Three Poems

Prehistory
 
I
 
To recognize the unwelcoming places where you grew
up in another land before the last century was through:
a fruitless stretch of dunes, willows, a warehouse wall
by the shore will hardly recall who lived here at all.
The lonely rushed through these streets with a taxi and three
carriages, while orangeade dripped on park paths. At three-thirty,
German girls gathered on the other side of the tracks,
saying Süsses Kind over the strollers along their path.
They yearned for the empire’s signs, walked the yellow
sand, and applauded the shadow on the balcony in the old
town, until their hairdos, hats, and rings were sunk
in bland waters by Marinescu in his victorious sub.
 
 

II
 
There is more to the landscape: importantly—the sky
and the piercing waves that gaze right into its eye,
smokestacks, stork-nest poles, willows sparsely
scattered along the lower banks of the canal,
the stink of flatfish, the wind rocking a shabby
yacht by the bridge. I see the teacher, holding his key,
returning from the Red Cross for a nap—
he gazes joylessly over his temporary flat:
laundry hung to dry in the garret, shutters knocking,
plaster peeling (onto the cradle?), bookshelves leaning
from Marxist tomes, and beyond the Danė river, he sees,
like a monotonous echo, timber frame homes recede.
 
 

III
 
The clatter of hooves—spoons and faience ring in answer.
The eye can spot a low Anglican church by the harbor.
Its roof is like the cover of an earthenware jar.
Nothing further. Europe’s threshold or boundary—
these flat shores, these swamps, fertilized equally
by the bones of Skalvians, Old Prussians, Vistula Veneti.
Catalogues of the past: nach Osten, Westen, one flees—
ships are sunk, the implacable weight of the sea
presses mustard gas drums. An irresistible current:
its echo bursts repeatedly on the desolate grassy fort.
And so the limpid reflection below a frozen skiff gleams
in morning cold, clearer than the skiff itself, it seems—
 
 

IV
 
so deep, like a voice hardly recognized in a dream
but which, in repeating a pointless sound, can mean
more than the people to whom one speaks. A nymph,
un-sleeping Echo, reigns over the world that is left.
Above the vanished city of my birth, from Bothnian
skerries to Skagerrak, from the fuming Eastern
Cape to Spit’s End, a clear rhythm, as from a trumpet,
sails out beyond us, announcing the Last Judgment:
it will wake us in the dark, lead us home from imprisonment,
so that we might be thankful for everything—even when
time erases all shape and gesture, like an experienced
censor, from the sheet of paper, the photo, and the text.


 
By the Ruins of the First Wireless Transmitter
 
I
 
Streets lead nowhere. The fences coil with heat.
On this side of the highway, vegetation is mired in sand,
and the republic extends in the sun behind you to meet
the geological faults on the other side of this land.
 
The shore, intoxicated by gasoline and rotting cod,
waits all day in vain for a refreshing breeze.
A steel bridge lures suicides. You can barely see
the motto on the post office’s white facade.
 
The austere flash of a Boeing cuts the sky like a blade.
Shutters are shut tight. The season is a month in arrears.
With your head on your hand, you can almost hear,
over the slope’s prickly grass, the azure ozone degrade.
 
 

II
 
A little farther on—cottages scrubbed like shells.
Don’t spend your coins on what passes as a souvenir.
A faded town hall tower. It seems you were born here,
though your accent sticks in your throat. Just as well.
 
Why resist the horoscope? The fates wield their shears—
the settlements of pilgrims, a littered suburban park,
this stocky mound of salty earth, where Bangpūtis sends swells
to crest over concrete in the form of a romanesque arch.
 
Chains, like sculptural art, gnaw empty space in boredom,
and the landscape sinks into sea like the dunes of Pervalka.
Two Atlantic shores fold the current into the continent’s arm
while the elbow extends in vain for a lost Europa.
 

 
III
 
True, it’s absurd to speak of exile. The bitter space
once took a week to be vanquished by ships,
but the globe shrinks. The interval is almost erased,
the dimensions diminish, though time never seems to fit.
 
It grows dark over there, while on this peninsula it’s day,
nevertheless, the computer connects east and west
with its gleam. Hard membranes relay radio waves:
voices of night from the other side. Euclid at his best
 
wouldn’t grasp this parallelic play. The connection of worlds
is what’s left after love and ashes. The skies rotate,
the oceans list, the axis of the universe whirls,
and space begins to speak as the ether undulates.
 
 

IV
 
With eyes fixed on the vault, sunk in a mattress of grass,
you gaze over ruins and stubborn autumnal chlorophyll.
You can get by without the screen or Skype. No message
awaits, and the lines of those you know lie still.
 
As if nothing happened, suddenly, the shadows thicken,
dull joints don’t obey, and the body’s blood weakens.
From a double homeland you are left with this watery abode,
a temporary lair by an antique transmitter of Morse code.
 
A pawn of your century, an assiduous student
of a vanished age, you savor the flavor of defeat
in your mouth, and send signals to the land of your birth—
dots and dashes of your pulse—Marconi of a new earth.


 
Three Imperfect Sonnets
 
I. Piazza Mattei
 
A stained white cornice. Clouds. “. . . Caesius fecit.”
Clusters of grapes frame a cohort of brazen words.
Bells, like the pulse in the tyrant’s aorta, grow quiet,
their faint peals fly across Largo di Torre. Here, no sword
can cleave reality from image. Ephebes gesture in the dusk,
and crystal rolls from a turtle’s shield into a dolphin’s
jaws, splashing a phallus. Acanthus and jasmine
become columnar stone like Daphne hiding from Phoebus.
 
Piazza Paganica, via degli Funari.
The key rattles the door, unlocking Rome—
the gristle of the Palatine,‌ the soil of the rotting Forum,
a lost century, with February forgotten already.
Only the fragments of letters fasten yesterday to today.
The fountain murmurs. Damp March drifts away.
 
 
 
II. Caffe Greco
 
The points of needles prick the rosin-filled air.
Pine canopies sway. Sandstone heats and wears.
This city prefers repetition. Perhaps the terrorist
who finished off Moro is more timorous than Brutus,
perhaps the water more turbid (but as bland and capricious),
but he is not as old as the angular torsos of caesars.
The alley, as before, branches from the Corso;
cumuli crowd its vantage, resembling ruins and frescos.
 
A café. An oasis choked with nomadic clamor.
In the depths of pale etchings—a doubled Rome,
baroque shells, spirals and the aquamarine Tiber.
An echo in the terrace lasts longer than a poem,
and the sun, unseen by those who have passed withal,
paints the fruit and erases shadows from the wall.
 
 
 
III. Colle Aventino
 
“It didn’t help either that he rejected the crown.”
Burdock rubs against the fur of a cat gone feral.
Motorcycles startle the block which once looked down
without fear on the prostrate body of the triumvir—
but enough of that. A siren sharper than a dagger
pierces the crossroad. Its drone drifts farther
into the hills above the Circus Maximus, then
to cool carnival booths in the square of Aventine,
 
packed with wine and cherries. Beyond gardens,
like a second sky, a cupola rises, speaking urbi
et orbi. Pink suburban stucco and the chapped skin
of roof shingles slowly soak up doubled Imperial
time. The universe brightens. Midday grows chilly,
and an ephemeral gaze embraces the eternal city.