Correspondences Read online

  Note to the eBook Reader

  Correspondences is a unique accordion-style book. On one side is a long poem by celebrated poet and novelist Anne Michaels; and, on the other, portraits by acclaimed artist Bernice Eisenstein, which are accompanied by quotations. In the physical book, the pages unfold, and can refold in a myriad of arrangements, the voice in the poem mingling with the voices that accompany the portraits, the portraits themselves resonating with the words, “just as a conversation can become/the third side of the page.”

  To see the actual accordion format, with its singular approach to a continuous textual conversation, photographs of the printed book appear here.

  When reading this eBook, you can “enter” the experience in either direction, starting with the poem or the portraits. Choosing one of the two links on the following page will bring you to the selected title page, and in turn to the contents of that side of the book.

  PLEASE NOTE that the poem's line breaks will vary across e-reading platforms. To experience the intended presentation of the poem and portrait pages, please set text to the smallest comfortable reading size. Enlarging the text too much will cause the poem’s lines to break in places the author did not intend, and might cause the short quotations that accompany the portraits (in the physical book on the left-hand page across from the portraits) to break and go on to a separate page.

  When looking at a portrait, if desired, you can click on the name of the subject below it to jump to a short biography and the source information for the quotation on that page.

  Entering the Accordion

  a poem

  portraits

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Text copyright © 2013 by Anne Michaels

  Artwork copyright © 2013 by Bernice Eisenstein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013001299

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96251-5

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96249-2

  ANNE MICHAELS is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry, The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, and Skin Divers, and two celebrated novels, The Winter Vault and the award-winning international best seller Fugitive Pieces, which was made into a feature film. She has also published works for theater. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in translation in thirty-seven countries around the world.

  BERNICE EISENSTEIN is the author of the internationally praised graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, which has been translated into ten languages and won the Jewish Book Award. Eisenstein’s artwork has appeared in exhibitions in Europe and the United States.

  The biographies and endpapers were written by Anne Michaels.

  The quotes accompanying the portraits were selected and arranged by Bernice Eisenstein.

  In Anne Michaels’s poem, lines by Anna Akhmatova are from “Requiem” from Poems of Anna Akhmatova (translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward), translation copyright © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, granted by Darhansoff & Verrill, Literary Agents, on behalf of Gretchen Kunitz and the Estate of Stanley Kunitz, Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 1973; quote by Albert Camus is from his book-length essay The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (translated by Anthony Bower), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1956; quote by Albert Einstein is from his lecture at the University of Kyoto in 1922, as it appeared in the magazine Physics Today, August 1922; lines by Franz Kafka are taken from Franz Kafka: A Biography by Max Brod (translated by G. H. Roberts), Schocken Books, 1947; quote by Helen Keller was taken from her essay “Three Days to See” in Atlantic Monthly magazine, January 1933; lines by Primo Levi are from Collected Poems (translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann), Faber and Faber, 1992; quote by Fernando Pessoa is from his poem “Henry, Count of Burgundy” in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (translated by Richard Zenith), Penguin Classics, 2006.

  Thanks to Ellen Seligman, Deborah Garrison, Helen Garnons-Williams. To Kendra Ward for her assistance. To David Ward for production expertise and support. A special thank you to CS Richardson for his valuable and insightful design contributions.

  v3.1

  in memoriam Isaiah Michaels

  —

  for R and E

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Endpapers 1

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Correspondences

  The wet earth. I did not imagine

  your death would reconcile me with

  language, did not imagine soil

  clinging to the page, black type

  like birds on a stone sky. That your soul – yes,

  I use that word – beautiful,

  could saturate the bitterness from even

  that fate, not of love

  but its opposite, all concealed

  in a reversal of longing.

  First the stag came, alone, hooves wet

  with light, to read the stones

  in the graveyard. Then the waterbird rising

  sudden beside me, the depth of

  dusk in its throat. A faithless

  cry. And then eyes

  so close and harsh among the trees

  I will not say I was not

  afraid, seeing your will equal my yearning,

  transforming matter this way;

  even as I felt the cost of it,

  this last shattering effort of love,

  a sign.

  They wanted you to shout oranges

  in the street, a few coins from the grocer

  to raise your voice. But you stared

  at the pyramid of perfume and oil,

  and instinctively smelled your fingers

  for the vanished scent, and felt into

  your pocket for the bit of peel carried

  since. And stood,

  the mud of another country

  still on your shoes. Silenced

  by that bit of earth.

  While Celan in Paris wept

  for the same contraband,

  ronger and grincer

  gnawing and grinding

  between voix and voie

  voice and path,

  between converse and its converse

  between Ancel and Celan

  between Mayer and Amery

  between the Nemen and the Prut

  between the Prut and the Seine

  between sauf and soif,

  rescue and

  thirst.

  They met in Zurich’s “Stork” on Ascension Day,

  26 May, 1960, and each touched the face of the other

  to read what was no longer there. All the ways

  we say goodbye for the last time: this,

  their first meeting.

  At the café, the radio was tuned

  to silence; Celan asked the waiter

  to turn it down.

  Even in their stillness, in their perfect

  camouflage, even hidden among the baby’s blankets,

  it found them. They both heard

  the white cornfield, restless

  above the squealing trams.

  Celan rushed from Paris to Stockholm

  and stood, forever

  unadmitted, outside

  her hospital door.

  “Come as quickly as possible,”

  Sachs had written

  and then:

  “Don’t, under any circumstances, come.”

  So
on others began to gather at our table,

  each brought another and another, stuttering,

  a hand on a shoulder, a hand

  resting on a cheek, a fall of hair,

  a face hidden, and like any conversation

  with the ineffable, they came

  to suffocate, to surrender,

  to moan, to turn away,

  to implore, to deplore, shame so deep

  there was nothing shame would not

  speak, to ruin, to undo, to rectify,

  to sanctify, to blaspheme by believing,

  to draw us near, to whisper, to reveal,

  to signify, to not be kept away,

  to keep us close.

  He met his German language under the Goethe Eiche,

  the bombed stump of Goethe’s oak,

  and for twenty years they lay together

  in its non-embrace.

  Names were changed

  ronger, grincer

  so valleys and mountains

  would not be stained

  Two names for one place,

  to each

  his own tortured solace,

  mouth

  to mouth.

  Forgive me, for beginning

  at the end, the place

  they said, you could no longer

  comprehend, as if your silence

  were proof of it. ich bin

  mit meinem selbst allein

  I am with my self, alone.

  Ten years of silence when I would not

  stop talking, like a mother

  speaking to the child inside her,

  remembering everything

  before it happens.

  As if I still knew how the body

  cries out under a tongue.

  It startled even me, who believed,

  when you wept suddenly at the familiar name,

  at the story of the rain on the lake, and of

  grandchildren in that place

  you loved.

  And when your brother

  died,

  when we brought you

  to his funeral,

  you sat so mute and lost,

  even I, the Foolish Daughter,

  wondered if it had been right

  to bring you. Until the coffin

  was carried from the room

  and you reached

  suddenly

  and rested your hand there.

  We used to stand beside the water

  and together on the northern road,

  as if we’d watched each other approach

  for hours, shadows barely moving

  across a great expanse of desert

  vater father

  wasser water

  He was a socialist when he listened to music, when he

  brushed his teeth, when he took the pipe filled with tobacco

  from my mother’s hand, passing it to him as he drove. He was

  a socialist when he looked at the trees, and when he carried the

  canoe on his back, and when he swam almost out of sight.

  He knew his heart would get him into trouble. Like any worker,

  he was afraid. But he never turned away except

  to weep. His children understood him. He

  understood them. I brought boulders from the lake

  200 miles in the trunk of the car to

  place by his grave. He was a socialist

  when he pulled over to the side of the road

  to eat bread and honey. When he looked at paintings.

  When he sang Vir ’o mare quant’è bello

  ispira tantu sentimento

  look upon the sea, how beautiful, how much feeling,

  as we fell asleep in the back seat.

  each night the same sun

  passes through the trees

  without burning,

  the same absence falls through the Sunday

  dusk, nothing gathered

  the bird browns in the oven, the table’s

  set, the music stops

  time, as the spring light, waxy and

  listless, falls on the blank river,

  and the right thing passes

  one dimension to another

  the limp jumping, the electrodes

  on the skull, the water spreading forever

  outward from that moment

  the falling body, the still body

  the surface blank again without

  a shore or passage back, the single

  moment that

  no one living

  remembers

  A true realist, wrote Celan, believes

  in miracles, even if useless

  there are eyes that never change,

  no matter the age,

  never stop seeing

  the same moment

  There was among us a young woman

  whose task was to turn solid to liquid,

  solid to gas – fusion and sublimation –

  earth into soil and for this pressure

  of the heart, she was seized

  for the look on her face

  for two years after they had died,

  Celan thought his parents

  still alive

  events homeless in time

  The scribe speaks aloud each word

  as he writes,

  wipes clean the quill

  and bathes himself entire,

  Woman washes woman,

  man washes man

  before writing His name.

  in the water’s flow,

  never turn the face

  from the sky,

  The holy ink is ritually prepared:

  tannic acid, crystals of iron sulfate,

  ground gallnut.

  the body must never be alone,

  never so vulnerable the soul

  as when first

  separate

  No two letters

  may touch each other.

  not from the moment of death

  to the moment of burial,

  not while the soul still hovers

  From the top of each line,

  one fringe of the prayer shawl must be cut away

  each letter is suspended.

  for that shawl will not be used anymore for prayer

  in life

  please understand

  ich bin mit meinem selbst allein

  No page bearing His name

  may be discarded.

  vater father, wasser water

  A holy book

  you must wash the body and

  the soul guarding the body

  must be buried.

  with water and with prayer

  not our memory of the dead,

  but what the dead

  remember

  The same question endlessly repeated,

  fingers grasping the same crumbling edge,

  one of the first signs of illness

  never allowing a lesion to form.

  How to cope financially, how to make

  nothing into something. When I was still a child

  you asked my brothers and I to sit with you

  at the table; I implore you,

  it is all I ask: do what you love, only

  choose work you love, no matter what it is.

  Not like me, making nothing

  out of nothing. Though at least you came out ahead

  on one side of the ledger, the side of love dark

  with pencil marks, the black of my mother’s hair

  as she sat in the row ahead at the concert hall

  the night you met. Unlike me, with both

  blank pages. How are you coping, you asked,

  over and over, financially.

  The dreaded endless question born of worry and

  helplessness. At least, I always joked, when

  you have nothing, nothing can be taken from you,

  but we both knew that was bad math, that there was

  always someth
ing to be taken from you,

  not lost, but taken. And so that was the one question

  on which you alighted, in the last months

  before that decade of silence,

  an endless painful longing to rescue,

  the repetition of the plough horse,

  majestic head bent to earth,

  turning the same direction

  at the end of each row.

  cold deep Prague dusk

  Paris dusk, Stockholm dusk

  black branches across a small window,

  dusk a black river

  poems arrive in the mail

  like an old friend on a rainy afternoon

  Sachs’ “homesickness scar”

  some madness is smashed perception,

  mental rubble,

  some madness a rigor mortis

  to turn one’s head is to be

  severed

  after all, after all

  there was no longer paranoia,

  no such category as too much

  fear

  Celan saw into the same water

  where his son and his wife had so recently floated –

  a school excursion on a riverboat –

  unhurried as the current,

  as still as a surface before it is touched

  by consciousness

  On this Easter Sunday

  what rises

  a woman from her bed suddenly

  alert for all she loves,

  an instinct,

  a willow branch lifted by the wind

  loosening its downward sorrow,

  a verbal gesture unnoticed at the time

  an almost indiscernible release

  of the tongue, like a man

  loosening the knot of his tie

  at the end of the day,

  the long day;

  like a doorknob being slowly turned

  from the outside, in the hallway;

  a dream of emptying moonlight from the water

  with her hands,

  the crunch of mayflies underfoot,

  their lives’ single day;

  how many minutes does an unborn child

  outlive its mother

  in the chamber,

  it’s late, it’s raining, time to

  turn for home, the distance