Bride of Ice Read online

walk away from the river, from my

  cries. Falling salts of mercury

  I lick off without attention.

  No great moon of Solomon

  has been set for my tears in the skies.

  A post. Why not beat my forehead to

  blood on it? To smithereens! We are

  like fellow criminals, fearing one

  another. (The murdered thing is love.)

  Don’t say these are lovers? Going into

  the night? Separately? To sleep with others?

  – You understand the future is up there?

  he says. And I throw back my head.

  To sleep! Like newly-weds over their mat!

  To sleep! We can’t fall into

  step. And I plead miserably: take my

  arm, we aren’t convicts to walk like this.

  Shock! It’s as though his soul has touched

  me as his arm leans on mine. The electric

  current beats along feverish wiring,

  and rips. He’s leaned on my soul with his arm.

  He holds me. Rainbows everywhere. What is more like a

  rainbow than tears? Rain, a curtain, denser

  than beads. I don’t know if such embankments can

  end. But here is a bridge and

  – Well then?

  Here? (The hearse is ready.)

  Peaceful his eyes move

  upward. – Couldn’t you see me home

  for the very last time?

  8

  Last bridge I won’t

  give up or take out my hand

  this is the last bridge

  the last bridging between

  water and firm land:

  and I am saving these

  coins for death

  for Charon, the price of Lethe

  this shadow money

  from my dark hand I press

  soundlessly into

  the shadowy darkness of his

  shadow money it is

  no gleam and tinkle in it

  coins for shadows:

  the dead have enough poppies

  This bridge

  Lovers for the most

  part are without hope: passion

  also is just

  a bridge, a means of connection

  It’s warm: to nestle

  close at your ribs, to move in

  a visionary pause

  towards nothing, beside nothing

  no arms no legs

  now, only the bone of my

  side is alive where

  it presses directly against you

  life in that side

  only, ear and echo is it: there

  I stick like white to

  egg yolk, or an eskimo to his fur

  adhesive, pressing

  joined to you: Siamese

  twins are no nearer.

  The woman you call mother

  when she forgot

  all things in motionless triumph

  only to carry you:

  she did not hold you closer.

  Understand: we have

  grown into one as we slept and

  now I can’t jump

  because I can’t let go your hand

  and I won’t be torn off

  as I press close to you: this

  bridge is no husband

  but a lover: a just slipping past

  our support: for the

  river is fed with bodies!

  I bite in like a tick

  you must tear out my roots to be rid of me

  like ivy like a tick

  inhuman godless

  to throw me away like a thing,

  when there is

  no thing I ever prized

  in this empty world of things.

  Say this is only a dream,

  night still and afterwards morning

  an express to Rome?

  Granada? I won’t know myself

  as I push off

  the Himalayas of bedclothes.

  But this dark is deep:

  now I warm you with my blood, listen

  to this flesh.

  It is far truer than poems.

  If you are warm, who

  will you go to tomorrow for that?

  This is delirium,

  please say this bridge cannot

  end

  as it ends.

  – Here then? His gesture could

  be made by a child, or a god.

  – And so? – I am biting in!

  For a little more time. The last of it.

  9

  Blatant as factory buildings,

  as alert to a call

  here is the sacred and sublingual

  secret wives keep from husbands and

  widows from friends, here is the full

  story that Eve took from the tree:

  I am no more than an animal that

  someone has stabbed in the stomach.

  Burning. As if the soul had been

  torn away with the skin. Vanished like steam

  through a hole is that well-known foolish

  heresy called a soul.

  That Christian leprosy:

  steam: save that with your poultices.

  There never was such a thing.

  There was a body once, wanted to

  live no longer wants to live.

  Forgive me! I didn’t mean it!

  The shriek of torn entrails.

  So prisoners sentenced to death wait

  for the 4 a.m. firing squad.

  At chess perhaps with a grin

  they mock the corridor’s eye.

  Pawns in the game of chess:

  someone is playing with us.

  Who? Kind gods or? Thieves?

  The peephole is filled with an

  eye and the red corridor

  clanks. Listen the latch lifts.

  One drag on tobacco, then

  spit, it’s all over, spit,

  along this paving of chess squares

  is a direct path to the ditch

  to blood. And the secret eye

  the dormer eye of the moon.

  And now, squinting sideways, how

  far away you are already.

  10

  Closely, like one creature, we

  start: there is our café!

  There is our island, our shrine, where

  in the morning, we people of the

  rabble, a couple for a minute only,

  conducted a morning service:

  with things from country markets, sour

  things seen through sleep or spring.

  The coffee was nasty there

  entirely made from oats (and

  with oats you can extinguish

  caprice in fine race-horses).

  There was no smell of Araby.

  Arcadia was in

  that coffee.

  But how she smiled at us

  and sat us down by her,

  sad and worldly in her wisdom

  a grey-haired paramour.

  Her smile was solicitous

  (saying: you’ll wither! live!),

  it was a smile at madness and being

  penniless, at yawns and love

  and – this was the chief thing –

  at laughter without reason

  smiles with no deliberation

  and our faces without wrinkles.

  Most of all at youth

  at passions out of this climate

  blown in from some other place

  flowing from some other source

  into that dim café

  (burnous and Tunis) where

  she smiled at hope and flesh

  under old-fashioned clothes.

  (My dear friend I don’t complain.

  It’s just another scar.)

  To think how she saw us off,

  that proprietress in her cap

  stiff as a Dutch hat…

  Not quite remembering, not quite
>
  understanding, we are led away from the festival –

  along our street! no longer ours that

  we walked many times, and no more shall.

  Tomorrow the sun will rise in the West.

  And then David will break with Jehovah.

  – What are we doing? – We are separating.

  – That’s a word that means nothing to me.

  It’s the most inhumanly senseless

  of words: sep arating. (Am I one of a hundred?)

  It is simply a word of four syllables and

  behind their sound lies: emptiness.

  Wait! Is it even correct in Serbian or

  Croatian? Is it a Czech whim, this word.

  Sep aration! To sep arate!

  It is insane unnatural

  a sound to burst the eardrums, and spread out

  far beyond the limits of longing itself.

  Separation – the word is not in the Russian

  language. Or the language of women. Or men.

  Nor in the language of God. What are we – sheep?

  To stare about as we eat.

  Separation – in what language is it,

  when the meaning itself doesn’t exist?

  or even the sound! Well – an empty one, like

  the noise of a saw in your sleep perhaps.

  Separation. That belongs to the school of

  Khlebnikov’s nightingale-groaning

  swan-like…

  so how does it happen?

  Like a lake of water running dry.

  Into air. I can feel our hands touching.

  To separate. Is a shock of thunder

  upon my head – oceans rushing into

  a wooden house. This is Oceania’s

  furthest promontory. And the streets are steep.

  To separate. That means to go downward

  downhill the sighing sound of two

  heavy soles and at last a hand receives

  the nail in it. A logic that turns

  everything over. To separate

  means we have to become

  single creatures again

  we who had grown into one.

  11

  To lose everything at once –

  what could be tidier?

  This is an end to our days

  as we wander in these outskirts,

  and to our joys – read burdens –

  to our lives, homes and both of us.

  Empty dachas. I honour them all,

  as I would an old mother.

  To abandon home is action.

  What is empty can’t be emptied.

  (As for dachas which are part empty,

  you may as well burn them right away!)

  So – do not flinch! When

  the wound opens.

  You must go into the outskirts

  and simply rip out the stitches.

  Let me put this plainly: love

  is no more than a line of stitches,

  a seam, yes, which is no protection.

  So don’t beg to be shielded.

  These stitches hold the dead to the earth.

  that is how we are stitched

  and time will show what kind of

  stitching: single – or reinforced.

  Whichever, rip the stitches out,

  friend, leave only shreds.

  I’m glad they tear out easily –

  better to rip than unravel.

  Look under the basting – there:

  a living red vein not decay.

  Rip and tear, you lose nothing.

  Let’s make for the outskirts

  Let’s go way out of town!

  And divorce our spirits for ever.

  There’s a wind in the brain, today:

  an execution to witness.

  The one who leaves feels no loss

  even as dawn is breaking.

  I sewed your whole life in a night

  perfectly, without basting.

  If it’s crooked, don’t complain!

  – You can just rip out the stitches.

  Ours are untidy souls. Both

  are covered with scars.

  Let’s make a violent sweep of this:

  in the outskirts, out of time.

  To the suburbs! The heel of fate

  is pressed into wet clay –

  So blame my hurried work

  friend, or the living thread

  which clings, however tangled.

  Here is the last street lamp.

  *

  – Here then? A glance, as if in

  conspiracy. A glance. From a lesser race.

  A glance – Can we climb the mountain,

  for the very last time?

  12

  Dense as a horse mane is:

  rain in our eyes. And hills.

  We have passed the suburb.

  Now we are out of town,

  which is there but not for us.

  Stepmother not mother.

  Nowhere is lying ahead.

  And here is where we fall.

  A field with. A fence and.

  Brother and sister. Standing.

  Life is only a suburb:

  so you must build elsewhere.

  Ugh, what a lost cause

  it is, ladies and gentlemen,

  for the whole world is suburb:

  Where are the real towns?

  Rain rips at us madly.

  We stand and break with each other.

  In three months, these must be

  the first moments of sharing.

  Is it true, God, that you even

  tried to borrow from Job?

  Well, it didn’t come off.

  Still. We are. Outside town.

  Beyond it! Understand? Outside!

  That means we’ve passed the walls.

  Life is a place where it’s forbidden

  to live. Like the Hebrew quarter.

  And isn’t it more worthy to

  become an eternal Jew?

  Anyone not a reptile

  suffers the same pogrom.

  Life is for converts only

  Judases of all faiths.

  Let’s go to leprous islands

  or hell anywhere only not

  life which puts up with traitors, with

  those who are sheep to butchers!

  This paper which gives me the

  right to live – I stamp. With my feet.

  Stamp! for the shield of David.

  Vengeance! for heaps of bodies

  and they say after all (delicious) the

  Jews didn’t want to live!

  Ghetto of the chosen. Beyond this

  ditch. No mercy

  In this most Christian of worlds

  all poets are Jews.

  13

  This is how they sharpen knives on a

  stone, and sweep sawdust up with

  brooms. Under my hands there is

  something wet and furry.

  Now where are those twin male

  virtues: strength, dryness?

  Here beneath my hand I can

  feel tears. Not rain!

  What temptations can still be

  spoken of? Property is water.

  Since I felt your diamond eyes under

  my hands, flowing.

  There is no more I can lose. We have

  reached the end of ending.

  And so I simply stroke, and

  stroke. And stroke your face.

  This is the kind of pride we have:

  Marinkas are Polish girls.

  Since now the eyes of an eagle weep

  underneath these hands…

  Can you be crying? My friend, my

  – everything! Please forgive me!

  How large and salty now is the

  taste of this in my fist.

  Male tears are – cruel! They

  rise over my head! Weep,

  there will soon be others to

  heal any gu
ilt towards me.

  Fish of identical

  sea. A sweep upward! like

  … any dead shells and any

  lips upon lips.

  In tears.

  Wormwood

  to taste.

  – And tomorrow

  when

  I am awake?

  14

  A slope like a path for

  sheep. With town noises.

  Three trollops approach.

  They are laughing. At tears.

  They are laughing the full noon of

  their bellies shake, like waves!

  They laugh at the

  inappropriate

  disgraceful, male

  tears of yours, visible

  through the rain like scars!

  Like a shameful pearl on

  the bronze of a warrior.

  These first and last tears

  pour them now – for me –

  for your tears are pearls

  that I wear in my crown.

  And my eyes are not lowered.

  I stare through the shower.

  Yes, dolls of Venus

  stare at me! because

  this is a closer bond

  than the transport of lying down.

  The Song of Songs itself