Correspondences Read online

  to the surface, surely further than

  consciousness,

  it is not the haunting that makes us believe

  in their presence, but the cold absence,

  the sudden day a soul is too far off to be felt

  something wakes her,

  the vase of

  dusk iris on the bed-table:

  paper and water

  The smallest detail gives them away,

  the paper pulled from the typewriter, shoes

  beside the bed. Nothing must be

  too straight or neat.

  They came while I was out, Sachs explained,

  I knew it immediately, though they were

  as cunning as I, and left things

  exactly as they were.

  the morning light, the same crimson

  monks wear in Drepung or

  hanging in the windows of Lisbon,

  the pressback chair, the rug

  sewn from scraps, the face of a child

  torn from a magazine and tacked to the wall for her

  forsaken expression,

  the books on the plank-and-brick shelves,

  the hundreds of LPs, every orchestra and

  soloist in their cardboard

  sleeves with spectacular covers I spent

  my childhood living into,

  every particular of driftwood and stone,

  snowshoes, books on animal tracks, astronomical

  maps, the memoirs of political prisoners and

  Life with the Painters of La Ruche, edible

  plants and woodcraft, pages of tortured

  solace, survival in the wilderness;

  always, from the moment we arrived

  there you were, your spirit saturating

  every blessed molecule,

  even, exactly where you last left it,

  years before,

  an unbearable phrase of music

  in the air

  Not only what a soul remembers

  but all it forgets,

  as if all you know and all you don’t know

  have changed places;

  cloud shadow on the hills,

  the sudden downpour in the vale of Borrowdale,

  turning the blue slate black,

  bare arms in the rain;

  animals turned to stone in the blue lias beds;

  the name that can’t be understood

  without its story;

  the narrow-bladed paddle and

  all the water it displaces;

  the help and helplessness

  of love;

  the photos and the millions

  of indifferent eyes that have looked upon

  their shaven nakedness;

  the ghost life that lives itself

  beside us, the shadow of what happened

  and what didn’t happen;

  If ever I lose

  my memory of you, walk beside me

  like a stag; like a bird heard, unseen

  and then

  we came and you were no longer there

  everything in its place

  your presence gone

  we waited, went out, returned

  but still nothing held

  the light after rain,

  for I looked there too

  in the rain that fell

  you could not bear to stay, all

  a painting you cannot hear

  and yet

  a soul can make the wind blow,

  make light and shadow through the trees,

  through rain,

  can be as near as your own skin

  To listen as if the sea

  had stopped

  The scribe writes a language

  without vowels, the reader’s breath

  Celan read the river, his Seine

  sein, his

  must not be represented,

  must remain invisible,

  each word

  eine, one

  keine, no,

  none

  an oxygen tent, a shelter

  of consonants,

  water, a will rushing

  breath to set fire

  heaven, it is written, is a seine

  thrown into the sea

  to meaning

  as the seine draws in, a breath, we swim

  toward the net, not away

  the difference between end and

  and,

  as the sein, being, belonging to,

  draws near

  soiled and

  solid,

  draw

  men and

  mein

  me in,

  mein

  Sometimes we are led through the doorway

  by a child, sometimes

  by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

  the past, for if there is anything we must change

  it is the past. To look back

  and see another map.

  Love enough to fill

  a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,

  a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,

  a bit of chalk, a bit of

  bone in ash.

  All that is cupped,

  all that is emptied

  the rush of water from a pump,

  a word spelled out

  on a palm.

  their relationship to their bodies changed,

  bone, not flesh, containing the soul

  and when the natural order of flesh

  was restored, the place the soul was stored

  was not;

  too much

  soul left in the bone

  enough to fill

  a bit of light on the water

  the draw of the oar draws your name

  from the shore, a breath drawn

  each pull of your arm,

  “life called for us”

  scent, ascent, assent,

  opened by love

  the way a father gives birth

  for only a moment, we belong

  to ourselves, not to

  parents, nor yet to a lover,

  only to ourselves,

  and then gravity returns,

  the pull of other bodies

  as it should be

  as it must

  and Salomon next to Sachs

  and the girl from the orphan camp

  caught by Chim, whose every photo

  is a name fished out of a throat

  every typewriter key, every piece

  of clothing, a poem you remember word

  for word but

  will not recite

  earth enough to fill a shoe

  each word the reverse of a word

  as if to say

  the moment you stop believing in me

  I will disappear

  To name the world

  that contains this world

  the way night and morning

  are the same day

  perhaps there comes a time

  when the dead leave off mourning

  “I like to think the moon is there

  even if I’m not looking at it”

  the rain that held the light

  that fell, the rain that fell,

  the light that held

  this room

  and the love we lived here

  that which your memory last looked upon

  your task

  now, perhaps,

  to forget not us, but

  the details of us, and love

  again and love again, and love again,

  sealing the seam

  endlessly, one pressed to another,

  like metal folded over and again

  for strength, like

  pleated cloth gathered and pierced

  by the steel needle of that single moment

  of dying

  and you will come back to me

  and I will come back to you

  and all the world

  will be a sign

>   all the world and

  every thought, every

  drop of paint to make sunlight or

  love in a human eye, every word that

  passes through our breath,

  every weight we hold and carry, every

  grasp of hair, grasp of heat,

  every cupping and every emptying

  your warm hand and – both in mine –

  your soul’s hand above the hospital bed

  as if your sight erased sound

  from everything you beheld, a

  reaching and a wiping clear,

  a wave goodbye

  where there was a great mass of leaves roaring

  now only a shifting, swathing

  swell of green

  silence, like a fine mist

  gradually soaking through

  each word embedded,

  the mud of another country on its shoes,

  an upstairs lamp so we won’t bump our heads on

  darkness, each word a fall

  into inarticulate space, each word

  a stub, a placeholder for the

  inexpressible solute or solvent,

  the fragment that is every object, every

  cry, all the invisible freedoms

  contained in a pair of socks, in warm clothes,

  the infrastructure each object implies, of

  industry, experience, chance, corruption,

  loneliness, love; impossible to understand an object

  without its story,

  the brutal, the blessed particularity,

  I think of the poet who wrote sixty pages of

  rhyming verse fermented in classical philosophy and

  Hindu gods, each word a barricade (as I am now)

  against it; no matter what questions we build, whether

  war, or illness, no matter the syntax or

  mysticism, medical terms,

  historical analysis, no matter,

  because to touch

  means always

  the warm skin under the flannel shirt,

  the soft hair under the tweed cap,

  smell of wet pavement on that cool morning,

  the ragged book left open by the bed,

  every noun and verb a slow peristalsis

  through our understanding,

  each word so worn with use,

  wanting to keep the surface as simple as possible,

  without acrobatics or overstatement,

  as invisible as a landmark in the desert,

  the place where the bus driver releases the airlock,

  an exhalation, and the traveller with his sack

  steps down into the wilderness, an expanse

  of sand without any singularity to the foreign eye,

  though he walks resolutely,

  without hesitation, into it,

  knowing the way,

  based on a single grain, a slant of light,

  an angle, an intensity, a calibration of

  an ever-changing element, a body

  language, like the moment of

  looking into that face and finding

  yourself suddenly, or was it slowly

  or like the moment of

  looking into that face and finding

  yourself suddenly or was it slowly

  alone,

  who is that woman with the baby,

  pointing to me and to your grandchild

  and when your language ceased,

  a gap ever widening, swaying and closing, swaying and

  opening between us, every word with the

  inarticulation of the sea when there is

  no shore to break and therefore bring

  its rhythm, the swaying deck from which you

  reached out to that coffin, to that child,

  I began the piling of words,

  to dig myself out

  to dare myself

  that single word

  And, after the words, in the ache to be precise,

  numbers:

  6 avenue Emile Zola, Celan’s last flat

  directly across from Pont Mirabeau

  where he entered the water,

  2 weeks, when it was still believed he was alive,

  perhaps, his wife hoped, he has gone at last to Prague

  7 miles downstream, May

  1, when the fisherman drew him out.

  Sachs was told, bedridden in Stockholm –

  he has gone before me –

  dying the same day Celan was buried, May

  12, 1970, at the cemetery at Thiais, field

  31, row 12,

  followed shortly by Améry, whose grave

  is inscribed with his number,

  because long after flesh, stone might remember

  1941, 22 June, Grodno occupied

  30 June, the star enforced

  1942, 2 November, ghetto A sealed

  15 November, ghetto B, first deportation, 1,000

  770 to the chamber upon arrival

  2,000, 22 November, 1,467 to the chamber upon arrival

  1943, 13 February, 5:40 a.m., the transport from

  Lasosna, where my father swam as a child

  And Charlotte Salomon’s

  769 paintings, 1941 to 1943, in hiding, until

  1943 September, Nice to Drancy,

  7 October, Drancy to Auschwitz

  10 October 1943, upon arrival with her child

  5 unborn months old

  even the unborn have a number, the same number

  not given to the mother and all those

  not worth counting

  not two to make one,

  but two to make

  the third,

  just as a conversation can become

  the third side of the page

  To name the moment one life

  becomes another, the critical mass

  of consciousness that allows us to see

  one who might otherwise have remained

  a stranger

  the moment that enables Pessoa

  every beginning is involuntary

  to recognize Camus

  in the light the earth remains

  our first and last love. Our brothers breathe

  under the same sky as we; justice is a

  living thing. Now is born that strange joy which

  helps one to live and die, and which we shall

  never postpone to a later time

  to recognize Levi

  it is not my fault if I live and breathe,

  eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes

  to recognize Einstein

  if a person falls freely he will not feel

  his own weight

  to recognize Keller

  long ago I became convinced that the seeing

  see little

  and Akhmatova

  no foreign sky protected me,

  no stranger’s wing shielded my face.

  I stand as witness to the common lot,

  survivor of that time, that place

  and Kafka

  there is hope, but not for us

  Mandelstam, Améry, Schwarz-Bart,

  the burnt book, the drowned book,

  the buried book,

  the typewritten record, the handwritten

  witnessing,

  the precise waking that is born

  from the nightmare,

  and so,

  I beg you,

  come out of the night, just this night, and into

  the hallway,

  leave your boots

  by the door, where they will be safe

  here in the room of the lit window

  you saw from the street,

  each to smell their favourite dish

  each to hear his own language,

  her own song, mother and father

  tongue, mother and father

  reading under the lamp, the lost child

  asleep upstairs, the lover’s breast,

  the moth
er’s breast, the book open

  to the third side of the page

  They met at Zurich’s “Stork,”

  the stork that is the Greek hieroglyph

  for soul, the Greek stork that,

  at death, takes human form

  and brings children

  into the house and cares for the old,

  the Slavic stork carrying unborn souls to earth,

  the Hebrew stork meaning mercy,

  the German stork with its human spirit

  and its protection against fire,

  the stork, with its white wings dipped

  in black, the stork with its nest

  in the chimney

  Come, it’s time to set the table,

  dusk is bruised with rain, the water is alive

  under the wind, evening is

  upon us. Outside, the animals make their

  accommodation, the lake loses its reflection,

  settles deeper. Set down the brush

  on the saucer, leave off the book,

  open, with its words against the pillow.

  The washing of hands, the tea kettle,

  the whisky, stocking feet

  on the wooden floor. Help me carry

  the chairs, never enough chairs,

  through the narrow doorway, chairs

  borrowed from the sewing table,

  from the desk, from the work table –

  paint-spattered and mended with wire.

  Bring the piano bench. Find the perfect

  symphony for parsing vegetables into broth.

  No need for candles, we’ll see each other well enough

  in the dark. Draw close

  your father’s chair next to my father’s,

  and I’ll fetch a book for the orphan’s chair,

  so she can reach the table.

  And last, a chair for the mourner

  who accompanies the body, so the soul is never,

  not for a single moment, alone.

  The surface of the water

  cut and mended, cut and mended,

  scissored into endless fragments and joinings,

  places for the light to settle

  then drown, and settle again,

  a line break forever changing the word above