Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking
   "What year is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise.

Praise

   . . . but one day through the gate left half-open
   there are yellow lemons shining at us
   and in our empty breasts
   these golden horns of sunlight
   pour their songs.
                                   -- Montale

‡     ‡

I go home and become a ghost
searching the houses I lived in. They say--

the father of my father of his father of his father was a prince
who married a Jewish girl

against the Church's will and his father's will and
the father of his father. Losing all,

eager to lose: the estate, ships,
hiding this ring (his wedding ring), a ring

my father handed to my brother, then took. Handed,
then took, hastily. In a family album

we sit like the mannequins
of school-children

whose destruction,
like a lecture, is postponed.

Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging
this dream. Her love

is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries
in my mouth.

On my brother's head: not a single
gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son.
 
And my father is singing
to his six-year-old silence.

This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.
The darkness, a magician, finds quarters

behind our ears. We don't know what life is,
who makes it, the reality is thick

with longing. We put it up to our lips
and drink.

‡     ‡

the shore, the trees, a boy
running across the streets like a lost god;

the light falls, touching his shoulder.
Where memory, an old flautist,

plays in the rain and his dog sleeps, its tongue
half hanging out;

for twenty years between life and death
I have run through silence: in 1993 I came to America.

‡    ‡

two women strolling along the water front.
I open the windows of an apartment

and say: I had masters once, they roared above me,
Who are we? Why are we here?

the tales they told began with:
"mortality," "mercy."

A lantern they carried still glitters in my sleep,
confused ghosts who taught me living simply.

--in this dream: my father breathes
as if lighting a lamp over and over. The memory

is starting its old engine, it begins to move
and I think the trees are moving.

I unmake these lines, dissolving in each vowel,
as Neruda said, my country
 
I change my blood in your direction. The evening whispers
with its childlike, pulpy lips.

On the page's soiled corners
my teacher walks, composing a voice;

he rubs each word in his palms:
"hands learn from the soil and broken glass,

you cannot think a poem," he says,
"watch the light hardening into words."

‡     ‡

but the provinces of human longing:
to the rhythm of snow

an immigrant's clumsy phrase
falls into speech.

But you asked
for a story with a happy ending. Your loneliness

played its lyre. I sat
on the floor, watching your lips.

Love, a one legged bird
I bought for forty cents as a child, and released;

is coming back, my soul in reckless feathers.
O the language of birds

with no word for complaint! --
the balconies, the wind.

This is how, while darkness
drew my profile with its little finger,

I have learned to see past as Montale saw it,
The obscure thoughts of God descending

among a child's drum beats,
over you, over me, over the lemon trees.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, formerly the Soviet Union, and moved to the United States in 1993. His collection of poetry, Dancing In Odessa, won the 2002 Dorset Prize and will be published by Tupelo Press. He is also the author of Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). He has won the National Russian Essay Contest, the National Shepardi Prize for Poetry, and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine and Milton Center's Award to Excellence in Poetry. In 1999-2000, Kaminsky served as a George Bennett Fellow Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. His current work appears or is forthcoming in New Republic, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, Tikkun, and South East Review. Kaminsky also writes poetry in Russian and his work in that language was recently recognized at the 2001 Venice Biennial.
Kaminsky now serves as a law clerk for the Bay Area Legal Aid and for the National Immigration Law Center; he will graduate in May, 2004 from the University of California Hastings College of Law.
"Author's Prayer" first appeared in Mars Hill Review and "Praise" in Salmagundi. Both poems appear in Kaminsky's chapbook, Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002).