where you sleep without water or light, a biscuit tin between you,
or later in the café ruins, you discuss all night the burnt literature
borrowed from a library where all books met with despair.
I wanted to give your notes back to you, to be
printed in another language, not yours or mine but a tongue
understood by children who make bulletproof vests out of cardboard.
We will then lie down in the cemetery where violets grew in your childhood
before snipers fired on the city using gravestones for cover.
Friend, absent one, I can tell you that your tunnel is still there,
mud-walled and hallowed of earth, dug for smuggling
oranges into the city—oranges!—bright as winter moons by the barrow-load.
So let’s walk further up the street, to the hill where one is able to see
the city woven in fog, roofs filled with sky, uprooted bridges,
and a shop window where a shard of glass hangs over the spine of a book.
The library burns on page sixty, as it burns in all the newspapers of the world,
and the clopping of horses’ hooves isn’t the sound of clopping horses.
From here a dog finds his way through snow with a human bone.
And what else, what more? Even the clocks have run out of time.
But, my good friend, the tunnel! There is still a tunnel for oranges.
TRAVEL PAPERS
Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur.
To the silence of the one who sets us dreaming.
RENÉ CHAR
1.
By boat we went to Seurasaari, where
the small fish were called vendace.
There a man blew a horn of birch wood
toward the nightless sea.
Still voice. Fire that is no fire.
Ahead years unknown to be lived—
2.
Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then
one by one, hours. Outside
(so fleetingly) ourselves—
3.
In a still mirror, in a blue within
where this earthly journey dreaming
itself begins,
4.
thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible.
5.
Mountains before and behind,
heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse,
then a sea village of chartreuse fronds.
Spent fuel, burnt
wind, mute swans.
6.
We drove the birch-lined
highway from Dresden
to Berlin behind armored
cars in late afternoon,
nineteenth of June, passing
the black cloud of a freight
truck from Budapest.
Through disappearing
villages, past horses grazing vanished fields.
7.
The year before you died, America
went to war again on the other
side of the world.
This is how the earth becomes,
you said, a grotto of skeletons.
8.
In the ruins of a station: a soaked
bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove.
9.
White weather, chalk, and basalt,
puffins, fuchsia, and history shot
through with particles
of recognition: this one
wetted down with petrol then
set alight, that one taking
forty rounds, this other
found eleven years later in a bog.
10.
In the station house, imaginary
maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry
of arrivals, the logs of ghost
ships, and a few prison
diaries written on tissue paper.
11.
Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies?
The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze?
Through the casements of glass handblown
before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop
through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigs
in wind through glass.
12.
Who were we then? Such
a laughter as morning peeled
its light from us!
13.
You said the cemeteries were full in a voice
like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom
but silent without grasshoppers or bees.
What do you want then? You with your
neverness, your unknown, your
book of things, you
with once years ahead to be lived.
14.
Your father believes he took you
with him, that you are
in an urn beside your sleeping mother,
but I am still writing with your hand,
as you stand in your still-there of lighted words.
15.
Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight.
Stairwells remember, as do doors, but windows do not—
do not, upon waking, gaze out a window
if you wish to remember your dream.
16.
An ache of hope that you will come back—
the cawing flock is not your coming.
17.
Did you float toward Salzburg? A wind
in the mustard fields?—or walk instead
beside me through the asylum in Kraków?