication Society, and Voices Within the Ark, copyright © 1980 by Avon. This ebook is based on printed publication, which is catalogued by Library of Congress thus:

Preil, Gabriel

Sunset possibilities and other poems.

(Jewish poetry series)

1. Preil, Gabriel—Translations, English. I. Friend, Robert. II. Title. III. Series. PJ5054.P7A23 1985 892.4'16 84-17138 ISBN 0-8276-0240-5 ISBN 0-8276-0241-3 (pbk.) Designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden

New ISBN 1-59045-479-0 Library PDF

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Acknowledgments

I should like, first of all, to express my gratitude to my dear Aunt Yetta, whose love of Zion and the Hebrew language had among its happy consequences my discovery of the poetry of Israel. My gratitude goes out as well to friends who helped make these translations better than they otherwise would have been: to Shirley Kaufman, who gave the manuscript a close, professional reading and made a number of valuable suggestions; to T. Carmi, who first intro­ duced me to Gabriel Preil's haunted and haunting autumn world; and to Peter Krieger and Ruth Nevo. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Shimon Sandbank, who self­ lessly and with endless patience gave of his time and knowledge: com­ ing to my rescue with many prose translations, saving me from embarrassing errors, and often finding ingenious solutions to what seemed insoluble problems. I also owe to him and to Zali Gurevitch whatever is of value in my discussion (in my Introduction) of Preil's unique use of the Hebrew language. What I owe to the late Laya Beth-Shalom cannot be put into words. She presided like a muse over everything I wrote, offering with her warm intelligence constant encouragement and creative criticism.

R. F.

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Contents By Way of a Preface by T. Carmi

Introduction by Robert Friend

NEW POEMS

With Walter and Amati 3

The Calm Patient 5

In a Bookshop 7

Telephone Silence 9

I Am Not in New York 11

Robot in Autumn 13

COURTEOUS TO MYSELF

A Sober Challenge 17

Rain Poem 19

Fordham: Late Summer 21

A Pear, for Instance 23

Record 23

Courteous to Myself 25

A Brief Note from Jerusalem 25

A Lesson in Translation 27

To Jerusalem Yes 29

Beyond Sleep and Waking 31

Limits of Vision 33

"The scent of pines and yearning..." 35

New Diagnoses 37

Opening to the Light 41

Exposure 41

On the Season's Text and on Its Marginalia Sunset 45

A Little Inquiring Poem 47

43

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POEMS FROM END TO END

Another Time 51

From a Late Diary 53

A Future without a Perhaps 55

A Celebration beyond Things 57

A Little Research in Snow 59

Sunset Possibilities 61

Little Spring Note 63

Romantic Reminder 65

Varieties of Sadness 65

Lecture 67

1974 69

The Eternal Present 71

Arriving 73

OF TIME AND PLACE

From Jerusalem: A First Poem 77

Jerusalem Moon 77

Leah's Absence 79 .

Moving 81

From an Autumnal Brief-Case 83

Abstract Afternoon 85

A Long Breath, A Solitary Garden 87

FIRE AND SILENCE

Brief Morning 91

Clouds, Lightning of the Sea 93

From Noon to Little Evening 95

From Lincoln Center: Words on the Henry Moore Sculpture Nuances of Brown 9 7 The First Time 99

Blood and Rain 99

New York: February 1965 101

Van Gogh: Williamsburg 103

A Somewhat Clouded Study 105

Pigeon Feeders 107

Unexpected Hope 107

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ix

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Madeleine and Nets 109

Image of a Friend against Time 109

Under the Sign of Appeasement and Rain Coruscations against Now 111

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111

MAP OF EVENING

The Tired Hunter 115

Between Childhood and Kingdom 115

Spring Lines, 1959 117

On Heat and Cold 119

Unusual Calm 119

Words of Oblivion and Peace 121

Sketch of the Voyager 123

Skin after Skin 123

Between Rain and Rain 125

A Small, Proud Autumn 125

From Rains on the Island 127

Lakes 129

The Evening Flesh 131

Clock Facing Mirror 131

From Regarding the Month of April and the Expiring Hour Concerning the Cherry Tree 135

From New York: On the Wheel of Summer 137

133

CANDLE AGAINST THE STARS

"Night. And I am drinking..." 141

From Maine Landscapes 143

How Shall I Praise 147

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By Way of a Preface

Gabriel the rain-lover sits in a cafe thinking of the poem he's going to write, if not today, tomorrow. ("Rain Poem") This is, in many ways, a typical Preil opening: self-indulgent, gently ironic, detached, relaxed, tentative, playful. The subject, as in many of his poems, is the poem itself. The reader soon learns, however, that besides being the subject, it is also the end result. He is invited to overhear the poet coax the poem into being, as he takes up "the chal­ lenge of the lucid page." The poem continues:

A poem, however, is not to be coerced (if one may use slightly didactic language) to come like tomorrows, like yesterdays, arguing and bargaining with a clock running down, a thermometer running wild.

It would be a mistake to take his languid tone for drowsiness. He drowses like the proverbial Hebrew deer, with "one eye shut, the other open." He is capable simultaneously of daydreaming and of observing the daydream. He achieves a precarious balance, allowing just so much of the "thermometer running wild" to enter the poem, counterbalanc­ ing it with the paradox of inverted time, of inevitable "yesterdays." The poem is conscious of what it is saying, of how it is saying it. In a sense, it seems to be deliberating, from line to line, how to proceed. At the same time, it is conscious also of other modes of expression, of other possible ways to put down on paper what is actually said. One of the many pleasures of Gabriel Preil's poetry is the degree of alertness it summons—or perhaps invites—from the reader. Indeed, it is a special brand of didacticism that can speak of negotiating with time and illness. What a beautiful leap from the nearly apologetic, ca­

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sual tone of "if one may use... " to the flash of imagination that re­ verses time and sets the poem apart from mortal ills. It is a kind of extension of the rain the-line-of-a-bird-or-plane cutting through black weather, and it radiates some tentative reckoning whose sum is an open question. In any case, in a good poem indifferences are flattened: it is the history of an exact line of tension, of a garden buffeted by hail. The definition of poetry is both self-effacing and self-assured, im­ perceptible and detailed, calculated and incalculable, tentative and fi­ nal. With "In any case..., " the poem recovers its casual, offhand tone; then "indifferences" and "history"—those dry, diagnostic words—make for a final slow movement, intentionally slowing down the poem, before the brilliant finale of "a garden buffeted by hail" and before the final paradox of a rich sensuous image joined to a sudden, sharp abstraction. The last stanza both is and exemplifies "an open question." How does one reconcile "a garden buffeted by hail" with "an exact line of tension"? (And, for the Hebrew reader, "line" conjures up the taut wires of high-tension electric poles.) How can a "line-of-a-bird-orplane" be a "history"? The answer, of course, is in the poem: The ques­ tion is the answer.

"Rain Poem" is included in Gabriel Preil's most recent collection, Courteous to Myself: Poems 1976-1979, published in 1980. It is a very appropriate title. Preil is nothing if not courteous: to himself, to the poem, to the world that he inhabits and observes, and to language. His courtesy consists, in part, of being constantly attentive to the genesis of poems within himself, contraries that extend competing invitations,

and my reply is Yes. ("To Jerusalem Yes")

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A fine Israeli poet, Avner Treinin, has described the progress of Gabriel Preil's poetry as a movement from "a clear blur to a clarity that blurs all realms"; that is, from imperceptible feelings and objects clearly, sometimes clinically, observed, to a lucidity—of a blinding sun, of death—that blurs all objects and boundaries.

In the great city of sleeping kings, I rise with the moon, the single slice of bread, to feed my hunger— an explication, perhaps, of the festivity. ("Jerusalem Moon") The flourish of "the great city of sleeping kings," the jubilation of "I rise with the moon," is toned down by "the single slice of bread," and finally muted by a tentative, matter-of-fact statement. That is one of the characteristic movements of a poem by Gabriel Preil, and con­ tains his unmistakable tone. The act of declaration or of definition al­ most always summons a qualification, a counter-statement or a counter-image (as in the line "In any case..." from the final stanza of "Rain Poem"). The concrete image nearly always invites an abstraction that deprives the image of its sovereign role and, at the same time, wid­ ens its range and intensifies its effect. The reverse progression—from minor to major—is in evidence as well. In "Arriving," phrases of poems are first likened to "glim­ merings / of a Talmudic proposition / in Grandfather's mind" and then "or a geometry theorem / opening up like a field." The modulation is all. "Arriving" ends, characteristically, with a groping conclusion: It may be that what we arrive at is the structure of the suggestive; the space flowing between the lines. Gabriel Preil is a master of the "structure of the suggestive." He achieves an exquisite balance (Robert Friend, in his Introduction, speaks of "exquisite proportion achieved in a narrow space"), as he moves between image and abstraction, detachment and intensity, selfindulgence and irony, colloquial usage and rhetorical touch. He makes light of his romantic impulses, and keeps them in check

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by giving his poems "scientific" titles: "A Little Research in Snow," "Sunset Possibilities," "Varieties of Sadness." He thinks of his poem as "a cool and cautious text" ("A Lesson in Translation") and scrupu­ lously records how, after eye surgery his heavy lenses "make exact / the wavering geometry / of the house across the way" ("Opening to the Light"). This is very much Preil's domain: the obscure being coaxed into view, clarity blurred under intense observation.

Gabriel Preil, "the rain lover," "the great cloud-connoisseur"; "shy rather than forward, despairing rather than joyful"; "only a bookkeeper confirming cold facts"; "Gabriel turned into Mr. Preil," "exchanging words with himself, with others within him," "not ex­ actly some sort of eccentric who writes his poems in Hebrew," has, by common consent, one of the most engaging, subtle, and credible voices of modern Hebrew poetry. T. Carmi, Jerusalem

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Introduction

Though Gabriel Preil was born in Estonia (in 1911) and has written his poetry in Yiddish and in Hebrew, his poetry owes as much to the Amer­ ica he loves as it does to the Jewish and Hebrew tradition he is steeped in. He arrived in the United States in 1922, attended public schools without bothering to graduate from high school, and was enrolled for a brief time at Yeshiva University. Like other poets of the American tra­ dition, such as Frost and Robinson, some of whose work he translated into Hebrew, he is mainly self-educated. Although he visited Israel only three times in his life (the first time in 1968, as the guest of the President of Israel), he is recognized in that country as one of the leading Hebrew poets. He has been awarded many literary prizes, among them the LaMed Prize for Hebrew Liter­ ature for his first book, the Jewish Book Council of America Award for Hebrew Poetry (he was awarded this twice), the Bitzaron Prize for He­ brew Literature, the New York University Neumann Award for a life­ time achievement in Hebrew literature, the Kenneth B. Smilen/Present Tense Literary Award for Jewish Literature, and the Friedman Prize for Hebrew Culture. Recognition has extended even further: In 1975 he re­ ceived an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College, and a selection of his work has appeared in an Israeli series of books dedicated to outstanding Hebrew writers. Preil has published one book of Yiddish poetry: Lider (1966), and eight books of Hebrew poetry: Landscape of Sun and Frost (1944), Candle Against the Stars (1954), Map of Evening (1961), Selected Poems (1965), Fire and Silence (1968), Of Time and Place (1972), Poems from End to End (1976), and Courteous to Myself (1980). A ninth book, Forty Poems in the Desert, is forthcoming. Not surprisingly, Preil's poems in Yiddish and Hebrew are similar in every way: in theme, imagery, and tone. In fact, some of his Yiddish poems were first written in Hebrew and then rewritten, with very few changes, in Yiddish. What I shall be saying, therefore, of his Hebrew poems applies as well to those written in Yiddish.

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It will be helpful to begin with a quotation from "Another Time." In this poem Preil declares: "There is no escaping my time./ It is Lith­ uania, it is America, it is Israel." And indeed, though he owes a good deal to tradition and the past—as every poet must, even the most original—he is, nevertheless, the poet of Now. We see the strands of yes­ terday threading his garment of today, but the garment is whole, all the interweavings contributing to an indivisible texture. Preil makes this clear when in his poem "Lecture" he tells us that the dead Yiddish writ­ ers Mendele Mokher Seforim and Jacob Glatstein "exist on a single map" with "the dense and lit-up foliage" outside the lecture hall where these writers are being discussed. And in "The Eternal Present" (the ti­ tle, too, makes the point), brooding over a photograph of his mother's uncle who "was physician to the Persian Shah," the poet suddenly as­ serts that he is "not a forgotten ring in a chain," but rather "a man en­ gaged in talk this moment, or a man biting into a pear, or drinking tea... " The poem concludes, "One present of dark and light exists./ There is no then." If the poet refuses to acknowledge the deadness of the past—nothing must die, the past must live—it is because he fears the eternal dyings that time and change bring with them. Mourning the death of Leah Goldberg, he says:

In listless drizzles objects perish, and everywhere mirrors mutely oppress. ("Lean's Absence") "The year is darkening," he says in "1974," recording still another de­ scent toward pastness: It is possible beautiful landscapes still remember me for one reason or another, but I see them now from a terrifying distance like dots grown dim on a map that has become a crumpled, anguished bit of paper— as I see myself.

And moving from Brooklyn to the Bronx, he cries out, " . . . m y new, my seething neighborhood / seems glad to make me old." Though there are many springs in Preil's poetry, there are more au­

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tumns, for the melancholy is ingrained. "All my walks begin," he says in "From an Autumnal Brief-Case," "with an inner autumn / and an autumn outside." "Perhaps," he continues, "some small consolation can be found / for the forest of delusions." How can he find it when the delusions themselves are the chief consolation, as they must be for a man whose nature is essentially pagan? The forest of the temporal is a forest of thorns, but blossoms rise out among them, and trees that offer their bittersweet fruit. Still, the poet seeks to escape the forest. Some­ times, when the wind slides "over the hairy field / like a razor blade," the poet grasps "the branches / of the great tree of sleep...," or he tries, as in "Sketch of the Voyager," to sink "like lead / into the abyss / of his old oblivion." Sometimes the poet finds, when his legends are "torn by beasts / in bitter forests" that it is simply enough to survive: a kind of victory crowns them

who reached their door safely,

those in whose ear the gallows

refused to whisper. ("A Somewhat Clouded Study")

Sometimes the poet's inner autumn frees him from the autumnal forest outside: Strange how with the chestnuts warming up my pocket

I have become the bearer of a small, brown autumn.

I am independent now,

untempted by the snares that a praised season

lay at my feet: free of the wonders

of vapor and of crystal. . . .

I have grown proud like one unsheathing a brown loneliness, who finds it now abounds with buds of fresh, new colors that the great autumn does not know. ("A Small, Proud Autumn") Akin to this stoicism of the imagination is the poet's ability in his maturity to relinquish the dying light, which becomes thereby more golden. "I walk," he asserts in "Under the Sign of Appeasement and Rain," in a golden-eyed

long-appeasing light,

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younger than any young man

not as yet appeased.

But he cannot always rely on his inner resources to face up to the forever-passing-away things of the world. Sometimes he dares to hope that religious belief will discover for him a world where leaves do not drop "like glass . . . from [his] time-tree." Living not far from a neigh­ borhood of fervently Orthodox Jews, and thinking of himself as a man whose "time of afternoons . . . / foams with a Van Gogh's / colors of despair," he promises himself that tomorrow he will

slip away

to orchard skies of Torah.

Maybe there in Williamsburg,

where a pacified, brute summer reigns,

they cork rich wines of ancient prayer.

And it may be

the mirror of my room

will no longer show

the desert face

of a Job-like Jew. ("Van Gogh: Williamsburg")

But that tomorrow never comes, and he turns to the art of poetry, which seemingly offers him a surer stay. "Weathers exaggerate," he says in "Arriving,"

and may lead one to forget

the peace found in a poem

living or lost

in a place without seasons.

"Phrases of poems," he says in the same poem, "hover in the air, tempt­ ing my hand / to seize them, / as if they were the glimmerings / of a Tal­ mudic proposition / in Grandfather's m i n d . . . " And if "no one can make time green," Heine—Preil consoles himself in "Moving"—still keeps his "morning smile" where he "blossoms from clouded marble." The marble, we note—permanent as it is—is nevertheless clouded. Preil's last consolation, therefore, is his first: a prodigal world show­ ering his senses with its gifts. Listening "to the gamut of colors," "se­ duced by the weathers," "caught in the net of the sensuous," what does it matter if he is sometimes "caught on the horn of renunciation" and

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that he remembers too often "the ambusher" death, "who leaps from his forest of shadows"? The Jerusalem moon offers him its "single slice of bread / to feed [his] hunger," "a thousand sunset drums / shiver the window-panes," and in the unbearable heat of summer he is solaced "with peaches, small, cool suns in the bounds of a green platter..." "Fragile wisdom of things," he says in "Blood and Rain," beauty of their contrariness,

for a moment you deflect the knife of evening,

and a pear no longer is as pale as a skull.

Too often, however, it is the skull that he sees in his forest, grin­ ning among the trees. If, in another poem, "Rains on the Island," he describes himself as one of the "sailors of the dusk / drinking in its golden showers," the sentence is qualified (as his joys are always qual­ ified) by its last phrase: "but sadder still." Sadder, despite his many cel­ ebrations, his moments of grace, because the flesh grows "sad and silent in its fated valleys," and because he bears the burden of unful­ fillment. "My captive days crumble," he writes,

like Proust's madeleine... But this slice, this hour, is a dry crust without aroma, the glimmer of its happenings imaginary. I am not a knight strolling in a dream garden though I crown with a golden love the girl who departed from my rainy door: as if the assuaging whisper of Now had reached me with the grey of her eyes, the grey of waters. ("Madeleine and Nets")

And yet the poet outbraves this emptiness. We see, when we have read his poems, that he is, after all, what he says he is in "Blood and Rain": like "a thin, little, rained-upon Japanese tree / through which flows / heavy, tropic blood"—that is, as far as the first part of this quo­ tation is concerned. For it is hardly a heavy, tropic tide that sweeps through these poems. That is only the poet's dream of a temperament that he would like to, but does not, possess. But the other adjectives do suggest his quality: strength in fragility, endurance in the face of time's angry weathers, exquisite proportion achieved in a narrow space.

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What is hard for the critic and translator to suggest, and harder still to illustrate in English, is the quality of Preil's language, which is, after all, the first and last test of any poet. When we concentrate on his language, we are not surprised to find that his interweaving of two lev­ els of vocabulary is analogous with his constant interweaving of the banal, the quotidian with what suddenly transcends them. Again and again we find the poet suffering "the cold lava of boredom / the stupor of the fearful city" ("Beyond Sleep and Waking"); or we see him "nailed to a seat in a stagnant coff ee shop" or described as "a woodchip floating palely / in black Bronx waters" ("Courteous to Myself"). These facts are ineluctable and tinged with sadness, but they are more than endured; for the poet, confronting the indignities of his "captive days" ("Madeleine and Nets") finds other facts (often metaphysical) with which to confront and conquer them. Staring from behind the glass of a post-office window, clearly a symbol of his captivity, he sud­ denly sees "the clouds flowering" ("Clouds, Lightning of the Sea"). The ice-skaters who are described (in "Lakes") as criss-crossing what we understand to be the frozen lake of human existence are neverthe­ less also described as "winter-festive figures." If he is envious for a mo­ ment of the Prince of Siam who wears "festivity and humility as the first skin of his body," and of his country, whose flowers are "high-tide huge," and of his Buddhism ("...there is nothing like the calm of the endless seasons that dream in his orchards"), his envy soon vanishes. For a prayer speaking "from beyond the bridges" of his beloved New York and "a peach and northern sunset" pouring through his window, he is reminded of his Jenny, "the villages of her peaceful words in flower" ("Words of Oblivion and Peace"). He needs, we see, no ex­ oticism for his celebrations, and he finds his transcendencies right at home—his celebrations being both of things and beyond things, a play of things beyond the heavy, the light, beyond bread, table, car. ("A Celebration beyond Things") The festivity and celebration that share the same poem with dail­ iness and ordinariness find their parallel in Preil's vocabulary. True to the language of the common man, the simple language of street and market and mundane affairs, he is hardly limited to it. On the contrary—for like Stevens, whom he resembles in other ways as well, he is a worshipper of the rare, the esoteric, the festive word. Words, too, are celebration, and they are often the glittering garments of what they cel­

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ebrate. Preil's delight in language makes itself evident everywhere—in his choice of vocabulary, for instance—sometimes (as he says of its in­ habitants in "A Brief Note from Jerusalem") hurling "street words . . . about like kingly stones"; and sometimes displaying a zest for such unusual variations of ordinary words as "shikachon" for "shi­ cheha" (forgetfulness) or "letef' for "letifa" (stroking). His delight in language also shows itself in the way he will resourcefully take liberties with syntax to suit his purposes. Like e. e. cummings, he will often turn one part of speech into another: a noun into an adjective in such a phrase as "tschuva ilanit" (a treeish answer) or "zroah neharit" (a riv­ erish arm); and an adverb into a noun in the phrase "tzohoray ach­ shav" (the noon of now) or in "cfor havadye" (the frost of certainly). Unabashedly, he will turn an intransitive verb into a transitive: some­ thing, he says, "buds sobriety," and with equal indifference to the rules he will pluralize a noun that is characteristically restricted to the sin­ gular, describing, for instance, a bird as "colorful in its despairs." He is fond of combining, in the Auden manner, abstract and concrete, de­ scribing rumors as "crumbling" and saying of little impulses that they "raise" (their heads, presumably) "like snakes." He is fond, too, of re­ viving and giving a modern slant to obsolete terms. Preil's delight in the word, in the Hebrew word, helps to explain why he has been able for more than half a century to resist the tide, everywhere battering at his ears and besieging him, of what has never­ theless been for him a beloved but alien tongue; and faithfully practice his profession of poetry in a Hebrew remarkably alive. I say "remark­ ably" because Preil has, so to say, lived his Hebrew out of context. It is true that he loves the common word, but he has not experienced it in the transactions of daily life, and so it comes about, paradoxically, that even an ordinary expression will sometimes be tinged by a nuance, hardly perceptible yet making its impression of something unusual, something even rarefied, though never artificial. The livingness of his style and his ability to more than keep up with the modern development of Hebrew are attested to by the fact that he is a poet very much ad­ mired, loved, and even imitated in Israel. Imitated in vain, for he remains unique. There is no one at all like him. And when we try to locate possible sources, possible influences that help explain his style, we are stumped. Perhaps what E.M. Forster said of Cavafy: that he stood at an angle to the universe, applies to Preil as well. At any rate, his Hebrew enables us to share, from the peculiar angle it provides, perspectives that are as wonderful as they are inim­ itable. Robert Friend

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NEW POEMS

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With Walter and Amati Dobbs Ferry in autumn. I with my pen

and Walter with his violins

that dangle like slabs of meat from hooks.

like ducks turning brown on spits,

or pears that ripen in their living gold.

Walter caresses his violins

as if he and they

were children deprived of caresses.

He passes a finger over the bow,

tries the quality of a string,

and listens deeply

as if in expectation of a word

that will be coming soon.

I too drift with a wave

to Cremona, city of violins,

and stop at Nicolo Amati's,

he who gave his instrument

the yellowish transparency

of a rare sunset hour,

or the darker tones

of an ordinary sunset at sea.

With some mysterious mixture

he glazed every flatness and rondure,

every concavity and convexity

of pine, maple, or willow

till the wood began of itself a music from within

even before the finished construct glowed.

For all that, he did begin with material hardly poetic,

with potash, strange acids, flaxseed,

while from various directions

all kinds of coruscations passed over it in turn—

glowing towards burning gold and from it,

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from reddish brown and towards it,

until they reached the blood hue of the mythical dragon,

so that I burn with the fire that lives in wood,

with the nightingale voice concealed in a violin string,

needing like them

the oxygen in air.

They are with Amati in Cremona,

I with Walter in Dobbs Ferry,

under the skies of autumn with my pen.

The Calm Patient A freezing, obsessed wind awakes an earthquake in a flowering tree, fills it with a white confusion as I wander lost the labyrinth of my blood.

I add a line here to the tree's biography, but who will add something about me enduring storm? It may be that the doctor knows a thing or two,

and if his memory does not play him false, he'll say,

"The patient was a little sad,

but yet quite calm

and never lost control."

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In a Bookshop The girl was looking for a book of poems,

for an anthology, she said.

The young man near her

climbed a ladder

and with a knightly gesture

presented her

with trophies of his hunt.

Her hair was evening

darkening her white skin.

I am aware that I am that young man

and she the one descending deep into my eyes.

I might add, of course,

that she is one of my poems,

but words like those have gone to sleep,

folded like me in this awakening spring

and no stone howls from a wall.

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Telephone Silence The unbroken silence of the telephone

announces a silence more penetrating still,

a clear wireless message

that the map is blurring.

Better to abstain

from even the tastiest words,

and like a porcupine curl up

and sink into a sleep

delicious enough to wake

the envy of a king.

In the morning delusions rise heavily.

I listen to the jangle of keys,

ask help from a slumbering pen.

No exit.

The city is a bitch

that refuses to bark.

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I Am Not in New York

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I am enclosed in a town beyond the sea,

I sink in mud, drown in fancies,

a bachelor playing little games,

pursuing a romanticism far from Byronic,

wooing dreams—soon fabricated, sooner crumbling-

among houses patched with the sadness

of renunciations.

My former geography

duplicates itself

in the mirror of this evening's sunset.

More and more it makes itself known to me.

In a little while I shall meet Gnessin* in a heavy rain.

I am not in New York.

* Hebrew novelist (1879—1913) who lived throughout his life in Poland and Russia, ex­ cept for a brief stay in Palestine in 1907.

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Robot in Autumn A robot, I am marched into a coffee shop.

The light is dim. And at the counter,

wax-faced men sit bent,

seeking bitter solace in brown cups.

The newspaper in my hand declares

its usual intensities. The waiter serves

tired cake. Abstract time

is overly abstract, invulnerable,

with no one pressing it

to fill out application blanks.

But still in New York, Athens

and Jerusalem, autumn is in flower.

Children return to their books, and leaves resume

their sunset colors.

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COURTEOUS TO MYSELF (1980)

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A Sober Challenge The white page is of the whiteness that comes with night, a landscape that makes visible wounds awake since dawn. I need the crumb of challenge in the imprisoning white.

Not appeasing restraint, not sleepy tributaries of provincial streams, not the stale seasons bring sweetness to things— only the blaze of white beginnings deprived like glowing cold of every summer eloquence, only the challenge of the sober page.

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Rain Poem Gabriel the rain-lover sits in a cafe thinking of the poem he's going to write, if not today, tomorrow. A poem, however, is not to be coerced

(if we may use slightly didactic language)

to come like tomorrows, like yesterdays,

arguing and bargaining

with a clock running down, a thermometer running wild.

It is a kind of extension of the rain the-line-of-a-bird-or-plane cutting through black weather, and it radiates some tentative reckoning whose sum is an open question. In any case, in a good poem indifferences are flattened: it is the history of an exact line of tension, of a garden buffeted by hail.

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Fordham: Late Summer Of course Poe knew

the same sort of rain

I recognize today:

an entire configuration

of dove-grey mist

burning purple

in the whispering leaves

But the little house itself

is now impassive

as if the history of desperate love

had passed it by,

leaving it behind

on a corner turning blind—

not like those near-by avenues

with beehive-sidewalks and people dragged

by their umbrellas.

They have no time to think

of Poe.

Only his neighbor,

who is besieged by love,

sometimes ponders on

Poe's predilections.

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A Pear, for Instance Waves of fearful knowledge in print, in the air,

a flowering that is a sun-setting, the windows bewildered,

and within—the stormy reticence of a poem,

its winy strength, the fragility of its meanings—

like those, perhaps, of a fruit, of a pear, for instance,

with flashes of tawny-gold, hints of reddish-green,

and something autumnal and like a violin

going through it, as if in this world

invitations were still extended

to come and sample tables of aromas.

Nor do you stumble, these late afternoons,

on angles sharp and unexpected,

some yards away from a smoking hand-grenade.

Record Stevens is reading a poem on the credences of summer. The window is covered with forest, the glass in my hand collects a small conflagration. With flickerings of a hidden wisdom and the defined beauty of things, the voice of the poet himself sounds in the air like a dark sailor's— remote from any credible color.

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Courteous to Myself

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For Israel Goor I was a boat at anchor in a pink fishing village in Maine— not a wood-chip floating palely in black Bronx waters. Nailed to a seat in a stagnant coffee shop,

sipping cola through a straw,

I ignore my patches.

I can at least be courteous to myself.

A suspicious cloud in my eyes,

I disregarded in Jerusalem

my title to nobility.

In New York I am a threadbare jacket

hanging on an old clothes-hanger.

A Brief Note from Jerusalem The gentleman makes his way among clouds and moons,

saying to himself that he cannot learn a thing

even from the masters of nostalgia.

End of sentence.

As for the cypress, palm, and olive and their pretensions,

they are nothing more than wretched lab assistants.

Nevertheless, skies we call prophetic

seem to assail imported metaphors.

Street words are hurled about like kingly stones.

And a mountain-purple leaps with a strange, rock-like caress.

Somewhat confused, the gentleman begins

to fold up the map of what he had hoped to forget.

And now there was some respite from nostalgia.

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A Lesson in Translation

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For Betsy Rosenberg The translator tried to lay bare

the things that were not said,

the methods of design and indirection,

the compulsion to explore and to arrive,

once even reading something in my face.

More than anything she thought

to plow the unique subsoil,

to identify the bristle of roots,

the glow in the shaping.

There were moments when she was drawn by an image

like that of trees in the morning uttering birds,

or by the accidental—orchestrating of itself

a delicate irony, a yearning.

The original, we may assume, is still the original.

She did not make of it her own possession

or something other and different, though mine.

She kept, it seems, every stanza of the poem intact,

its credibility as usual flowing from autumn to autumn.

In spite of that, I question

how a cool and cautious text

can be turned into something sad, defeating peace.

Had I learned a lesson in translation?

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To Jerusalem Yes I left that city for a little while, its homey and its exotic raiment, the undiminished wisdom of the olive, the youthful arrogance of the cypress, not knowing whether someone there would one day read my name upon a tombstone.

But in a cafeteria here,

as in more innocent days,

poems are written still that defy the last incursion

and they are like the weathers that keep on returning.

The hot, brown wind in the hills,

the cool drizzle turning blue upon the slopes

extend competing invitations,

and my reply is Yes.

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Beyond Sleep and Waking My friend is translating Shakespeare.

On a night sleeping as usual,

he reads passages of living Hebrew,

while I suffer the cold lava of boredom,

the stupor of the fearful city.

I keep thinking

of the unripeness of things,

of the meaning of "So what!"

How good it would be

if the ephemeral buds of the cherry,

the coolness of receding waves

were taken from me.

Failing that, I entreat of Someone to let me be like Julius Caesar murdered or Hamlet done in by his riddle. And my loves buried beyond all sleep and waking.

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Limits of Vision

A cup of black coffee

does not imply a black cloud,

but if it does

(in any case, it is not obligatory),

then Isaac also suffered, I suppose,

the same assault of cloud,

his eyes a dim betrayal.

Poets whose vision is defective

have wanted, whether consciously or not,

to say good-bye to the light of day.

Perhaps the poems too have reached their limits,

some great refusal having, some time before,

already hemmed them in.

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"The scent of pines and yearning The scent of pines and yearning—vanished

colors fading in streets, in pictures,

the town estranged,

love obliterated,

aimless confrontations

of light and shade,

crystals turned midnight-dark,

air bored through.

Surely, Isaac too thought such blind things. Autumn has begun to extinguish me, to bear false witness against me. Winter has countersigned the verdict. And in my hand a splinter of colored glass.

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New Diagnoses

The operation went well,

but the radio broke down.

One of the channels, however,

proves stubborn

and keeps on repeating old tunes.

Give me the new kind of fiction

that chooses, like me,

ways that are serpentine

yet somehow reliable.

Such fiction's a desert like me—

only infrequently

rearing a lonely palm.

Neither Joyce nor Fichman* serves

to define the limits of blindness.

After surgery, a window though small

was opened

in the overcast eye.

Colors begin

to sort themselves out.

Sorted out for some time now,

a man of perhapses,

I bless the small certainty,

the seagull brightening

on the white wave.

*Yaakov Fichman (born in Bessarabia, 1881; died in Tel Aviv, 1958) was a well-known poet and critic of the Bialik generation.

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In Dobbs Ferry a restful calm prevails.

It is relative, true, but the assuagement it provides

brings back the country peace of a former century.

The sky is circumspect, the river whispers,

and a passing car turns into a leisurely carriage.

Even the weatherman who had predicted storm

regrets his hastiness, produces from his sleeve

mild days of purple clouds, and casts them straight at me.

The Hudson here is not exactly majestic; modestly it listens to a thin hooting of a train wandering among pines. Once more in thickets of the alphabet the eye gropes through the thorn-entangled verse. The owner of the eye thinks of the poems that Homer, for instance, or Milton might have written had they been operated on by eye-specialists. But wouldn't the light have darkened the poem?

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Opening to the Light The heavy lenses open up to me delicate meanings that the train weaves like a silver thread; and make exact the wavering geometry of the house across the way. A childish satisfaction courses through me even though I am a slumbering artifact, a cryptogram of things in their first deciphering. There is also, as it happens, the faintest hint of spring in the fragrance of morning coffee.

Exposure The naked day does not strip me bare, Wrapped in skins, I lie within my cave. And no one comes. The letter of the smooth-skinned woman remains impenetrable hieroglyphics. Even a mugger keeps his distance in this bright-shelled hour that covers me with its armor when the stadium games begin and the crowd streams in its nakedness.

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On the Season's Text and on Its Marginalia I sit embraced by my New York or New England winter,

by that virginal and earliest glitter,

while I comment on the season's text itself

and on its marginalia.

In the last analysis, it is a kind of apple

I bite into with teeth unblunted,

so demanding that I spend

my summers in its service.

Or it is a hamlet smiling on white thresholds.

Though sometimes hardly rational in its behavior,

it takes things with exaggerated sternness.

I think then of Bialik* in his village,

its intimacy, propitiatory and snowy.

But since, it seems, I have no option

I must resort at last to central heating,

solving the problem somewhat.

*Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), Hebrew poet who had a profound influence on modern Jewish culture.

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Sunset Restlessly circling in the fierce heat, soon the sunset with its burning castles will lie down before me. It is not a pretext this time for classifying colors, or for locating it in the mythology of this or that nation, or for playing the game of yearnings people used to play, or even for the naming of a young poet's first book.

This is the nakedest of farewells made in the midst of small talk without a wine-drop in the glass. This is a romanticism hermetic and touched by fire, sorrow delivered like a final pistol-shot while fleeting words are exchanged on things that hardly matter.

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A Little Inquiring Poem There was a cloudy romanticism

young men experienced

at the beginning of the century.

Mother was a young girl then

and father liked the flowing of her hair.

But I ask myself stubbornly

time and again:

What happened to the songs that spoke to mother-

green echoes coming in waves?

Are they hidden in the files

of bearded musicologists,

or is an old fiddler

still evoking somewhere

a shadow of their shadow

on a pale, slack string?

Or are they simply

remembrances that perished

otherwhere, otherwhen?

Glass cities disintegrate.

Air—hostile—fades.

thus do I end

my little inquiring poem.

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POEMS FROM END TO END (1976)

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Another Time There is no escaping my time.

It is Lithuania, it is America, it is Israel.

I am an imprint of these lands;

and one way or another they have absorbed my weathers.

Yes, I am diving into waters that are much too deep;

and I am afraid the waters are not deep enough.

Anyway, it looks as if I want to lock myself in

with the time that is right for me.

No other times

shall have a share in it.

There is something of arrogance here.

Most probably my thought

is abstract, brags a bit.

But on a late evening once,

confronting a knife's thunder

in a mugger's hand,

I saw an alien and a naked time

observing me

from behind a glass almost insanely clear,

and standing frozen on a twisting blade.

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From a Late Diary Gabriel turned at last into old Mr. Preil.

Overnight the pamperings began

that go with taking off a coat

and opening a door.

Suspicions and hypotheses

sprouted in him like weeds.

And he tried to ignore

the marginal in things,

the fortuity of time—

not wanting to give up

the wininess flowing in him,

and the streaming of his young streets.

As for the obtuse, they do not realize

that the self-same Gabriel

shares his time with them,

that no change threatens him.

It would also seem the coffee is hotter now,

and longer now the lightning-play of jets,

and longer lasting the bird-trees in full bloom.

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A Future without a Perhaps I cross out so many names in my little notebook, but first they were crossed out by the Lord of Mercies, the ambusher who leaps from his forest of shadows.

I cross out name after name in my little notebook. Feel I am accountable, deserving black punishment, as if I were the first to do what I have done. Of course, I am only a bookkeeper confirming cold facts, who signs, as it were, an edict that will also apply to me in a future without a perhaps.

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A Celebration beyond Things A celebration beyond things,

a play of things beyond the heavy, the light,

beyond bread, table, car.

This mist, for instance, this sun.

(And it's not important if the New York mist

is very much different from the mist in Oregon

or if, for that matter, the sky of Oregon

reserves its opinion about Maine's.)

The thing to remember is

that I am almost ready to swear

that the variations in clouds

can drive mad the clouds themselves—

in any case, drive me mad,

who listen to the gamut of colors,

seduced by the weathers

of poems and loves.

Even the rained-upon stone

now celebrates something.

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A Little Research in Snow Snow, not the rare snow of Jerusalem, but the casual New York kind began to surround me as candle after candle in me was lit, each day a prophecy, each day a reward. Even the weatherman seemed notable for his kindness, careful not to reveal certain acidulous phenomena somewhere invading a place, an ambience.

I am a snowed-upon island now, a single glint of a blade. The possibilities for self-indulgence have finally been sealed off.

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Sunset Possibilities No one would believe me if I described such a sunset. They would say a tired rhetoric has fired his brain, the Complicator of things has made him fish like a callow youth in the poetaster's pot.

El Greco's celebrated clouds did not climb by means of mountainous heroics. They were valleys washed by little pearly waves and a silence flowed through them like a crystal holiday. I, the great cloud-connoisseur, affirm Toledo is a city that has lost its massed spoils of terror; in the sky the horns of her oxen, the arrows of her storms are shattered. Perhaps El Greco also thought of such a possibility.

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Little Spring Note

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Book-backs compete

in the autumnal spring

of Murray Hill.

They too are laden

with the same dim gold.

As ancient and young

as devouring time.

It is also true

that the air here is silk—

not a street betrayed.

But on the great continent tranquility after tranquility

ebbs away and the stars are tired.

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Romantic Reminder Always the same net cast by expectation when planes orphan the airports, trains loosen their grip on dove villages, and we remember the season of comets that reddened the faces of other observers. Caught in that net, the blue garden praises the blond moonlight. Disconsolate the identity of things in the never-ending street.

Varieties of Sadness The snow makes me sad.

She doesn't understand my sadness,

my remembering other white things

that were mine.

She makes me sad.

The snow doesn't understand my sadness,

my remembering other white things

that were mine.

She. The snow. And the difference between them is thin and fragile like the beginning of a poem.

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Lecture

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For Yael Miron The dense foliage is lit up by reds and greens.

A legend rises at the high windows,

and along an avenue calm as an ebbing sea,

a bus glides through a rippling, violet rain.

In some hall, a lecturer dissects specimens of literature, exposing the autobiographical veins running through them. He introduces names that flare up among the sentences like flash bulbs, like sounds of past events. So, for example, Mendele Mokher Seforim* on his daily walk drops in, glints of surprise sparking from his spectacles, or Glatsteint enters, as if into his own, as wise as light and smiling with his eyes. They exist on a single map,

but the story regions they discovered

are much cooler now,

lending themselves to discussion and conclusions

no less, perhaps, than does

the dense and lit-up foliage—

and the riddle of their being is the same.

*Mendele-the-Book-Seller, pen name of Shalom Jacob Abramovitch (1837-1917), who created the modern Yiddish novel and the short story.

tJacob Glatstein (1897-1971) came from Lublin, Poland to New York at the age of seventeen, and became the most distinguished of the American poets writing in Yiddish.

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1974 The year is darkening over hill and river— this, at an age when I am being gnawed at as if by a New York summer. So that I am ready to suspect that I was the first to write with rhetorical flourishes the words about the desert in the heart. Heavy is the rock of their truth. Beautiful landscapes might still remember me for one reason or another, but I see them now from a terrifying distance like dots grown dim on a map that has become a crumpled, anguished bit of paper— as I see myself.

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The Eternal Present

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My mother's uncle was physician to the Persian Shah.

Before this, or later, he built bridges near the Caspian Sea.

His greying photograph attests to his youth in 1888,

in Lithuania, close to the East Prussian border,

in the spring of a good wheat-year.

I don't know, however, the exact date of his sister's marriage,

but she gave birth to a daughter in the above-mentioned spring,

and she is, and has been for a long time now,

my mother—a baby-girl grown old.

And the summers and winters arrive in New York

year after year

and there is no then.

I am not a forgotten ring in a chain or a beloved heir.

I am a man engaged in talk this moment,

or biting into a pear, or drinking tea,

or listening behind the shutters

to the voice of the cantor on a Saturday night.

Here, of course, there is no mere historic documentary.

One present of dark and light exists.

There is no then.

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Arriving My lines falter on the downward slope, but their defenselessness begins to bare first February shoots like those out of doors wondering a little about themselves. Sometimes it turns spring. Phrases of poems hover in the air, tempting my hand to seize them, as if they were the glimmerings of a Talmudic proposition in Grandfather's mind or a geometry theorem opening up like a field. I am reminded of that merchant of nightingales in Ispahan who bemoaned his lack of customers. Weathers also exaggerate and may lead one to forget the peace found in a poem living or lost in a place without seasons. It may be that what we arrive at is the structure of the suggestive, the space flowing between the lines.

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OF TIME AND PLACE

(1972)

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From Jerusalem: A First Poem Under these historic skies I am older than Abraham and his stars, and I am the young father of the children playing among pink trees. On Alharizi Street, on a violet afternoon, such an hour of grace gazes out of an arched frame as sometimes whispered to the prophet weary of fires, who dreamed of a village cool among the stars.

Jerusalem Moon The moon has risen above the festive city.

It is not now a silver vessel on an azure sea,

nor any other metaphor that drops

from rhetoric's tired trees.

In the great city

of sleeping kings,

I rise with the moon,

the single slice of bread

to feed my hunger—

an explication, perhaps,

of the festivity.

No longer am I caught on the horn of renunciation. A violet morning prophesies: It is never too late.

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Leak's* Absence Leah's gone. And in the cafe I try to launch words over the brown cup as if Leah were still here; and they are heard in a world not changed from the world in which she fell asleep.

Now there is no one to explain the desert of her absence. In listless drizzles objects perish, and everywhere mirrors mutely oppress. In Jerusalem the houses of song are orphaned. And from the brown cup rises a bitterness like no other.

*Leah Goldberg (1911-1970), one of Israel's leading poets. Leah should be pronounced, as in Hebrew, as a word of two syllables: Lay-ah.

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Moving In my old neighborhood the finest Hasidim

made bridges of the street.

Henry Miller, on the other hand,

invented for himself a vagabond.

I, in that same place,

bore on my shoulder

birds of Hebrew song,

while ships departed for one sea or another.

Now my new, my seething neighborhood

seems glad to make me old,

even though Heine blossoms here

from clouded marble,

and another poet keeps saying

that only God makes trees.

Both are younger than a morning smile,

but even one as tired of banalities as I am

accepts unquestioningly that banal observation:

no one can make time green.

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From an Autumnal Brief-Case

All my walks begin with an inner autumn and an autumn outside, and end with the same clouded gold that sometimes makes an arch for my poem. But where is that more balanced phrase that will describe the quarreling colors? Perhaps some small consolation can be found for the forest of delusions.

The voting for a mayor in a public building rustles like a park in autumn (this, after walking to a cafe in a flutter and tasting autumn in a cup), and it demands a respectful seriousness until the blond candidate himself turns into a humorous note scribbled on the margin of the season, when—it is possible to assume— even his family name is round, polished like autumn fruit.

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Abstract Afternoon This afternoon in the plane

is an abstraction amid abstractions,

an existential desert of clouds,

not bringing to mind in the slightest

cities of wiser men,

or scientific experiments

carried out in airy arenas.

So that between Rome and Lydda, the serving of cake and coffee —while somewhere below a piano complains of love's oppression— is nothing more than an isolated if acceptable ceremony, appropriate to the challenge of some grey invasion. So that the legends that azured the ancient islands of Hellas dissolve into meaninglessness. And there are no scarlet flowers.

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A Long Breath, A Solitary Garden I want a longer breath

to help me get through those days

poor in possibility.

I want to get off at a station

where I can rest a while,

or find some pretext for a holiday.

I pray that someone,

maybe the Great Unknown,

will write me out prescriptions

that guarantee my sleep

will not turn into a city all on fire—

especially on those mornings

when newspaper columns

crumble with the news,

and one more yesterday too much

laments, turning me into a man

murdered in a solitary garden.

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FIRE AND SILENCE (1968)

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Brief Morning It's been a long time since I've written a poem.

Till it comes—such a long drawing of breath.

Even they who sagely try

to light up my clouds

cannot reach the stations of my silence.

A pity.

My brief morning soon

will grow estranged,

and a night fisher weave

a thick-roped net.

I shall enter rooms of heavenly boredom,

the earth will deny me

the velvet touch of her fruit.

Leaves like glass drop from my time-tree.

Apple-gold dapples,

shimmers questioningly.

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Clouds, Lightning of the Sea From a window of the post-office I saw the clouds flowering like peach trees, so I sent them like picture postcards to lands of relentless cold where orchards on a summer map are strange. I would do well on this late afternoon

to wear a suit of livelier colors,

and turn inspector of an old house:

to search there for the toys

of an innocent morning

lost in the abyss of a forgetful mirror.

In another life I looked with hope

into a glass that collected and reflected

the lightning of the sea.

The fruit that were in my hands then,

indifferent to the clouds,

sang a song of praise.

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From Noon to Little Evening On an afternoon of a suddenly windy day

that lashed a moon-like sun,

whistled like a shepherd to his flock,

slid over the hairy field

like a razor blade—

I grasped the branches of the great tree of sleep hoping to rest in its shade— a latter-day Absalom newly aware of a flowering muteness, cancelling every fact. Who was there to see me

conquer awakening

till a sun of boredom slowly climbed down the hill,

and a little evening arrived,

a star uninvited rose,

and I opened my eyes.

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From Lincoln Center:

Words on the Henry Moore Sculpture

This nude of Henry Moore's is a hollow-boned swimmer freezing in shallow water, sinking slowly into an abstract dream. It flickers in a space that opens in abstraction too, where a summer sun hangs suspended, a shadowy drawing of slanted purple lines, or where a moon, its valleys photographed, stands naked and bewildered. Only this swimmer, hollow-boned, conquers the shore of boredom.

Nuances of Brown The lit-up electric boot no longer proclaims a thing. A brown yearning of chestnuts, baked bread drifts through the street. A flashing bus like a beast from a brown wood runs by, and fire-engine-clang, spiralling between thick walls of silence, shakes the brown air.

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The First Time The gravedigger's shirt turned red in the sun, his boots turned black in the white snow, as if for the first time day became night and the earth had never opened its mouth. And the mourners stood like children, surprised by the light of an hour that turned the shirt of the gravedigger red— and their blood turned to snow.

Blood and Rain I am like a thin, little, rained-upon Japanese tree through which flows heavy, tropic blood; or like a willow hung with joyful violins. Fragile wisdom of things, beauty of their contrariness, for a moment you deflect the knife of evening, and a pear no longer is as pale as a skull.

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New York: February 1965 On a day transparent with light like a landscape by Monet, my childhood broke away from a small Jewish town and glided on ice blue in the distance— while a small cloud hovered in me like a cloud of a Shakespeare sonnet.

Perhaps because I was ill the frosty town meant to shower and solace me with the almond tree's fragrant snow even though somewhere else like a reluctant seer an olive tree nodding its head refused to reveal a thing.

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Van Gogh: Williamsburg My pen wandering over this paper desert cannot, this time, capture on its point the pain flowing between endless shores, the image glowing hot and dark. Cool plaques of bronze revive the memory of a poet's distant afternoons, but my time of afternoons today foams with a Van Gogh's colors of despair, and a thousand sunset drums shiver the window-panes.

Tomorrow I shall slip away to orchard skies of Torah. Maybe there in Williamsburg, where a pacified, brute summer reigns, they cork rich wines of ancient prayer. And it may be the mirror of my room will no longer show the desert face of a Job-like Jew

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A Somewhat Clouded Study As if legends were torn by beasts in bitter forests and the rain did not cease its reporting of those who, blind to the waters' blindness, cast bread upon the waters; of travelers who folded countries in their pockets while the one station slid away a kind of victory crowns them who reached their door safely, those in whose ear the gallows refused to whisper.

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Pigeon Feeders Humming in the park at twilight and feeding the pigeons in a grey sadness, they carry their loneliness like a sword in its scabbard—

as if they had never noticed

some golden messenger in the early morning,

or noon ascending like the mountains.

In the valley of their being that reddens with sunset they listen to a fluttering of wings, but they do not bow their heads before the sword-like loneliness.

Unexpected Hope The waiting room leads to a corridor where doubt blazes like a sunset, but a morning song that suddenly soars in me turns the frost of certainty into a brittle rumor. As if with the stubborn flow of April days, the mortality of the written word grows dim, and a watch that clings to the wrist seems to shake off the dust of terrible time.

And for a moment nothing can defeat the trees' gladness.

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Madeleine and Nets My captive days crumble

like Proust's madeleine,

and like it ramify with memories.

But this slice, this hour,

is a dry crust without aroma,

the glimmer of its happenings imaginary.

I am not a knight strolling in a dream garden though I crown with a golden love the girl who departed from my rainy door, as if the assuaging whisper of Now had reached me with the grey of her eyes, the grey of waters. Proust perhaps would have evoked a different past, the nights slipping through all the nets.

Image of a Friend against Time Suddenly the burning day turned April-cool.

My friend, unlike the day, did not breathe clear,

but went on rolling forth his cloudy words

like data in a passport to a never-never land.

Bitten by a fierce indifference,

his face was a compass that betrayed its owner.

Beyond his border

time, deaf, roared like fire,

and blind, cooled its waters and its wine.

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Under the Sign of Appeasement and Rain After Bach, Bernstein and Britten,

after the larger and smaller suns,

the rain after which perhaps

there is no other,

I sit down in a cafe

in unappeased candlelight,

older than any old man

already long appeased.

After Bach, Bernstein and Britten,

after the larger and smaller birds,

the rain after which perhaps

there is no other,

I walk in a golden-eyed,

long-appeasing light,

younger than any other man

not as yet appeased.

Coruscations against Now Jets flash their lightning from void to void and a shimmer defines tiny birds in their thin line of flight. In my dim monastic cell an apple on a table glows like a reddish globe and a tumbler whispers amber nuances

as if the present, pausing to stand on the sidelines and watch competing coruscations, breathed clarities, and with translucent fingers located the past's forgotten places. Beyond the shore wrongs fade, and time invites to easy confabulation.

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MAP OF EVENING (1961)

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The Tired Hunter Having written every kind of poem,

proud ones and shy ones,

weak ones and divinely wise ones,

your pen remains suspended

in the indifferent air,

even though the birds you once set flying

still sleep upon the cliffs,

and your colors

have not yet lost a sparkle of the kingdom.

Until you discover in the sharp light of noon

that the poems are only

blind arrows sent flying

to the heart of an imagined

eternal city

and you are only a hunter

who has at last grown tired.

Between Childhood and Kingdom After the rain the clouds poured light

and blazed with wines.

Upon the earth, the harbors of blood grew silent.

This time, it seems,

my choice was truly successful.

I was no longer a dabbler,

playing with colors of flame, with shades of dew.

Suddenly I was a man

pressing toward an irreplaceable landscape,

a man discovering the single hue

that runs through childhood and kingdom.

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Spring Lines: 1959 Upon the table white wine, outside, the spring turning white and you giving no thought at all to that last white that will strip you bare one day. Do you realize that one day a strange wine will be turning white upon another table when a distant spring pours through the windows ? The man who will be living then is very close to me now although he lies hidden still in the dark lap of perhaps while I have already found the sadness of the certain. Upon the wall a picture turning blue, outside, the blue of spring, and you not wanting to imagine at all the icy blue that will stare from your eyes one day. Do you realize that one day upon another wall that same picture will turn blue when a distant spring recalls it from a then, and the man who will be living then will recognize the signature of my life.

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On Heat and Cold This heat, which pulses through the veins, erupts

and will turn into something like cold logic sooner or later:

whether in a winter that seems more distant and towering than

Everest or on an impending evening that will dim the mountain torches.

Heat puts on its agenda only the easily solved:

things are exposed in their nakedness, in their blind dailiness.

It loathes an algebra that buries itself in its thickets,

the thought at ease with its midnights.

Heat pours its terrible streams over our borders,

invites one last immersion.

Only a little while—and we shall be thinking cold,

our heads covered with snow.

Unusual Calm A tree all bronze, all of it bells flaring and dying,

stands on a sunset hill,

and a house alternately freezing and trembling,

drips colors like wounds.

An unusual calm has descended

on the expanse of meadow

unnamed on my map of storms.

Surely this calm is what an old sailor feels,

when watching from the turret of his little house

the sea raging like lava,

he suddenly finds it as peaceful as a field,

or a child sleeping.

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Words of Oblivion and Peace

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To Jenny N. I once broke evening bread with the brown-faced, white-smiled Prince of Siam. He wore festivity and humility as the first skin of his body. His talk touched on London and New York—large villages lacking true wonders, and his memory dwelt on the people of his country, small of stature, eaters of pale rice, and on the flowers there, high-tide huge, and summoning, ablaze, the armies of their colors. Lowering his low voice, "There is nothing," he said, "like the absolute oblivion that Buddha gives. No small eddy will ever ruffle its seas, and there is nothing like the calm of the endless seasons that dream in its orchards." Suddenly, a wind blew from the corner of the street, a prayer spoke from beyond the bridges, but as the flesh grew sad and silent in its fated valleys, through the window-pane there poured a peach and northern sunset, and I saw Jenny, the villages of her peaceful words in flower.

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Sketch of the Voyager He rises from a sea of weary sleep.

Breakers of dream still dash upon his shores

and slowly wake. Beyond low banks of crawling mist

raised lanterns signal silently.

And a boat, no longer hesitant,

moors in the blue,

waits for a certain voyager

to board her. But suddenly the voyager

draws back, to float again on his lazy, winy sea.

Again he shuts his eyes, again he sinks like lead

into the abyss of his old oblivion.

Skin after Skin In the dead of night, when the rain

repeats and repeats its cloudy chronicles,

you waken from the valley of your sleep

to see so clearly that the vision blinds.

Because some sun has broken through the abyss,

you feel as if you shed

skin after skin to the last nakedness.

You feel as if your fortress of disillusion

has melted like soft snow.

You grow sober then to the point of pain,

and shine then—to the point of pain,

having reached that burning core,

the good certainty utterly stripped of hope.

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Between Rain and Rain At night, when the sound of the rain between sleep and sleep awakes you, and a brook-murmur runs through your village of dream, you think of the rains of your childhood that fell so gently, and your heart responds to the echo of that young silver . . . or think of the graver metal of future rains wearily beating on a closed door. But suddenly you see, by the light of lightning,

helplessly swept along

by the stream there's no escape from,

your present years and see

how fragrant they are, how good,

like this rain.

A Small, Proud Autumn Strange how with the chestnuts warming up my pocket I have become the bearer of a small, brown autumn. I am independent now, untempted by the snares that a praised season lay at my feet; free of the wonders of vapor and of crystal that covered the land so quickly. Strange how with the chestnuts warming up my pocket I have grown proud like one unsheathing a brown loneliness, who finds it now abounds with buds of fresh, new colors that the great autumn does not know.

Perhaps because of this I suddenly saw a king bereft of his crown and burning with despair.

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From Rains on the Island

After the first sudden rain,

the long pause after,

fleets of water anchored once again

before the window,

and we were like sad sailors of the dusk,

forsaken of all ports.

At home the coffee that we drank was bitter-hot

like the onslaught of the spring.

The bread we ate was good upon the tongue

as if the meadow-scent were in our nostrils.

The summer soon will knock upon our doors—

and we shall be

sailors of the dusk

drinking in its golden showers,

but sadder still.

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Lakes

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White scratches lacerate the lake of ice.

Winter-festive figures move and freeze upon it,

figures launched out of nowhere by blind time

that burns and is.

Wounds of light and cloud criss-cross the sky-lake.

Cleaving its waves,

a sharp-nosed, circling plane or another moon surprises

that which has dwelt with time and been its eternal witness.

Recalled to mind, the blue knives of the ice

will be like flowers,

and shadings of snow will glide

like silver and like wool,

before the music dies upon a lake

and the familiar world is gathered in.

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The Evening Flesh The flesh is so sad, so much of evening,

so silent, so alone.

It has gone down to the garden of all wisdom,

to the ambuscades of every pleasure—

and these can but confirm

its close affinity

to dissolving smoke.

The flesh imprisoned like a captive in his cage, the flesh dreaming till the grave swallows it— and after it has sobered, finding the grave good. The heights will descend to the valleys then. And the bridges collapse in the water.

Clock Facing Mirror Are they alive, the hours reflected in the mirror,

or are the clock hands frozen dumb?

Has the mirror, shining hunter, captured the hours

that shiver now within a frenzied cage?

Does time run forward, a blind messenger,

or like a thief drop all his loot behind?

I don't know which of these has reached me first: the movement of moments or the winter clock.

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From Regarding the Month of April and the Expiring Hour

If not everything has been said about death in the month of April, let us add here that in the springtime even an aged man sinking into the abyss is gathered like an innocent child. His white hair darkens like the evening, his net of wrinkles conceals a stranger, and a young mother emerging from somewhere blossoms in the anchor of an eye. But to be born in the month of April is more difficult. Kingdoms of birds and flowers marvel at the unfolding morning of a world of one who has dared the gate. And the tiny hand seems troubled and unwilling to grasp anything. And the voice, like that of the aged man, is soft as if in propitiation. Between one April and another there stretches only the long corridor of winter.

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Concerning the Cherry Tree

The cherry tree is red again and the old man who let me taste of it last year is gone. His fruit are darker now. My fruit grow darker, too.

Whether the tree has felt the old man's absence I do not know, but this is clear: this year its fruit ascend in a rebellious roaring conflagration proclaiming against death's night life's repeating colors. May the ultimate storm, the one that cleans our bones, be like the summer raging with the gold of its splendor forever.

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From New York: On the Wheel of Summer

Half-past eleven. A hot day floats like a wave, burns like a forest. Before me the city, like one inviting seduction, strips like a desert. My eyes are red with a restless night, my mouth tastes sand and weariness, and I am like a beast trapped by a dazzler who beats on the panes as on the drums of Tophet; a hunter whose poison bullets shoot from savannahs of boredom. Soon in her different summer comes a woman—

with peaches, small, cool suns in the bounds of a green platter;

her smooth arms flowing—peaceful streams.

Afterwards we shall arrive where sea-tongues lap the shore,

and the fire of the day will die.

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CANDLE AGAINST THE STARS (1954)

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"Night. And I am drinking

Night. And I am drinking smoky black tea from China.

The cup is gay with flowers and figures of musicians.

Rice whitens in a saucer placid as a brook.

And from a pipe, tobacco

lures like dim gold.

My thoughts are folded now like birds on branches.

My feet rest, having trodden

the fields of obliteration.

I am a man approaching middle-age,

sitting by myself in the evening breeze of Brooklyn

as other men before me sat in their various Brooklyns,

making their calculations,

skulls furrowed, like mine, by wrinkles,

mouths, like mine, pain-twisted

for imagined or palpable reasons.

But he has still to come and fetch me,

descending from his mountain—

oblivion's dark master.

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From Maine Landscapes

A chain of forested islands laden with patience

float in the ocean. They float with a terrible splendor

in the imagination, that island

sunk in mysterious seas.

On the shore to our right there rises

a blue-leafed willow from granite,

telling us of the near that overcomes the distant.

The islands toss their misty locks of hair,

and our gaze no longer

aches to caress the yellow of the strand's sand-carpet,

the green of the trees at twilight

shedding their gold,

the red flower wounding a rock,

the brown boat wounding a wave.

Putting on a garment of mist, a man lies down on the mountain,

turns into a flowing and violet shadow,

into an evening of clouds girt for rebellion.

Even then will the blue-leafed willow

watch over your gleaming islands.

Lake Sebasticook, a cool-flamed sapphire, set with beech and hazel. At a dream distance, beyond this small island a lark pours out its song and deer browse calmly, and I alone on the shore: a clamorous city invaded by armies of silence.

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Silence enters like sap the veins of each tree and is wrapped in tangible tree-bark. From the slates of lake-waters a silver-blue sky dumbly and drowsily arches, and even the pauses of silence in the lark-throat turn into a well of song. And I alone on the shore—an army storming, invading the borders of silence.

16

Sleep in Maine—

a long draught of a cool drink,

fermenting cider, amber

whispering in a jug,

to whose glass-trails a sleepy

orchard-vapor clings.

Food in Maine—

a modest parade of potatoes in yellow coats

circling the flowered rims of bowls;

the dazzle, the sudden flare of blueberries,

blue stones and buttons competing among boughs.

Prayers in Maine—

the look of open-eyed lagoons,

love that is song-response of bird to bird.

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How Shall I Praise How shall I praise the bright-eyed garden god,

the cherry tree drunk with a dream

slowly growing red,

while people are sleeping in rooms as black as pitch,

and in the silence saying voicelessly:

"You, too, will be like the bright rind of this fruit,

hoarding drunkenness,

until it falls one day, until it finds

that moment of its truth.

You, too, even you."

And even I, one day.

One man leaves behind a map grassy with dreams,

one wanderer, in the midst of his affliction, turns to stone.

And a stone rolls, is lost upon the slope.

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