|
The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, No. 1 & 2 (2006) reprinted by permission of Legal Studies Forum POETRY ____________________ ILYA KAMINSKY * 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 an empty page is the white flag of their surrender. If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through 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. [148]
DANCING IN ODESSA
Dancing in Odessa In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows, doves covered the main district, and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbor’s backyard, producing a four digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to the voice on the line. My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolley, a one armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country. Yet my country cannot be found, its citizens meet in a dream to conduct elections. He did not describe their faces, only a few names: Roland, Aladdin, Sinbad. [150]
In Praise of Laughter Where days bend and straighten in a city that belongs to no nation but all the nations of wind, she spoke the speech of poplar trees,— her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose composed odes to barbershops, drugstores. Her soul walking on two feet, the soul or no soul, a child’s allowance, she loved street musicians and knew that my grandfather composed lectures on the supply and demand of clouds in our country: the State declared grandfather an enemy of the people. He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat and danced naked on the table in front of our house— he was shot, and grandmother raped by the public prosecutor, who stuck his pen in her vagina, the pen which signed people off for twenty years. But in the secret history of anger—one man’s silence lives in the bodies of others—as we dance to keep from falling, between the doctor and the prosecutor: my family, the people of Odessa, women with huge breasts, old men naive and childlike— all our words, heaps of burning feathers that rise and rise with each retelling. [151]
Maestro What is memory? what makes a body glow: an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden —I write this now and I feel my body’s weight: the screaming girls, 347 voices in the story of a doctor saving them, his hands trapped under a wall, his granddaughter dying nearby— she whispers I don’t want to die, I have eaten such apples. He watches her mouth as a blind man reading lips and yells Shut up! I am near the window, I am asking for help! speaking, he cannot stop speaking, in the dark: of Brahms, Chopin he speaks to them to calm them. A doctor, yes, whatever window framed his life, outside: tomatoes grew, clouds passed and we once lived. A doctor with a tattoo of a parrot on his trapped arm, seeing his granddaughter’s cheekbones no longer her cheekbones, with surgical precision stitches suffering and grace: two days pass, he shouts in his window (there is no window) when rescue approaches, he speaks of Chopin, Chopin. They cut off his hands, nurses say he is “doing OK” —in my dream: he stands, feeding bread to pigeons, surrounded by pigeons, birds on his head, his shoulder, he shouts You don’t understand a thing! he is breathing himself to sleep, the city sleeps, there is no such city. [152]
Aunt Rose In a soldier’s uniform, in wooden shoes, she danced at either end of day, my Aunt Rose. Her husband rescued a pregnant woman from a burning house—he heard laughter, each day’s little artillery—in that fire he burnt his genitals. My Aunt Rose took other people’s children— she clicked her tongue as they cried and August pulled curtains evening after evening. I saw her, chalk between her fingers, she wrote lessons on an empty blackboard: her hand moved and the board remained empty. We lived in a city by the sea but there was another city at the bottom of the sea and only local children believed in its existence. She believed them. She hung her husband’s picture on a wall in her apartment. Each month on a different wall. I now see her with that picture, hammer in her left hand, nail in her mouth. From her mouth, a smell of wild garlic— she moves toward me in her pajamas arguing with me and with herself. The evenings are my evidence, this evening in which she dips her hands up to her elbows, the evening is asleep inside her shoulder—her shoulder rounded by sleep. [153]
My Mother’s Tango I now see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows— she rides a wild pony for my birthday, a white pony on the seventh floor— “And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!” the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks. At the center of my life: my mother dances, yes, in this poem, as in childhood, my mother asks to describe the stages of my happiness— she speaks of soups, she is of their telling. Between the regiments of saucers and towels, she moves so fast—she is motionless, opening and closing doors. But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony! My mother’s past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder. I draw an axis through the afternoon to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language— young, not young—my mother gallops a pony on the seventh floor. She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens what is shut, shuts what is open. [154]
American Tourist In a city made of seaweed we danced on a rooftop, my hands under her breasts. Subtracting day from day, I add this woman’s ankles to my days of atonement, her lower lip, the formal bones of her face. We were making love all evening— I told her stories, their rituals of rain: happiness is money, yes, but only the smallest coins. She asked me to pray: to bow towards Jerusalem. We bowed to the left, I saw two bakeries, a shoe store; the smell of hay, smell of horses and hay. When Moses broke the sacred tablets on Sinai, the rich picked the pieces carved with: “adultery” and “kill” and “theft,” the poor got only “No” “No” “No.” I kissed the back of her neck, an elbow, this woman whose forgetting is a plot against forgetting, naked in her galoshes she waltzed and even her cat waltzed. She said: “All that is musical in us is memory”— but I did not know English, I danced sitting down, she straightened and bent and straightened, a tremble of music a tremble in her hand. [155]
Dancing in Odessa We lived north of the future, days opened letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky. My grandmother threw tomatoes from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket over my head. I painted my mother’s face. She understood loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans. The night undressed us (I counted its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter touched my eyelid—I kissed the back of her knee. The city trembled, a ghost ship setting sail. And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew. He was an angel, he had no name, we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled, a ghost ship setting sail. At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived. We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream. At the local factory, my father took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth. The sun began a routine narration, whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving as the darkness spoke behind them. It was April, the sun washed the balconies. April. I retell the story the light etches into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me. [156]
MUSICA HUMANA
— an elegy for Osip Mandelstam [A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in case they were found by Furies with a search warrant.] While there is still some light on the page,[In Crimia, he gathered together rich ‘liberals’ and said to them strictly: On Judgment Day, if you are asked whether you understood the poet Osip Mandelstam; say no. Have you fed him?—You must answer yes.] I am reading aloud the book of my life on earth [158]
salt the rim of the glass; you[In summer 1924 Osip Mandelstam brought his young wife to St. Petersburg. Nadezhda was what the French call laide mais charmante. An eccentric? Of course he was. He threw a student down the staircase for complaining he wasn’t published, Osip shouting: Was Sappho? Was Jesus Christ?] Poet is a voice, I say, like Icarus, [159]
But on certain afternoons[He sat on the edge of his chair and dreamt aloud of good dinners. He composed his poems not at his desk but in the streets of St. Petersburg; he adored the image of the rooster tearing apart the night under the walls of Acropolis with his song. Locked up in the cell, he was banging on the door: “You have got to let me out, I wasn’t made for prison.”] Once or twice in his life, a man [160]
but there is joy of shape, there is [161]
[Nadezhda looks up from the page and speaks: Osip, Akhmatova and I were standing together when suddenly Mandelstam melted with joy: several little girls ran past us, imagining themselves to be horses. The first one stopped, impatiently asking: “Where is the last horsy?” I grabbed Mandelstam by his hand to prevent him from joining; and Akhmatova, too, sensing danger, whispered: “Do not run away from us, you are our last horsy.”] —as I die, I walk barefoot across my country, [162]
He believed in the human being. Could not[Osip had thick eyelashes, to the middle of his cheeks. We were walking along Prehistenka St., what we were talking about I don’t remember. We turned onto Gogol Boulevard, and Osip said, “I am ready for death.” At his arrest they were searching for poems, all over the floor. We sat in one room. On the other side of the wall, at a neighbor’s, a Hawaiian guitar was playing. In my presence the investigator found “The Wolf” and showed it to Osip. He nodded slightly. Taking his leave, he kissed me. He was led away at 7A.M.] At the end of each vision, Mandelstam [163]
Nadezhda, her Yes and No are difficult [164]
Musica Humana His name was Osip but, either jokingly or in disguise, we called him Ovid. As the story goes, Ovid was a rose thief. He stole dozens of roses from the public parks at night, hiding them in his coat, then selling them at the train station in the morning. Ovid became famous when he stole the Governor’s coat, and then sold it to the city’s Chief Judge. While at the Judge’s house, he stole a horse and went back to sell it to the Governor, mentioning that he saw the Judge wearing the stolen coat. The Governor saddled the stolen horse, galloping to its rightful owner to claim his own precious possession. As for Ovid, he moved to Argentina and became a cook. While soups overheated in a pot engraved with the word “obsession,” he sang himself to sleep between the stove and the table. “Cold Mint Cucumber Soup”
2 tablespoons butter 1 cup plain yogurt 1 onion (chopped) 1garlic clove 3 cucumbers (sliced) 2 tablespoons rice flour 2 cups chicken stock 2 tablespoons fresh mint (chopped) Salt and pepper.
Melt butter in a skillet with garlic, onion, cucumber; cook until
soft. Stir in stock. Blend, bring to boil, puree. Blend in mint, chill. Before
serving, stir in yogurt. Mix. “I will tell you a story,” Ovid would say. I would shake my head, no thank you. “Ah, a romantic boy with a barefoot heart! Never have you been buried in the earth or savored the delicious meat of sacrifice! Listen to a story— When, in his fifties, my uncle got sick, his two brothers went around the street with a “list of days.” They asked the neighbors to give him a day or two of their own lives and to sign their names next to it. When they asked Natalia, a young girl next door who was secretly in love with him, she wrote: “I am giving you all my remaining life,” and signed. Even his brothers tried to talk her out of it. They argued, voiced reasons: she would not listen. “All my remaining life,” she said. “That is my wish.” [165]
The next morning, my uncle was up with a smile on his face while the girl’s body was found at midday breathless in her own sweaty bed. The winter passed and then another winter. One by one the man’s friends began to die, he buried his own brothers. He abhorred his existence. Every Sunday we saw him at the market, trying the fruits with his thumb, buying a peach or a pear, muttering to himself. He only spoke to children. One night, he said, it seemed as if he heard a distant music. Amazed, he understood—it was the day of Natalia’s wedding, a choir in which she did not have a chance to sing. A year later, reading the Talmud, he stopped in the middle of a page, hearing a child’s cry. Lord, he whispered, her baby is due today—a happiness she will never know. Her life, hour after hour, steamed before him. He heard music once more, wondering if it was her second marriage or her own daughter’s early wedding. How many times he woke at night asking God to grant him death; but he lived. We saw him, each Sunday morning, at the market, buying fruit, counting the singles carefully. Once, in July, getting coins from his pocket to pay for a plum he began, violently, to rub his chest. He sat down on the pavement, whispering that he suddenly heard someone’s sickening scream. We understood. [166]
A Toast If you will it, it is no dream. — Theodore Herzl October: grapes hung like the fists of a girl gassed in her prayer. Memory, I whisper, stay awake. In my veins long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come right out of the eighteenth century Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination is the only word. Imagination! a young girl dancing polka, unafraid, betrayed by the Lord’s death (or his hiding under the bed when the Messiah was postponed). In my country, evenings bring the rain water, turning poplars bronze in a light that sparkles on these pages where I, my fathers, unable to describe your dreams, drink my silence from a cup. [167]
NATALIA
Natalia Her shoulder: an ode to an evening, such ambitions. I promise I will teach her to ride horses, we will go to Mexico, Angola, Australia. I want her to imagine our scandalous days in Odessa when we will open a small sweets shop—except for her lovers and my neighbors (who steal milk chocolate by handfuls) we will have no customers. In an empty store, dancing among stands with sugared walnuts, dried carnations, boxes upon boxes of mints and cherries dipped in honey, we will whisper to each other our truest stories because to fantasize is our custom. The back of her knee: a blessed territory, I keep my wishes there. [169]
As I open the Tristia, evening spreads its nets ________________________________________________
This poem begins: “Late January, the darkness is handwritten onto trees.” As I speak of her, she sits at the mirror, combing her hair. From her hair the water pours, the leaves fall. I undress her, my tongue passing over her skin. “Potatoes!” she tells me, “I smell like potatoes!” and I touch her lips with my fingers. [170]
On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed, ________________________________________________
I am going to stop this, I am going to stop quoting poems in my mind. She liked that, she carried banners protesting banners. Each night, she gave me beer and stuffed peppers. On a tape—she spoke and spoke and spoke; her speech rising to my shoulders, my brows. One button made her still. But her speech raised to my shoulders, my brows. [171]
“Let me kiss you inside your elbow, ________________________________________________
“I don’t need a synagogue,” you said, “I can pray inside my body.” You slept without covering yourself. I couldn’t tell departure from arrival. You spoke inside my twice averted words—you yelled when you opened the doors, and opened each door in silence. Someone else is on this page, writing. I attempt to move my fingers faster than she. [172]
We fell in love and eight years passed. ________________________________________________
(And suddenly) the joy of days entered me. She only danced under apricot trees in a public park, a curious woman in spectacles whose ambition was limited to apricot trees. I wrote: “I touched her ear with my lower lip.” She laughed as she read this, I read over her shoulder. I set my evening clock to the rhythm of her voice. [173]
Envoi “You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa” — a fortune teller, 1992 What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts, the birds force themselves into my lines— the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats. I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals, bless the sky inside his body, the sky my medicine, the sky my country. I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order. The wind, my master insists on the joy of poplars, swallows— bless one woman’s brows, her lips and their salt, bless the roundness of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern by which I live my life. You can see us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed and I am a man arguing with this woman among nightstands and tables and chairs. Lord, give us what you have already given. [174]
MY FATHER
BETWEEN YES AND
NO
My Father Between Yes and No Far North. December. A handful of light trembles and sings and trembles. I write to you from a place you have never been, our story older, more human. The porcelain years break into sense and forgiveness. Our cities slip into the dark. And I? I live alone, touch the words filling with slowness of afternoon. I imagine Ithaca: the high shores, clouds folding and unfolding, light settling on what we say and do. Soul, what has left but keeps arriving between me and my country, a glasswork of forgetting, I pray: we walk under the Lord. He cannot recall our names but the difficult sky comes down to what we say. (He bends over the table and writes, as if opening I imagined myself a caravella—in a room large enough for everything to be buried the boy sleeps; the silence draws through the streets, [176]
falls open. His father, in another room, unlights the lamp and leaves the world alone. Evening revolves on its pale axis. In this room, a bookcase is laden with stories of Don Quixote and Odysseus as they dance, holding their trousers up in this room full of rain for a boy about to awake, lighting a lamp over and over. A bookcase, a table, a prayer, a dry cheek: what opens, against all evidence, is unopened. In this room the living are asleep, the dead are unburied, thoughts passing through their hands. The boy sleeps in this room where the father would read aloud, unearthing the Russian speech so that the Cyrillics sparkle. The doors open and close and open and close and open— a boy turns and turns in his sleep. ▀ We lived by the sea, a province full of promise— candelabras, ancient arcades flood with the future of a Republic. Was it something in the air or something inside our heads? Or the sea’s dark, nervous influence? Love cities. This is what my father taught me, walking the streets half sleeping, singing ships swaying in the distance. The lamplight falls and follows my hand. Things give themselves away, a chair, a glass of wine small islands helplessly half flooded. I open the window, say in a low voice, my father. The rain begins far off and comes no closer. ‡ When you died, I saw Odysseus praying. The difficult man took the words like young girls, kissed their lips. [177]
In a dream, you stood on your knees, untouchable.My son, fame is a rescue that comes long after the ship is sunk. The war is over now, I have forgotten what city was under the siege. The cities sleeping are homesick and defenseless. At night, I raise my cup and toast the seagulls crying overhead. I don’t know how to live on Earth, Telemachus. I bless these gulls, my fierce political comrades. and mend the weeks of rain in my hands and drink the rain water to forget. I touch your forehead in order to remember. ▀ We lived under the auspices of apricot trees. When I read from Chapman’s Homer in the English neither of us could speak, father joked: “What is the difference between an Odessa Jew and an Englishman?” “An Englishman leaves without saying goodbye. The Odessa Jew says goodbye but doesn’t leave.” ▀ —because the true understanding is always silence: my father walks in the opposite direction of my journey: “It’s cold outside, close the window!” “If I close the window, will it be warmer outside?” but the sky was all around us once, we played chess with empty matchboxes— son of a waltzing father, father of a waltzing son [178]
waltzing away from himself he blessed me with his loneliness, a light winged being. —but my father comes from work to see my father translating Odyssey at the kitchen table, the even numbered pages are the wind, on the other pages: our bodies practice war against themselves. The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail. In my blood, a small ship slides on without a crew. ▀ The year I died, I wrote a psalm to the Lord, spoke his language, watched my body in its sleep. I recall: you stood—Beautiful!—your naked shoulder propping up the ruined world, birds came out of your head, growing to enormous size. That winter, I traveled: L.A., New York. The words I wrote hung like old pants that don’t fit. I sat on the train station, heard announcements, got on a wrong train, saw you, Lena, Abram —your bodies are broken toys. As Marina said: to love is to see a man in the form of God; not to love: to see instead a table, a chair. Chairs rule the world! an arm chair, a sofa, a flat seat, the government of plain wood. The dead return like seagulls, we laugh and laugh. First I lose my shirt. Then you turn, sprinkling seawater in my face. We will live! the city will give off light like a piece of crystal, the soil will pray, the water will have wings. (I am thinking of you as my memory cuts itself into vowels, the line opens on a shore, the sails. Stay awake. Send the [179]
photographs of the boy and your new poems to a province of gratitude, a train station where no trains arrive). As the night uncurls we discover light falling on the walls, from where? “Go into exile— write your Tristia,” a Gypsy fortune-teller laughs opening her dress. I recall her vowels filled with the rain. I escaped, yes—a butterfly in a parking lot or man in a parking lot, his chest full of yellow wings. I lived as though the city was on fire— faces from the metro followed me to the house and upstairs. There I sat, cataloging memories fragile as chrysanthemums on a wind. I turn back, laundry flattens on the balconies like sails, mornings full of light make my hands harden with language. It’s August. The sun begins a routine narration, whitening their bodies— mother, father dancing, moving as a darkness speaks behind them. It’s August. Light washes the balconies. August, the speech in my mouth thickens as a pear, dark sister of sweetness. I retell the story a light etches into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me. [180]
Praise [181]
Praise We were leaving Odessa in such a hurry that we forgot the suitcase filled with English dictionaries outside our apartment building. I came to America without a dictionary, but a few words did remain: Forgetting: an animal of light. A small ship catches a wind and sails. Past: Figures coming to the water’s edge, carrying lamps. Water is suspiciously cold. Many are standing on the shore, the youngest throwing hats in the air. Sanity: a barrier separating me from madness is not a barrier, really. A huge aquarium filled with water weeds, turtles, and golden fish. I see flashes: movements, names inscribed on the foreheads. A swift laugh: she leaned over, intrigued. I drunk too fast. Dead: entering our dreams, the dead become inanimate objects: branches, teacups, door handles. I wake and wish I could carry this clarity with me. [182]
Time, my twin, take me by the hand through the streets of your city; my days, your pigeons, are fighting for crumbs— ▀ A woman asks at night for a story with a happy ending. I have none. A refugee, 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. [183]
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. ▀ I believe in childhood, a native land of math exams that return and do not return, I see— 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. ▀ America! I put the word on a page, it is my keyhole. I watch the streets, the shops, the bicyclist, the oleanders. I open the windows of an apartment and say: I had masters once, they roared above me, Who are we? Why are we here? A lantern they carried still glitters in my sleep, —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 . [184]
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.” ▀ I was born in the city named after Odysseus and I praise no nation— to the rhythm of snow an immigrant’s clumsy phrases fall 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 a little finger, I have learned to see the past as Montale saw it the obscurer thoughts of God descending among a child’s drum beats, over you, over me, over the lemon trees. [185]
* Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004). Kaminsky also writes poetry in Russian. In the late 1990s, he co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization which sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad to help support relief organizations. Kaminsky has served as Writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and has taught poetry at numerous literary centers. He currently works as an attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid. He lives in Berkeley, Califonia. The poems here are, with one exception, are from Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004). The poems in Dancing in Odessa were previously published in Adirondack Review, American Literary Review, Born Maganzien, Canary River Review, Chapiteau Press, DMQ Review, HazMat Review, Mars Hill Review, New Republic, Poems From the Heron Clan Anthhology, PoetryMagazine.com, Pudding House Publications, Tikkun, Salmagundi, Southeast Review, Southwest Review, Sundress Publications, and Web Del Sol. |
