Map (7 page)

grain of sand, drop of water—

landscapes.

 

I won't retain one blade of grass

as it's truly seen.

 

Salutation and farewell

in a single glance.

 

For surplus and absence alike,

a single motion of the neck.

 

 

The two of them were left so long alone,

so much in un-love, without a word to spare,

what they deserve by now is probably

a miracle—a thunderbolt, or turning into stone.

Two million books in print on Greek mythology,

but there's no rescue in them for this pair.

 

If at least someone would ring the bell, or if

something would flare and disappear again,

no matter from where and no matter when,

no matter if it's fun, fear, joy, or grief.

 

But nothing of the sort. No aberration,

no deviation from the well-made plot

this bourgeois drama holds. There'll be a dot

above the “i” inside their tidy separation.

 

Against the backdrop of the steadfast wall,

pitying one another, they both stare

into the mirror, but there's nothing there

except their sensible reflections. All

 

they see is the two people in the frame.

Matter is on alert. All its dimensions,

everything in between the ground and sky

keeps close watch on the fates that we were born with

and sees to it that they remain the same—

although we still don't see the reason why

a sudden deer bounding across this room

would shatter the entire universe.

 

 

We treat each other with exceeding courtesy;

we say, it's great to see you after all these years.

 

Our tigers drink milk.

Our hawks tread the ground.

Our sharks have all drowned.

Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage.

 

Our snakes have shed their lightning,

our apes their flights of fancy,

our peacocks have renounced their plumes.

The bats flew out of our hair long ago.

 

We fall silent in midsentence,

all smiles, past help.

Our humans

don't know how to talk to one another.

 

 

They must have been different once,

fire and water, miles apart,

robbing and giving in desire,

that assault on one another's otherness.

Embracing, they appropriated and expropriated each other

for so long

that only air was left within their arms,

transparent as if after lightning.

 

One day the answer came before the question.

Another night they guessed their eyes' expression

by the type of silence in the dark.

 

Gender fades, mysteries molder,

distinctions meet in all-resemblance

just as all colors coincide in white.

 

Which of them is doubled and which missing?

Which one is smiling with two smiles?

Whose voice forms a two-part canon?

When both heads nod, which one agrees?

Whose gesture lifts the teaspoon to their lips?

Who's flayed the other one alive?

Which one lives and which has died

entangled in the lines of whose palm?

 

They gazed into each other's eyes and slowly twins emerged.

Familiarity breeds the most perfect of mothers—

it favors neither of the little darlings,

it scarcely can recall which one is which.

 

On this festive day, their golden anniversary,

a dove, seen identically, perched on the windowsill.

 

 

Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink

on ordinary paper: they weren't given food,

they all died of hunger.
All. How many?

It's a large meadow. How much grass

per head?
Write down: I don't know.

History rounds off skeletons to zero.

A thousand and one is still only a thousand.

That
one
seems never to have existed:

a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,

a primer opened for no one,

air that laughs, cries, and grows,

stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,

no one's spot in the ranks.

 

It became flesh right here, on this meadow.

But the meadow's silent, like a witness who's been bought.

Sunny. Green. A forest close at hand,

with wood to chew on, drops beneath the bark to drink—

a view served round the clock,

until you go blind. Above, a bird

whose shadow flicked its nourishing wings

across their lips. Jaws dropped,

teeth clattered.

 

At night a sickle glistened in the sky

and reaped the dark for dreamed-of loaves.

Hands came flying from blackened icons,

each holding an empty chalice.

A man swayed

on a grill of barbed wire.

Some sang, with dirt in their mouths.
That lovely song

about war hitting you straight in the heart.

Write how quiet it is.

Yes.

 

 

Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper, with these words: “Somebody save me! I'm here. The ocean cast me on this desert island. I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I'm here!”

“There's no date. I bet it's already too late anyway. It could have been floating for years,” the first fisherman said.

“And he doesn't say where. It's not even clear which ocean,” the second fisherman said.

“It's not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere,” the third fisherman said.

They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That's how it goes with universal truths.

 

 

Hear the ballad “Murdered Woman

Suddenly Gets Up from Chair.”

 

It's an honest ballad, penned

neither to shock nor to offend.

 

The thing happened fair and square,

with curtains open, lamps all lit:

 

passersby could stop and stare.

 

When the door had shut behind him

and the killer ran downstairs,

she stood up, just like the living

startled by the sudden silence.

 

She gets up, she moves her head,

and she looks around with eyes

harder than they were before.

 

No, she doesn't float through air:

she steps on the ordinary,

wooden, slightly creaky floor.

 

In the oven she burns traces

that the killer's left behind:

here a picture, there shoelaces,

everything that she can find.

 

It's obvious that she's not strangled.

It's obvious that she's not shot.

She's been killed invisibly.

 

She may still show signs of life,

cry for sundry silly reasons,

shriek in horror at the sight

of a mouse.

                     Ridiculous

traits are so predictable

that they aren't hard to fake.

 

She got up like you and me.

 

She walks just as people do.

 

And she sings and combs her hair,

which still grows.

 

 

He glanced, gave me extra charm

and I took it as my own.

Happily I gulped a star.

 

I let myself be invented,

modeled on my own reflection

in his eyes. I dance, dance, dance

in the stir of sudden wings.

 

The chair's a chair, the wine is wine,

in a wineglass that's the wineglass

standing there by standing there.

Only I'm imaginary,

make-believe beyond belief,

so fictitious that it hurts.

 

And I tell him tales about

ants that die of love beneath

a dandelion's constellation.

I swear a white rose will sing

if you sprinkle it with wine.

 

I laugh and I tilt my head

cautiously, as if to check

whether the invention works.

I dance, dance inside my stunned

skin, in his arms that create me.

 

Eve from the rib, Venus from foam,

Minerva from Jupiter's head—

all three were more real than me.

 

When he isn't looking at me,

I try to catch my reflection

on the wall. And see the nail

where a picture used to be.

 

 

Titanettes, female fauna,

naked as the rumbling of barrels.

They roost in trampled beds,

asleep, with mouths agape, ready to crow.

Their pupils have fled into flesh

and sound the glandular depths

from which yeast seeps into their blood.

 

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough

thickens in troughs, baths steam, wines blush,

cloudy piglets careen across the sky,

triumphant trumpets neigh the carnal alarm.

 

O pumpkin plump! O pumped-up corpulence

inflated double by disrobing