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
Time, my twin, take me by 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.
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,
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."
*
I was born in the city named after Odysseus
and I praise no nation
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
"Praise" previously appeared in Salmagundi
© All Copyright, Ilya Kaminsky.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.
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