Map (10 page)

“It's only me, let me come in.

I want to enter your insides,

have a look round,

breathe my fill of you.”

 

“Go away,” says the stone.

“I'm shut tight.

Even if you break me to pieces,

we'll all still be closed.

You can grind us to sand,

we still won't let you in.”

 

I knock at the stone's front door.

“It's only me, let me come in.

I've come out of pure curiosity.

Only life can quench it.

I mean to stroll through your palace,

then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.

I don't have much time.

My mortality should touch you.”

 

“I'm made of stone,” says the stone,

“and must therefore keep a straight face.

Go away.

I don't have the muscles to laugh.”

 

I knock at the stone's front door.

“It's only me, let me come in.

I hear you have great empty halls inside you,

unseen, their beauty in vain,

 

soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.

Admit you don't know them well yourself.”

 

“Great and empty, true enough,” says the stone,

“but there isn't any room.

Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste

of your poor senses.

You may get to know me, but you'll never know me through.

My whole surface is turned toward you,

all my insides turned away.”

 

I knock at the stone's front door.

“It's only me, let me come in.

I don't seek refuge for eternity.

I'm not unhappy.

I'm not homeless.

My world is worth returning to.

I'll enter and exit empty-handed.

And my proof I was there

will be only words,

which no one will believe.”

 

“You shall not enter,” says the stone.

“You lack the sense of taking part.

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.

Even sight heightened to become all-seeing

will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,

only its seed, imagination.”

 

I knock at the stone's front door.

“It's only me, let me come in.

I haven't got two thousand centuries,

so let me come under your roof.”

 

“If you don't believe me,” says the stone,

“just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.

Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.

And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.

I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,

although I don't know how to laugh.”

 

I knock at the stone's front door.

“It's only me, let me come in.”

 

“I don't have a door,” says the stone.

 

 

 

 

NO END OF FUN

 

1967

 

 

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?

For a drink of written water from a spring

whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?

Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?

Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,

she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.

Silence—this word also rustles across the page

and parts the boughs

that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

 

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,

are letters up to no good,

clutches of clauses so subordinate

they'll never let her get away.

 

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply

of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,

prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,

surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

 

They forget that what's here isn't life.

Other laws, black on white, obtain.

The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,

and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,

full of bullets stopped in midflight.

Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.

Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,

not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

 

Is there then a world

where I rule absolutely on fate?

A time I bind with chains of signs?

An existence become endless at my bidding?

 

The joy of writing.

The power of preserving.

Revenge of a mortal hand.

 

 

Memory's finally found what it was after.

My mother has turned up, my father has been spotted.

I dreamed up a table and two chairs. They sat.

They were mine again, alive again for me.

The two lamps of their faces gleamed at dusk

as if for Rembrandt.

 

Only now can I begin to tell

in how many dreams they've wandered, in how many crowds

I dragged them out from underneath the wheels,

in how many deathbeds they moaned with me at their side.

Cut off, they grew back, but never straight.

The absurdity drove them to disguises.

So what if they felt no pain outside me,

they still ached within me.

In my dreams, gawking crowds heard me call out Mom

to a bouncing, chirping thing up on a branch.

They made fun of my father's hair in pigtails.

I woke up ashamed.

 

So, finally.

One ordinary Friday night

they suddenly came back

exactly as I wanted.

In a dream, but somehow freed from dreams,

obeying just themselves and nothing else.

In the picture's background possibilities grew dim,

accidents lacked the necessary shape.

Only they shone, beautiful because just like themselves.

They appeared to me for a long, long, happy time.

 

I woke up. I opened my eyes.

I touched the world, a chiseled picture frame.

 

 

In the old master's landscape,

the trees have roots beneath the oil paint,

the path undoubtedly reaches its goal,

the signature is replaced by a stately blade of grass,

it's a persuasive five in the afternoon,

May has been gently, yet firmly, detained,

so I've lingered, too. Why, of course, my dear,

I am the woman there, under the ash tree.

 

Just see how far behind I've left you,

see the white bonnet and the yellow skirt I wear,

see how I grip my basket so as not to slip out of the painting,

how I strut within another's fate

and rest awhile from living mysteries.

 

Even if you called I wouldn't hear you,

and even if I heard I wouldn't turn,

and even if I made that impossible gesture

your face would seem a stranger's face to me.

 

I know the world six miles around.

I know the herbs and spells for every pain.

God still looks down on the crown of my head.

I still pray I won't die suddenly.

War is punishment and peace is a reward.

Shameful dreams all come from Satan.

My soul is as plain as the stone of a plum.

 

I don't know the games of the heart.

I've never seen my children's father naked.

I don't see the crabbed and blotted draft

that hides behind the Song of Songs.

What I want to say comes in ready-made phrases.

I never use despair, since it isn't really mine,

only given to me for safekeeping.

 

Even if you bar my way,

even if you stare me in the face,

I'll pass you by on the chasm's edge, finer than a hair.

 

On the right is my house. I know it from all sides,

along with its steps and its entryway,

behind which life goes on unpainted.

The cat hops on a bench,

the sun gleams on a pewter jug,

a bony man sits at the table

fixing a clock.

 

 

No one in this family has ever died of love.

No food for myth and nothing magisterial.

Consumptive Romeos? Juliets diphtherial?

A doddering second childhood was enough.

No death-defying vigils, love-struck poses

over unrequited letters strewn with tears!

Here, in conclusion, as scheduled, appears

a portly, pince-nez'd neighbor bearing roses.

No suffocation-in-the-closet gaffes

because the cuckold returned home too early!

Those frills or furbelows, however flounced and whirly,

barred no one from the family photographs.

No Bosch-like hell within their souls, no wretches

found bleeding in the garden, shirts in stains!

(True, some did die with bullets in their brains,

for other reasons, though, and on field stretchers.)

Even this belle with rapturous coiffure

who may have danced till dawn—but nothing smarter—

hemorrhaged to a better world,
bien sûr,

but not to taunt or hurt
you,
slick-haired partner.