Manifesto
Gods of the world unite!
Set up the party of one heart and liver,
And save the milkman
who at the crack of dawn
milks the morning mist
and whistles the tune about freedom.
If God exists
If God exists
I'll have dinner at his house.
Red berries instead of light.
He'll send his angel-chauffeur for me.
Clouds like fat doves
will flutter round the table.
We'll drink from empty vessels
vintage holy water and free will.
Even if God has stubby fingers
he still sucks them for eternity.
If God's a polyglot he'll translate holy verse
for an anthology that's even holier
than the first word's drop
from which a river sprang.
Then God and I will ride our bikes
over a cherry tree, over the fields of paradise.
Earthly reeds in urns.
Predators lying fallow.
Then God will get off his bike and say
that it is he
who is God.
He'll take out his binoculars. He'll tell me
to look at the world. He'll explain
how it came into being,
how long he has gone on like this and
how unerringly he has erred with this world,
throwing ideas into the wind like paper planes.
If God is a believer
he'll pray to himself for life everlasting.
Oxen lift up the sun on their horns.
The table totters on its legs.
I'll get some medicine from God
and recover
right after my death.
On war
War is within us.
We are born with war.
The first scream.
The first fury.
Veins cannot hold in the blood.
And when we stand where roads cross
and when we love where war pauses
- we cling more tightly to this earth of ours.
We try to sink into earth. Into our mother.
We want our names to be remembered.
And we say too much
though we have no words.
So the earth, my Earth, roars around me.
And even if I could hide my eyes with trees,
and even if I could flee to desert isles,
and even if I could keep silent -
death
would still be there before me.
Lusting for victory, we rush on
to the unknown face of Maybe.
In my heart, I despair of this damned fate,
tired of studying graphs of theories
I shut my eyes. These woods of Academe are scented.
But even there, servile heroes emerge
hauling their shining armor in their arms.
They bring the shriek of war. It sets the tree on fire.
Here is the corpse of a bird. It sang a while ago.
The landscape's crushed its frame,
the panes shake, glass like old age shatters.
That shining, heavy armor. I am given a sword.
I run to the earth through the altered trees.
I am making a name for myself, no other name
will defeat this one of mine . . .
That is how every child who builds a sandcastle
learns about war
That is how every child who wields a wooden sword
knows about war.
Children
Children meet at nostalgic dinner-parties.
Children meet in executive sessions.
Children are experienced.
Some of them cannot recognize a swan.
Children have identity papers. Birth certificates.
Health records. Certificates of death.
Children choose their leaders who
make speeches praising rocking horses.
Children hijack planes and kidnap ministers.
Children emigrate to the ends of earth.
Children submit reports about their parents.
Children fight for the rights of wooden dolls.
Children sit in astrakhan fur coats.
Pink cakes fly through the air.
Children recall the fallen Roman Empire
and nod their little heads.
In the huge kindergarten of nations
children play ball and
spit cherry stones at each other.
They switch on an artificial sun
that rises like a mitigating circumstance.
Then children put aside their toys
and start to produce some new children.
Witness
Anything I say
may be used in evidence.
Memory and facts -
two roads that diverge.
I do not remember
if it was dark or light.
If the road curved.
Who ran out first
and under which sentence.
I do not remember
if he was blinded by light,
or enlightened by reason.
If he fled from the scene of the crime
to the place of salvation.
If it was too late to plead to God
or too early to spread the news.
Truth and truth only
died in that accident.
Out from the judge's sleeve
leaped a live squirrel.
On shores
The sea swallows clouds, violins and Magellan's
islands, ships coffers mothers and children
captains ear-rings shoes buttons and bows
despair and fears forks family photographs
shrieks and air.
On shores the relatives stand waiting for years.
Dressed in black. With flowers.
They throw pebbles into the liquid grave
and letters attached to the stones.
Down in the sea they have finally come to their senses.
They are frantically building the post office. They receive
letters periodicals volumes of poetry by living poets.
They cut back jobs and dismiss people.
Some steer away and choose
to cultivate new states,
transparent and waterproof.
They keep accepting new ships and cruisers
captains buttons air and children
despair and forks and coffers and ear-rings.
The influx of influential souls is welcome.
And on shores the relatives stand waiting for years.
Questions at a poetry reading
What's your favorite color?
Your happiest day?
Did any poem outrun your imagination?
Do you have any hope?
You frighten us.
Why is the sky black?
Who shot down time?
Was it an empty hand, a hat sailing
across the sea?
Why a wedding dress
with a funeral wreath?
Why hospital corridors
Instead of forest paths?
Why the past and not the future?
Do you have faith? or don't you?
You frighten us.
We fly from you.
I try to stop them flying
straight into the fire.
My loneliness
My loneliness completed her course of study.
She was punctual and worked hard.
They awarded her medals and distinctions.
The course is popular.
Thousands of readers walk through it
writing things down.
Crossing them out.
She is tired of ruling
like Frederick the Great.
She already has some pupils.
Timidly subservient.
My loneliness is public.
She nests down in her cage
with her feathers of silence torn out.
Translated by Susan Bassnett and Piotr Kuhiwczak
From the Gulf Stream of Sleep
Nations run out of trains
onto the icy steppes of air
of frozen years.
With barbed-wire stars
overhead.
Seven-year-olds
learn by heart
the sums of dreams.
The conductor's voice
rips the world
from the Gulf Stream of sleep:
AUSSTEIGEN!
VYKHODIT'!
Silence
stamps its feet
for warmth.
Envoy
To write so that a beggar
would take it for money.
And the dying
would take it for birth.
Dictation
Pay attention to dictation.
Don't make a mistake.
Don't crowd the letters
in nation.
Know
when to open and when to close
the parentheses of lips.
Silence -
starts with what letter?
Decline
but not in every case.
Be careful
not to divide love in two
as in black currant or first comer.
Take care
to place a period after certain dates.
After others
a pause.
See that you don't
abbreviate life.
Remember
not to misspell death.
Die
correctly.
The Wall
On the right side of the wall
wooden platforms.
Polyglot rustle of words.
Shoals of tourists.
We hold binoculars to our eyes.
To our eyes
magnifying the situation.
In the situation brought up close.
On the left side of the wall
an ordinary human hand
holds a sandwich.
It's lunchtime.
I see:
a machine gun set aside
an ordinary human face
the tired gray of eyes
aimed at the distance.
I see:
magnified air
the city's swollen edge
blushing flags
a green lettuce leaf
falling from the hand
flies up and down
tries to escape
fights with the wind
which pins it to the barbed-wire coils.
A brown German shepherd
with a pink German tongue
pretends to take a nap
in the watchful fur of the air.
The guards
brush crumbs from their uniforms.
Through binoculars
they watch our hands eyes tongues
the magnified time
on someone's watch.
On the right side of the wall
another bus drives up.
A little red-haired girl stands on tiptoe.
Someone spits out a cherry pit.
Someone bursts out laughing.
Someone's heavy silence.
Tiny leaves of fear.
History's great pageant
in the open
air.
To Marianne Büttrich
For a year now I've been trying
to write you a letter.
But
the locusts of my thoughts
are untranslatable.
The people on duty are untranslatable
guarding my words and grammar.
My hours can't be translated
into yours.
The black lilacs behind the window.
The unbuttoned gates. The yellowed cigarette butt of a day. The dead eye
in the peephole
at six a.m.
Rilke is untranslatable too.
Die Blütter fallen, fallen . . .
Wir alle fallen . . .
I've got so much to tell you
but
a tunnel is approaching
my delayed train.
A long whistle sounds.
I'm tired, Marianne,
I'm leaving for the Bermuda Triangle
to take a rest.
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
We 1998
The dissipated time has passed
when we played with fire
while cities burned.
We shortened our trips
by reading books.
The moving images beyond the window
clung to the subject of life.
Those who wanted power for the masses
now keep shops of devotional objects.
Trysting spots for skittish chameleons.
A new generation was set into functional landscapes
and now has its own country. Civil service. Self-assured beauty.
Perhaps simply the same virus of transience.
The necessity of accepting crime's vibration
and the goosedown of the air.
It hasn't yet expired,
that hope so indispensable to sleep
when poetry's seconds awaken them at dawn
for duels of words
They watch us closely
like classics flying past
whose wings generate
angelic static.
Translated by Clare Cavanagh
| 
