too much. If there were no cattle, horses, or sheep to be sold, they would take
people whose passage had been paid and whose forfeit put up. Our papers
were in order, and we had the passage and forfeit to board. They gave us
drinking water, but shut off all water at night. Two weeks of the rocking
boat and stink of buckets, all of us asleep on planks. Such rise and fall, such
pitch of the ship! But some nights on deck, holding the rails for all her life,
she said she ploughed the sea as she once had the fields, and into the furrows
of light went the seeds and the black-winged waters fell upon them.
EXILE
The city of your childhood rises between steppe and sea, wheat and light,
white with the dust of cockleshells, stargazers, and bones of pipefish,
city of limestone soft enough to cut with a hatchet, where the sea
unfurls and acacias brought by Greeks on their ships
turn white in summer. So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,
city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys,
an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir
where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea.
If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when
you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if
someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.
If you return, your father will be alive to prepare for you
his mint-cucumber soup or give you the little sweet called bird’s milk,
and after hours of looking with him for his sandals lost near the sea,
you visit again together the amusement park where
your ancestors are buried, and then go home to the apartment house
built by German prisoners of war, to whom your father gave bread,
which you remember surprised you. You take the tram to a stop
where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks
with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand.
FISHERMAN
March. The Neva still white, crisp as communion, and as we walk
its bridges, steadying ourselves on the glaze, tubes of ice
slide from the gutter-spouts to the astonishment of dogs, some of whom
have not seen spring before, while others pretend not to remember,
and a woman bends over her late potatoes, sorting and piling, and you say
“in this house lived a friend of my father who was killed” and
“in that house lived another, and in this, a very bad poet no longer known.”
We come to the synagogue and go in, as far back as a forgotten holiness,
where, we are told, you can whisper into the wall and be heard on the other side.
But the rabbi doesn’t know you are deaf. We whisper into the wall to please him.
A sign in Cyrillic asks for donations, and in exchange we apparently buy
dozens of matzos wrapped in paper. There are only a hundred
of us left in the city. While we are here, a fisherman waits on the river,
seated with a bucket beside him, his line in the hole, but in the last hour
water has surrounded his slab of ice, so unbeknownst
he is floating downstream, having caught nothing, cold and delirious
with winter thoughts, as they all are and were, and as for rescue,
no one will come. It is spring. The Neva, white and crisp as communion.
FOR ILYA AT TSARSKOYE SELO
We stand at the casement window of Pushkin’s Lycée.
These are the desks where Pushkin wrote, his chalkboards, his astrolabe.
Snow falls from here into the past and vanishes on golden minarets.
Snow recedes from the birches. A lesson writes itself in winter chalk:
On the day Michelangelo died in Rome, Galileo was born in Pisa.
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. When they searched for
the poet Kabir, they found nothing beneath his shroud but a sprig of jasmine.
Man is like the statue whispering about the marble chiseled from his mouth.
You are the guardian of this statue, standing in your silent world.
The year Isaac Newton died, there was a barn fire during a puppet show.
Kabir says all corpses go to the same place, and the world has fallen
in love with a dream. This life is not the same as your other life.
We are here now in one of the shrines of the silver poets.
You are one of the silver. The snow is a white peacock in a Russian poem.
THE LOST SUITCASE
So it was with the suitcase left in front
of the hotel—cinched, broken-locked,
papered with world ports, carrying what
mattered until then, when turning your back
to cup a match it was taken, and the thief,
expecting valuables, instead found books written
between wars, gold attic-light, mechanical birds singing,
and the chronicle of your country’s final hours.
What, by means of notes, you hoped to become:
a noun on paper, paper dark with nouns:
swallows darting through a basilica, your hands up
in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows
breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost
in a hospital gown, and here your voice,
principled, tender, soughing through
a fence woven with pine boughs:
Writing is older than glass but younger
than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope.
Dear one, who even in speaking is silent,
for years I have searched, usually while asleep,