Wheel With a Single Spoke Read online

it will cut its root to start,

  then its suckling leaves

  and dentations

  breaking light apart.

  Ah, thus the only ah, thus inward

  toward myself, from myself,

  the furthest sky away is

  nightfall’s coastal shelf.

  III.

  I absorb the news that my right leg has departed.

  I pour wisdom into the left,

  idol of flesh, and smart.

  Neither one is your friend,

  neither two, neither no one . . .

  Blood comes with the soul, just that:

  Eat it, sister heart, eat it

  yesterday and the day before.

  IV.

  Flee forward, always forward,

  from the four holy chambers.

  My gut is my friend, my ankle my parent,

  the road has no return.

  Blood speaks,

  its valve, vein, artery,

  the white bone inside speaks,

  the viscera, the zither.

  The cell speaks, the lymph speaks

  the mobile brick of the tongue, –

  the end of every bone will speak,

  melting in the movement of nimbi, nimbus.

  The Tower of Babel turned with its glove

  inside out, –

  heart, bedbug, mare, hetaera,

  inside out . . .

  Thus a pyramid

  thus a pyramid

  thus a pyramid

  V.

  My only prey is my life.

  I can only lose my life.

  Everything happens in my lifetime.

  My heart defeats my blood

  and then

  my heart chases my blood away.

  My blood inflates my heart.

  My only prey is my life,

  yes.

  My only prey is my life.

  All I can lose, all I can lose,

  but who can say

  what I may lose!? . . .

  But what does “who” mean

  or “to lose,” Lord

  what is “to lose” – “loss”?

  I slept with all my bones along a sword blade,

  until the sword became my spine,

  until a cloudlike body and the sliding

  moment were enveloped in its shine.

  That’s why I put my temple to things, my ear

  my eardrum, my what I am,

  trying to sever it from its pair,

  its shadow, the earthen dam.

  But things will laugh in their own language

  at my victory, its glory,

  at reddened eyebrows, silent muscles,

  the way I break the sword in two, or three.

  Sleeping and Waking

  Since I couldn’t understand a single thing

  and neither could you,

  I thought we made a nice pair.

  We confessed to each other

  our darkest secret –

  that we existed . . .

  But that was night, and oh, in the morning,

  what a terrible vision,

  I awoke with my head against you:

  you yellow, you haystack, you wheat.

  And I thought – Lord,

  what kind of bread am I going to be,

  me,

  and who will eat it?

  Decree

  I may be forgotten, because

  I don’t care for my arms. I may lose them.

  I may be abandoned, because

  I don’t love my legs. I can walk

  just as well with air.

  I may be left alone, because

  my blood will pour into the sea

  in any case.

  There’s room. My ribs have all risen

  like sea walls.

  There’s enough light. My eyes

  see only one mask.

  But it does not yet exist,

  so there’s room, there’s room, there is.

  The beating moon inches across the roof of the mouth

  Soon it reaches the teeth

  and the scrape of enamel is heard,

  long words

  with seven heads,

  breaking free.

  Cautiously, it comes to the lips:

  nothing more is heard, in silence

  the lines of my teeth advance,

  barely visible, row by row.

  It floats in the air for a time, and a bird

  jabs its wing into the moon, there is some flapping,

  then nothing more. It must

  have stuck the other wing

  into the moon, too. Reverberating,

  my teeth have arrived, and now they glitter in the sky.

  Higher, and higher, Excelsior! I hear myself shouting.

  You will let them bite you soon

  to make room for the moon to pass, the victor.

  Higher, and higher, Excelsior!

  Mime

  Too quickly they change, what we call

  moods,

  as though a mime

  kept falling asleep in the barracks,

  in an unending line of beds overlapped inside me.

  The tired mime, his mouth on a cold stone,

  evaporates from the bottom bed,

  in order to condense on the bed above

  even sadder and more beautiful.

  The mime’s vague edges

  do not distinguish truth from a lie,

  choking them to sleep, together

  upon the same pillow.

  Sliding toward cold, from heat,

  and then toward the burning,

  highest bed, the tenth

  in the aurora borealis.

  A curse, yes, when you can always begin from the beginning,

  your life unborn.

  Poetry

  for Matei Călinescu

  Poetry is an eye that cries

  a shoulder that cries

  a shoulder’s eye that cries

  It is a hand that cries

  a hand’s eye that cries

  It is a sole that cries

  a heel’s eye that cries

  O friends,

  poetry is not a tear

  it is crying itself

  the crying of an uninvented eye

  a tear

  from one who should be beautiful,

  a tear from one who should be glad.

  Song of Three

  We are two, you are alone,

  so we let you do what you want.

  We give you two hearts;

  one we keep in me,

  the other we keep in you.

  Your face we make

  like our face,

  the way coins match

  the two brutal stamps

  when the coiner gives them birth.

  We are two branches of you,

  one shooting toward the moon,

  with your love of the sky,

  the other shooting from your belly,

  with your love of the earth.

  We and you wanted to be one.

  But matter hates truth

  and, to punish us, made us three.

  We are two and you are alone

  so you are the master,

  so you are the queen,

  because we two are the same.

  But nothing is the same as another thing

  except in boring stories about happiness.

  Laughing Tears

  Eyelid with teeth, with a tooth-marked tear

  and food that lacks its salt,

  the proof I cannot live in the present

  are my memories, one and all.

  The proof I cannot see without a witness

  are my childhood and adolescence,

  doubling the nonbeing of these seconds

  with nonbeing from some other time.

  Ah, laughing tears

  ah, laughing tears

  break over me when I talk

  to the old moment rotting in the
current

  moment. Ah, laughing tears

  ah, laughing tears

  in the eye of cold things

  and the tooth, like the scepter

  of uninvented kings.

  Murderous Memory

  Vision did not go straight ahead, rather

  it circumambulated things, went over

  to a pillar in a corner, dark ogive, and

  interrupted sleep, below an unmoved star.

  Parting, you made a friendly gesture

  rustling your hand like leaves,

  soul of spider, soul of a horse,

  like a sail slowly unweaving

  or like the shadow of a horseshoe, bleeding

  over each approaching moment.

  A long row of eyes tumbled silently

  over your shy gaze, gentle woman.

  And nothing was straight, or simple, or holy

  in that afternoon spent downing pints.

  After the massacre, the nearby seconds slowly

  rotted through hours that were fat, thick, alive.

  It Was Crushed Music

  It was crushed music

  running down the ankles.

  It was vast indifference

  that scaffolded my heart.

  It was a gaze through sleep

  like through an iron ring.

  At the door, the porter in epaulettes

  elegantly helps undress

  snakes of their skins

  and stones of themselves.

  The wine was pretty good,

  the death agreeable,

  as one after another, celebrated

  skiers plunged through the air,

  spraying me with snow.

  I’m So Tired I Can’t Go On, He Said

  I’m so tired I can’t go on, he said,

  standing like a veiled wave . . .

  eye, O iris, iris-eyed

  proffer a truthful gaze.

  You hit my chest with sightless

  wine from your goblets spilled,

  which I now drink, and while I do

  I am drenched but unsullied.

  And you beat me with

  Saturn’s falling vine,

  the thick tail of a comet snuffed

  when it and thought entwined.

  While my frozen skull turns white

  around the eyes it hasn’t got,

  from one to ten

  the bears eat ice and grow thin

  with the polar desperation

  of “haves” and “have nots.”

  Brusque Speech

  What happened to those amazing guys

  from after the war?

  High school students who visited society women

  and even spoke French

  with a decent European accent?

  One or another of them would print a little book

  of poems

  on his own dime, or by subscription,

  and we, the students,

  would read it melting with admiration, un-understanding

  the un-understandable . . .

  Where are those young men

  dressed in melancholy, in the image of distinction

  framed by our wide eyes

  and oval eyelids?

  Where are you, eighth-grade

  homeroom teacher,

  whose effeminate nose still guards the smell

  of a very young man, just shaved?

  Lord, what pure days, Lord

  what respect would fit within

  our boyish talk

  our breaking voices.

  What happened to those amazing guys

  from after the war?

  Where are you, homeroom teacher

  from the eighth grade?

  Halerib, Khaa

  Halerib, Khiiii . . .

  Heoro, loro, oro

  don’t understand, Halerib, Khaa

  don’t understand, aero, loro, oro . . .

  You Leave Your Scent

  You leave your scent of milk

  like a river in my bed,

  I sleep exhausted through the night

  a royal sword above my head.

  Ha! there is white still in the world

  and there is the heavy, livid

  tang of thirst, when a certain sleep

  runs through the dawns, like liquid.

  But the smell, ah, the smell,

  precedes you in the air, awake,

  when the moon, to harvest valor,

  bends its bone until it breaks.

  You leave the air with your scent

  of metal and woman,

  of an insect fired inside the clay

  of Chaldean space,

  of a future column

  from a century unborn,

  of the wall charred in a blaze

  that once charred Ruth.

  And you remind me of a

  bitter rain, a brittle cloud,

  my sweet antique

  of future age.

  The Jester and Death

  The guide lost his mind in the Špilberk, high up

  in the prison;

  he plays out the old tortures run amok

  assorted bodies thrown here and there

  until their livers fell out, in fear.

  Through the cold hallways where the ex-dead

  become door handles instead

  or they complete with their ex-meat

  the walls that rust with swords and knives,

  the guide lost his mind and ventriloquized

  a string of fire from his mouth to ignite

  my sense of hearing, sense of sight,

  with my horse’s muzzle I feed on hay,

  with my stork’s beak I fricassee

  the interior, unseen cross.

  I peck myself with squawking

  hens and calm back down again –

  when I traverse the stomach of the guide

  like through the sack of great divide.

  But the Špilberk dead are not our twins,

  they are too old for our cognition.

  The newly dead, the newly dead

  run over us like sweat,

  the guide perceives my sweat-soaked

  meninges and licks them.

  I leave white. What’s dry inside me growls.

  A stone jester at the gate of the prison.

  I lean against it. It is and isn’t.

  I kiss its cheek. I drink water from its mouth.

  Contemplation

  Sickly spheres appear, bubbly, livid,

  pushing against the night, shoving it aside.

  Spools of trees turn wet, turn to liquid

  and flow, so bitter, to the other side.

  Let’s sit on benches in the damp

  and watch the Prodigal Son return,

  I know him by his sound and shape

  and the way the nocturnal birds

  fall dead above him

  and by the cold of amphibians

  that snake around my heels,

  my ankles, my tibias . . .

  Pulse

  Everything you saw froze so quickly

  the lake and all that leapt

  from its banks, and the comet

  froze like a skier mid-jump.

  Then it melted so quickly,

  it would have been natural

  for you to drown in the depths

  like fish on gravel.

  You just had to know to swim

  and then to skate on the ice,

  then swim, then skate,

  for a moment – a day, a month – a life.

  Law

  Because I imagine it

  he told me:

  law means having two hands

  two hands with five fingers

  each,

  law means having two

  feet

  with five toes each

  I sit among green branches

  and imagine this

  law, law means having

  two hands
>
  with five fingers each

  law means having two

  feet

  with five toes each

  Law means having a skull

  with two eyes, two ears

  two nostrils

  two eyebrows, two

  pairs of separations

  He told me, because

  I imagine

  you have a head, two hands, two feet

  Night falls and shadow falls

  You lie down, but you won’t for long

  you have to be because you were

  He told me: get up

  walk around.

  Ode to Joy

  Come you, soul’s grandeur

  released from memory and the flight of guardian angels

  always whooshing over you with wings

  of calm, as though the world

  were made of stained silk, and maternal hands

  ripped it, slowly, out of spite.

  Come grandeur and say:

  I was just like him,

  my nerves experienced the same vernal green,

  I wrapped myself in the same horizon;

  the plain of aloneness.

  Everyone thought I was him, even me,

  because of the sole sky

  where the sun and moon beat

  over us.

  I went ahead of him, I went

  behind,

  I floated over him, or I was the road

  and let his footsteps kiss me, over and over,

  until everyone thought I was him,

  even I thought I was him

  because of the gift of death, something that

  endowed us both.

  When they stuck their split tongues out to whistle

  words with seven heads,

  biting and poisoning us, and we

  had the same torn ear and the same bloodstains,

  we colored diabolic syllables, –

  I thought I was him, and everyone

  thought I was him,

  and only he knew

  which body exactly he was in.

  But only he really died,

  only he knew that it was he,

  but I did nothing but turn

  my wrath a moment toward myself,

  so law could pass in peace

  and mystery could pass unmolested.

  No earlier, no later.

  Undeciphered Inscription

  The river flowed by quickly, even though

  it was there alone, all the time.

  Being there, it flowed

  and carried being and everything, thus