Penguin Modem European Poets
Advisory Editor: A. Alvarez
Selected Poems . Vladimir Holan
Vladimir Holan was born in Prague in 1905.
For seven years he worked in a pensions
office in Prague. In 1933 he became editor of
the arts reviewZivot (Life), and since 1940
has given all his rime to writing. He has
published more than twenty books of poetry,
four prose works, and translations of Rilke,
Baudelaire, Ronsard, Lermontov, and
selected Chinese poets. After 1948 Holan was
accused of 'decadent formalism' and, though he
continued to write throughout the fifties, no
new book, except for a few earlier narrative
poems, was published until 1963. In 1965, on
the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, he was
granted the highest Czechoslovak literary
award and in 1966 the international
Etna-Taormina poetry prize for A Night
with Hamlet, which has been translated into
11;;ilian.French, German and Swedish.
Selected Poems
Vladimir Holan
Translated by
With an Introduction by
Jarmila and Ian Milner
Ian Milner
Penguin Books
Contents
Introducticm 9
Translators' Note
Penguin Books Ltd, Hannondsworth,
Middlesex, England
Penguin Books Inc., 7110 Ambassador Road.
Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood.
Victoria, Australia
First published by Penguin Books 1971
Copyright (» Vladimir Holan, 1971
Translations copyright © Jarmila and Ian Milner,
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd,
London, Reading and Fakenham
Set in Monotype Bembo
This book is sold subject to the condition that
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the publisher's prior consent in any form of
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published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser
from
WITHOUT
Horoscope
19
No, Don't Go Yet
The Hour 21
from
1971
I
f·
16
TITLB
20
ADVANCING
Nothing Mter All 25
On the Pavement
26
Dead Man's Complaint
27
Building the Tower of Babel 21
Death 29
Today There Is . •• 30
In a Village Cemetery by the Suicides' Wall
Eodem anno pons ruptus est 32
Encounter V 33
She Asked You 34
Passion Week 35
Smiles 36
Human Voice 37
In the Kitchen 3&
The Child 39
Bequest 40
October
41
Presentiment
42
Mother 43
Still Life by a Lake 44
Night After Night 45
Rope ..•
46
Yes or No? 47
Stay 48
Listening to a Record 49
from
TRIALOGUB
The Wall
53
31
'Introduction
Vladimir Holan was born in Prague in 1905. He spent his
childhood in the rolling wooded countryside of central
Bohemia but returned to Prague for his secondary
schooling. In 1926 he published his first book of verse. For
the next seven years he worked in a social insurance
(pensions) officeand during this time published two further
volumes of poetry. In 1929 he visited northern Italy; the
fascination of its architecture, scenery and cultural past
colours some of his later poetry. In 1933 he became editor
of an arts review, Zivot (Life), but since 1940 has given
all his time to writing. He has published more than twenty
volumes of poetry, apart from various selections and
anthologies, and four prose works, including Lemuria
(1940), his diary of the years 1934-8.
When Holan began writing in the late 1920S the prevailing poetic manner, practised by leading poets like
Vltezslav Nezval, Jaroslav Seifert and Konstantin Biebl,
was 'poetism', a Czech adaptation, with its own higWy
coloured fantasy and easy charm, of surrealism and dadaism.
Holan's early work went along with this mood of avantgarde virtuosity. His early volumes of poetry show a
command of inventive imagery, of metre and stmcture,
and an unusual skill in verbal play. It is a self-sufficient,
Mallarmean poetry of magic artifice. But the lights were
going out in Europe and 'poetism' went with them. The
outrage of Munich and the full Nazi occupation in March
1939 caused Holan, like his fellow poets Seifert, Halas,
Nezval and Hora, to respond with a new poetry: direct,
focused on stark realities, impassioned in tone, voicing the
popular mood of shocked resentment at the Munich betrayal, and an unbroken will to survive as a nation.
9
The liberation in May 1945 brought its own kind of
poetry. Collections like D{k Sovetskemu svazu (Thanks to
the Soviet Union, 1945), and Rudoarmljci (Red Army Men,
1947), render, sometimes rhetorically,
sometimes informally, both the hopes of the immediate postwar years
and the genuine feeling of appreciation for the human
qualities of the ordinary Russian soldier.
After 1948, by one of the absurd yet tragic ironies in
which recent Czechoslovak history abounds, Holan, the
author of the postwar tributes to the Soviet Union and the
nation-stirring anti-fascist poems of 1938-40, was accused
by party dogmatists of decadent' formalism' and was abused,
or ignored, in the press. Until 1963 no further volume of
his poetry was accepted for publication. By nature very
reticent, he responded to exclusion from public life and
letters by withdrawing to his house in Prague on the small
Kampa island on the Vltava; he scarcely left it for the next
fifteen years. From this long vigil comes his finest poetry,
a poetry which fuses, with compelling force, personal
feelings of bitterness, scorn, anxiety, despair, mystification,
with social moods of oppression and fear. To his official
critics he replied with saeva indignatio in his 'To the Enemy'
(1949) :
To be, you would have to live,
but you will not be because you aren't alive,
and you aren't alive because you do not love,
because you don't love even yourselves, let alone your
neighbour ...
In 1963 the wind changed. Three volumes of his verse
were published in that year alone, followed by three major
collections, Na postupu (Advancing) and Trialog (Trialo-zue)
in 1964, and Bolest {pain} in 1965. His long reflective-dramatic
poem Noc s Hamletem (A Night with Hamlet) was aho
published in 1964, the year of Shakespeare' s quatercentenary.
10
On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1965, Holan was
given the title of National Artist, the highest official literary
award.
A Night with Hamlet was written during 1949-56, the
grim years of isolation, and was finished in 1962. Interviewed
in the weekly Literarn{ noviny, when the poem was first
published, Holan remarked:
The years of writing A Night with Hamlet were the cruellest of
my life. In my desperate loneliness I was well' earthed' to receive,
and survive, all the horrors of that time. But it would 'be mistaken
to think of the poem as merely an expression of those particular
events, since I have always been concemed with man and the
human drama in general, with man's condition and unhappy lot,
which he endures at all times
The question that was on my
mind was: who was Hamlet?
I'm sure of one thing: for many
tragic nights he became my companion. He stepped through the
wall and there he was. We talked to each other .... The conversations went on ad infinitum, not always tolerant, not always friendly,
but always passionate. Something of those talks I've caught, I
trust, in A Night with Hamlet.
The poem is a long, loosely connected sequence of dramatic dialogues, in close-textured and finely modulated free
verse, between Hamlet and the poet; there is also an entracte
in which Orpheus and Eurydice, saved from the underworld, reflect on the nature of human love. The abrupt transitions of theme, the wild plunges of poetic thought, bizarre
imagery, the baroque rhetoric, are characteristic of the poem
as a whole. Its semi-dramatic form is not there to dramatize the inner world of the human personality and its tensions.
It is more in the tradition of Socratic dialogue - polemical encounters in which the characters wrestle with ultimate questions: the nature of art and the artist, the eternal
war between those 'drest in a little brief authority' and
the human spirit, the meaning of death, the mystery of
being. In the poem Hamlet stands for the timeless and
II
indestructible spirit of man. He speaks as Renaissance and
modem man in the same breath.
Holan's poetic world, represented in this volume mainly
by work done during 1948-56, is frequently dark, gloomy,
full of strange menace or mysterious presences. Death is a
recurring motif: he sees the skull beneath the skin mocking
human endeavour. Like some modern dramatists he is
deeply aware of the strict limits of effective human communication. Few other poets of our time know so intensely
the meaning of isolation, of being shut in by a 'wall' (his
own image: see the poem, ' The wall ') of uncomprehending
Authority. Hence his 'Ubi nullus ordo, sed perpetuus
horror':
To live is terrible since you have to stay
with the appalling reality of these years.
Only the suicide thinks he can leave by the door
that is merely painted on the wall.
There is not the slightest sign that the Comforter will come.
In me the heart of poetry bleeds.
The darker poetic moods come from a mingling of
personal and social impulses. Behind Holan's awareness of
the fears, tensions and sense of alienation brought on by the
condition of society lies an older, personal conviction. Man
has been driven out of Paradise and is doomed to suffer
his exile. The suffering is in the remembering: he strives to
recover his lost innocence. The recurring motifs of virginity
lost or abused, of love frustrated, twisted, defiled, are the
image of man's fallen state. But there are other recurring
motifs, particularly those of mother and child: images of
simple unsentimentalized motherly love and of the fresh
spuntaneity of the child's world. These are Holan's primary
sources of hope and redemption. Behind them is something
more shadowy but distinctly felt: the presence of the divine
Spirit of which maternal love and a child's innocence are
12
expressions. Not that Holan is a religious poet in a strict,
theological sense. He is more conscious of and interested in
the enigma of God's presence in a godless and.1awless world.
His short poems are a kind of gnomic monologue in which
some concrete, often everyday, incident is evoked. Then, in
the last line or two, the poem suddenly leaps away from the
particular, familiar experience and shows it as a small
fragment of the knowable in the void of the unknown. In
that sudden confrontation of the tiny known and the vast
unknown, the God of Holan's world is born.
In his constant relating of the concrete t'b the abstract,
in his sensing of a numinous quality in the familiar features
of the natural world, in his finding of analogies between
the natural and the human worlds, Holan is at times like
Rilke, whom he admires and has translated into Czech.
'Human Voice', especially the opening, is an example:
Stone and star do not force their music on us,
flowers are silent, things hold something back,
because of us, animals deny
their own harmony of innocence and stealth,
the wind has always its chastity of simple gesture
and what song is only the mute birds know,
to whom you tossed an unthreshed sheaf on Christmas Eve.
To be is enough for them and that is beyond words. But we,
we are afraid not only in the dark,
even in the abundant light
we do not see our neighbour
and desperate for exorcism
cry out in terror: 'Are you there? Speak!'
Holan's verse is often
reading and sometimes
method partly accounts
here he has turned away
metre and poetic forms
13
difficult to understand at a first
remains obscure. His formal
for this. In the work represented
from the earlier use of traditional
and created his own adapted free
verse. In an interview given to Literarn{ noviny in 1964, he
said:
To write free verse meant for me a new search .•. a search for
the primordial meaning of words and a discovery of their inner
semantics. By 'atonal harmony' (the term used in A Night with
Hamlet) I understand a special toneless instrumentation, a harmonious disharmony. I was interested in the inner rhythm of images,
their tonelessharmony, and in the casual connections and mutual
relations between words, their hidden inner tension.
stage the poetry reveals a highly competent control of its
chosen mode. In his own country, many regard him as the
outstanding living Czech poet. In 1966 he was awarded the
international Etna- Taormina Prize for A Night with Hamlet,
which has been translated, along with various selections of
shorter verse, into Italian, French, German and Swedish.
IAN MILNER
And in fact his poetry has in it a good deal of verbal play
and semantic exercising. He likes to explore to the furthest
limits the expressive resources of the poetic word, arranged
in strange and startling combinations, placed in the most
unlikely context. His syntax is at times deliberately distorted, ellipsis a common device, and aposiopesis a characteristic ending. Like Eliot, he believes in 'dislocating the
language into meaning'. N ot, however, in the surrealist
manner of an unchecked tide of images. His free verse is
firmly knit, its structure and texture intellectually controlled,
however abrupt the shifts of imagery.
Behind the verbal craft lies the poetic vision that it expresses and by which it is shaped. Here at times Holan is
obscure, perhaps consciously. He uses ambiguity at a
number of levels, to heighten his sense of modern man's
enigma. Sometimes the enigma itself seems impenetrable.
This is Holan's way of showing the strangeness of human
existence - the sudden intrusions of mystery, of the numinous, of God - in a world where the devices of scientific, social
and political control over individual life are more and more
intrusive. The elliptic idiom matches the enigmatic vision.
The range and variety of Holan' s work is very impressive.
Few modern poets can show such creative development
through more than twenty volumes of verse. The style,
theme and genre constantly change and mature, but at any
14
IS
Translators' Note
The poems are arranged chronologically according to date
of publication and their order is the same as in the original
volumes in which they appeared. The period in which the
poems were actually written, often important for a full
understanding of mood and symbolic reference, is indicated
in footnotes.
The selection is intended to be as representative as possible
of the whole range of Holan' s work in the forties and fifties.
In view of the limited space available, it was therefore decided editorially to include, along with the shorter poems,
only the opening third of A Night with Hamlet. While the
poem's total effect cannot thus be felt, the opening is selfcontained and gives a representative idea of overall method,
theme and quality.
from Without Title*
* Published
16
1963: poems from 1939-42.
Horoscope
Early evening .... Cemetery .... And the wind sharp as
bone splinters on a butcher's block.
Rust shakes its model out of tortured form.
And above it all, above the tears of shame,
the star has almost decided to confess
why we understand simplicity only when the heart breaks,
and we are suddenly ourselves, alone and fateless.
19
No, Don't Go Yet
The Hour
No, don't go yet, don't be afraid of all the excitement,
it's the bear opening beehives in the orchard.
He'll soon be quiet. I too will hold back
words that rush like the serpent's sperm
to the woman in Eden.
This is the hour: music cannot
and the word is unwilling. The gloomy line of nothing
drawn by the breath hungrily shows
that the whole of reality is needed
for act to become image.
No, don't go yet, don't lower your veil.
The fuel of crocuses has lit up the meadows.
That's what you are then, life, although you say:
- By desire, we add something. But love
remains love.
It is beginning to rain. Red fades from the dahlias.
The murderer washes his hands at the well.
20
21
from Advancing*
* Published
1964: poems from 1943-8.
Nothing After All
Yes, it's dawn and I don't know
why the whole week I hurried
down the cold avenues to this door
where now I stand before my time.
I didn't want to force the future.
I didn't want to wake the blind man.
He'll have to open the door for me
and go back again.
25
On the Pavement
Dead Man's Complaint
She's old and hobbles here every day
to sell papers.
Tired and beyond it
she flops on her boodle of extras
and falls asleep.
Passers by
are so used to it they don't see herand she, mysterious and mum as a sibyl,
conceals what she should offer.
I was allowed to return a while to my people.
On home groood
I recognized the boat-house
and soon came to the village.
The wind slid into the willow's sleeves.
It was Sooday, the family were sitting in the orchard.
My sister was taking the milk to the cellar.
It didn't occur to me Iwould scare them.
But since they didn't believe it was really me
I shouldn't have said I was alive.
Everything vanished in thin air
amidst the cries of violets and pansies
.
and in front of me crumbled the webbed landscape,
wild poppy, moonlight
and alarm-clock on the cemetery wall.
26
Building the Tower of Babel
Death
You were working off your sentence as a hodman.
From dawn grimace to evening grin the work
was like winter earth to a gravedigger.
Long ago it had knocked the wind out of us
and hope of escape was no more than
.
a gob of spittle trodden by a bare foot.
The transience of anything spiritual was so frightening
that many of us would have gladly believed
in the immortality of the flesh.
We began to meet our doubles •••
You drove it out of you many years ago,
closed the place, tried to forget it all.
You knew it wasn't in music and so you sang
you knew it wasn't in silence and so you were quiet
you knew it wasn't in solitude and so you were alone.
But what could have happened today
to ~are you like one who in the night suddenly sees
a beam of light under the door of the next room
where no one has lived for years?
As for you .... But no!
It was enough for that woman of Babylon
to walk across the high asphalt rampart
and the whole vast inhuman pile
meant for eternity
suddenly seemed to you rather brash.
The ruins were so immediate
they were like the certainty of love.
29
In a Village Cemetery by the
Suicides' Wall
Here where the corn-cockle kisses the photo of the dead
and the tombstone nun has the worn movement of marble
in the cackling of geese ... ah yes, here
everything nods the same approval that man was not created
but ready-made. Things are also ready-made.
Man and things made at the persuasion of the dead!
Things wait. Man forebodes.
Things importune. He resists.
Things age and outlive their time. He is immortal
and perishes.
Things are desolate and he is alone,
and is not alone only when
his life turns against itself ...
31
Today There Is . . .
Today there is deep in you a not long dried-up spring,
though how quickly it fills with tears.
Today there is deep in you a not long abandoned airfield,
though how quickly it's overgrown.
You'll have to go on foot now, your spring of grief within.
But you stand frozen
while in front of you
cockroaches cross the street
moving from butcher to baker.
30
Eodem anno pons ruptus est
Encounter V·
Joy!
There is joy, there really is.
And he felt it not as something merciless
which rushes on us
and puts out our unguarded £tre
nor as a vertigo which in the double light of irony
brings us a bottle and shoes to make us dance no, what he felt was a quiet, simple, unfounded joy,
given rather than granted for an hour,
the joy of a man walking over a bridge
who will go on singing for ever ...
But it was enough for the wind to toss a withered
at his feet
and the bridge was overloaded.
Stopped by a woman at the gates of an unknown town,
I asked her: Let me pass, 1'm only gomg in
and out, and in and out again,
because like any man I'm afraid of the dark.
But she said to me:
I did leave the light on !
leaf
33
She Asked You
Passion Week
A girl asked you: What is poetry?
You wanted to say to her : You are too, ah yes, you are,
and that'in fear and wonder,
which prove the miracle,
I'm jealous of your beauty's ripeness,
and because Ican't kiss you nor sleep with you,
and because I have nothing and whoever has nothing to give
must sing ...
Am I really
and keeping
and thinking
because I've
But you didn't say it, you were silent
and she didn't hear the song.
alone again, loving a little
silent a little, suffering a little
myself free
never fulfilled my fate?
Don't I understand that a man gives
only because he was left short of something?
Was I so full of those proud colours
that tease the empty light until it fades them?
Even art, where feeling serves the pulses
as the type-setter his lamp,
has left me for my double .
and is somewhere lowering my stocks, the better off
the more my barren husks
deserve trampling.
Outside it is raining, just the time
the wolf goes after the swan,
while from the paranoiac river resounds
the roar of floating logs,
coffms for us all.
34
35
Smiles
There are many smiles.
But I am thin,king of the most difficult,
the simplest smile.
It is deep-set, cut
on every side by the vinegrower's blade of time,
a smile that needs just one more wrinkle
to unravel everything and be ready for God's full name.
A smile like that stays on the face
somewhat longer than the joy from which it came _
or it's the smile that goes before the joy
•
and disappears
leaving the whole face to joy alone.
Human Voice
Stone and star do not force their music on us,
flowers are silent, things hold something back,
because of us, animals deny
their own harmony of innocence and stealth,
the wind has always its chastity of simple gesture
and what song is only the mute birds know,
to whom you tossed an unthreshed sheaf on Christmas Eve.
To be is enough for them and that is beyond words: But we,
'we are afraid not only in the dark,
even in the abundant light
we do not see our neighbour
and desperate for exorcism
cry out in terror: 'Are you there? Speak!'
37
In the Kitchen
You haven't been here for almost a year.
You were afraid to come in.
And when you did, the emptiness once so entreating
and then spurned took its revenge,
wilfully demanding you atone
for your presence with your presence.
Everything here disgraces you:
linoleum, kindling, dead flies,
bread mould, the brackish vinegar of cracked plaster,
the sorrel of stains and the tan of taut air,
the sputter of spiders lurking in corners
and, underneath it all, the silence
where the moon shines only in day-time.
But in the middle of all this you suddenly see
(with the finality of a lifetime,
cruel, ordinary, mysterious)
a coffee-cup stained
by the lips of the girl who left you.
I
I
I
The Child
A child with its ear to the rails
is listening for the train.
Lost in the omnipresent music
it cares little
whether the train is coming or going away ...
But you were always expecting someone,
always parting from someone,
until you found yourself and are no longer anywhere.
39
Bequest
October
What poets leave behind
has always something in it hurt by time, sin, exile.
The truest of them,
the least known, quietest and most loving
doesn't force anything on you: neither by his image,
scorn nor solace, least of all by love;
Present, he is absent. And Picasso
making a snowman well understood
that the immortality of art
is in time, sin, exile,
which the sun must redeem
in tears, springs, river, sea, and nothingness.
The crystal air excludes
any kind o£likeness. Even our doubles
refuse to give their ghostly evidence that we are alive.
Invisibility grows so frantic
that we simply close our eyes.
Good wine needs no bush. Art neither.
40
41.
Presentiment
Mother
One December night you filled your glass with wine
and went to the next room for a book.
When you returned the glass was half-full.
You were afraid and asked in a cracked, mad voice
who could have drunk it since you live alone
shut in by stone walls and wild thorn
and amidst such inhumanity
that long ago you drove away statue and chimera and ghost.
Have you ever watched your old mother
making up the bed for you,
how,he pulls, straightens, tucks in and smoothes the sheet
so you won't feel a single wrinkle?
Her breathing, the motion of her hands and palms
are so loving
that in the past they are still putting out the fire in Persepolis
and at this moment calming some future storm
off the China coast or in unknown seas.
42
43
Sti 11 Life by a Lake
Night After Night
Yes, everything is here. Everything perfect
and in place, quiet, luminous,
there is wisdom dusted offby man, bread and books,
no, not even a hair to blur your pen
and you won't have to wipe it on your sleeve,
you know well the wine-cellar stores only wine,
the elements are here, wind, stars, storm and yet you are thinking up the names of sailing ships,
eager for flight.
Only a virgin can enter by a closed door
her own bedroom
in which everything that is called assurance
has long smelt of masturbation's sheets,
of violence, of spittle in a well or wreath of resin
flung voluntarily on the tower of man.
If he is a poet, all will be ruined,
if a murderer, then nakedness will reign here
and there will be an applauder, an applauder
hired from the marble quarries of Aeschylus.
Before you dream them, maybe sooner,
you will really run away, like that monk
who left Olympus because
he didn't find a goddess there.
44
45
Rope ...
Romeo's rope ladder!
How lightly it sways in the evening wind,
subtly hiding its hemp soul.
Who went down it understands man's greatness,
which unless dishonoured here wouldn't be complete.
And whoever climbs it
lives a passion pure-blooded and young enough
to expect an echo,
but too divine
not to perish in its own fire.
Yes or No?
Vie always look for the mean. But, as a point,
it is blind. Seeking our heart
we seek blindness .... And blind for a long time
we become only touch.
Touch which apologetically affirms
there will always be rich and poor,
'not because the body is satisfied or hungry
but because every human soul is different ...
Meanwhile it is mere touch
that unerringly gropes
through the diverging alleys of the slave-market.
47
Stay
Stay with me, don't leave me,
my life is so empty
that only you can stop me, proudly humble,
from asking further questions.
Stay with me, don't leave me,
have pity on my impatience
which, scrawled in a prison.,..ship's log,
will outlast eternity.
Stay with me, don't leave me,
you don't know anger nor will your anger lastand where would you go, how would you feel
when you are over it ? Wait a little, wait,
wait at least until
the postman comes with letters only for you!
Listening to a Record
. Only today somewhere or other they are plucking the
pheasant
meant for King Sargon's'table.
Only today the double quarter-tone oflong extinct birds
lives in the music of barbaric dances.
Only today the common quinsy of rock drawings
finds animal glory in the throat of opera.
Only today tantalum or bezoar
show up in the underbelly of an ancient statue.
Nothing returns from the other world. Everything is here.
But even the spirit within us
must always be entering.
49
from Trialogue*
* Published
1964: poems froin 1949-55.
The Wall
Why is your flight so weighed with cares,
why does the journey pall?
I have been speaking fifteen years
.to a wall
and Ihave dragged the wall here
out of my own hell
so that it can now
tell you all ••.
ZlJune 1963
53
To the Enemy
why a mirror mists over when looked into by a
woman in menses,
and from love oflife poets don't ask
why wine moves in the casks
when she passes by ...
I have had enough of your baseness and if! haven't killed
myself
it is only that my life is not my own
and I still love someone because I love myself
You may laugh, but only the eagle attacks an eagle
and Achilles alone can pity the wounded Hector.
To be is not easy .... To be a poet and a man
means to be a wood without the trees
and to see.... The scientist observes.
Science can only rummage after the truth:
by inches, not wings! And what for?
Simple enough, and I've said it before:
science is in the probable, poetry in parable,
the big cerebral hemisphere
rejects a great poem by asking for sugar ...
The cock shrinks from rain but that's another story,
it's evening, you would say: sexually ripe,
and the lady has such firm breasts
you could easily break
a pair of brandy glasses on them, but that's another
story.
And imagine a lighthouse on a ship,
a floating lighthouse: but that's quite a different story.
And your whole development from stem of man
to lichen spawn: but that's quite a different story.
That cloud's going to vomit but you can't even belch,
you are not able to be, not even
the snake's scales can choke you,
<_
what God conceived, He wants to be full of feeling,
children and drunkards know it,
but they aren't rude enough to question
*28 September is the name-day of St Wenceslas, patron saint of
Bohemia and traditional symbol of Czech national feeling.
54
55
And I have had enough of your impudence
which thrusts into everything it wants to possess,
and yet does not know how to embrace.
But disaster is on the way
something you never could have dreamt of
because you do not dream,
what God conceived, He wants to be full of feeling,
disaster is on the way, children and drunkards know it,
only from love could joy come,
from love that was not passion
only from love could happiness come,
from happiness that was not passion,
children and drunkards know it ...
To be, you would have to live,
but you will not be because you aren't alive,
and you aren't alive because you do not love,
because you do not love even yourselves, let alone your
neighbour.
And I have had enough of your coarseness,
and if! haven't killed myself it is only
that my life is not my own
and I still love someone because I love myself ...
You may laugh, but only the she-eagle attacks an eagle
and only Brises' daughter the wounded Achilles.
To be is not easy .... Shitting is easy ...
28 September 1949*
Today Is Not the Time
The Last
Today is not the time for songs of the triple rose.
You pledge your girl undying love
and soon after say you're sorry
that the wedding-dress hasn't come,
and instead of the ring you hand her
poisoned gloves.
The last leaf trembles on the plane-tree
for it knows well that without shaking there is no firmness.
I tremble, God, because I feel
I shall soon die and should be firm.
From every tree falls the last leaf
for it is not without faith in the earth.
From every man falls the last pretence
for the mortuary slab is utterly simple.
The leafhas no need to ask you, God, for anything -
We visit neither hospital nor funeral.
You made it grow and it has not spoilt Your hand.
But I ...
57
Always
Mi Lascio-
Not that I wouldn't like to live, but life
is such a liar
that even ifI were right
I would have to look for truth in death ...
I learnt tonight from a book on astronomy
that certain stars are the oldest
and near to extinction .... Grateful for the news
I opened the window
and looked for the youngest star .... But I could see
only clouds when someone's mean laugh
(like the wind howling in a crematorium chimney)
drove me to find
a star in interstellar space
as dawn was breaking ...
And that's what I'm doing.
o my love, now shall we love and not despair,
how be desperate and wise at the same time?
59
from A Night with Hamlet*
*Published 1964: written 1949-56 and 1962.
Dedicated to VladimirJustL
Menippus
I can see only bones and bare skulls; most of them look
exactly alike.
Hermes
That's what the poets have admired, the bones. And only
you don't seem to think much of them.
Menippus
Well, then show me Helen; I'll never be able to make her
out myself
Hermes
This skull is Helen.
Lucian
On the way from nature to being
walls are not really kind,
walls soaked with the urine of talents, walls running with the
spittle
of eunuchs in revolt against the spirit, walls no smaller
for not yet bein g born,
walls that enclose the ripened fruit ..•
The supple ripeness of Shakespeare
invites licence. Its meaning,
which like amazement should be
festive, with the decline of the times,
(in face of the possible signs of his absence)
becomes a supercharge levied on every apartment
63
into which a director has rudely shoved his way.
Fraud alone is certainty here. And the spectator,
crawling out before his time like St George's dragon,
basks in the bile of the critics ...
And those who dare to map desire
are at their ease, though their bad temper
shows that the brute is always with us ..•
Nature is a sign
which, if not mute,
denies itself. And the male of the species,
that opener, feels dumb simply because
the spirit always moves forward
while everything closes behind it ..•
And he was like that ... Hamlet!
He had an arm missing and evening
rolled through the empty sleeve of his coat.
as through a blind man's sex nipped by mUSIC.••
Nature merged our contempt for the town
with the rock urine of mosses uprooted
'
at the golden summit of power
.
.'
and waited for the caterpillar of thevme to change roto a
butterfly,
but waited in vain,
for he despised wine from the day
he was driven by thirst to open a horse's artery
and drink the blood ...
So he made up his mind to admit the jinn
and exclude the apparently unrevealed mysteries,
and caught between himself and himself
, to plead for the abyss.
Afterwards he spoke only from its depths
even when talking of a certain saint
who no long~r had anything except the pain
of remembering an ancient love,
a pain little enough to be easily hidden
in a hollow tooth •.•
It doesn't matter
whether what we heard was the sucked saliva
running from sleeping crickets' mouths,
builders of Inidnight bridges,
creators who made themselves double tombs,
or phantoms whose wages is prophecy.
Only art made no excuses •••
And' also life insisted,
, insisted dangerously that we would survive,
though we might really wish to die ...
There was no refuge .... Nowhere, not even in the
unconscious ....
But he was there, Hamlet, who like a Mozart-tippler
6verturned the Alps in order to stand a bottle shakily
on the creaking stairs of the fear of death,
so locked in himself that all immortality
could fit inside him ...
And it is true that in his presence
the knife raised above a sheep
would not cut
and the melted pewter of old baptismal fonts
returned to its primal form.
Anxiety endures. He got in the way of eternity
and had to heal the wound. He was in the grave of the father
and had to be the child of the sons .... He was
face to face with the holy spirit of music
. and had to live for the takings of a whore
or the price of a dog.
Oh, not that he knew everything, for he well understood
that when egoism overeats
it doesn't throw up but digests and starts again not that he was wise, like a single wooden pillar
among columns of stone not that he trembled like an aspen facing
that ancient floor painted with menstrual blood not that he was a miser, thinking of final things
and living in King Atreus' tomb
where the treasury led straight to the charnel-house not that it mattered to him
whether Alexander the Great's crooked neck
had straightened out anything in history no, no, but I always see his grimace
at those for whom any mystery
is a void into which
they hurl all the fury of the castrated ...
He who gives is still a miser ...
But we who do not believe are always expecting
something,
•
and maybe people always expect something
because they have no faith .... They are enlightened
but don't give light .... They are thin-blooded
yet for them nothing exists unless blood is shed,
they are damned though not yet excommunicated,
they are curious but haven't found the mirror
in which Helen-Helen
looked at herself from below-from below,
and they are so deaf they would like to hear
Chrises voice on a disc.
Meanwhile everything, everything here
is a miracle only once:
only once Abel's blood
which was to destroy all wars,
only once the irrecoverable, the unconscious of chi~dhood,
only once youth and only once song,
only once love, in the same breath lost,
only for once everything against heredity and custom,
66
once only the loosing of contracted ties and liberation
and so only once the essence of art,
only for once everything against the prison,
unless God Himself should wish to build a house
on this earth ...
A green hawthorn leaned over the wall
scattering on the road the buds of its curiosity.
The window opened the wind, bringing a draught:
Your deeds are many and yet none,
but to do and to be is the envy of everyone!
Night smoked history, ate the fried wings
cut from Mercury's ankles,
and drank it down
with the sweat ofSt Tragedy's organist ....
•Only when you make your peace with death,' said Hamlet,
•will you understand that everything under the sun is really
new ....
Our body is not a canvas hangar
for cutting into strips ...
But our subconscious plays tricks .... Even if we give
alms, it is we who profit!
So it is when we make love in error .... Yet no!
The groping sex of human beings means only
to have the relation without the man .... And yet
love's liver is found in sin.
The tensing of the body reminds you of
the profaning and chastisement of the spirit ..•
Even in the presence of the sleeping we are not at ease
for we do not know where they will halt,
while we are stuck in our tracks ...
Consider how heavy a cat suddenly becomes
when dead, while some man
will spend the whole day shooting sparrows!
Yes, there is the shame of a man and the shame of a woman.
A man cannot bear to look at cotton-wool.
And woman? No sooner born in the dry season,
she is already flattering the rains .. .'
In a moment Hamlet added: 'Children are never satisfied
with an answer ....
They will play with a cupboard full of secrets
and finally carry off the key within themselves.
Or they are ill and secretly open the letters
of an imprisoned poet who used to
pay for his own little room simply because
the letter was opened by them. . .
.
Or when ill they see in their dreams a pIllar of fire
and cry: It's a bough, a vein of God!
Or in illness cannot free their minds
of the unending handwork of women
which aims only at keeping them warm
.
and would weave a man into its pattern or else seIze up .••
Or they are well! Every moment
hands reach for the slices of bread ...
And when they run out of the barn
they may trample on the last grain oflast year's harvest
so that soon they will be more temptc;d
.
to crown the skull of fire with a sheaf s golden Wig.
They are as full oflife as a horse
that doesn't feel its rider a stranger
but its own thought .... Rejoicing, shouting,
they have been a year together wi~hout rc;grets,
.
they have a sure remedy for anything that s not a nuracle all stains are only mud-stains
on a new dress and can soon be washed off ...
Children! They have found the true names, we have only to
pronounce them!'
,I interrupted and told him he looked like
a mill-stone quarry.
68
Have a drink, Hamlet! I said. Do·you want it along with
the oven, soul of the farm,
or with the passion of the blood's cardinal points?
But he didn't take it badly and said: 'Po-pa!'
What's that? I asked and he replied:
'They talk that way in Tibet!'
and went on: 'Virgins, ah yes, they know
when a tree is unwell! ... But Ihave known convicts.
For some of them it's enough to imagine
huge backsides, huge only because
the leaden memory of the same crime
forces them to squat without legs,
unless they are swollen from all the beatings,
since they smell of tar ....
"There was no tram!" said the woman. And the man
replied: "It's worse when a ship is late,
you, I mean, who like a ship
leave in you under you a continuous line .. ."
Yes .... Whereas virgins, yes,
they know when a tree is unwell .... And the cloth
of their 'innocence
always covers the niale graftings,
even if their stockings are made from the hair of whores ...
Freedom, you know, is always kin
to voluntary poverty .. .'
Night overlapped night .... It bowed to the earth
or became a tomb for everything
the living and the dead were doing ...
Maybe the living felt shy and were insolent ..•
And the dead, envious, not deliberately
but from heredity or ~engefulness.
I understood when Hamlet said, not knowing my thoughts:
'What only surrounds us now
. one day will bury us ...
Once I was present .at a fire .•.
One of countless flames was enough for me to notice
that the whole hand of a fish-pond keeper who was there
had only a single joint
and to make me think of the bony sculpture
of nothing upon nothing ...
The hair of a hanged man
is more sensitive when silky on the spine
and comes no closer to being
than to the hairs of knowledge.
But still more spacious
for the shivering quinine of Elsinore
was the sound of Ophelia cutting her toe-nails •••
You know .. .'
No, I don't know, I said .... But right now
I'm expecting guests, I added, annoyed
that h.e plainly liked his own misfortune ..•
Again he was not offended and went on:
'Querer la propria desdicha .... But what
moves a mother
would shatter argosies on the open sea ...
Besides .... If there is no God,
no angels and nothing after death,
why don't the worshippers of nothingness·
bow down just to them,
the non-existent?
I had this feeling once
while hunting white falcon .... It also rises
from Chinese tombs .... And the tables of Moses
say the same .... But from an inverted humility
or pride that is not yet clear for the bellows are only now being stitched up we would rather kiss a greyhound between the eyes and a
horse on the hoof,
7°
and are not afraid to enter a library ...
While hunting white falcon I have felt rhythm,
before the tables of Moses, movement,
by the Chinese tombs, the symphony of rhythm,
and, among the Ainus, gods, near, far, light and heavy ..•
Besides, at the moment
you are expecting guests
and they are already here since they've come before their
time ...
Yes, to see each other and talk together
and feel a warm trust
and heartbeat true as Rembrandt's needles,
though each of us is different from the other
(for that is what the soul does),
and yet not to catch the serpent by another's hand.
A jet engine is not for the poet ...
And as a tree remains a tree while it bears some fruit
that ripens too soon
and some at the right time and some still later no, one cannot hurry with words
for we do not nor have we come
from the pitiable right of mankind
to be human for man's sake!
Effective love, you know? .. The everyday is the
miraculous ...
The greater the poem, the greater the poet,
'and not the contrary!' he added,
, And you are already a great poet if you ask yourself with
whom you are to be lost ...
Yes, art as something that stops a swollen head ...
I tell you, art is a lament,
something for somebody, nothing for everyone,
for simply by hoping you are already in the future ...
There is always something that outstrips us, for even love
71
is only part of our certitude ..•. Atonal harmony .••
And pain as punishment
for being a fugitive ...
Or is it that human aid,
which might have helped,
calls upon the aid of God?
I don't know, but from the form of some people I have
recognized
the true proportions of an octopus .• .'
The wind wrangled in the chimney .... And in some grove
ruffled the hair on a fallow-deer's penis ..•
And somewhere in history it chased Raleigh's drunken
galleons
only to rip them apart,
as your mother once impatiently
tore her sleeves listening to Wagner .•.
But you can't drive out the soul by drinking, like a gopher
from its hole,
for even if you think of it as so full-bosomed
that you say: what reserves! - you are still a being,
ftxed in transitory form by the winged hate
of man and woman.
but what is work? To befaithful to one's lot, unselfishly,
or to sell indulgences
or become a zealous stoker in a crematorium,
stick a thermometer in the rectum of war
or have to sing at the vintage
to prove you don't eat grapes,
examine a horse's teeth or like an executioner
rip out the nostrils of the condemned,
be corroded by vinegar and bile and take revenge on others
or burn off a woman's right breast
to make her an archer,
to be the seed of fate in history's womb
or the feeling that is condemned to forced labour
under the grey Siberia of old heads or on penalty of death to ftle off your fetters
and rather force your eyes out
than look at the horrors of today,
and yet still hear the singers
dead long ago, but free? ...
Composition's net at best gathers in the ornamental •••
I'm not indifferent to one little step or fall
of a child in the nettles .... Ifhis mother tells him:
Go and get some rum for the tea,
offhe goes, repeating: rum for the tea, rum for the tea,
and ends up whispering: heaven for me* ...
No, no, I'm not indifferent to the single fall
of a child .... Yet evil always rises
up humanity's spine, spattered with blood
like a dentist's staircase .... Ancient
and weary, at each step it recoils in disgust,
yet rises again and again to the brain of pride,
for after so many attempts
'Salamander in the ftre !' Hamlet broke in.
And then frying the seed of the Word on the melted
bacon of his tongue, hissed:
'What a poet writes, an angel or demon does ...
Thus dreams revenge themselves on uninterrupted
consciousness!
I am always looking for a free canteen
where the little window would not be that
of a prison cell through which
the prisoner is watched,
the peephole called the judas ..•
"He that will not work shall not eat/" True,
*In the Czech there is a jingle: 'rum do caje, Cum do clje'.
72
73
by saints and poets,
after so many attempts by saints and poets to switch off the
current it believes only in the moment of harmony
when there is a short circuit
between heaven and hell.
But of course .... We can also wait
until something bursts and love falls on us.•••
Maybe our hope is in patience
and waiting. Imagine
life's terminus ...
An old man stands there, cowering
like words in the rain.
"I'm 'ere," he says, "waitin' for a gent
'0 promised me a room, said it'd be unfurnished wouldn't worry me a bit -"
It was raining. And the old man's trust
was so blind or so openhanded
that it saw a snug future for him
and only the passers-by understood
that someone had taken him for a ride
under the mezzo rilievo of the moon .... But you know
how it is:
suddenly nothing, absolutely nothing,
absolutely nothing facing us
like the moment when it seems
the future is behind us.
Lovers should be gay!
The universe, though as they say finite,
is also unlimited .... A man is suddenly sick at heart,
a woman cold, instead of killing each other
they come together, grateful
once again to see something of their fate,
though it leads with shameless precision
to the poorhouse.'
74
from_Pain*
*Published 1965: pOems from 1949-55.
Daybreak
It is the hour when the priest goes to mass
, up the devil's back.
It is the hour when the heavy bag of dawn
is zipped up the human spine.
It is the hour of frost and no sun
yet the stone is warm
because it moves.
It is the hour when the lake freezes round its shores
and man in his heart.
It is the hour when dreams are nothing more
than fleas nipping the skin of Marsyas.
It is the hour when trees ripped by the deer
bind their wounds with resin.
It is the hour when elves pick up
the splintered words of time.
It is the hour when merely for love
one dares descend the stalagmite cave of tears
which held back in secret worked their hidden will.
It is the hour when you have to write a poem
and say it differently, quite differently.
77
Meeting in a Lift
Deep in thf!Night
We stepped into the lift. The two of us, alone.
We looked at each other and that was all.
Two lives, a moment, fullness, bliss.
At the fifth floor she got out and I went on up
knowing I would never see her again,
that it was a meeting once and for all,
that if! followed her I would be like a dead man in her
tracks
and that if she came back to me
it would only be from the other world.
'How not to be!' you ask yourself and in the end say it
aloud ...
But tree and stone are silent
though each is born of the word and therefore dumb
since the word is afraid of what it has become.
But names they still have. Names: pine,
maple, aspen .... And names: feldspar,
basalt, phonolite, love. Beautiful names,
afraid only of what they have become.
79
Reminiscence I
Early Spring
The sun set on the dung-heap
like an office lamp
~at before it goes out lights up
a wizened acacia in the street below.
A girl stood by the fountain in the square.
Beautiful. I talked to her.
She seemed almost grateful, every word of mine
invited her not to be only of this world,
she knew nothing, not even that nakednesS
can be so clad
that only a dress uncovers it,
she laughed, played with her ring, coughed a little.
Her ordinariness was so mysterious that it disappeared
and she had to be kissed to become more mysterious.
But when I asked her later
the way to the nearest village
she pointed in the wrong direction.
Light comes from a low bank of cloud.
The snow is moving out.
Air sleeks itself in the willows.
Earth remembers. Springs are aware.
From love oflife the crow
flies without a sound
and the seed is wordless ...
But not everything silent is dumb.
That cave on the left of the landscape is very quiet.
And if it quickly fills with soldiers
Some big mouth has been at work.
Homer before the belly of the Trojan horse •••
Presence isn't only present tense!
81
80
Snow
How?
It began to snow at midnight. And certainly
the kitchen is the best place to sit,
even the kitchen of the sleepless.
It's warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wine
and look out of the window at your friend eternity.
Why care whether birth and death are merely points
when life is not a straight line.
Why torment yourself eyeing the calendar
and wondering what is at stake.
Why confess you don't have the money
to buy Saskia shoes?
And why brag
that you suffer more than others.
How to live? How be simple and literal?
I was always looking for a word
that had been spoken only once,
or a word that had not been spoken at all.
I should have looked for ordinary words.
If there were no silence here
the snow would have dreamed it up.
You are alone.
Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.
82
Nothing can be added
even to unconsecrated wine.
Once More
When It Rains on Sunday
Even though a friend often failed to understand my verses
(there are beings who cannot kill
for all their wanting)
though in despair and desolate
(some statues were so appalled
by the sins of men that they turned to wood)
though suicide alone looked my way,
Ialways had the same feeling: to become nothing,
and yet to destroy that nothingness!
When it rains on Sunday and you are alone,
open to the world but no thief comes
and neither drunkard nor enemy knocks at the door,
when it rains on Sunday and you're deserted
and can't imagine living without the body
or not living since you have it,
when it rains on Sunday and you're on your own,
don't think of chatting with yourself.
Then it's an angel who knows, and only what's above,
then it's a devil who knows, and only what's below.
Once more Iwas in love ..•
A book is in the holding, a poem in release.
8S
After St Martin's Day I
Verses
The first snow fell at dawn. Young and coy,
merely a promise and token,
a phantom to prove how beauty passes.
And before mortals
aware of its presence
confessed, if only with half-open eyes,
the fever of their desire the thirsty earth grew impatient and the thaw began.
But by then
you knew from several footprints
that some walk, others mark time.
It is the time when the cabbage is served with wrath
and the calf with hate,
it is the time when death draws wine from nightshade,
it is the time when the blinder you are the more you stare,
it is the time when field boundaries are ploughed up,
it is the time when the hot tear knows
that it cries alone,
it is the time when the wolf grabs letter and book,
it is the time when the searchlight is on the spirit,
it is the time when you cannot love your own unhappiness
because it is everyone's.
86
Non cum Platone
Reminiscence II
Her beauty destroys my love,
for in destroying illusion she destroys reality.
To Franti!ek Tichy
His love destroys my beauty,
for since Iwas given a mask I want a curtain too.
Heavy dawn .... Village
where they have eaten all the cocks.
After hours of searching everywhere in vain
for pimpernel, we came out of the wood
and halted at high noon in the heather.
The air was baked like a sheet of tin. We looked
at the slope on the other side, thickly grown
with bushes and trees. They were rigid, like us.
Iwas about to ask something
when in the unmoving mass
of frozen enchantment a single tree
in a single spot
suddenly began to tremble
like a quarter-tone, yet soundless.
You would have said it was from careless joy,
the spirit of adventure.
But the tree began to rustle
like the rustle of silver turning black.
Then it began to quiver
like the skirt of a woman who touches
a man's clothes while reading a book in an asylum.
And then the tree began to shake and sway
as if shaken and swayed by someone
staring into the dark-eyed depths oflove and Ifelt I was meant to die that moment •..
'non 'btea fi"d
ral , ' my f:at her sal"d'"
, It ,s an aspen. ,
But I still remember how he paled
when we came there later on
and saw beneath the tree an.empty chair.
88
Autumn II
Autumn twilight in the country,
twilight that makes friends.
But over the fields a couple came into view
who kept asking the way
since a farmer had shown them his whip.
- 'I love you because -' the man was telling
the woman the old old story.
'r remember,' the woman said,
'how they used to say whoever
slept under a yew would die .. ,
Why don't we go on a bit further?'
The wild geese are on the wing.
The cold is cleansing the river.
The nixie's gone to warm up in the orchard shed.
After St Martin's Day II
It was some time after Martinmas.
I was walking across the Gahatagat
plateau. I was in the sort of mood
when I didn't know which day it was.
But the snow had been falling and falling. It covered
everything.
And at one moment the wind blew so sharply
I lowered my head
and suddenly saw with shrinking heart
always a step ahead of me
a fresh footprint.
There wasn't a living soul around.
Who was it there in front of me?
It was
90
9I
r walking
in front of mysel£
Ubi nullus ordo, sed perpetuus horror
Night Watchman's Song
To live is terrible since you have to stay
with the appalling reality of these years.
Only the suicide thinks he can leave by the door
that is merely painted on the wall.
There is not the slightest sign that the Comforter will come.
Burns was right .... But I am convinced
that we Catlnot imagine any woman
from reading a book, still less from reality.
She is. And thanks only to her
men are too, very often as murderers
who sometimes share royally
the diamond crown of her mystery.
In me the heart of poetry bleeds.
93
Without Title II
Fourth Month
They say the Druid stones can be moved.
But the beauty of women, their very motion, is much more
cruel.
Broken-spirited the poet writes it down in this world,
in this world which turns a sullen ear
to distance and adventure
and eynic-eyed sells its wonder cheap ..•
April mist. One ray of sun
pale as a blind man's stick inches its way,
though more certain than a week ago.
Cold hands, warm heart.
You too have more than a feeling .... But that is all.
If danger threatens, you have no defence.
Ifhappiness, you are powerless.
The proud spirit cannot be tragic.
94
95
The Pine
The, Chicken
How beautiful that old white pine
on the hill of your childhood
which you revisited today.
Beneath it$ murmur you remember your,dead
and wonder when your turn will come.
Beneath its murmur you feel
as if you had written your last book
and now had only to be silent and weep
for the words to grow.
The doors open by themselves
before an angel. At other times a chicken
comes from the courtyard into the kitchen
and looks round at the company with so critical an eye
that they do not wait to see how it will end
but quickly cross themselves in self-defence.
What life have you had? You left the known
unknown.
And-your fate? It smiled on you only once
and you were not there ...
for the
97
Death
In Nothingness
Once again he is going round
like the sodden air on an incendiarist's skin
or the whiff of a nearby brewery.
I see him clearly through the line
cut by Adam's black diamond
in the glass of virginity.
In nothingness larded like a fat book
about a lost lyric;
by an unknown poet,
we, who sweat instead of weeping,
we, who say a stone s-weats when it weeps,
thought today of one who was drowned
while learning to swim so as not to drown ..•
Meanwhile the park beyond the window, at other times so
prim,
rubbed its green nose on the sleeve of the wind
and then looked at it through the eyes of the mistletoe.
99
On a Freezing Night
.Glimpsed
One night I heard a walnut-tree
crack with the frost.
It went offlike the shrapnel
at the storming of Babylon,
shrapnel which is exploding only now.
Glimpsed from the train, which takes shadow for truth.
But she was truly beautiful
and bareheaded,
bareheaded as if an angel
had left his head there
and gone off with the hat.
The farmer ran out of his house, a horse from the stable,
and I found myself opening
the white book of summonses to conscience ...
We don't have a single clue
and then we are dumbfounded.
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101
Between
Between the idea and the word
there is more than we can understand.
There are ideas for which no words can be found.
Lovers
Time
Time
Time
deaf,
The thought lost in the eyes ofa unicorn
appears again in a dog's laugh.
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103
in the mountains: jealousy, fruit of unbelie£
at the spring: infidelity, fruit of jealousy.
by the river: jealousy without love,
but gorged with sex ...
Dream
During an Illness
The dry depths at the borders of memory
fray out into hairs that reach to hell.
Continence is shamelessly insistent. Laughter.
I have never taken men seriously,
says Lady Macbeth
and she inspects her hand
bloody from the murder of drunken mosquitoes.
A melting icicle, a leaking·tap,
counting drops of medicine.
104
lOS
Tibet sees by water. We by tears.
Epoch
The Virgin
By the images of things
we are still in time.
The party is over at which there were so many lights
the dark was perfect.
And he was there. She didn't mind
ifhis feelings were wine and his thoughts
grapes.
Towards morning he left her. She sat gazing
through the small hole in her dress
at Monday's naked nail.
But today, before the sower has taken a step,
the reaper is already there.
It seems
there will be neither dead nor living ..•
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107
Twelfth Night
The Sparrow
T4e day of candles which lick
the carp bones of Christmas Eve.
But the wooden mortar for grinding poppy-seed
is very beautiful
in the deep foreground of the straw wall,
and beautiful this antique stillness,
and a week gone hasn't deceived time's seeming.
It's freezing and yet the tombstone is warm.
Because it moves.
Flying from a snowy branch a sparrow
rocked it slightly and so nodded
refusal of blind feeling.
108
A little snow fell off the bough.
Before long there will be an avalanche.
109
Goodbye
But
Once more the storm is rising from fate's black quarter.
The mind feels faint,
bemused like a body turned inside out.
Who is that dancing in the bats'-wing cloak?
Who was struck dumb by the rattle of what he saw?
The water in the well lures youth, a man seeks the spring.
All that is over. There are words
one must not speak o£
You will never keep the promise you made.
The skull has dreamed your eyes.
The god of song and laughter long ago
shut the doors of eternity behind him.
Since then only sometimes
a dying memory echoes in us.
And since then only the pain
is neverlife size,
it is always larger than man
and yet must lodge in his heart.
IIO
III
from At the Last Breath*
*Published 1967: poems from 1961-5.
You Can
There's room in me and more
for your grief and your blaspheming
and for your joy. No, nothing hinders
your coming in on sunny days,
not only when the storm is howling.
Here you can cry and curse
and, close to the mystery, laugh, even laugh and nothing will stop your leaving.
I am here, you only come and go.
IIS
Changes'
Why Today?
This is our hope: that we have passed
the limits of the last reality.
But while consciousness disappears
it is the very consciousness
whose constant changes
remain ...
You know very well that pain is ~ot made less
by comparing it with greater pain,
but how is it your hands are bloody?
You haven't killed anyone,
you've never done that, you never
would, it's only that you're going to,
but why has it been today?
u6
II7
Don't Cry!
It's getting dark, stop reading! Sun's coming out, don't cry !
Maybe today or yesterday or after a while
your fate and your will
are going to be in harmony with life,
even if minds are different.
Of course if you step beyond words
you'll fall into the abyss.
Blood enough for you, little to the murderers ..•
lIS
Whq Knows?
So you put down your cut braids
and plucked eyebrows on my book
just because
on your wedding-day you will wear one dress
at the registry and another at the church,
though since the linen's short
you'll have to do the washing every week,
while even now the bridegroom's selling the bedroom suite?
Potentiana, who knows whether tears
reveal themselves only when
nobody wants anything from them.
II9
Additional Poems*
*The first two published in a periodical, 1967; the others written
1969.
Against
I would gladly tell you but I must not.
Time dances badly
in tragedy's worn-out shoes
and testifies against love.
Though the trees blossomed there was no fruit.
Living in life and existing in nothingness
whatever happens, nothing happens .••
And whar augury? Call a third time?
123
We Too
_You're Thinking of Children
Spring before its time. So uncertain a spring
that the first shoots are its own doubts.
If we are afraid the sneezing in the morgue
means snow and more frosts on the way,
how are we to appease the riled and stingy sun?
Heaviness of heart without freedom
is only at its beginning. Something
is missing in the earth's loins and navel.
We too lack much when we love:
such as love or self-forge~ting.
You're thinking of children, of their
here and now, everything now,
without a thought of when
or where .... What's the good oflooking
yourself in a mirror,
.
they ask, simply because
they haven't yet been in love .... Yes,
only children don't need a double.
I2S
at
Joy
What you said and then Jived
was for the dead .... But really
only joy exists in time,
because it alone is instant.
The most present. The most mortal.
For Himself
So many apples and no apple-tree! But
now there are no more apples here.
So much passion and no love! But
now there are no unchristened here.
Every man for himself
and we have time only for moments.
It won't last.
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127