Wojahn Weldon Kees in Mexico, 1965 - Columbia: A Journal of ...

Wojahn
Weldon Kees in Mexico, 1965
Evenings below my window
the Sisters of the convent of Saint Teresa
carry brown jugs of water from a well
beyond a dry wash called Mostrenco.
Today it was hard to waken
and I've been dead to the world for ten years.
They tread the narrow footbridge
made of vines and wooden planks, sandals clicking:
brown beads and white crosses
between hands that are also brown.
Over the bridge they travel in a white-robed line
like innocent nurses to a field hospital.
Exactly ten. I've marked it on the calendar.
Maria, who speaks no English,
is soaping her dark breasts by the washstand.
'Yesterday she said
she'd like to be a painter and sketched
on the back of a soiled napkin,
a rendition of a cholla —
with her lipstick. And laughed,
then drew below each nipple
a smudged rose. Weldon
would have been repelled
Und fascinated, but Weldon is dead;
I watched him fall to the waves

Wojahn
of the bay, the twelfth suicide that summer.
He would have been fifty-one this year,
my age exactly, and an aging man.
Still, he would not be a fool
in a poor adobe house, unwinding
a spool of flypaper from a hook
above the head of his child bride.
When she asks my name, I tell her
I am Richard, a good Midwestern sound.
She thinks Nebraska is a kingdom
near Peru, and I
the exiled Crown Prince of Omaha.
I've promised to buy her a box of paints
in a shop by my palace in Lincoln.
We'll go back, Maria and I,
with the little Sisters of Saint Teresa
who are just now walking across the bridge
for water to be blessed at vespers.
Frederick Busch
The Right Address
Idelivered Lenny just as I delivered a hundred or more pieces
of mail during the war. And I sent the letter that brought
him into mourning and risk. I wrote it care of the school in
Rome, saying that when our Opel hit the doe, the deer stood
still and the car ricocheted off the road, then across it, and up an
incline of shale. We rolled back, I told him, and then we stopped,
and I was certain that before I fainted I saw the bone of Ariana's
forearm slide through her flannel sleeve.
Lenny Levine, in 1971, was teaching American servicemen's
children abroad because his country had tried to draft him twice,
before he took up teaching and was therefore classified "Essential"
to the national effort. I knew that if he came home he
would invite conscription. But I sent the letter, and five weeks
later he flew from Rome to Boston, rode the bus to Montpelier,
Vermont, saw me in the Trailways waiting room and butted me
in the chest. Weeping, he said, "I'm here. I'm here."
He wept again, as I drove us in my Volkswagen bus, and he
sniffled at the end of the drive, outside Bennington, at the house
Ariana had bought for us after her mother drowned off Providence,
drunk on white burgundy and widowhood. I fried old ham
and poured neat whisky for us in the damp kitchen. Lenny was
letting his whiskers grow again; his pale face was framed as if in
a locket by the sparse red hair and beard. In his greasy suede
sportcoat, he slouched in a chair and studied the room, and I
knew he was thinking that if the lights were brighter, he would
see the old canisters Ariana had bought, and the William Morris
wallpaper, the stripped chairs she'd refinished. Lenny wore the
dimness of the room like a quilt, he pulled it upon himself as he
leaned one shoulder at the wall and huddled, peered.
And then as I served us he chattered — because, I guessed.
!• T W\

Busch
he was frightened of what he had done, of how much safety
he'd renounced, of what emotions I'd require. He talked about
Italian girlfriends and war-loving officers and nuclear artillery
shells and his trip to Venice. "There was this boatload of German
tourists on Murano," he told me. "They all marched into
one of the fornaci, one of the factories where they blow the
glass? I'm standing there with them, we're all lined up on a kind
of bleacher, three tiers of steps, and this sweaty little guy opens
one of the ovens — I didn't know they were Germans, did I say
that? So he opens the furnace door and all this heat comes out.
There are these middle-aged people around me in very good
lightweight tweeds, and when the oven door opens up, they
sigh. They love it! And I'm standing with them, and they're moaning.
German tourists always moan when they appreciate something.
And all of a sudden I think, wait a minute, hold it; all
these people are swooning for an oven. They have to be Germans.
And they had to be there when it happened. They damned
well probably were there. Now, I knew they weren't about to pick
me up and put me in the oven — "
"Alice in Wonderland," I said.
"What?"
"No, I meant — which one is that? Hansel and Gretel, I
guess. Is that what I meant?"
"What you meant was I'm telling you a lot of stories because
I'm afraid you're about to tell me something about Ariana."
"More ham?"
"No, no more. More whisky."
"I don't think so," I said. Not for me. I want to drive tomorrow.
Are you coming with me?"
"Sure. Yes. That's why I'm here."
I was cleaning my nails with a paring knife. I looked past
Lenny, along the wall at which he leaned. Lenny turned to look
there, but he could see just a pair of muddy black boots, a long
propped shotgun, a corner. "You're here because of Ariana," I
said.
"Where are we driving?"
10
The Right Address
"I've been doing mail runs," I told him. "I go up to Montreal,
sometimes other places. I did Toronto once. I take letters from
people in the States. I deliver them to people who didn't want to
get drafted. And then I take mail back. I take it into Vermont,
New York, sometimes New York City. Sometimes I drive to
Boston. Tomorrow I'm going to Utica, some towns near there.
Would you like to come?"
"That's why I'm back, Bill."
"No it isn't, dammit. Now I want you to tell me the truth."
"But why?"
"Why?" My anger made me feel that if I took a breath and
bellowed, I would say something pivotal and salient. But I had so
little to say. And this was my friend, I told myself. This was my
friend; I wanted to tell him I remembered that. And I wanted to
hit him, then. I stood, and I was much bigger than he whether I
stood or sat. I decided to at least tower. And finally I poured
more whisky for him and said, "Find a bed, Lenny. I'll wake us
up."
"I thought maybe we'd talk a little," he said.
I shook my head. "We did."
So he gave up, finished his whisky and asked, "Any room's
okay?"
That was a question I'd been waiting for. I took considerable
pleasure in saying, "Ariana was sleeping upstairs in the
little room, the second door on the right. You're welcome to it."
I enjoyed his silence, and then his little syllable: "Bill?"
"Lenny, goodnight."
But he persevered, and he fooled me. "It was something I
used to teach the seniors. Chekhov said, if there's a shotgun at
the beginning of a story, you should make sure it gets fired by
the end. You remember that?"
"You duck out of the army, and all those cannons, Lenny,
and you end up teaching children about shooting off shotguns?"
"It's about story-telling," he said. He looked so dirty in that
suede coat, so sparsely haired, so like a gosling, so lonely in a
kitchen he had known at other, brighter, times, that I wanted
suddenly to talk about college and the years afterward in New
York, and our long silly drunken conversations, our truer sober
i
11
Hffll

1
Busch
ones. But instead I moved toward the kitchen door and put my
hands above its frame, leaning in at him, but staying away I
said, "You do keep on not telling me what you're telling me "
Lenny closed his eyes as if he were a stutterer who had to
measure out sound. "Don't do anything rash," he said.
That was Lenny: words, little wisdoms, the fearing for the
worst. I heard myself say with great calm, "I had a concussion. I
wasn't conscious. I couldn't tell them. She was out too. Nobody
knew. The bone tore through the skin. They were afraid of
infection. They gave her a lot of penicillin. She's allergic to it. I
could have told them. They didn't wake me up to ask. She's
allergic to penicillin and she had a reaction. So she died. Her
throat closed. Everything closed. Now: you think, is this it? You
think I'm going to take a breech-blocked shotgun that's fifty
years old and put it in my mouth and try blowing my brains out
on account of a woman's secret allergy?"
Lenny was panting as if he had run up the stairs. "I'd consider
it," he said.
"Maybe that's why we're here. Because I know that you
would," I lied. "Would you go to bed now, please? And stop
telling me Russian stories and German stories and Italian stories
and fairytales and lies?"
It was supposed to be my time of grieving, just slightly his,
and we were supposed to understand that and not talk about
what we understood, so he rose and walked to me and squeezed
my arm, and I squeezed his, and then he went up. I knew what
he would do — turn on the lamp in the room she'd been using,
and see the mattress on the floor, its sheets and blankets mounded,
and see no clothes in the closet, and see no pictures on the
walls, and no sign of Ariana or anyone else. He would stand in
the room that was abandoned and he would fear to lie on the
mattress. I went upstairs and got into the bed we'd moved from
New York in a rented truck, years before. I heard him walk softly
downstairs to sleep on the living room sofa. I knew he'd pause on
his way, and stare in the darkened kitchen at the shotgun I
would never use. And that was Lenny: he was the man who
indicted me — the man whose indictment I nearly wanted to
12
The Right Address
share — for having no desire to load a gun and suck on the
muzzle and make my story neat.
The weather was good for driving — a low, overcast sky
with little glare on the Albany Northway and New York 20 —
and the driving was simple and fast. In a New York town called
Schuylerville, we delivered a letter addressed in a hand so looped
and dark with effort, we both expected hysterics from the addressee,
Mrs. Adolph Yoder. But she smiled and shook her head,
as if her hidden-out son were a naughty fourth-grader, and
before she read the letter, she served us iced Kool-Aid. "Isn't
this war confusing?" she crooned. At a house on a hill outside
Cooperstown, we slid a letter underneath a door. Circling back
to Route 20, near an abandoned gas station, at what used to be a
diner, we presented, to a very old unshaven man who chewed
tobacco and didn't speak, three envelopes, numbered in sequence
and held together with a hinge of masking tape.
We drove as far south as Norwich on Routes 12B and 12,
stopping at Deansboro and Madison, where a short woman in a
trailer park turned her back and told us to leave the letter in the
mailbox outside her mobile home. She said, looking away, "You'd
think grown men would have a regular job."
Between deliveries, we stopped at bars, eating kielbas and
pickled eggs and drinking beer, filling ourselves each time as if
we hadn't stopped before, as if we had performed manual labor
and were emptied. We were driving north again when it was
well past dark, and Lenny had told his stories about Salerno and
Lake Como and Rome, and I had told a number of stories about
how Ariana had paid for the house and we had lived there, as he
knew on her mother's money, one year raising two pigs and
killing them, thereafter planting a garden each year but keeping
no stock.
On Route 20, outside Madison, I turned onto 12B, and
Lenny said, "That leaves the big envelope for Clinton."
I said, "That's the last one. But first we pause for replenishment."
13

Busch
"We just did that. Bill."
"I want us to wait a while for the Clinton delivery. The
woman we're delivering to doesn't always get home until later
on."
"That's custom-tailored service."
"Service is service," I said.
So we stopped in a town called Oriskany Falls, a large crossroads
lined with shabby small houses that were close together,
many for sale. A long high factory sat on a river that ran through
the town, and its open windows let out light and the surf-sound
of machines. The street lamps, instead of shining the blue-green
radiance of highway lamps, cast a hard brown-yellow glare, and
Oriskany Falls was an old tinted photograph at night. Men on the
street wore white undershirts and stared. The women we saw
looked older than the men, but not as old as their children.
At the clapboard Antique Mirror Bar, the only functioning
part of a closed hotel, we parked the van and walked on stiff legs
with tight necks. Inside, we drank beer in a booth across the
large room from an ordinary bar counter backed by customary
mirrors. We looked away from one another at the wallside
booths; we commented on the size of the glowing jukebox, the
silence of the bartender and his only other patron, a small man
in a yellow slicker who drank something green at the bar.
"I'd like to commend us," Lenny said. He left the booth and
returned with two double-shots of whisky.
I took one and said, "That sounds like the beginning of a
comment."
"No, it's the beginning of a commendation. Which is different."
"Not with you, it's not. Let me instead remind you of the
night you became impotent in Hanover, New Hampshire. You
remember that? It's a worthwhile recollection, which I prefer to
a commendation, because it is definitely not a comment."
"I was never impotent in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was
impotent at a small hotel on Torcello not too long ago, and I was
less than efficient about a year ago in the Vaucluse. But never in
Hanover."
The Right Address
I signalled to the bartender, raised the shotglasses, and he
reluctantly brought more drinks. "Yes," I said, enjoying myself.
"Hanover, New Hampshire. You were upstairs with a nurse, the
one who had beautiful brown hair. I was downstairs, I don't
even know whose house it was. We were supposed to spend the
night studying for something. A classics course we were flunking,
I think. So, you were up there, and all of a sudden I heard
you singing your sad little song — 'I can't do it!' Right? Remember?
And the nurse you were with, she had amazing brown
hair, I remember, she screams back, 'Honey, you sure can't!''
Lenny didn't laugh. He nodded, smiled, stopped smiling,
and said, "I would like to commend us."
"I'm not going to be able to stop you, am I?"
"I'd like — no, you can't. I flew about 97,000 miles to say
this. I'd like to say, we are the only two men I know who can do
this."
I looked at the room.
"And without talking about her," Lenny said.
He lifted his glass; I held mine onto the table. The door
opened out and the women arrived, entering single-file and in
silence. They wore red shiny warm-up jackets trimmed in white
cloth. On the back of each jacket, in small and unevenly-applied
white letters, was ORISKANY FALLS KADETTES. Their slacks
were tight on their calves, and they wore ballet flats or sneakers.
The one who carried the largest bowling ball case, made of bright
red plastic, wore curlers in her hair beneath a pink translucent
scarf. It was she who went to the jukebox at once and put the
money in.
Lenny said, "What year is this?"
"This is where I want to go when I die," he said.
The women stood at the bar and drank beer. They smoked
a lot, quickly dipping toward their cigarettes to sip the smoke.
And songs I hadn't heard for years came out of the wide high
jukebox, and everyone listened to Jerry Lee Lewis and Paul
Anka, to cha-chas and mambos and mostly to songs that required
the Twist and the Lindy, or the Jersey Bounce. "This is
better than being in the world," Lenny said.
14 15

Busch
And then, while the leader towed a taller, thinner woman
by her red satin sleeve, another member of the team put more
money in the Disney-glow jukebox. The women stood at the
end of the table and smiled at Lenny and me with shy but
certain expressions — Only Dance — and each held out a hand.
Without speaking, we moved to the center of the room, bobbed
our heads at one another until we agreed to the beat, and then
began.
We thumped on the soft boards of the Antique Mirror Bar
with our knees cocked, our elbows locked, eyes avoiding our
partner's. We turned, stamping, gripping moist hands, then releasing,
then gripping again, pulling hard, each trusting the other
to support the bent weight hanging as we spun, shoulders banging
down as heels did, to signal or celebrate the rhythm, or the
act of dancing, or the silence in which we agreed to move.
There was no arrangement for the tenure of each dance.
Women in red satin jackets walked up as they wished, tapped a
teammate on the shoulder, moved, head nodding, into the music
and then the dance, and then danced with Lenny or me. The
music was constant, and each of the team danced with one of us
several times. Lenny and I huffed and blew, but the women,
though sweaty, only smiled or frowned with effort, the women
made no sound. So there was the music of the Lindy-Hop, the
squeak and shuffle of shoes, and the panting of men.
The little person at the bar in the yellow slicker turned,
twice, to look over his shoulder at us, then went back to his
drink. The bartender watched a small soundless television set at
the corner of his counter, set in among beef jerky and potatochip
packets. Chuck Berry roared.
Then the music did stop. Lenny said, "Thank you" to everyone.
No one replied. The women reassembled at the bar, a couple
of them nodding to Lenny and me, one offering a small wave at
shoulder-height. They worked at their hair and lips, pulled the
hems of their red satin jackets, the cuffs of their sleeves, and
then, each retrieving a bowling ball case from the floor among
bar stools, they left.
"The guys are coming home from the 4 to 12 shift," I
guessed. "They 11 make dinner for them now."
16
The Right Address
"I believe it," Lenny said. "1 believe anything."
From outside the partly-open door, a woman called, "You're
welcome, boys," and the team giggled as the door closed.
Lenny said, "I believe it."
I brought drinks from the bar, and we sat in the booth,
sweating, pouring cold beer and chasing it with warm whisky.
"There are nights like this, anything like this," I said, "and some
fishing, and sometimes I go out with a gun that isn't breechblocked
and I shoot something, and sometimes I see a couple of
movies in a row."
"And then go home and watch another movie on TV until
you fall asleep?"
"Unless it's a sad one. I turn them off."
"Right," Lenny said, "or an offensively happy one. Right?
For me, anyway. If Gene Kelly starts in kissing her, and she
smiles with tears in her eyes, then I fall apart."
I put my hand on Lenny's wrist, squeezed it, released it,
wiped my mouth, and said, "That's all I'm telling you, Lenny. Fill
in the rest. You know me well enough, all right? That's all of the
details for now."
"We can do that," Lenny said. "You and I are the only guys I
know — you know that wasn't true about Hanover, I don't
remember that at all. And the time I was talking about on Torcello
didn't happen. I never stayed on Torcello. It happened in
Rome. After I got your letter, about the crash."
"That did it to you? Are you surprised I'm not surprised?"
His pale face reddened, and I thought he might cry once
more. But he said, "I wonder if this wouldn't be a good time to
deliver the last letter."
"Oh, fine. Fine. You don't care about sleeping in the van, do
you?" I was almost sorry, then, for having written to him. But
there was, as he had pointed out, the last delivery.
"One more drink and I can sleep on the roof," he said.
"You probably won't have to."
We stood in the Antique Mirror Bar and waved at the bartender,
who didn't wave back. "Nobody answers you in this part
of the country," Lenny said. "Have you noticed that? They do
17
II

Busch
not perform the little motions of grace to strangers around
here. I believe they live on human flesh."
The little man in the slicker, drinking his green fluids, called
"You be careful, boys."
I said, "You too."
"Oh, hell," the little man said, "I always am. You don't see
me churning around with no half a dozen girls in pajama tops "
So at half past midnight, pitching up hill roads in a northeast
backwater, Lenny calling out names on rural mailboxes, as
if I didn't know where to go, we came to the small farmhouse on
the broad plain that sat above the valley we'd driven through.
Route 12B below gleamed grey in hard moonlight and looked
like a nail that lay on a board. Up there, the land was silage crop,
golden even at night with the coming-on of autumn, blown by
steady winds. The house was at a crossroads, in a square of
shaved lawn, flanked by balding maples. The leaves rattled, insects
called through the slamming of our car doors, and it
wasn't long — we hadn't yet rapped at the metal knocker —
before an upstairs light went on, and then a parlor light, and
then the light above the door.
She said, "I guess I got more mail."
I said, "My friend's delivering with me."
She wore a bathrobe meant for a man, and her feet were
bare. Her hair looked shiny and tight, it held to the curve of her
head the way her large toes gripped at the floor. Her nose was
narrow, nearly beaked, and she looked like someone — she always
did — fresh from inconsequential angers. "Hello, friend,"
she said.
I said to Lenny, "This is Miss Waldren."
"You can call me Loretta, friend," she told Lenny. "The man
who writes to me is not my husband. We never made agreements,
really." She looked at the mailing envelope I held out. "I
don't think I want that."
"The guy who sent it thought you would," Lenny said.
"Do you think he's a victim of something?" she asked him.
Lenny said, "I don't much care what he is. I hope he doesn't
die of something in Asia some time. He's in the dead letter
department already."
The Right Address
"Well, that tone of talk doesn't make much sense," she said.
"And nobody's dead, for heaven's sakes." Then she looked at me
and raised her eyebrows up at her own mistake and shook her
head.
Lenny said, "No, huh? Says you. But how about this — we
came about a hundred and fifty miles the long way around to
give you that?"
She said, "All right. Then I'll take it from you." She was
looking at me. I wasn't able to turn to look at Lenny and dare
him to say something more.
I stood in front of her, waiting, and then Lenny went back
to the van. I watched him lean against the door. She raised her
eyebrows, this time for fun, and she went inside.
Lenny called, "You bastard. You son of a bitch. How am I
supposed to handle this?"
I turned around and folded my arms. It was all I could do.
Lenny said, "Sure." He climbed into the van. I went inside
the house.
Next morning, I woke him very early, bringing a thermos
and a brown bag filled with cinnamon toast. I threw the envelope
from Canada into the back of the van and, as we ate and
drank, I drove. We listened to the radio, we watched the traffic
form, we didn't speak.
Turning onto the Northway, I looked at him. Lenny said,
"Get much?", and I sprayed a mouthful of coffee onto the instrument
panel.
"It was awkward for you," Lenny said. "It serves you more
or less right."
"I'm sorry, Lenny."
"You're so sorry, you're taking that poor bastard's letters
back to him, right? All the way back to Montreal? Do you think
he'll find that form of penance touching?"
"She doesn't love him," I said.
"Dammit, Bill."
We listened to a Phil Ochs song and looked at the cars. And
in a little while, I said, "You know, you realize this: I'm not the
one around here doing penance."
"Leaving me the penitent?"
18 19

Busch
"Lenny, you're the guy who came over an ocean for her.
You're the one who rode the bus. You're the one who couldn't
get it up, and you are the one who is stuck so deep into grieving,
you have to hang onto Ariana's husband who she probably would
have ditched. Might have. I don't know. But I'm right about this.
You loved her for so long."
Lenny looked out the window.
I put my hand around the back of his neck and I squeezed.
He bent forward. "I like it that you love her/' I said. "It's fine."
"Do you love Miss Waldren?"
"We're friends. We get along. You don't understand it all,
about me and Ariana. It's confusing."
"You brought me over, didn't you, just so I could see her? I
believe that's called confession, in certain churches. Except I'm
not — "
"No! You keep on having what you had for her, Lenny. I'm
driving you to a bus station, Lenny. All right? I'm taking the
goddamned envelope north, and that's my problem, and forget
it. But you get onto a bus and go someplace for a while. We're
friends."
"Who?"
"I'm talking about you and me."
"Okay."
"And well connect in a while."
"You are not about to shoot yourself, that's pretty apparent."
"And it isn't the reason you came here."
"Part of it."
"All right. Part of it. But you know why you really came
here."
"Because you wanted me to," Lenny said. And a few minutes
later, he sighed and said, "Listen, why don't you save me
the carfare and get me over the border into Canada? You can
drop me off up there. Because I'm sure to get drafted if they
catch me in the States. I'm not "Essential" now. Get me over,
and I can stay up there for a while."
"You wanted to come home, Lenny."
20
"Fine."
"Lenny, you did."
"You can carry my mail back and forth."
"I didn't force you home, Lenny."
He said, "That feels better, doesn't it?"
The Right Address
21

John Engels The Extinguishment
The Extinguishment
I wait, not fully understanding
how it is I wait,
one measure being that the sun
has moved in from the mountains and begun to fall,
another, that the late
shadow of the afternoon looms east,
contains us, pools
in the hollow of her throat.
The repsirator breathes. Outside,
lizards scuttle on the walls
or freeze in place at each
chill flickering of dusk.
A pulse of shadow from the apple tree
flutters on her face. I read aloud,
sing des colores, call her name,
none of which she hears,
for it is coming nearer,
and she scarcely breathes,
in and out of dreams in seconds, sleeps
and waits to know the difference.
Everything out there burns,
and it is possible, even at this moment,
for me to look away from her, look out
and understand dusk in the garden out there as if
jt were the advent of free light, an
illumination, a splendid
brillia» ce: long burst of golden light
flooding the yard, burning
in the grass, so the grass becomes
light, or light becomes
blades and stalks and seed-heads
of fire, a garden of fire
walled in by the darknesses, moving
to beat against its walls: fury
of that figure, flame
and all that resembles flame! She
burns away, and I
who have never felt
the least difficulty of breath,
do nothing that counts,
do nothing at all.
What breathes for me? my body wishing to be
one body with the other, to take breath
for the other against
all risings of dead air,
my body in itself no more than in the other
contained, as the white walls of the sickroom
are contained, surrounded by
the house, this house
by air, and all
that at the bright edges of the air
contain it, that deeper breath
which penetrates and is resplendent
through the all, informs us
to the voice of the particular
at such moments as we may be drawn
to desire less. Whatever
22 23

Engels The Extinguishment
the breath may make of things, whatever
it claims, does not
sustain us. She
dies young. That
is the literal fact.
Darkness
at the edges of her pillow.
It is late,
and far beyond the wall
the sky will soon rejoin the horizon,
though in the interval
light is flooding in the yard,
and there is no place more beautiful than this:
beauty spills over and diversifies
into the waxy flowering of the candlebush,
the cold eye of the lizard, even
into the the elegant white shape
the bedsheets make of her, into the great
curve and containment of
eyelid, small well
of darkness at the corner of
her mouth where the body turns in,
entering itself.
The respirator sighs, and gathers breath,
I take my turn, sitting alone with her,
who, I imagine, must be as I would be,
afraid to be alone, though I do not
really know, understanding from the usual
terrified indwelling how I
will be the next to die, how quickly
it comes on, the hand
numbing, the fingers
giving up on things, then legs,
tongue, voice, then
heart, these latter two
not quickly; and how at the end
the indeterminate mind keeps on
observing out of what we wish to be its sleep
the slow perishment, coldly desiring,
only for itself, the body; finally itself
signing inward onto the inmost seed
of dream. Stop breathing, let it happen soon!
Do you see what rises in the darkness, are you there
and willing to believe there is
in your body something ihat does not appear
within its outline, something far away
and materially hid,
which does not advance upon the tomb, itself
suffers, thinks, works, is torn
apart from the body, somehow manifest
in the whole life of the world,
in the garden's sudden fire, in bone and ash,
in every startlement of the real, each massive
rising of night, each crying out
in the truest language which the body
does not fear to bear against
the mortal fictions of the literal,
some separate poetry, some
ghost rising,
crying out
with the glorious accents
of the particular?
Great emptiness of sky
straining to darken,
the ceiling darkening,
24 25

Ertgels
shadows flowering
beneath the bed,
failure of the breath's ratios
which have deformed us into love
for the shapes of things which do not die
and are not dying — we cannot help it,
beauty limps
in the clamorous, radiant shadows of the world,
in the frailest membranes of the heart which dreams
and does not cease to dream we live
against the risings of dead air,
and take on power to breathe in death or love
one for the other, each taken breath
one to the lessening other in
so light a balance they
may coalesce.
In this breath-taking nocturnality
how quickly it comes on, how
in the face of it we maintain
the perpetual transformations, the figure,
by what perversities the image of the hand
sustaining its darknesses, the eye
sustaining the yard in shadow, the tree
heavy and shuddering
with apples; and how
in the contiguous presence and whole
clarity of the dream, no breath
is heavy, nothing
is strange, the lizard's eye
contains and is perfect
as the angel's, each
seeing for the other, finding
what in the terrible fist of the night
is visible. The breath
measures the body's waiting; so easily gone blind
and out of breath, her body
surrounds her, she surrounds
the common heart which,
even more deeply than she sleeps,
sleeps, itself capable
of dreams beyond the dream
in which it is neither dark nor light,
beyond the dream
in which the first and incapable eye
awakened to itself, the further heart, heart
of the waiting and the waiting ones,
awakened to that entire consonance in which
nothing in all the radiant landscape did not sleep
which did not freely breathe,
nor for itself only.
The Extinguishment
26 27
'"I

Miklds Radnbii
Evening in the Garden
New moon on the sky is as delicately thin
as a tiny wound that a swallow cuts
flitting on the water's face and which, after it,
he promptly forgets.
Now the garden was making its bed for the night;
many sleepy bugs: into flowers they crept,
and the pert tulip, standing around
on its bed, slept.
So I step lightly now and think
that, possibly, on my lady's neck the bun
is like a snorting golden period closing
a happy poem.
And I say the poem: eagerly it comes
growing louder on my lips, like faithful breath
after a kiss, like — between fallen
leaves — young grass.
And with a poem I step into the house, from where
my woman runs to meet me; on her snowy neck
she wears the bun which, in unfurling,
is a golden flag.
7934
28
Punctual Poem about Dusk
It was exactly eight-o-nine;
fire was kindled under water,
riverbank willows turning fatter,
with shadows squeezing in between.
Evening arrives; the river Tisza
just laps along with the giant raft,
too lazy to swim it, fore or aft;
the one it watches, the hiding sun,
now lurks among tall meadow grass,
rests on the sloping pasturelands,
scatters in air, and all at once
darkness settles above the paths.
Faithfully two poppies protest;
you can still see them, they don't mind,
yet here comes, punishing, the sky:
by bayonetted breeze it sends
word; and the darkness, flying wraith,
smiles at the flowers which only bend
and will not break, can scarce abandon
lightheartedly their crimson faith.
29

;
Radnbii
(So twilight ages, old as Gramps,
you can even call it evening;
blackly it sees the Tisza rolling,
its breath befogs the riverbanks.)
1934
30
Goats
The clouds are becoming a veil,
are letting their colors fall,
between the grasses it's black;
fattening, small, soft bodies
of kids still give off brightness,
and separate out from the dark.
A gray goat stands around,
on her hair the light goes out,
eyes go sleep-fire-gold;
on her great dugs the strength
of sunlit grasses distends.
She looks past the good, warm fold.
Twilight again casts its surf.
You see the blood at the turf
of sky burst and run;
lewdly a billy goat pinches
flowers, and on his two haunches
sniggers to the face of the moon.
The other one walks like a ghost,
gingerly stepping on grass,
bleats on an ebony note;
31

Goats
his beard flows; by the spell,
he scatters dark and small
marbles abroad in the night.
Nagytelekmajor, I 942
Translated from the Hungarian
by Emery George
Qeorge Seferis
On a Ray of Winter Light
Leaves like rusty tin
for the desolate mind that has seen the end —
the barest glimmerings.
Leaves aswirl with gulls
made wild by winter.
The way the heart finds release
the dancers turned into trees,
into a huge forest of trees stripped naked.
White seaweed burns,
gray-haired sea-nymphs, eyes lidless, rise from the waves
shapes that once danced,
flames now marble.
Snow has covered the world.
My companions drove me mad
with theodolites, sextants, lodestones,
with telescopes that enlarge things —
better if they kept at a distance.
Where will roads like these lead us?
But maybe the day which began then
has not yet died out
with a rose-like fire in a ravine,
with a sea ethereal at the feet of God.
32 33

Seferis On a Ray of Winter Light
Years ago you said:
"Essentially I'm a matter of light."
And still today when you lean
on the broad shoulders of sleep
or even when they anchor you
to the sea's drowsy breast
you look for crannies where the blackness
has worn thin and has no resistance,
gropingly you search for the lance —
the lance destined to pierce your heart
and lay it open to the light.
What murky river took us under?
We stayed in the depths.
The current flows above our heads,
bending inarticulate reeds;
the voices
under the chestnut tree turned into pebbles
pebbles that children throw.
A breath of air, then another, a gust
as you put down the book
to tear up useless bygone papers
or lean forward to watch in the meadow
arrogant centaurs galloping
or nubile Amazons with sweat
in all the runnels of the body
as they compete at jumping and wrestling.
Gusts of resurrection one dawn
when you thought it was the sun that had arisen.
Flame is healed by flame,
not in the slow trickle of moments
but in a single flash, at once;
like the longing that merges with another longing
so that the two remain transfixed
or like
the rhythm in music that stays
there at the center like a statue
immovable.
This breath of life is not a transition:
the thunderbolt rules it.
Translated from the Greek
by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard
34 35

Joseph Brodsky
Cape Cod Lullaby
I
The Eastern tip of the Empire dives into night;
Cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;
On classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight
As a finial cross darkens and then is gone
Like the nearly empty bottle on the table.
From the empty street's patrol-car a refrain
Of Ray Charles' keyboard tinkles away like rain.
Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet
Of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea-lather
And sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower
Rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The street lamps glisten in the stifling weather,
Formally spaced,
Like white shirt buttons open to the waist.
It's stifling. The eye's guided by a blinking stop-light
In its journey to the whiskey across the room
On the night-stand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its
dull boom
Goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,
Comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,
Rolled-up road-map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.
It's strange to think of surviving, but that's what happened.
Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length
Around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened
Darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,
And so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,
36
Not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,
But rather to those now disappeared from sight.
Cape Cod Lullaby
It's stifling. And the thick leaves' rasping sound
Is enough all by itself to make you sweat.
What seems to be a small dot in the dark
Could only be one thing — a star. On the deserted ground
Of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set
Its fragile egg in the steel hoop's ravelled net.
There's a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.
II
Like a despotic Sheik, who can be untrue
To his vast seraglio and multiple desires
Only with a harem altogether new,
Varied and numerous, I have switched Empires.
A step dictated by the acrid, live
Odor of burning carried on the air
From all four quarters (a time for silent prayer!)
And, from the crow's high vantage point, from five.
Like a snake charmer, like the Pied Piper of old,
Playing my flute I passed the green janissaries,
My testes sensing their pole axe's sinister cold,
As when one wades into water. And then with the brine
Of sea-water sharpness filling, flooding the mouth,
I crossed the line
And sailed into muttony clouds. Below me curled
Serpentine rivers, roads bloomed with dust, ricks yellowed,
And everywhere in that diminished world,
In formal opposition, near and far,
Lined up like print in a book about to close,
Armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows
And cities all went dark as caviar.
And then the darkness thickened. All lights fled,
A turbine droned, a head ached rhythmically,
37

& '
:||| j;f
• t>S ! lib
I
'?!
-,^
|I
0 •
iHI
•
1 m
•
111
. 11
HI
i
Brodsky
And space backed up like a crab, time surged ahead
Into first place, and streaming westwardly,
Seemed to be heading home, void of all light,
Soiling its garments with the tar of night.
I fell asleep. When I awoke to the day,
Magnetic north had strengthened its deadly pull.
I beheld new heavens, I beheld the earth made new.
It lay
Turning to dust, as flat things always do.
Ill
Being itself the essence of all things,
Solitude teaches essentials. How gratefully the skin
Receives the leathery coolness of its chair.
Meanwhile my arm, off in the dark somewhere,
Goes wooden in sympathetic brotherhood
With the chair's listless arm of oaken wood.
A glowing oaken grain
Covers the tiny bones of the joints. And the brain
Knocks like the glass's ice-cube tinkling.
It's stifling. On a pool hall's steps, in a dim glow,
Somebody striking a match rescues his face
Of an old black man from the enfolding dark
For a flaring moment. The white-toothed portico
Of the District Courthouse sinks in the thickened lace
Of foliage, and awaits the random search
Of passing headlights. High up on its perch,
Like the fiery warning at Belshazzar's Feast,
The inscription, Coca-Cola, hums in red.
In the Country Club's unweeded flowerbed
A fountain whispers its secrets. Unable to rouse
A simple iirra lirra in these dull boughs,
A strengthless breeze rustles the tattered, creased
News of the world, its obsolete events,
Against an improvised, unlikely fence.
38
Ql iron bedsteads. It's stifling. Leaning on his rifle,
The Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
Against a concrete jetty, in dull repose
A trawler scrapes the rusty bridge of its nose.
A weary, buzzing ventilator mills,
The U.S.A.'s hot air with metal gills.
Cape Cod Lullaby
Like a carried-over number in addition,
yhe sea comes up in the dark
And on the beach it leaves its delible mark,
And the unvarying, diastolic motion,
The repetitious, drugged sway of the ocean
Cradles a splinter adrift for a million years.
If you step sideways off the pier's
Edge, you'll continue to fall toward those tides
For a long, long time, your hands stiff at your sides,
But you will make no splash.
IV
The change of Empires is intimately tied
To the hum of words, the soft, fricative spray
Of spittle in the act of speech, the whole
Sum of Lobachevsky's angles, the strange way
That parallels may unwittingly collide
By casual chance some day
As longitudes contrive to meet at the pole.
And the change is linked as well to the chopping of the wood,
To the tattered lining of life turned inside out
And thereby changed to a garment dry and good
(To tweed in winter, linen in a heat spell)
And the brain's kernel hardening in its shell.
In general, of all our organs the eye
Alone retains its elasticity,
Pliant, adaptive as a dream or wish.
For the change of Empires is linked with far-flung sight,
With the long gaze cast across the ocean's tide
39

• i ?
I
(Somewhere within us lives a dormant fish)
And the mirror's revelation that the part in your hair
That you meticulously placed on the left side
Mysteriously shows up on the right,
Linked to weak gums, to heartburn brought about
By a diet unfamiliar and alien,
To the intense blankness, to the pristine white
Of the mind, which corresponds to the plain, small
Blank page of letterpaper on which you write.
But now the giddy pen
Points out resemblances, for after all,
The device in your hand is the same old pen and ink
As before, the woodland plants exhibit no change
Of leafage, and the same old bombers range
The clouds toward who knows what
Precisely chosen, carefully targeted spot.
And what you really need now is a drink.
V
New England towns seem much as if they were cast
Ashore along its coastline, beached by a flood-
Tide, and shining in darkness mile after mile
With imbricate, speckled scales of shingle and tile,
Like schools of sleeping fish hauled in by the vast
Nets of a continent that was first discovered
By herring and by cod. But neither cod
Nor herring have had any noble statues raised
In their honor, even though the memorial date
Could be comfortably omitted. As for the great
Flag of the place, it bears no blazon or mark
Of the first fish-founder among its parallel bars,
And as Louis Sullivan might perhaps have said,
Seen in the dark,
It looks like a sketch of towers thrust among stars.
40
Stifling. A man on his porch has wound a towel
Around this throat. A pitiful, small moth
Batters the window screen and bounces off
Like a bullet that Nature has zeroed in on itself
From an invisible ambush,
Aiming for some improbable bullseye
Right smack in the middle of July.
Cape Cod Lullaby
Because watches keep ticking, pain washes away
With the years. If time picks up the knack
Of panacea, it's because time can't abide
Being rushed, or finally turns insomniac.
And walking or swimming, the dreams of one hemisphere
(heads)
Swarm with the nightmares, the dark, sinister play
Of its opposite (tails), its double, its underside.
Stifling. Great motionless plants. A distant bark.
A nodding head now jerks itself upright
To keep faces and phone numbers from sliding into the dark
And off the precarious edge of memory.
In genuine tragedy.
It's not the fine hero that finally dies, it seems,
But, from constant wear and tear, night after night,
The old stage set itself, giving way at the seams.
VI
Since it's too late by now to say "goodbye"
And expect from time and space any reply
Except an echo that sounds like "here's your tip,"
Pseudo-majestic, cubing every chance
Word that escapes the lip,
I write in a sort of trance,
I write these words out blindly, the scrivening hand
Attempting to outstrip
By a second the "how come?"
41

Brodsky
That at any moment might escape the lip,
The same lip of the writer,
And sail away into night, there to expand
By geometrical progress, und so writer.
I write from an Empire whose enormous flanks
Extend beneath the sea. Having sampled two
Oceans as well as continents, I feel that I know
What the globe itself must feel: there's nowhere to go.
Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew
Of stars, burning away.
Better to use a telescope to see
A snail self-sealed to the underside of a leaf.
I always used to regard "infinity"
As the art of splitting a liter into three
Equal components with a couple of friends
Without a drop left over. Not, through a lens,
An aggregate of miles without relief.
Night. A cuckoo wheezes in the Waldorf-
Inglorious. The legions close their ranks
And, leaning against cohorts, sleep upright.
Circuses pile against fora. High in the night
Above the bare blue-print of an empty court,
Like a lost tennis-ball, the moon regards its court,
A chess queen's dream, spare, parqueted, formal and bright.
There's no life without furniture.
VII
Only a corner cordoned off and laced
By dusty cobwebs may properly be called
Right-angled; only after the musketry of applause
And "bravos" does the actor rise from the dead;
Only when .the fulcrum is solidly placed
Can a person lift, by Archimedian laws,
Cape Cod Lullaby
The weight of this world. And only that body whose weight
Is balanced at right angles to the floor
Can manage to walk about and navigate.
Stifling. There's a cockroach mob in the stadium
Of the zinc washbasin, crowding around the old
Corpse of a dried-up sponge. Turning its crown,
A bronze faucet, like Caesar's laureled head,
Deposes upon the living and the dead
A merciless column of water in which they drown.
The little bubble-beads inside my glass
Look like the holes in cheese.
No doubt that gravity holds sway,
Just as upon a solid mass,
Over such small transparencies as these.
And its accelerating waterfall
(Thirty-two feet per sec. per sec.) refracts
As does a ray of light in human clay.
Only the stacked, white china on the stove
Could look so much like a squashed, collapsed pagoda.
Space lends itself just to repeatable things,
Roses, for instance. If you see one alone,
You instantly see two. The bright corona,
The crimson petals abuzz, acrawl with wings
Of dragonflies, of wasps and bees with stings.
Stifling. Even the shadow on the wall,
Servile and weak as it is, still mimics the rise
Of the hand that wipes the forehead's sweat. The smell
Of old body is even clearer now
Than body's outline. Thought loses its defined
Edges, and the frazzled mind
Goes soft in its soup-bone skull. No one is here
To set the proper focus of your eyes.
42 43

Brodsky
VIII
Preserve these words against a time of cold,
A day of fear: Man survives like a fish,
Stranded, beached, but intent
On adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish,
Wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then
To depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen)
For the interior, the heart of the continent.
Full-breasted sphinxes there are, and lions winged
Like fanged and mythic birds.
Angels in white, as well, and nymphs of the sea.
To one who shoulders the vast obscurity
Of darkness and heavy heat (may one add, grief?)
They are more cherished than the concentric, ringed
Zeroes that ripple outwards from dropped words.
Even space itself, where there's nowhere to sit down,
Declines, like a star in its ether, its cold sky.
Yet just because shoes exist and the foot is shod
Some surface will always be there, some place to stand,
A portion of dry land.
And its brinks and beaches will be enchanted by
The soft song of the cod:
"Time is far greater than space. Space is a thing.
Whereas time is, in essence, the thought, the conscious dream
Of a thing. And life itself is a variety
Of time. The carp and bream
Are its clots and distillates. As are even more stark
And elemental things, including the sea-
Wave and the firmament of the dry land.
Including death, that punctuation mark.
At times, in that chaos, that piling up of days,
The sound of a single word rings in the ear,
Some brief, syllabic cry,
Like 'love,' perhaps, or possibly merely 'hi!'
But before I can make it out, static or haze
44
Trouble the scanning lines that undulate
And wave like the loosened ripples of your hair."
Cape Cod Lullaby
IX
Man broods over his life like night above a lamp.
At certain moments a thought takes leave of one
Of the brain's hemispheres, and slips, as a bedsheet might,
From under the restless sleeper's body-clamp,
Revealing who-knows-what-under-the-sun.
Unquestionably, night
Is a bulky thing, but not so infinite
As to engross both lobes. By slow degrees
The africa of the brain, its europe, the asian mass of it,
As well as other prominences in its crowded seas,
Creaking on their axis, turn a wrinkled cheek
Toward the electric heron with its lightbulb of a beak.
Behold: Aladdin says "Sesame!" and presto! there's a golden
trove.
Caesar calls for his Brutus down the dark forum's colonnades.
In the jade pavilion a nightingale serenades
The Mandarin on the delicate theme of love.
A young girl rocks a cradle in the lamp's arena of light.
A naked Papuan leg keeps up a boogie-woogie beat.
Stifling. And so, cold knees tucked snug against the night,
It comes to you all at once, there in the bed,
That this is marriage. That beyond the customs sheds
Across dozens of borders there turns upon its side
A body you now share nothing with, unless
It be the ocean's bottom, hidden from sight,
And the experience of nakedness.
Nevetheless, you won't get up together.
Because, while it may be light way over there,
45

if!
i
BrodsJry
The dark still governs in your hemisphere.
One solar source has never been enough
to serve two average bodies, not since the time
God glued the world together in its prime.
The light has never been enough.
I notice a sleeve's hem, as my eyes fall,
And an elbow bending itself. Coordinates show
My location as paradise, that sovereign, blessed
Place where all purpose and longing is set at rest.
This is a planet without vistas, with no
Converging lines, with no prospects at all.
Touch the table-corner, touch the sharp nib of the pen
With your fingertip: you can tell such things could hurt.
And yet the paradise of the inert
Resides in pointedness;
Whereas in the lives of men
It is fleeting, a misty, mutable excess
That will not come again.
I find myself, as it were, on a mountain peak.
Beyond me there is ... Chronos and thin air.
Preserve these words. The paradise men seek
Is a dead end, a worn-out, battered cape
Bent into crooked shape,
A cone, a finial cap, a steel ship's bow
From which the lookout never shouts "Land Ho!"
All you can tell for certain is the time.
That said, there's nothing left but to police
The revolving hands. The eye drowns silently
In the clock-face as in a broad, bottomless sea.
In paradise all clocks refuse to chime
For fear they might, in striking, disturb the peace.
Double all absences, multiply by two
46
VVhatever's missing, and you'll have some clue
To what it's like here. A number, in any case,
Is also a word and, as such, a device
Or gesture that melts away without a trace,
Like a small cube of ice.
XI
Great issues leave a trail of words behind,
Free-form as clouds of tree-tops, rigid as dates
Of the year. So too, decked out in a paper hat,
The body viewing the ocean. It is selfless, flat
As a mirror as it stands in the darkness there.
Upon its face, just as within its mind,
Nothing but spreading ripples anywhere.
Cape Cod Lullaby
Consisting of love, of dirty words, a blend
Of ashes, the fear of death, the fragile case
Of the bone, and the groin's jeopardy, an erect
Body at sea-side is the foreskin of space,
Letting semen through. His cheek tear-silver-flecked,
Man juts forth into Time; man is his own end.
The Eastern end of the Empire dives into night —
Throat-high in darkness. The coil of the inner ear,
Like a snail's helix, faithfully repeats
Spirals of words in which it seems to hear
A voice of its own, and this tends to incite
The vocal chords, but it doesn't help you see.
In the realm of Time, no precipice creates
An echo's formal, answering symmetry.
Stifling. Only when lying flat on your back
Can you launch, with a sigh, your dry speech toward those
mute,
Infinite regions above. With a soft sigh.
But the thought of the land's vastness, your own minute
47

Hi'
Brodsky
Size in comparison, swings you forth and back
From wall to wall, like a cradle's rock-a-bye.
Therefore, sleep well. Sweet dreams. Knit up that sleeve.
Sleep as those only do who have gone pee-pee.
Countries get snared in maps, never shake free
Of their net of latitudes. Don't ask who's there
If you think the door is creaking. Never believe
The person who might reply and claim he's there.
XII
The door is creaking. A cod stands at the sill.
He asks for a drink, naturally, for God's sake.
You can't refuse a traveler a nip.
You indicate to him which road to take,
A winding highway, and wish him a good trip.
He takes his leave, but his identical
Twin has got a salesman's foot in the door.
(The two fish are as duplicate as glasses.)
All night a school of them come visiting.
But people who make their homes along the shore
Know how to sleep, have learned how to ignore
The measured tread of these approaching masses.
Sleep. The land beyond you is not round.
It is merely long, with various dip and mound,
Its ups and downs. Far longer is the sea.
At times, like a wrinkled forehead, it displays
A rolling wave. And longer still than these
Is the strand of matching beads of countless days;
And nights; and beyond these, the blindfold mist,
Angels in paradise, demons down in hell.
And longer a hundredfold than all of this
Are the thoughts of life, the solitary thought
Of death. And ten times that, longer than all,
The queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness.
48
Cape Cod Lullaby
gut the eye can't see that far. In fact, it must
Close down its lid to catch a glimpse of things.
Only this way — in sleep — can the eye adjust
To proper vision. Whatever may be in store,
por good or ill, in the dreams that such sleep brings
Depends on the sleeper. A cod stands at the door.
Translated from the Russian
by Anthony Hecht
49

Interview with Joseph Brodsky
Do you think that your new book A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus, &
Giroux) marks any particular crossroads in your poetic career?
What I really can detect if I look, if I am capable of assessing
myself, are simply prosodic shifts, like one from tetrameters
into pentameters, acquiring a bigger swing, or another one,
away from predominantly pentametric structures. Somewhere
about three or four years ago, I began to drift to something like
an accentuated verse, stressing the syllabic element, not the
syllabatonic — returning almost to the slug, a slow speech. Not
exactly slow, but the kind of poem that proceeds without any a
priori music.
Do you attribute the prosodic shifts to anything in particular?
It had to do with a very simple thing, a sense that the existing
meters began to satisfy me less and less and that some different
music entered. Not that I had exhausted the possibilities of the
strict meters — since one has, at any time, all these temptations.
But there is a certain domineering note, or tune, that is going
through one's mind. It's a very strange thing. I say tune; I can
just as well say noise. In either case, whatever it is, it's not just
exactly a tune, a musical hum. For this hum has a certain
psychological overlay. It's an extremely grey area — not grey,
it's a certain frequency, so to speak in which you operate and
which, at times, you change. However, at any point, you just
opt for several things. Once you have the experience of the
strict meters, you always long to return to them, as well as
deviate from them. At any given point, you are under the spell
of several of them. So it is not as though you have really abandoned
the previous prosodic idiom, but you have just departed
from it.
Would you say there was any particular influence? For instance, Derek
Walcott's work?
50
Interview
[sjo, not really. At that time I hadn't read Derek's work. I think
what really prompted it a bit, if we talk about the literature, is
that I had read two or three poems by somebody in French.
French poetry is technically speaking syllabic. And I realized
that the beat was somewhat . . . well, when you read a poem,
very often you get a certain prosodic taste in your mouth. This
js what happened, I think, once again. I must say I was using
these things before, but never in such an extensive fashion. I
wouldn't call it a shift, really: neither thematically, nor, of
course, mentally. It was simply a prosodic alteration, and a
noticeable one at that.
YJhen you start to work on a poem, do you have a form already in mind or do
you work from the subject materials toward the form?
I always have, I think, some sense of form. In fact, what I have is
a volume, an idea of quantity. It is not exactly a vessel. I have
some sort of outline. I know how many chunks there are going
to be. I think in some sense I have an image of its flesh and I
know more or less how long it is going to last. Somehow, however,
in the course of the writing, it starts to spin itself off, it
extends, expands, or it shrinks.
So the chunks you've been working with are really dictated by some phonetic
sense of rhythm or psychological sense of rhythm rather than blocks of images?
The former. Very often you don't have images, and really you
don't have things to say. Images, et cetera, are suggested by the
language, in the process of its deployment. Sometimes things
are prompted by rhyme, by what is said before. You've got these
two or three things and you think, well, I should take the next
step. There's always a considerable temptation to make a next
step. And very often submission to this temptation pays off.
Do you think these things are preserved in translation?
The succession of images and sometimes the succession of
thought, the development, the psychology of the next step
sometimes are preserved.
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Brodsky
But not the prosody itself?
Sometimes there is an attempt to preserve it; if the translator is
a conscientious person, he will try to imitate the structure.
However, there is a large question that looms over those things.
It certainly involves the biography of this or that structure
within various cultures, various languages, various prosodic
traditions. The same structure may mean, imply or allude to
different things. I never know whether the nuance — and poetry
is all about nuance, linguistic nuance — really survives. However,
I think quite a lot of a poem survives translation. Besides,
one is not able to say something so qualitatively different that in
translation it could be so utterly lost. Man's capacity for utterances
is somewhat limited: you cannot lose much, even though
you only understand the man in half.
In your introduction to Platonov 1 believe you said that the translation necessarily
had to miss Platonov's very special grammatical constructions, which 1
believe you called a backing-in operation, a dead end.
A cuneiform, in a way.
Do you think the same kind of loss occurs in the translations of your poems?
No, because ... well, it occurs, certainly, but in my case it occurs
to a lesser degree than Platonov's because his main tool, so to
speak, was his texture. That was his main device. A device that
is really unreconstructable in English. Or you can reconstruct it,
but only to a certain extent — beyond this it becomes tedious in
English. In Russian it's all pleasure.
In addition to the prosodical feature you already mentioned, what do you see as
your main device?
Well, actually I would say precisely the readiness to submit to
this temptation of making the next step. That is, when you
think the subject, emotion, even an image and its implications,
are exhausted, I try to make a next step — to plumb some
impossibility of image or of sentiment. I tried it once, in that
large dialogue thing ("Gorbunov and Gorchakov"), fourteen
hundred lines, and I liked it. For one thing, it was written in
52
Interview
decima, ababababab, which is bloody monotonous, mindboggling
in itself, every stanza. So any attempt to make a next
stanza was nearly unthinkable to me at the time. Also, in terms
of the argument, the points of the argument, any continuation
of the conversation seemed to be unthinkable. Those characters
couldn't have had anything to say to each other. And yet we
know the nature of conversations; they always linger. They
always resume — it's like crickets — in the same note they quit
last night. This is one of the frightening powers of exchanges,
of dialogues. So I was trying to ape those powers ... I can talk at
length about the poem, merely because it is one of the most
serious things I've ever done in my life. I don't think I'll ever be
able to repeat anything of a parallel scope because I don't have
any more of that patience or whatever it is. That poem displays
one of the main devices — making that next step, which seems
a) impossible, b) even unnecessary. Perhaps it's not my main
device, but this is what I respect myself for . . . Pity that the
translation of that poem is really nowhere. I struck it out of the
book.
The poem seems to investigate how inevitably a kind of betrayal or selfbetrayal
got perpetuated. Could you comment on that?
True, and this is one of the essential, perennial themes of
Russian literature. It's all about betrayal. In that respect I think I
am in the tradition — well, more in that of prose than of poetry.
This is the literature or mentality which is considerably poised
by that expectation of betrayal. To a certain extent I think that
it affects the language itself. I suppose I shouldn't venture into
these dark areas. For instance, in Russian, however strong an
accusation is, it always has this expectation of reversal merely
because, I presume, the words are polysyllabic and are invested
with a great deal of phonetics. Also, there is a somewhat selfeffacing
element, merely because there are too many syllables
to take that accusation at face value. That idea of reversal, of
ambivalence, of betrayal creeps into the language. We are talking
now about the nuances. So, in Russian, in fact, it's easier to a
certain extent to speak with a very poised voice regardless of
the sentiment. The sentiment may be a straightforward "I
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Brodsky
approve of this" or "I disapprove of that." Yet merely because of
the language, the expression of this sentiment is tinged with
ambiguity. There is this slight poise, even poison, I would say. A
reader senses it. You can play on that endlessly — because
nearly every statement reeks with uncertainty.
Would you say that language is using its speakers or that its speakers are at
the mercy of language?
Both, I presume; although my verdict doesn't count: I am in a
peculiar position — that is, I am outside the language, and I
became its observer to a certain extent. Well, a writer is always
an observer. So, his assessment of the language is, to say the
least, somewhat biased. However, I would say, we are the victims
of our language. Victims, that is, as a nation, and as writers
we are servants. Not that we perfect it — we rather proliferate
it, unwittingly.
Do you think the same obtains for English?
To a certain extent the same thing goes for English, but in a
different line of regard. English is an analytical language and
does not really allow for much nuance. Or you get circumvential,
Henry Jamesian, to say the least. There is English and
English: Jane Austen and Orwell, on the one hand, and James,
Conrad, and Nabokov on the other. I prefer the Austen/Orwell
tradition. Jamesian English has a sense of texture similar to that
of Russian. And once you're working with texture, your statements
get . . . not exactly compromised, but less important —
you are striving for the cumulative effect. So it depends on
whose English we are talking about. English perse? Well, there is
no such thing, I think.
In the title poem "A Part of Speech," does the image of language as mice refer
to some quality of the Russian language?
It refers in a way to the phonetics of the Russian word for
"future," which phonetically resembles the word for "rodents."
Therefore, I spin it off into the idea that the future, that is, the
word itself, gnaws — or whatever it is, sinks its teeth — into the
cheese of memory.
Interview
Time seems to be a constant, recurring theme throughout your poetry.
This is the only thing in the world. It's much more interesting
than space, for instance. Because space is a thing, whereas time
is an idea about things, about the Thing. And, if I were to
describe the thing I'm interested in, it is what time does to a
man. That's, in short, what it's all about.
Do you connect your interest in time with, say, Pasternak's or Mandelslam's?
I don't think that my notions of it are that different from theirs:
they are just human notions of time. They simply involve that
rather Christian notion of linear time, that is, not an African
kind of thing, a circle or spiral that goes backward. In that
respect we are not altogether different. It's awfully hard, again,
to assess myself, but I would say I am more interested in the
purely abstract notion of time. I think I may safely say that I am
using the concrete notions of time as the point of departure into
the abstract speculation. And what I'm trying to do is to make
these abstract speculations palpable by means of imagery, concrete
emblemata, and all those things. Sometimes it works.
In "Mexican Divertimento" does the concluding image of the lizard looking up
at a space ship serve as a catapult from the various Mexican emblemata to
some such speculation?
The only thing which I think is worthwhile to say about that
poem, at least for me, is that the subject was Mexico — not
exactly Mexico, but one's state of mind, I think, set against the
least congenial background. Or I guess that was the subject. I
was trying to employ the traditional Spanish meters. The first
part about Maximillian starts as a madrigal. The second, "1867"
— that business about Juarez — it's done to the tune of a choklo,
that is, an Argentinian tango. "Merida," the third section, is
done in the meter that was employed by the greatest Spanish
poet, I think, ever, Jorge Manrique, in the Fifteenth Century.
It's an imitation of his lament for his dead father. And "Romancero"
is a traditional Spanish thing, those tetrameters. There is
an approximation to a modern poem in that chapter "To Evgeni."
And a kind of classical iambic pentameter, a normal, regular
54 55

Brodsky
thing, bringing this home in that final part for the encyclopedia
the "Encyclopedia Entry." After all, it's called a divertimento. It
has to do with fashions, with the styles employed there. It's not
exactly stylization. It's paying a tribute to the culture in question,
so to speak.
I wonder if in that poem you have a more public, a broader voice?
Could be, but at the same time I resented that. And I was trying
to subdue it. I was somewhat surprised that The New York Review
of Books picked it up, because it is not exactly the most liberal
stance that has been displayed there. I am afraid that it may
have irked some people in Mexico, because it is somewhat
Evelyn Waughish.
Of all the poems you've written, which are your favorites?
One was written about two or three years ago — "Letters from
the Ming Dynasty"; Derek Walcott has translated it. Also, I like
"The Butterfly." I was trying to combine two things, Beckett
and Mozart. Many years ago, in Russia, I was after a girl. We
left a concert, a Mozart concert, and she told me as we walked
down the streets, "Joseph, everything is lovely about your
poetry," et cetera. "Well, you know that," et cetera, "except you
never execute in a poem that lightness and yet that gravity
which Mozart has." And that kind of got me. I remembered that
very well, and I decided to write that butterfly poem. Well, I
hope I managed. Actually, George Kline did an excellent job
translating the poem.
Would you comment on the relationship between Christianity and modern
culture? Is your interest in Cavafy in any way connected with this?
The relationship between God — well, Christianity, or those
religious things — and the modern culture is quite direct: it's
the relation between cause and effect, if you like. If I have those
things in my poems, it's merely an attempt of the effect to pay
tribute to the cause. It's as simple as that. It's not that I am
exactly religious, not at all. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't
really know. I don't think that I belong to any kind of creed. In
56
Interview
fact, when they asked me in the hospital, well, that crucial question,
because everything can happen, I felt quite at a loss.
As for Cavafy, and why it's important for me to teach him, I
don't have a one-line answer. One thing — because I love his
work immensely. I think he is perhaps the only poet in this
century (although this is not what I love him for) who has a kind
of clear-cut system, or who at least is faithful to himself, to his
idea of what it ought to be. The others, however great they may
be, seem eclectic. But then, after him, everybody looks so.
Therefore, one of the advantages of studying Cavafy is, you
know what it is the man aims toward, what are the means he
finds suitable, and what he rejects. This is very important
knowledge for any student of literature.
If we reduce it to an extremely pedestrian level, what he tells
you is a very simple tale about ambiguity being the ancient state
of mind. This is something we fail to perceive, because we think
that we are the most complicated creatures. And yet you can get
this sensation from somebody as old as Plutarch or Herodotus,
as much as you can get it from Cavafy. However, people don't
read the classics that much these days. To say the least, I think
that reading Cavafy for the sake of sheer historical content may
humble a modern man considerably. Still, as I mention all these
things, I am far, very far away, from saying why I like Cavafy.
Well, I presume the main reason is that note of ennui, very
sustained, which is the essential sentiment of a man about life
and which hasn't been displayed until him or after him with
such a constancy in poetry. Whereas everyone else who displayed
it would do so in a romantic or expressionist key, which
is a betrayal of the entire sentiment, Cavafy's poetic operation
was, in my view, on the same plane of regard as the sentiment
itself.
What about Auden? Why do you like him so much and like teaching him?
Because, for me, there is no better poet in either language. Well,
actually, for me, there are two poets — Tsvetayeva, she's a
Russian, and Auden. They are extremely disparate. She is all
tragedy; but they have one thing in common. Both espouse, or
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Brodsky
their poetry espouses, the philosophy of discomfort. That is,
almost to the extent of "the worse, the better" or, in the case of
Auden, "the more interesting." I'm afraid I may sound almost
like an Englishman. I guess what attracts me to both of them,
and especially to Auden, is that kind of a drama which never
manifests itself in the dramatic fashion. If anything, it manifests
itself in the anti-climatic fashion. He was great with that technique,
the anti-climatic technique, just astonishing. This to me
seems to be an extremely noble posture in the art of letters.
Also I am completely . . . it's a peculiar thing, I think, for a man
from a different culture to be so taken by a foreign poet. I
seldom derive such an amount of joy from reading as I do in the
case of Auden. It's a real joy, and by saying joy I don't mean just
a pleasure, because joy is a very dark thing in itself. For me he is
a lot more profound or "sublime" than anybody else, more so
than Yeats or than Eliot, merely because he does all those things
that they aspire to and make a great deal of in a very oblique,
parenthetical fashion. And this is what I respect a poet for. Well,
I don't really know. Auden himself would certainly disagree
with that and would boo me for what I'm saying. At one point I
was bold enough to ... well, it was really because my English
wasn't very good at that point. I visited him at Christ's Church
in Oxford. And suddenly there was that meaningless pause,
because I didn't know how to fill it nor was he willing to fill it
with anything. Then I interrupted it by saying, "Wystan, do you
know what I think? I think that you and Tom Eliot make one
great English poet." Well, that was the most idiotic thing. He
just gave me a daunting look.
To teach him — although that could be done a lot better than
I do — for me seems to be almost a natural thing to do. If only
because to deal with him in person or in verse is the best occupation
one may have on earth. Actually, I consider myself extremely
lucky for that. It's not just luck; it's an astonishingly
generous fate. Because there is nothing better in my view in the
entire English language than the poetry of this man. For me to
talk about him is ... the most sensible and, say, just occupation.
It grows on me the more I read him. It's not just a question of
language. I can read and reread Eliot or Yeats, for that matter,
58
Interview
and see the sparks of wisdom and profundity. Yet for me, for all
their beauty, it's a little raw in either case, especially in the case
of Yeats. I must say that I have a great deal of admiration for the
raw stuff. Still, Auden, having most of what they had, possessed
a unique intelligence. To say the least, he was really the
first poet who was at home in his century, who didn't pretend
he deserved or was destined for something better. Or worse.
That's a very dignified stance.
Do you feel something toward him as Statius does toward Virgil in the
Purgatorio?
Ah-huh . . . Exactly. And this is in part what helps me to operate,
or justifies my operation, in the English language. Somehow
I think that to work in the same language that he did is one
of the most demanding — certainly demanding, no question
about that — one of the most challenging, most rewarding
things. Well, it's ... I really love him very much. It's something
haunting really, because the more I read, the more. ... As the
narrator in Anthony Hecht's poem ("Behold the Lilies of the
Field") would remark, "I wish I were like them."
Are you writing poems in English at all?
I've written several. Some of them were published. Others
weren't. I'm not aspiring to all that, but when I write prose, I
wonder what would he say — whether he would find it rubbish
or a sensible thing. Auden was an astonishing critic, among all
the other things; he had that peculiar mastery of common
sense. And with the exception of Orwell, I consider him the
greatest stylist of English prose.
Are you writing more and more prose?
No, not really, no. I wish I had more time, or I wish my time
were better organized, or I wish I could organize it better. Unfortunately,
I am a mess.
Do you have another book of poems in the works?
There are about two books of poems. It depends on what you
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Brodsky
consider a book, how many pages. If you use American standards,
there are about two books ready. However, since translation
by definition lags behind, poems amass, and you end up
with a fatter book.
Are the poems in these untranslated books similar to those in A Part of
Speech?
The shorter poems are quite similar. The longer ones — I don't
know if I can say how different they are. Perhaps they are
worse in some sense. Sometimes they are more monotonous.
However, the monotony is always, at least to my eye, deliberate.
I just hope that a reader may grasp it. But he may not, and
then I am in trouble. But then again, so what. Basically, it's
always done for your own . . . whatever it is — for yourself and
the hypothetical alter ego. At any rate, it is for somebody invisible.
Perhaps for an angel, for all I know.
Are the poems more didactic?
They are more angelic, I think. ... So that He understands.
Do you like living in New York for half a year and in Michigan for the other
half?
I do, although I'd rather stay somewhere on the East Coast for
the second semester as well — not necessarily in New York, but
on the East Coast. Because it's somewhat claustrophobic over
there in Michigan. It's too deep inside of the continent, you see
— like some comma in War and Peace, pages and pages to go
either way. I used to live for all my life, or at least for thirty-two
years, by the sea. It's something really biological, I think. Not
that I have fits of claustrophobia literally, but the meaninglessness
of space is really bothersome. But then again the telephone
in Ann Arbor doesn't ring as though it were invented yesterday.
I've noticed that a number of your poems, for example, "In the Lake District,"
have comic undertones.
It's a humorous poem. I don't understand what's going on — not
that I've read that much of what people say — but there is a
60
Interview
ereat deal of comic undertone, I think, in what I'm doing. Yet
people always ask about the religious significance.
I think of the metaphor of the ruins of the Parthenon as decaying teeth.
The whole point is that it is not a metaphor actually. It's very
literal — especially since I came to Ann Arbor, with my Russian
dental work, so to speak. It's not dental work, actually, it's
something opposite to dental work. I was having some trouble,
and friends took me to the doctor. He extracted about five at
once, at one round. I don't really remember how I made it home.
The moment I hit the bed, the postman rang the bell, and there
was a bill. So I almost had the feeling that the doctor was dragging
my teeth out with one hand and writing the bill with the
other. But the thing is, the building I teach in is right next to a
dental school, and there are all kinds of emblemata and even
statues. Some modern sculpture that manifests the progress of
this discipline. Hence the poem.
Comic undertones, then, play an important role in your poems . . .
Certainly. Basically, there are two or three things. Russian
poetry as a whole is somewhat serious, and people very seldom
allow themselves cracks. You see, when you write poetry, especially
when you are young, you always know, you always anticipate
that there is some sardonic mind that will laugh at both
your delights and sorrows. So the idea is to beat that sardonic
mind. To steal the chance from him. And the only chance to
steal that from him is to laugh at yourself. Well, I've done that
for a while. Yet irony is an extremely insulating thing. It's not
liberating really, especially if irony is directed, if irony has a
consumer, a designated consumer, that sardonic reader. The
only way to beat the guy, in case he does exist — but you better
suspect he does — is by the sublimity of the statement or the
importance or gravity of it, so he won't be able to sneer. I
proceeded to do those things, or I hope I did. The technique of
laughing at yourself or making cracks stayed with me, and from
time to time I resort to that.
Another thing about irony is that sometimes you resort to it
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:
Brodsky
just in order to avoid a cliche. Say, a rhyme kind of creeps in
and there is no better one in sight. Yet it has a tinge of cliche. So
you had better reinforce it a bit. . . . You may use an assonant
rhyme, and the essence of assonance in itself is quite ironic..
there are lots of tricks. It would be just to say that irony is a
product of the language itself, as much as the rest. It's one of
those things, so why not have it in the poem? It's a pleasure. But
you shouldn't overdo it, and you should always juxtapose it
with something. It should never be a goal in itself.
7 think of the lines: "To ask/ the sense of ich bin, otherwise, is mad. . .
What, qua poet, he gains; qua man,/ he loses." Those lines to me have a
comic twinge, but there's something very profound attached.
That was a nice poem. That was 1965 in the village of Norenskaya,
a long time ago, fourteen years ago, years past, astonishing.
Do you think being in exile aided your interest in observing language with
some detachment? And your themes dealing with estrangement?
To be absolutely honest, I think it did. However, I pretend, and
with good reason, that it didn't, because basically every country
is just a continuation of space. When I came here I told myself
not to make a big deal out of this change — to act as though
nothing had happened. And I acted that way. And I still, I think,
go on. However, for the first two or three years, I sensed that I
was acting rather than living. Well, more acting as though nothing
had happened. Presently I think the mask and the face
have got glued together. I just don't feel it; I can't really distinguish.
I
In terms of my interest and the way this change influenced I
me, I wouldn 1't know u.. mui what 10 to say with conviction. Because certain
things really eallv happened. liannpno^ I k~- became less nostalgic for certain
cultural phenomena, for example, for the idea of the avantgarde
in art. Presently I think it's ninety percent bullshit, if not
more. If I had stayed in Russia, I would have continued to think
that the theater of the absurd is a grand thing. However, I really
don't know. I think that what makes one change his attitude or
62
Interview
his perceptions is not so much actual experience, an actual taste
of this or that thing, but aging itself. You get less excited. You
don't exactly grow smart, but you get more earthly, so to speak.
In a way it's a damaging thing because what's required by the
popular version of poetry, what's required from the poet, is a
certain elevated state. And I must say that while in Russia, I was
in general a bit more, how to put it ... ethereal. 1 never was
ethereal, but I had somewhat more ethereal concerns. As I
wrote a poem, I would more often lapse into that groping for
the invisible. However, that would often lead me toward a kind
of mystical incoherence, which even then I despised considerably-
If anything of this kind takes place today, it's more precise
and therefore less frequent. Again, I wouldn't ascribe that to
the change of milieu so much. It's due to that noble name for
aging — maturity; although very often I feel as uncertain as
when I was nineteen, eighteen. Poetry is the best school for
uncertainty. As for my attitude toward language, toward my
• language, so far I don't think anything really bad has happened.
On the contrary. At home you use the language in haste. You
kind of trust . . . well, you don't trust really, but it's a kind of
automatic thing, writing. For instance, there are lots of passages
in those poems — although I don't look at them often because I
just can't bear it — in which I see the language has been used
somewhat slovenly. These days I would be more careful, leaner.
J wonder if being away from one's own language and not hearing so many
competing voices gives one a different perspective on one's own voice?
Language is an awfully private thing. By being displaced, you
arrive at the ultimate privacy. It's a fete a tete between you and
your langage. There are no mediators. It certainly gives you
something of a boost to hear your language on the street, some
twist of phrase, some turn, and so forth. But then again I think
that the poet should develop his own idiom. Since he has his
own way of thinking, that is unlike other poets', he also develops
his own way of speaking. However, the purpose is to be
more concise within your own idiom. That's some sort of a
purpose. I think being displaced doesn't obstruct that course of
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Brodsky
events. For all I know, it just encourages it. When you're writing
in your own language in a foreign realm, a peculiar thing starts
to happen. Suddenly there are lots of fears — you forget this,
forget that. When you grope for the rhyme and you don't find
it, you wonder, Jesus Christ, what's happening? Could it be that
there is no rhyme, or did I forget something? Those things do
happen. And, well, it's enough to make you nervous. As you are
going to say something, you unleash all the sluices of your
linguistic memory, and you try to imagine the alternative ways
of saying something, which you would not really do while at
home. All in all the volume of your linguistic operations stays
the same. What sustains the language, I think, is not so much
speaking as reading. In short, being out of your existential context
helps to winnow a cleaner notion of yourself, of what you
are both physically and linguistically.
Could you suggest some reading for young poets in addition to Cavafy and
Auden?
Young poets? I used to be in that category for quite a while.
Hardy, in the first place. Edwin Arlington Robinson, especially
"Eros Turannos," "Isaac and Archibald," and "Rembrandt to
Rembrandt" — those are quite interesting things apart from his
shorter poems like "Richard Cory," and that Tilbury Town thing.
We are talking about Americans presently. Let's think about
foreigners. I think reading foreign poetry loosens your imagination
or your intuition. I would certainly suggest a Yugoslav,
Vasko Popa. Or there are several great Poles: Czeslaw Milosz
and Zbigniew Herbert, for instance; Herbert especially because
he's so conceptual. It should be fairly easy for an American to
grasp him. "Conceptual" is a bit of a put down for Herbert
because he is much more interesting than that. Polish poetry is
extremely rich, and I would add to a reading list poets like . . .
well, there are not that many translations . . . Wyslawa Schymborska,
Stanislaw Grochowiak, Tadeusz Ruzewicz — although
what bothers me about him is what is known as the International
Style. Auden said, in our era of global uniformity, it's only
in poetry that an international style is impossible. However,
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Interview
Ruzewicz is that kind of a poet, but all the same, quite profound.
There was another Polish poet you should read, who was as
eat, j think, as Baudelaire. Norvid. Cyprian Camille Norvid.
There is a magnificient Czech poet, he's still alive, I hope, a
tremendous man — Vladimir Holan. There's a Penguin collection
of his. He's the best possible news on the horizon. Let me
finish with the East Europeans. Janos Pilinszky — his book,
translated by Ted Hughes, has been recently published; however,
they are not the most successful translations. Also, there is
a magnificent Hungarian poet, Miklos Radnoti, whose luck was
real sour. He was killed by the Germans in a concentration camp
in Yugoslavia. After he was buried, his wife came to the camp.
When they dug the body out — it was a kind of common grave
she recognized him by finding in his breast pocket a bunch of
elegies, written in classic alexandrine verse. That's something.
As for Germans, there is Ingeborg Bachmann, first and foremost,
and then Peter Huchel. He is a magnificent poet. Well, I'm
sorry for these "magnificent poets," but he really is. And his
friend and contemporary, Giinter Eich. Huchel is in the Michael
Hamburger collection. Paul Celan is also a very good poet. He
committed suicide in Paris in 1971 or 1970. We shouldn't buy
this thing from Europeans — I mean both we Americans and we
Russians; we shouldn't buy these kinds of self-dramatizations.
It's a reversal of self-aggrandizement. They really had a rotten
lot, all of them in this century, those who had the misfortune to
be born in the twenties and thirties — the war, et cetera. All the
same, I think some of them were making too much of their
unhappiness or catastrophes. They thrived on it in a way; they
built their identity around it, unlike Czeslaw Milosz. For a
poet's identity should be built more on strophes than on catastrophes.
. . . Still, Celan. Also, a man I had in mind is Georg
Trakl.
For the French, I really don't have any kind words except for
one man I just happened to come across in my own, well, silly
and unsystematic reading. Actually, there are two men, who
were minor poets: Rene de Cadoux and Jules Supervielle. I mention
the minor French, because the guys like Reverdy, Rene
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Char, and Michaux — I don't like them. They are quite well
known, and I don't think there is any point in my making propaganda
for them.
I know nothing about poetry in Spanish. Except for Jorge
Manrique, Gongora, St. John of the Cross, and Machado. In
comparison to Machado, Lorca and others look pale. A very
good Dutch poet is Nijhoff. His poem "Awater" is the poem to
reckon with, one of the grandest works of poetry in this century.
It's a completely different thing. This is the future of
poetry, I think, or it at least paves the way for a very interesting
future.
The Russians: Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, Klujev, Zabolotzky.
There is a collection of Zabolotzky's, Scrolls, in English. For all
the inevitable pitfalls of translation, you see how avant-garde
he is — imagery alone saves it.
If we have a civilized poetry — not only civilized in terms of
tone, but in terms of sustaining civilization — it's Italian poetry.
For one thing, there is Umberto Saba, the man from Trieste, a
traditionalist, but with all kinds of devils. Then, Guiseppe Ungaretti,
except I'm afraid he took Mallarme literally — that dictum
that there shouldn't be too many words on the page. And
there are not many. I think a poem is a poem, and it should have
enough words on the page to make it dark. Otherwise it becomes
tanka-like or haiku-like, which is a very nice thing, but
it's done better by the Japanese themselves, by Basho. Then,
there is, of course, Montale. OS lesser known poets, I would
mention Cesare Pavese. There is one book by him which is extremely
crucial for anyone who concerns himself with poetry —
II Mestiere di Vivere (in translation, The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-
1950). It's a diary or confession. As for the poems themselves,
they have been rather decently translated into English. Also,
there is Zanzotto and that peculiar character Sandro Penna, who
is virtually nonexistent in English.
The reason I am suggesting Italians is because of their level of
mental operation, the subtlety. They are quite cultivated because
of their education, a solid kind of European education. But
apart from their actual knowledge of Greek and Latin, apart
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Interview
from the Renaissance texture of their actual surroundings —
apart from all this, there is that familiarity with an artifice, that
familiarity with columns as omnipresent as trees. The result of
such a situation is that artifice is regarded as natural, and vice
versa. I think we are fairly removed from them, removed enough
to appreciate this kind of sensibility. Perhaps their poetry is not
as good as it seems to us because of the refinement of its texture.
This is what we in America are somewhat lacking. But one
always profits from nostalgia. If we are talking about poetries,
then, while the texture of Italian poetry is mostly cultural or
historical, the fabric of American poetry is rather anthropological.
It's not that I'm deriding the latter, praising the former.
The whole point is that they provide us with something to
grope for. And there are examples of such groping motions in
those magnificent Italian poems of Richard Wilbur, Anthony
Hecht, and Stanley Kunitz. In fact, one can make an excellent
anthology of American poetry on Italy. It's a poetry of a very
hungry eye. This is the way civilization works: by induction.
If I were a young poet, or whatever ... a trooper ... I would
rather read the ancient stuff. I think no one has a right to touch
paper before he's read Gilgamesh. No one has the right to write in
the English language without reading the Metamorphoses by Ovid.
The same goes for Homer and for Dante. Before we get to
Dante, there are a lot of excellent Romans. I would single out
Martial. The Loeb Series is awfully good. There is nothing more
crucial. You should watch some translations, though, because
sometimes Martial comes out sounding like a New York cabby.
And it's really silly. Martial is so multifaceted. He was the worst
possible ass-licker in the history of poetry. His praise of tyrants
is just mind-blowing. Yet I have never read anything more
vicious than his epigrams. For their sheer force you should respect
them. Also he is an excellent lyric poet. He was a native of
Iberia, of Spain, and returned there from Rome to settle. In one
poem he looks back on his life in Rome. He talks about how half
of his life has been covered, and there were good days and bad
days. If we take white pebbles and black pebbles for good and
bad days, he says, there are more black pebbles on the table. If
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you want to live happily, he says to his friend, don't befriend
anybody very closely; thus perhaps there is less happiness, but
there is less grief. When this kind of message comes from a
millenium ago, it moves you considerably.
In general, one should have his left hand on Homer, the Bible,
Dante, and the Loeb Series, before grabbing the pen with the
right.
All these authors are a lot more important in my view than
our contemporaries, if only because the contemporary literature
is the effect of that ancient cause. If you want to learn a
pattern of metaphoric thinking, reading Ovid is crucial, to see
how this guy animates mythology. Well, in his myth about Narcissus
and Echo, Narcissus appears in the water, and Echo appears.
She is in love with him, but Narcissus sends her away.
And he, well, he just jumps. But when Ovid tells about the grief
of Echo . . . It's not that you begin to cry . . . You may cry: it
depends on, well, your kind of nerves. This is such a beautiful
description of her reactions, her hesitations. It makes Virginia
Woolf's stuff sound like a kindergarten. Honestly. This is most
puzzling: we think that because today we are present, we therefore
are smarter than those who are absent. From reading the
ancients, we learn that idea is not accurate. It may be true in
terms of technology, but it humbles you a great deal in terms of
poetry.
If I were younger, what I would do is write a book of imitations.
It's an old dream of mine to do a collection of spinoffs,
especially of the Alexandrian school, and especially of one guy
whom I like best, Leonidas from Tarentum. He is one of the
most imaginative guys. I thought about doing such a book, a
kind of small pamphlet. It would have a watercolor of some
ruins on the cover, and my name.
Conducted on November 18, 1979
by Eva Burch and David Chin
Nicholas Delbanco
Maggie Alone
In her room again, alone, she begins to pack — pulling out a
matched set stamped with LV's and opening the luggage
on her bed. She turns on the overhead light. She empties
her six bureau drawers. Maggie works for some minutes with
efficient inattention — not sorting things or folding them but
stuffing each valise until it barely shuts. She fills her cosmetics
case also. Holding the hair-dryer, however — having trouble
with the cord, attempting to bend and wrap it so the slip-case is
positioned properly — Maggie sees herself reflected in the bathroom
vanity console. She stops.
Maggie pats her face as might a blind person feeling its
contours. The cheekbones are sharp. She wiggles her nose. She
has to concentrate; she snaps the cosmetics case shut. In the
kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. But whom would
she choose for a consort, she wonders, the blindest of the blind
or the one who can distinguish dark from light? This is assuming,
of course, that all the women are equally young, equally
rich and attractive and adept in bed. She presses the lobes of her
ears. The parable does not make this explicit, but it is implicit:
the terms of success are sight and sight only — therefore all else
must be equal.
Or perhaps the one-eyed man in the region of the blind is
damned, not saved by sight. Perhaps he alone can see devastation,
how the landscape around them grows withered and sere.
He in all that countryside must meditate on blight. If beauty is
in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder has no eyes, then
how might such beauty survive? She tries to remember and
cannot remember if the phrase is "country of the blind" or
"region of the blind" or "kingdom of the blind." She busies
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herself, remembering. If she does not remember, Ian and Andrew
conferring in the kitchen beneath her will win; her problem these
past years has been retentiveness.
Maggie smiles. She touches her teeth. She is retentive
enough, lord knows, but what she retains makes no sense. She
remembers a man in a diner who wore a thick cord sweater and
ordered coffee next to her, closing his hands on the mug. He
turned to her and confided how he liked sugar first, then cream.
That way the sugar could dissolve at leisure in the hot brew.
Most people prefer to have their coffee poured first, and then
they add cream and sugar. But his practice was the reverse. He
had had to explain this, always, to waitresses or people who
offered him coffee. She remembers his theory in detail, and the
sensuality with which he praised the sugar's diffusion — the
way it rose to the surface, permeating everything from the
bottom up. For the life of her, however, Maggie cannot recollect
the man's name — or the diner, or whether they arrived together
or ever met again. Perhaps it was no diner but a restaurant or
airport lounge; perhaps the stranger was a dream-transfigured
lover or man in a TV commercial.
She does not know. She does not need or care to know; it is
a composition without frame. But she wakes with the taste of
sugar, the coffee so thick it is viscous, her mother telling her to
have some manners and not pile her spoon so high or take a
second spoon. The amount of sugar that she seems to need is
appalling, it's probably a sugar imbalance, or maybe it's pure
gluttony and will make her fat. Her father tells them never
mind, it's good for the folks in Jamaica, and he brings her sugarcane
to chew.
The Cutlers have maids from Jamaica. Maggie's childhood
is an unending memory of maids — they wear green uniforms
with a white frilled apron. Their names are Netty and Alice and
Gladys and Bess; they meet her in the hallway when she comes
home from school. Later, they tell her their troubles. They have
glass in their thumbs or pins in their hips or seventeen cousins
in Runaway Bay and problems with men and rheumatism in the
winters in this city made out of steel and cement; she might not
believe it but she'll learn. Steel and cement soak up water like
Maggie Alone
nobody's business, and when the winter comes it gives that
dampness back, that's how a city breathes, that's why it's smart
to wear rubbersoled shoes. She sits at the kitchen table, on a
stool the twin to that which her daughter Jane possesses now,
head cocked, winding spaghetti round her fork and smearing
the pasta with ketchup. Or she's ladling Netty's special sauce
that's orange and milky and just how she likes it; her mother
tries on Saturdays but never can equal the taste or consistency
_- so Netty makes up a batch and they keep it in the freezer, just
in case.
She attempts to find instruction in such scenes. She knows
that in Manhattan she will seek psychiatric help, and the help
vvill ask her, at sixty-five dollars an hour, to conjure up that fulltime
help to whom her parents must have paid sixty-five dollars
a week. These are the facts of inflation, not value. Maggie packs
her boots. She takes four pairs. She evaluates her mother's
absence. It had been easy enough, in the years when she wanted
to exorcise Judah, to label him some father-surrogate, some
ratified totem of incest with no sexual taboo. It had been easy
but untrue; the two men were the same age but otherwise
unlike.
She knows an analyst might argue that their very opposition
is proof of similarity; she's picked her father's opposite
number in order to score points. But the truth is the two men
were fond of each other; they would have gotten along. Maggie
remembers, still, the contrast at her wedding: Judah huge and
rumpled, her father slight and neat. Mr. Cutler sported a Thomas
E. Dewey moustache that he later enlarged to a beard.
Judah did not travel and her father was unwilling to intrude.
He had tried to avoid taking sides. And since their marriage
was continually a question of which side to take, he'd kept
to the sidelines and covered his eyes; he had welcomed Maggie
when she fled from Judah, first, but urged her to return.
Her mother had been dead by then — had had a heart
attack at fifty-six. There had been no warning. Maggie remembers
picking up the phone, and her father's choked announcement
and her disbelief: her mother died at luncheon, drinking
tea. "She never knew what hit her," was the phrase her father

Ill
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used. Maggie can remember how she pictured some crazed waiter
wielding the tea-pot as a truncheon, wreaking havoc in Le Pavilion
and scattering the customers like chaff. She herself is fiftyfive.
She thinks perhaps the women of her family are doomed to
early death. Her mother had been prudent and had paid attention
to her diet and went to exercise class. She was well preserved.
Nor had they been intimate — so that Maggie, thinking
back on it, thinks possibly what troubles her now is retrospect
and anger, a punishment for long-masked indifference to her
mother's death. She had worn mourning, comforted her father
and been the dutiful daughter for months. Still, the quick of her
remained untouched; she could not help half-smiling at a term
like "well preserved"; it reeked of candied yams and pickles and
vegetable permanence, not health. She had broken from her
mother with a break so absolute it had appeared to heal.
Yet nothing is that simple, she knows now. No such fracture
mends. She wishes she could spend the time with that
society lady whom in that time she wished to avoid. The image of
her mother — stern-seeming, brittle, sitting with her long legs
crossed and reading The New Yorker their one summer in Vermont
(when first, at thirteen, she'd met Judah; when her family elected
once to take an inland holiday but hated it, hated the heat and the
flies and lack of salt water and seafood; "We tried," her mother
said. "We gave it every opportunity. You have to give us that.") —
is an image of life lost.
But though Maggie now might see herself as her mother's
look-alike and has tried to offer Jane what she herself never
received, her father was not Judah — never was. She loved him
without reservation, but he made her smile. Even in his final
years, living in retirement in Wellfleet and careless of his clothing,
fixated on his Rhodes 19, even in his death-bed rantings the
man was more comic than fierce. The Cutler in her had been
banished when she married Judah Sherbrooke, and she wanted
it that way. She put all that behind her when she entered the
Big House.
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Maggie Alone
Maggie walked on marble then. Peacock's walkways had
been marble, brought from the quarries at Danby or Proctor, and
the path he laid out through the grounds would shine in the new
moon. The village, too, had had marble sidewalks. North Street
and West Street and Main Street used the broad, slick stone for
vjng — and since there were no streetlights, such sheen was an
advantage. She remembers the bright reach of it like wake behind
a boat, the feel of her heels in the slight corrugations and how the
facing had pocked.
But the elders of the village thought such grandeur commonplace;
you couldn't give marble away. It was slippery when
wet. It made Elvirah Hayes so nervous she walked in the mud by
preference. Agnes Nickerson fell in front of Morrissey's grocery
store and cracked her knee open and fractured her hip. Samson
Finney said that marble had three uses only: it's useful for statues
and tombstones and sinks.
So two years after Maggie came they cracked up the paving
or levered it off to the side. They joined the state sidewalk
program, getting cross-walks and poured cement slabs. That was
an improvement, Samson said, though not so good for lawsuits
or the tourist trade. Then trains stopped coming too. When
Maggie first arrived there had been nine trains heading north per
day, and nine trains heading south.
The village is a losing proposition; Samson tells her why.
The price of fuel oil and the price of gasoline is prohibitive and
getting worse; real estate's too high. Industry goes south or west
or simply goes bankrupt and quits; the Route 7 bypass won't
work. It will take tourists past the town, not cause them to stop
off and visit; our industry is tourists now, he says. Half the state
is paying for the other half to live on welfare; it used to be
seventy-thirty, but now it's half and half. He's seen breadlines
before and hell see them again if he lives. I'm telling you the
truth, he says, as if she might not otherwise agree; you'll see
fighting in the streets before you see the Welfare System fixed.
Samson has aged. He comes to visit Maggie once a month
and calls her every week; his visits are ceremonial always, and
he brings a gift for Jane. He is her only visitor and one authentic
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Delbanco
guest. He sits and reminisces in the leather block-chair Judah
liked, the strongest link to Judah left, telling his widow how they
would carouse, drinking Irish whiskey neat and patting his lipg
with his tie. "To hell in a handcart," he says. "It was Judah's
expression. Or mine. I'm not sure I recall which one of us began it
— but every time I'd use the phrase he'd say you mean handcar,
not handcart, and we'd argue over that. Or maybe it was me
who'd say handcar and him who'd say handcart, I can't remember."
Samson blinks. "It doesn't matter anyhow, it's just an
expression. The world's gone to hell in a handcart. Let's celebrate
the world."
His suits are threadbare now, his socks are at his ankles,
and he walks with an umbrella as a cane. In the chair across
from her he scratches at the armrest. "Nothing's what it seems
like any more. You build a road, it hadn't ought to be a one-way
proposition, not only be a bypass and take you somewhere else.
You mark my words," he says, "I'm telling you God's truth."
Main Street won't be any use to anyone but bicyclists; weeds
will make it to the middle line and daisies push up through the
cracks. What the state can do to pasture if it puts a highway
through is only one side of the coin, says Samson; they'll be
grazing off of Main Street soon enough. He can remember
when the airport was a cabbage field — thirty acres planted in
red and white alternate sections. Up there from Mount Anthony
it looked like Frederick Matteson was playing checkers
with a giant, he had it planted so perfect. So when the runways
crumble it can be a cabbage field again.
The town's been good to him; he isn't saying otherwise, and
he's settled something on Jane. It won't make her rich, Samson
says. She doesn't need it anyhow, but it makes him feel like
when he's gone he'll keep on going with that girl; she, Maggie,
mustn't mind. Old men are forgetful, he says, but one thing
they remember is mortality. He, Samson, recollects that clear as
clear. One thing he remembers is the way she looked in '38, her
Calamity Jane outfit on and riding that merry-go-round like it
was an actual horse.
74
Maggie Alone
In the final months of Judah's life, they attended the church
oyster supper. He had been doing so, he said, since 1946. It
wasn't the Sherbrooke church, wasn't even local, was twenty
miles of dirt road into the next county and down by Hoosac
Falls- But Judah said they served the best oysters, from here to
kingdom come, and it didn't matter where you lived and didn't
much matter what faith you professed in order to have faith in
this: Ralph Anderson knew oysters and where to order them
cheap. He, Judah, had cherished raw oysters. He'd be a doubledyed
Baptist on Thursday, he said, if they allowed only Baptists
inside; he'd help fence the graveyard where the graveyard fence
fell down; if born-again Christians got second helpings he'd be
born again.
But though the congregation had first licks at" the first feeding,
there was always enough to go round. They sold tickets to
the supper six weeks in advance. By two weeks thereafter they
were sold out, and Judah was part of the list. He'd buy up a
table's worth anyhow, and take his sister Hattie and Samson
Finney and Maggie, if she were willing. If the table was partempty,
so much the better, Judah said, that means there's extra
for us.
The feast was in October, and the afternoon was bright.
They waited in a pew. Ralph Anderson announced the numbers,
calling them off in tens, and meanwhile trying to sell cranberry
bread and fudge and relish in the vestibule where the ladies
displayed baked goods. Maggie looked around her and was
shocked. How could they all have grown so fat, she asked herself,
so old in the years since she'd last attended, so blue-haired
and bedecked with rhinestone finery? The ladies smiled and
nodded. The men waved. The carpenter from Shady Hill had a
new set of teeth. His mouth made appreciative separate motions
as he praised the oyster stew. There would be raw oysters, then
stew, then scalloped oysters, then pie. There were mashed potatoes
and squash and rolls and coffee provided gratis, Hattie said,
so all the Baptists had to pay for were the oysters brought north
in bulk.
Their numbers were called. She helped Judah downstairs.
He made space for himself, as always, and seemed the largest
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Delbanco
person there, though his gait was shambling and his bulk had
been reduced. He busied himself, as he did always, assessing the
evening's probable profit — the total take at five dollars a head,
minus the expenses. He worked out the figures aloud. "Onehundred-thirty-seven
folks at a sitting," he said. "Four sittings,
right? That's five-forty-eight times five. Not counting those
who eat free. They clear fifteen hundred easy, maybe eighteen
hundred, depending on the freight."
Their waitress knew the Sherbrookes; she filled their water
cups. She told Judah how well he was looking, told Maggie it
was wonderful to have her back again. She bet Samson he
wished it was gin, told Hattie how the day before they'd had a
hepatitis scare and thought they'd have to cancel — how someone
down in Chesapeake had called up Adam Chamberlain and
said these oysters came from beds the state had put in quarantine.
"Not fit for local consumption," she said. "But OK to ship
out of state — can you imagine?" So Ralph had been up half the
night checking out the accusation, making certain there was
nothing to it, making certain what they had were prime-grade
oysters with no question mark attached. "Truth is," she said, "if
I'd have to get sick, this isn't the way I would like to. Catch me
eating them raw. ..." She shook her head and topped up Judah's
plastic bowl. "Cholesterol," she told him. "Heavy on cholesterol.
That's what oysters are."
Maggie picked and chewed. There were bowls of cocktail
sauce and crackers, jugs of vinegar. The oysters seemed stringy
and thick. She had difficulty swallowing; the mixture adhered to
her throat. Those in the group around her asked for second
helpings; Maggie blew her nose. In the next instant, with her
handkerchief still at her mouth, she blinked to clear her eyes.
She could not see. Then Maggie saw the room as if through
water, with the steel columns kelp and the many- fingered children
waving at her languidly. There were solemn-eyed strangers
like fish. They snouted up against their plates. She shook.
There was coral all around her, and its edges were knife-sharp.
The light above was like the light through water impossibly
deep. She pressed her nose and fought for air.
76
Maggie Alone
Samson had a pocket flask. He uncorked it and poured
whiskey in her coffee cup. "Good for what ails you," he winked.
"It makes Irish coffee, is all." Upstairs the next set of celebrants
waited.
Maggie drank. The coffee failed to warm her but it cleared
her sight. That instant she knew she would leave. She'd
thought life with Judah might last. Then when he died she
thought to mourn him in the proper context; then she was
pregnant with Jane. In the sixth month of her pregnancy she
dreamed nightly of escape, but there had been nowhere to go.
Then for a while it seemed that staying would be pleasant and
convenient; then inertia mounted up and everything was stasis
and she could not move.
Yet these faces and bodies repelled her, this white flesh
wandering from feeding-perch to feeding-perch, these up-country
citizens who hated her and would hate Jane. They inserted
their teeth after the curried oysters and before the bread. They
were her enemies. Their names were Harrington and Cooper
and Hall; their names were on the stones outside and would be
incised soon again. "If this is the salt of the earth," she said to
Samson Finney, "I'll go on a salt-free diet." He studied her,
concerned. "They're good folks," Samson said. "They may be
dull and pious and whatnot, but they're law-abiding folk."
Maggie checked her face in her pink compact mirror. "Bad
for business," she said. She had tried to humor him but he was
unamused. These people would brand her if they dared, had
branded her in their mind's eyes already, would tar and feather
her and run her out of town except she owned the town.
This last phrase is theatrical. She does not own the town.
That was being proved. Nor do they bother her or come to call
except each second Thursday while she hides in her room. But
they roil about beneath her like carp after bread; they lurch and
snap and swallow indiscriminately. Jane cannot live here, she
knows. Jane will have to leave, as her brother Ian and Maggie
herself had left. When the gong sounded and the five o'clock
set-to arose, shuffling, scraping back their chairs, swallowing as
if in unison that last chunk of lemon meringue, Maggie thought
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Delbanco
she would not make it, not climb up the stairs behind Judah —he
needing no help now but striding, hands in his pockets puffing
out the flannel, fetching his cigar-case and telling Samson, "We
might as well have us a smoke."
The men bit cigar-ends and spat. Hattie had excused herself,
drifting off to visit with the Conovers. Judah and Samson
traded jokes the way they traded cigars. They'd been doing so
for decades, and Maggie scarcely listened, and she wondered if
they listened to each other anymore — they must have known
the repertoire by heart. It wasn't as if they collected jokes or
told them well; it was more a ritual observance, a way of stating
fellowship.
"Did you hear the one?" asked Samson, "about this king in
Africa who got himself a modern house with all our Foreign
Aid? So he had this fancy chair, see, with jewels on the headrest
and leopard-skin pillows, and they looked through the picture
window and saw it and deposed him. Killed the king." He
paused; he puffed smoke circles. "Which only goes to prove," he
said. "That people who live in glass houses shouldn't stow
thrones."
Judah laughed. He threw back his head and repeated the
punch line: "Stow thrones." His white hair was fluffy with washing;
it bunched at the back of his neck. He winked down at Maggie
and asked, "You ever hear that one? Stow thrones."
"She's heard it," Samson said.
They were standing in the vestibule, and Maggie stepped
outside. She'd brought no wrap because the afternoon was
warm, but now she shivered, waiting. Judah collected his coat.
The lights were on in the church, and the parking lot was full, and
cars lined the dirt road. A policeman waved at traffic, and a
woman in a wheelchair waited for a lift. Maggie saw the white .
curl of smoke from a chimney to the east, the sickle moon above
her and a far plane, blinking. She felt herself so alien in this [
country company — so balanced between shame and scorn —
that she began to cry. She licked her lips and tasted salt; she
would weep this way for years.
78
Maggie Alone
She sits. Her luggage tilts towards her, and she steadies it.
cne remembers finding Judah on the night of her return. They'd
been apart for seven years; then he informed her he was dying
and she took the bus north and stayed. That night he tried to
sleep with her and failed. She fell asleep beneath him and woke to
find him gone. His departure had been noiseless, and her first
waking thought (who had slept alone for seven years, or mostly,
staying with her lovers only on occasion, with Andrew for a
month, living with no one but Judah though she lived on Sutton
place and he had never visited) was that she'd dreamed return.
The room had the dim light of dream. When she realized that the
weight that fell asleep atop her, seeming to her terrified senses
the weight of death arrived to dally, dead weight pressing on her
breasts as Judah's proved reproof — when she realized that he'd
left her bed but had been an actual presence, and she was in
Vermont — she woke and rose and followed him and went to
set things straight.
He was not in the house. She tried each room, from basement
to cupola, not wanting to rouse Hattie or signal her alarm.
But she had been alarmed. His clothes were by the bed, for
instance, and she did not know his dressing gowns and coats
sufficiently to know if he'd donned one of them; in their seven
years apart his wardrobe would have changed. She switched on
every light in the house. She looked in every closet, in the
elevator and the basement, leaving only Hattie's room unlit. The
place seemed huge, illimitable, a cave in which she hunted him
but knew there'd be no trace.
She tried the pantry last. The storm door to the back porch
had been insecurely closed. The door had slipped its latch. She
knew on the instant how Judah escaped; he'd done what she
used to do often, leaving the Big House behind, walking off the
heat or shame or argument or airlessness of life within such
walls. He was out on the land where she never could track him,
where privacy continued. He had invited her into the mansion
— invited her in 1938 when first they met, when she was lost;
invited her again a decade later when they met at Morrissey's
grocery by seeming accident which they soon enough, in the
silly-sweet aftermath of their new nakedness together, agreed to
79

Delbanco
call fore-ordained; invited her to marry him and enter countless
times thereafter, to come back from Providence, Boston, New
York, to come back then in April, 1976, and have the house
declared — in Ian's absence, Samson's acquiescent presence,
Hattie's powerless abiding — her own.
Yet the land remained utterly his. She owned it outright also,
but she could not bring herself alone to roam its thousand acres
as she did when at his side. So all through the dawn of her
first day's return she waited by his exit door, wearing her traveling
clothes, drinking coffee in the kitchen and huddled to the
stove. The world might be no merry-go-round, nor memory a
carousel — but Maggie was assailed by circularity. He had been
as lost to her when by the elms or sugar-house as she had been
to him before, installed in Manhattan. At eight o'clock that
morning, while Hattie was stirring above, when Maggie was on
her third cup and her stomach would not settle, Judah walked in
from the porch. His step was slow. His lips were blue. His boots
were unlaced, and he had had bits of straw all over his duckhunting
jacket.
"Still here, I see," Judah said.
"Still here."
"Sleep well?"
"No, I didn't. Did you?"
He made no answer, blew on his hands. She rose and
poured him coffee. "Two sugars?"
"Thank you." His hands had been raw. He folded them
around the mug so that she could not see the mug, and steam
rose from his thumbs. They made a kind of peace together,
drinking, silent, and it lasted. Later that morning she did go
outside. She found hay-bales drawn together by the barn, and
some of them were loosened where he'd made the hay his pallet
for the night. She'd known (not needing to confirm this by the
match-book lying there, the few charred stalks and shooks) that
Judah had endured the April watch outside, relinquishing the
house to her for what would prove forever.
But forever was five years. Six months later Judah died, and
six months later their son Ian returned, and six months thereafter,
more or less, Hattie left the Big House and threw herself
Maggie Alone
jnto the pond. Then the circle was complete. Then the hired
man did burn the hay and burn the barn and burn himself,
though drunk and not intending to, not conscious of the carousel
and how his action finished what her last return began.
Maggie watches herself in the window. It is deep dark outside,
and the light behind her renders the pane a mirror; she
studies her own face. The women of the house, it seems, are
those who leave, whereas the men remain. She buckles the first
two bags. Forever is five years, she thinks; there's nothing but
death that endures. And short of such finality all action is irresolute.
Judah failed to burn the barn, the hired man survived his
burns,. Ian gutted that honeymoon house — the Greek Revival
shell on the edge of their land he'd planned at first to renovate.
But soon enough he left it and returned, his father's son, to
where they both began. Now that she, Maggie, was leaving he
would feel free to marry and start the Sherbrooke line again.
She wishes him well. She tells him goodbye. She'd thought that
four years previous she'd said goodbye to Andrew, but he's
drinking downstairs in their daughter's presence and about to
eat truite almandine.
jane, plain ]ane, Calamity ]ane, Jane )ane come in from the rain
— Maggie rests her forehead on the glass. It is cold. She has
wanted to jump. Often in the months gone past she'd thought
such pain could not be borne, need not be borne; breathing was
too much to ask. Hattie had quit; she could too. There's nothing
in the pure plain fact of lastingness to praise. Death lasts beyond
all lastingness, so why put pancake make-up on the agelines
in her neck?
Jane is the answer, of course. She is the single reason, and it
suffices. Maggie cannot jump — cannot open the window even
for fear of the sweet whiff of freedom in jumping. She tries. She
sits on the bed's edge and writes, using her yellow notepad and
the toilet case as surface, using a ball point pen. "Darling," she
writes. "I don't expect you to understand now, but maybe later
you'll understand. Keep this letter, please. It will tell you sometime
what you'll want to know — I loved you, love you, will
continue loving you until there's no life left. My death does not
concern you. It should be set apart. It must not worry you. It..."
80 81

Delbanco
Maggie stops. She is not serious. She tries this letter on for
size like an ill-fitting dress; its lines are not her lines. She takes a
second tack. "The only thing that frightens me is that you'll feel
responsible — not now, I mean not now when Ian and Andrew
will take good care of you. I've gone on a trip, they will say.
Remember when we gave you goldfish for your birthday? And
you woke up the next morning saying you were just so lucky
that the goldfish could be pets? Well they'd died that night — it
happens to fish often on their way back from Mammoth Mart. I
tiptoed in that night to see how you were doing, and they'd
floated to the top. We flushed them down the toilet, Ian and I.
You wouldn't take no for an answer. I had to lie to you — it's
the first time I remember doing that — and pretended they'd
gone for a swim. They were fish that belonged in the river but
they'd surely be right back. You went back to sleep, it didn't
seem to bother you. I bothered me. It would bother me if Ian or
your father says that I've gone on a trip."
She takes a second sheet. Her handwriting is clear. "You
never asked about Judah, so I didn't have to lie. You never knew
him so it wasn't a loss, really, and Ian has been wonderful and
Andrew will be wonderful and everything will work out fine. If
you don't feel responsible. I'm old and weak. Going back to New
York means beginning again, and I'm not sure I can manage it.
But you must manage it, my darling."
Maggie stands. She folds the sheets, then tears them twice
and lets the letter drop. She turns off the light and goes out.
82
Elizabeth Weber
Sachertorte
Perhaps this land is too bright,
hills, grass, towns and people
washed to nothing, and we come back
to where we started, not caring
if little Arturio's father
gets drunk and beats him, or Sabriana
has syphilis because after all, this is what
the world is.
And what does it matter
if that fountain has stood five hundred years.
That they took nine hundred men
and shot them before the eyes
of the village women
saying don't do anything, don't try
anything. Their blood is gone
and now children run shrieking
their joy.
And this sadness
you drag along like a cat is not sadness.
It is perhaps your blood
craves something sweet,
a Sachertorte, a kind word, here or there.
We strain towards something
we can name, the light that springs
from the fountain,
until fields waving madly disappear
with the thin sorrow that keeps us.
83

P. B. Newman
The Light of the Red Horse
(Paralysis by Guillian-Barre's Syndrome
She thinks,
pain is like golden zinnias
cutting you with their stiff leaves,
crushed glass in your mouth blood.
There are different kinds of pain.
There is the blood biting your lips
in childbirth, one pain fighting another,
something good.
Then there is the old helpless pain,
evil, unendurable.
The paralysis begins in your left hand.
It draws the nerves together, numb,
and you cannot even pinch. Then
your left foot begins to sting a little.
There is no pinch like that ceasing.
At first I thought I'll be able to die
and I won't even be able to scream.
My cells remembering themselves,
some promise that
discovering
they drew to a higher level
throwing it all on one gallop.
Like the promise of a short life
heavenly green up through the splitting red.
On horseback.
Indian women squat the child
fighting like the light against their eyes
84
squeezing their mouths shut riding.
A great red horse. Riding the sun.
You skim the light of geraniums
a flaming taste like ajis the children
would taste them though we told them not to.
Rubbing sugar on their lips like babies crying.
A flame like pepper feeling nothing
though they wipe your lips the blood
running where you bit no taste.
The blood running where they shaved
you in the crotch, your feet in stirrups
like a horseman his feet in blood fighting,
the sun swelling between your legs
bringing to birth its light.
Pain like carnations
that bites deep into your guts
that sinks roots into your belly and grips
your backbone while your eyes fill with red.
Pain like sky rockets
light opening and burning more
into the darkness that never burns
that's always cool and slow and deep.
And you fight deeper swimming deeper
in the coolness remembering childbirth
pain your lips biting and the blood
the rockets tearing and flashing into
the darkness while you remember
surfacing the light waves pouring
over you and the gulls high and turning
on the sea wind they hardly moved
their wings
in the dust of the salt air beating
against them.
Newman
soaring into
85

The Light of the Red Horse
And the peaceful feeling as your guts tore
and the child came out the last
impossible push it gave and climbing
off your horse you looked down
at the body
not your own the death your life
the child your enemy your gift.
Hathaway
Coloring Margarine
On the top step with soft kitchen light
behind us and dank cellar glooming below
we sat together kneading the yellow into
white margarine. Older and stronger, you
always got the longest turn, I remember.
Mother's radio was always playing "tunes"
by Percy Faith and his orchestra, I think.
That was the music we beat and squeezed to,
and it seemed the yellow product tasted better.
I lack patience with the college girl who cuddles
her new kitten in my class. She lets it crawl
underneath her sweater, between her terrific
breasts, and because I am weak I force a sickly
smile. This is not innocence, but its cynical
use. I would be labeled cynic if I leveled
a reproof, since the girls pretend to think
the cat is cute and the boys are dazzled by her tits.
Could I work this little vignette into the textbook
honesty of Cordelia and Kent? Instead
I take a tangent with aimless anecdotes
of sibling rivalry. This kitten, class, and play
do not interest me as much as a memory of you
sliding back in focus — clutching our cat
in such sweet dishonesty when I came to punch
you back. O you knew my frail honor
would permit me to pound a girl, if she was
sister, but parental rules forbad
the striking of that cat. Other things come
86 87

Hathaway
back: the time you were spanked too for not
telling that I alone ruined Grandmother's fox
with gum. Later, shut together in the scary closet
with that dripping beast, its glass eyes
strangely lit with malice and reproach, we
were as close as we ever were. Your senseless
sacrifice made sense to you, I am sure. Though
I did not understand your female moods,
grown-up talk at table, or the love mush
on the radio. I still don't. Let me confess,
in Lear the only character I fully understand
is Edmund. Listen, do you remember what
I'm remembering now: When-e-ver we kiss/
1 wor-ry and won-der/ you're close to me
now/ but whe-re is your he-art?
88
Stephanie Gunn
The Woman, the Man, and Carmella
The Woman, twenty-nine and lanky, was pregnant once
for eight weeks. That was time enough for the fetus to
have elbows and eye balls. If the Woman ate a green
per in a summer salad, the fetus ate the same green pepper.
The Woman called the fetus Carmella. Carmella's father just
walked out the door. He is meeting his wife and three lovely
children in Washington, D.C., where the five of them will fly to
Brazil and stay for years in a village fecund with heat and nuts.
There is an American school there. The Man is a painter, a great
and heartless painter. He will live on an inheritance that will
stretch out for years what would go in a flash around What
Cheer, Massachusetts and Scrimshaw, New Jersey. He has left
the Woman in her house in Woodstock, Vermont. In the kitchen.
Doing sixty dishes. He wasn't about to take her with him.
Can't you see the introduction: "Dear, this is my ever-frolicking,
ever-faithful mistress — Posey. She's decided to come along."
A phone call comes to the Woman; she has passed the test.
The Woman is, for this one instant, the happiest she has ever
been in her life. The Woman calls the Man on the phone. This is
something they agreed that she would never do. But the Woman
senses celebration and, in her haste, in her total excitement,
she cannot wait. The Man's wife answers the phone. The
Woman asks to speak to the Man. The Man's wife calls him, and
his "Hello" comes clearly on another extension. The Woman
knows that the Man's wife is listening. The Woman says "Hello."
She hears the Man take in a breath of surprise, of horror,
maybe.
89

Gunn
"I called to tell you that — " the Woman begins in her haste,
in her total excitement.
"Listen," the Man interrupts, "Where are you?" The Man is
asking for time.
"I'm where I usually am. Except that it isn't just me any
more," the Woman replies.
"Oh? George's there?" Who's George? "I'll call you back?"
the Man says.
"You best," the Woman says.
"O.K. Ill do that then." The Man hangs up. Now the Woman
and the Man's wife are on the phone alone, together. The
Woman could tell the Man's wife. Surely she would listen. Surely
she would hear. The Woman has to tell someone. But she
replaces the phone on its cradle. Better not tell the Man's wife,
the Woman supposes. Anyone but her.
The Man calls the Woman the next morning from a phone
booth in Georgetown. "How are you?" he breathes.
"Me? I'm fine . . . but we, you and I, are pregnant."
"Oh Lord. I knew it had to be something like that . . . you
nearly told me on the phone yesterday, didn't you? My wife was
listening, you know. She heard the whole thing. What are you
trying to do?"
"You're yelling at me. I do not need that now." There is
great tickering, rushing of long distance.
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to yell. I love you."
"Will you be the father of our child?" the Woman asks the
Man.
"I don't see how I can," the Man says quietly.
"You already are," the Woman says quieter.
Til meet you in Boston. We'll find a doctor. I'll take care of
you," the Man says. And soon after their connection is broken.
In Boston, the Woman and the Man sit closely on a couch in
a large room with festive wall paper. The Woman is called. She
looks at the Man's eyes. "I will be here," he says. He kisses her
softly on her lips and she is reminded of wet egg whites. The
Woman rises and, with a group of others, is shuffled into a
90
The Woman, the Man, and Carmella
oom where some explaining is done. But it's more about what
happened, and how not to have it happen again, rather than
hat is going to happen this afternoon. The Woman stands.
"Excuse me? About this vacuum cleaner — what if it gets carried
away? What if my stomach and liver and lungs go along
with " The eyes of the herd turn upon the Woman with a
vengeance that would silence the sound of even a river that has
run hard and long and blue for many years.
In the bathroom mirror the Woman looks for her image but
sees only a form under a white sheet open at the back, a white
back, eyes she has never seen before, eyes she does not know.
The Woman is led into a small white room where a mobile
hangs above a cushioned white table top. Silver instruments
shine at her. There is air conditioning. Not one window. The
Woman lies on the table and hikes her naked feet up onto the
cold metal stirrups. A man who knows how to run the machine
in the corner enters. The Woman shakes his hand in introduction.
In no time he clamps open her private parts. He tells her
that he is going to shoot her innermost opening with something
that will numb her there. He will shoot in a circle four times —
three o'clock, six o'clock, nine o'clock, twelve o'clock. The Woman
cannot think what he is talking about. "Will I be here all
day?" she asks his dark head of hairs intent between her legs.
"Can I hold your hand?" the Woman asks an assistant who
has just walked in.
"Sure, Honey." Her hand is fleshier, older, warmer than the
Woman's. The machine runner holds tubing, a siphon at Carmella's
mouth. The machine runner places his foot above a metal
floor pedal and, with the caution of one who is at a sewing
machine, steps on it. The machine begins its hum. Carmella,
sucked through see-through tubes, spills into a sink. The Woman
is talking in her head. O god forgive me. Carmella forgive
me. And out of her head, "What . . . what am I doing . . ." The
women's hands are soaking and tight.
It's O.K., honey. We're two-thirds done. Well count O.K.?
Let's count. Well count to ten together. Come on ... one . . .
two . .. three ... I'm counting with you ..." Carmella, I'm sorry.
Do you hear me, Carmella? CARMELLA DO YOU HEAR ME?
91

Gunn
"Come on now, that's it ... seven, O.K. now . . . nine ... ten
Honey, it's O.K. now . . . it's all over." The Woman thinks, I'm
all over.
The machine stops. The Woman is undamped. Rocked
from side-to-side like a row boat in a wake, something is slipped
between her legs, a diaper, she thinks. The Woman is sat forward,
for an instant held, then half-carried to a room where
there are couches where some are lying and some are sitting
There are blue blankets and there are pink ones. The Woman
lies down and covers herself with a pink blanket. Sunlight is
yellow through slightly parted curtains. The Woman asks herself,
Why is there no music box music? No music box string to
pull and hear?
"Shall I tell the Man that you are through?" an assistant
asks.
Am I through? the Woman asks herself.
While in her kitchen cutting sausage to fry, on the morning
of his parting, the Woman asks the Man, "Are you in love with
your wife?"
"No," the Man says.
"Are you in love with me?" the Woman asks.
"Yes. Yes I am. I should stay with you. But I'm not going to,
damn it!" he says putting his fist through the kitchen wall into
the bathroom. This says something about the Woman's house,
their passion, as well as what the Woman will be doing after she
finishes the sixty dishes.
The Man is gone. The Woman has never let him come to
her house before. Where she lived gladly alone before now reminds
the Woman of the Man. They had, for five years, met
once a month in places between where they lived. Out of the
way places that no one has heard of, in the hope that no one
would hear. Like Scrimshaw, New Jersey and What Cheer, Massachusetts.
Now that the Man is gone it is somewhat of a relief
to say out loud these words they had kept secret, or sacred, as
she preferred to think. Excuse her while the Woman throws
92
The Woman, the Man, and Carmella
en her hallway window and yells, "What Cheer, Massachuts!"
OU(- into the slippery morning air. Maybe that will wake
the guy next door who plays "Mack The Knife" on his electric
organ all night, the Woman hopes. It is early. Six-thirty, she
thinks the clock at the end of the hall says. The woman has tears
• her eyes and cannot see properly. "Jesus I loved him," the
Woman says. He stayed for three days. The Woman had tears in
her eyes most of the time. She wore a towel over her face. One
night they couldn't go out to dinner. With a towel like that, who
would? The Man held it as if he was scared that if he let go, her
face would slide down off her jaw and leave her skull showing.
The Man had nightmares like that. They prodded him to nuzzle
the Woman in her sleep. With her towel-face neither of them
could go anywhere. The Woman is not a good cook. Her shopping
is worse. Unbleached flour and utensils are the only edibles
in her kitchen. All else the shelves hold are Ajax, Windex, and
Draino in unbreakable cans and bottles.
The Woman closes the window, walks down the hall and
looks into the kitchen. She spies the Draino. Why not drink it
for lunch, the Woman suggests to herself, though it is early for
lunch. She sees a piece of bathroom through the hole in the wall
the Man made with his fist. She looks away. In the hall she
remembers their dance. Hank Williams was on the player. Walking
the hall to the dining room with two forks in her hand, the
Woman sensed the Man behind her, felt the Man's arm come
around her waist. The Man turned the Woman to him. He held
her tightly. She dropped the forks. He leaned back, lifting her
off her feet. She, balanced on his groin, laughed and asked, "Is
this how you danced when you were fifteen?" "I danced any
damn way I pleased," the Man replied, "Like this! And this . . ."
and he illustrated six or seven ways of clinging and clawing and
hanging, and shifting feet, and his hands were all over her, and
the Woman and the Man had to lie down right there in the sunfilled
hallway and hump on the foot-smoothed, warmed, and
wooden floor.
The needle at the record's end went thubub thubub thubub,
and their hearts together, and their stripped clothing fly-
93

Gunn
ing, ballooning about as they swooned and gently thrashed and
thrashed with a rude violence. She took him back to Kansas in I
fifty-nine, and he, he took her away into a void, a timeless and
dark place. They had been so ruthless — the vacuum cleaner
the shots, three o'clock, six o'clock, nine o'clock, twelve o'clock
he took her away from all of that, far away, away the Woman
went.
The Man stayed in a Boston hotel with the Woman for two I
days. During this time the Woman tried to recover herself. The ?
Man sweetly brought her rations of thick soups and french I
breads. He stroked her head, he brushed her hair, he soaped her $
in the shower and after, towelled her. She felt clots the size of I
golf balls slip out of her. "Aah!" The Woman would say in ter- I
ror, "Carmella's knee caps!" or "Aah! The last of Carmella's I
evolutionary tail!" In the morning a red run-over dog lay on
their white sheets. The Woman believed her womb to be a
deathly place. The truth was, simply, that the Woman would
have cheerfully died. The dead don't care about the living. The
woman knew that. And what of the unborn, she asked herself.
No, they don't care, either. "Carmella," the Woman started in
sudden recognition, "Carmella doesn't give a fuck. Never did."
What if the Woman is pregnant for eight weeks. She is
going to one of those rug cleaners to be vacuumed. Two months
is time enough for a fetus to have ears, eyes, nose, arms and
legs, knees and elbows, fingers and toes. The Woman sings to
herself in her house in Vermont, "Knees and elbows, fingers
and toes, eyes and nose." The Woman reads in a book that the
fetus, at this time, has the face, unmistakably, of a human's. She
shuts the book. Her breasts have begun to overflow her bras.
There is a pulling in her lower abdomen, the gentle tugging of
the tadpole rearranging itself, settling, multiplying at the rate
evolution has perfected. It is as real to her as a child who already
walks and talks. She knows its face. She calls it Carmella.
94
The Woman, the Man, and Carmella
The Woman and the Man are sitting closely on the couch.
. waji paper. The Woman is called. She looks. The Man's
6 5 "I will be here," he says. Kisses her. Wet egg whites.
The Woman lies on the table, naked feet on cold metal
. rups. The machine runner enters. Clamps her open. Shoots
, three o'clock, six o'clock, nine o'clock, twelve o'clock.
"Can I hold your hand?" the Woman asks the assistant.
"Sure, honey." Fleshier, older, warmer.
The machine runner holds tubing in his hand.
"Stop!" screams the Woman. Hooked into metal, she leans
forward. With creases around his eyes, the runner looks at the
assistant. The assistant asks, "What?"
"Unhook me!" The runner and the assistant are wax figures
in a science museum. "Please let me go," the Woman says slowly
"Let us go." The runner, cross at lost time, drops instruments,
leaves.
"This is very unusual," the assistant allows herself to say.
The woman is pregnant. It has been eight months. She
adores it. She calls it Carmella. Carmella kicks when the Woman
sings, "Fingers and nose, eyes and knees, elbows and toes . . ."
The Man has written the Woman from his foreign village
many times. Many times he has written: "All my love." "All his
love!" The Woman says, "HA!" In his last letter the Man said
that he will come for a visit in eight weeks.
What if when he comes there are two of us, the Woman
thinks.
The Woman will leave Carmella with that electric organ
player next door. She will fix the Man a meal soaked in Draino
all spiced up. As he chews, as he swallows, as the meal begins to
take hold of the Man, the Woman will run next door to collect
Carmella. Together they will watch the life of the Man abandon
his body. They will feel warmth. Carmella will know that her
father is all hers. She will know that one life is of great worth,
certainly worth that of another's.
95

Contributors
JOSEPH BRODSKY's new book of poetry, A Part of Speech, and a
new book of essays, Less Than One, will be published this spring
by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
FRED BUSCH's newest book, Rounds, was recently published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Hardwater Country, a book of short
stories, was published last year by Alfred A. Knopf.
NICHOLAS DELBANCO is the author of several novels. "Maggie
Alone" is an excerpt from Stillness (William Morrow & Co.,
1980), which includes a trilogy beginning with Possession (1977)
and Sherbrookes (1978).
JOHN ENGELS has published three books of poetry: The Homer
Mitchell Place, Signals from the Safety Coffin, and Blood Mountain.
EMERY GEORGE teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor. His second volume of Mikl6s Radnoti translations will
appear later this spring.
STEPHANIE GUNN once trained for the Olympics in the high
jump. She now lives and works in New York.
WILLIAM HATHAWAY teaches at LSU and has two books in
print from Ithaca House. A third book will be published by the
LSU Press in 1981.
ANTHONY HECHT's latest book of poems is Venetian Vespers
(Atheneum 1979).
EDMUND KEELEY has just finished a novel and is working on
a third and final edition of George Seferis: Collected Poems in collaboration.
P. B. NEWMAN teaches at Queens College in Charlotte, North
Carolina. His most recent book, The House of Saco, won the North
Carolina Poetry Society Award for 1978.
MIKLOS RADNOTI was born in Budapest in 1909. In November
1944 he was executed in a concentration camp. During his life he
published several books of translation (including the first collec-
. n of Apollinaire's poems in Hungarian) and six books of his
n poetry. The poems published here belong to a new volume
of translations by Emery George to be released this spring.
GEORGE SEFERIS won the Nobel Prize in 1964. This poem is
ne of a three-poem series which comprised his last book.
PHILIP SHERRARD is the co-translator, with Edmund Keeley,
of Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems (Princeton 1979).
ELIZABETH WEBER is a former winner of the Academy of
American Poets Prize given by the University of Montana at
Missoula. She lives in Missoula.
DAVID WOJAHN teaches in the Arizona Poets in the Schools
program. He is completing his MFA at the University of Arizona
at Tucson.
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