Bride of Ice Read online

sneaking up their little knees. They cry:

  – Chrys – o – lite.

  Red moss! Blue caves!

  (Feet go deeper. Skies rise higher.)

  Mirror boxes. Crystal balls. Something’s

  been left behind, something grows closer…

  You’re stuck up to the knees! Careful.

  – Ah this chrys-o-prase!

  The water is shoulder high on

  little mice in schoolday clothes.

  Little snub-nose, – higher, higher

  now the water’s at your throat.

  It’s sweeter than bed linen…

  – Crystals! Crystals!

  In my kingdom: (The flute sounds the gentlest dolce)

  Time dwindles, eyes grow larger.

  Is that a sea gull? or is it a baby’s bonnet?

  Legs grow heavy, hearts grow lighter.

  Water reaches to the chin.

  Mourn, friends and relatives!

  Isn’t this a fine palace

  for the Bürgermeister’s daughter?

  Here are eternal dreams, words without pathways.

  The flute grows sweeter, hearts more quiet.

  Follow without thinking. Listen. No need for thought!

  The flute becomes sweeter still, hearts even quieter.

  – Mutter. Don’t call me in for supper…

  Bu-u-bbles!

  1925

  from POEMS TO A SON

  Forget us, children. Our conscience

  need not belong to you.

  You can be free to write the tale

  of your own days and passions.

  Here in this family album

  lies the salt family of Lot.

  It is for you to reckon up

  the many claims on Sodom.

  You didn’t fight your brothers

  my curly headed boy!

  So this is your time, this is your day.

  The land is purely yours.

  Sin, cross, quarrel, anger,

  these are ours. There have been

  too many funerals held by now

  for an Eden you’ve never seen

  whose fruit you never tasted.

  So now, put off your mourning.

  Understand: they are blind

  who lead you, but then

  our quarrel is not your quarrel,

  So as you rush from Meudon

  and race to the Kuban

  children, prepare for battle

  in the field of your own days.

  January 1932

  Homesickness

  Homesickness! that long

  exposed weariness!

  It’s all the same to me now

  where I am altogether lonely

  or what stones I wander over

  home with a shopping bag to

  a house that is no more mine

  than a hospital or a barracks.

  It’s all the same to me, captive

  lion what faces I move through

  bristling, or what human crowd will

  cast me out as it must

  into myself, into my separate internal

  world, a Kamchatka bear without ice.

  Where I fail to fit in (and I’m not trying) or

  where I’m humiliated it’s all the same.

  And I won’t be seduced by the thought of

  my native language, its milky call.

  How can it matter in what tongue I

  am misunderstood by whoever I meet

  (or by what readers, swallowing

  newsprint, squeezing for gossip?)

  They all belong to the twentieth

  century, and I am before time,

  stunned, like a log left

  behind from an avenue of trees.

  People are all the same to me, everything

  is the same, and it may be the most

  indifferent of all are these

  signs and tokens which once were

  native but the dates have been

  rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere.

  For my country has taken so little care

  of me that even the sharpest spy could

  go over my whole spirit and would

  detect no native stain there.

  Houses are alien, churches are empty

  everything is the same:

  But if by the side of the path one

  particular bush rises

  the rowanberry…

  1934

  I opened my veins

  I opened my veins. Unstoppably

  life spurts out with no remedy.

  Now I set out bowls and plates.

  Every bowl will be shallow.

  Every plate will be small.

  And overflowing their rims,

  into the black earth, to nourish

  the rushes unstoppably

  without cure, gushes

  poetry…

  1934

  Epitaph

  1

  Just going out for a minute –

  left your work (which the idle

  call chaos) behind on the table.

  And left the chair behind when you went where?

  I ask around all Paris, for it’s

  only in stories or pictures

  that people rise to the skies:

  where is your soul gone, where?

  In the cupboard, two-doored like a shrine,

  look all your books are in place.

  In each line the letters are there.

  Where has it gone to, your face?

  Your face

  your warmth

  your shoulder

  where did they go?

  2

  Useless with eyes like nails to

  penetrate the black soil

  As true as a nail in the mind

  you are not here, not here.

  It’s useless turning my eyes

  and fumbling round the whole sky.

  Rain. Pails of rain-water. But

  you are not there, not there.

  Neither one of the two. Bone is

  too much bone. And spirit is too much spirit.

  Where is the real you? All of you?

  Too much here. Too much there.

  And I won’t exchange you for sand

  and steam. You took me for kin,

  and I won’t give you up for a corpse

  and a ghost: a here, and a there.

  It’s not you, not you, not you,

  however much priests intone

  that death and life are one:

  God’s too much God, worm – too much worm!

  You are one thing, corpse and spirit.

  We won’t give you up for the smoke of

  censers

  or flowers

  on graves

  If you are anywhere, it’s here in

  us: and we honour best all those who

  have gone by despising division.

  It is all of you that has gone.

  3

  Because once when you were young and bold

  you did not leave me to rot alive among

  bodies without souls or fall dead among walls

  I will not let you die altogether.

  Because, fresh and clean, you took me

  out by the hand, to freedom and brought spring leaves

  in bundles into my house I shall not

  let you be grown over with weeds and forgotten.

  And because you met the status of my

  first grey hairs like a son with pride

  greeting their terror with a child’s joy:

  I shall not let you go grey into men’s hearts.

  4

  The blow muffled through years of

  forgetting, of not knowing:

  That blow reaches me now like the song of a

  woman, or like horses neighing.

  Through an inert building, a song of passion and

  the blow comes:

  dulled by forgetfulness, by not knowing which is
r />   a soundless thicket.

  It is the sin of memory, which has no eyes or

  lips or flesh or nose,

  the silt of all the days and nights

  we have been without each other

  the blow is muffled with moss and waterweed:

  so ivy devours the

  core of the living thing it is ruining

  – a knife through a feather bed.

  Window wadding, our ears are plugged with it

  and with that other wool

  outside windows of snow and the weight of spiritless

  years: and the blow is muffled.

  1935

  Readers of Newspapers

  It crawls, the underground snake,

  crawls, with its load of people.

  And each one has his

  newspaper, his skin

  disease; a twitch of chewing;

  newspaper caries.

  Masticators of gum,

  readers of newspapers.

  And who are the readers? old men? athletes?

  soldiers? No face, no features,

  no age. Skeletons – there’s no

  face, only the newspaper page.

  All Paris is dressed

  this way from forehead to navel.

  Give it up, girl, or

  you’ll give birth to

  a reader of newspapers.

  Sway he lived with his sister.

  Swaying he killed his father.

  They blow themselves up with pettiness

  as if they were swaying with drink.

  For such gentlemen what

  is the sunset or the sunrise?

  They swallow emptiness,

  these readers of newspapers.

  For news read: calumnies.

  For news read: embezzling,

  in every column slander

  every paragraph some disgusting thing.

  With what, at the Last Judgement

  will you come before the light?

  Grabbers of small moments,

  readers of newspapers.

  Gone! Lost! Vanished! So,

  the old maternal terror.

  But mother, the Gutenberg Press

  is more terrible than Schwarz’ powder.

  It’s better to go to a graveyard

  than into the prurient

  sickbay of scab-scratchers,

  these readers of newspapers.

  And who is it rots our sons

  now in the prime of their life?

  Those corrupters of blood

  the writers of newspapers.

  Look, friends much

  stronger than in these lines, do

  I think this, when with

  a manuscript in my hand

  I stand before the face

  there is no emptier place

  than before the absent

  face of an editor

  of newspapers’ evil filth.

  1935

  Desk

  1

  My desk, most loyal friend

  thank you. You’ve been with me on

  every road I’ve taken.

  My scar and my protection.

  My loaded writing mule.

  Your tough legs have endured

  the weight of all my dreams, and

  burdens of piled-up thoughts.

  Thank you for toughening me.

  No worldly joy could pass

  your severe looking-glass

  you blocked the first temptation,

  and every base desire

  your heavy oak outweighed

  lions of hate, elephants

  of spite you intercepted.

  Thank you for growing with me

  as my need grew in size

  I’ve been laid out across you

  so many years alive

  while you’ve grown broad and wide

  and overcome me. Yes,

  however my mouth opens

  you stretch out limitless.

  You’ve nailed me to your wood.

  I’m glad. To be pursued.

  And torn up. At first light.

  To be caught. And commanded:

  Fugitive. Back to your chair!

  I’m glad you’ve guarded me

  and bent my life away

  from blessings that don’t last,

  as wizards guide sleep walkers!

  My battles burn as signs.

  You even use my blood to set out

  all my acts in lines –

  in columns, as you are a pillar

  of light. My source of power!

  You lead me as the Hebrews once

  were led forward by fire.

  Take blessings now from me,

  as one put to the test, on

  elbows, forehead, knotted knees,

  your knife edge to my breast.

  2

  I celebrate thirty years

  of union truer than love

  I know every notch in your wood.

  You know the lines in my face.

  Haven’t you written them there?

  devouring reams of paper

  denying me any tomorrow

  teaching me only today.

  You’ve thrown my important letters

  and money in floods together,

  repeating: for every single verse

  today has to be the deadline.

  You’ve warned me of retribution

  not to be measured in spoonfulls.

  And when my body will be laid out,

  great fool! Let it be on you then.

  3

  The rest of you can eat me up

  I just record your behaviour!

  For you they’ll find dining tables

  to lay you out. This desk for me!

  Because I’ve been happy with little

  there are foods I’ve never tasted.

  The rest of you dine slowly.

  You’ve eaten too much and too often.

  Places are already chosen

  long before birth for everyone.

  The place of adventures is settled,

  and the places of gratification.

  Truffles for you not pencils.

  Pickles instead of dactyls

  and you express your pleasure

  in belches and not in verses.

  At your head funeral candles

  must be thick-legged asparagus:

  surely your road from this world

  will cross a dessert table!

  Let’s puff Havana tobacco

  on either side of you then;

  and let your shrouds be made

  from the finest of Dutch linen.

  And so as not to waste such

  fine cloth let them shake you

  with left-overs and crumbs

  into the grave that waits for you.

  Your souls at the post mortem

  will be like stuffed capons.

  But I shall be there naked

  with only two wings for cover.

  1933-5

  Bus

  The bus jumped, like a brazen

  evil spirit, a demon

  cutting across the traffic

  in streets as cramped as footnotes,

  it rushed on its way shaking

  like a concert-hall vibrating

  with applause. And we shook in it!

  Demons too. Have you seen

  seeds under a tap? We were

  like peas in boiling soup,

  or Easter toys dancing in

  alcohol. Mortared grain!

  Teeth in a chilled mouth.

  What has been shaken out someone

  could use for a chandelier:

  all the beads and the bones

  of an old woman. A necklace

  on that girl’s breast. Bouncing.

  The child at his mother’s nipple.

  Shaken without reference

  like pears all of us shaken

  in vibrato, like violins.

 
The violence shook our souls

  into laughter, and back into childhood.

  Young again. Yes. The joy of that

  being thrown into girlhood! Or

  perhaps further back, to become

  a tomboy with toothy grin.

  It was as if the piper

  had led us, not out of town, but

  right out of the calendar.

  Laughter exhausted us all.

  I was too weak to stand.

  Enfeebled, I kept on my feet only

  by holding your belt in my hand.

  Askew, head on, the bus was

  crazed like a bull, it leapt

  as if at a red cloth,

  to rush round a sharp bend

  and then, quite suddenly

  stopped.

  … So, between hills, the creature

  lay obedient and still.

  Lord, what blue surrounded us,

  how everywhere was green!

  The hurt of living gone,

  like January’s tin.

  Green was everywhere,

  a strange and tender green.

  A moist, uneasy noise of green

  flowed through our veins’ gutters.

  Green struck my head open,

  and freed me from all thinking!