Ilya Kaminsky

Running down Vasenka street my clothes in a pillowcase I was looking for a man who looks exactly like me so I could give him my Sonya, my name, my clothes. Running down Vasenka street with my lips moving, one of those who run from the trolley that bursts like an intestine in the sun, those who lock the door, lock it with the second key, and who try to speak, stutter but try to speak. A wife screams as if she were in labor

Yet I am. I exists. I has a body, When I see my wife’s slender boyish legs the roof of my mouth goes dry. She takes my toe in her mouth. Bites lightly. How do we live on earth, Mosquito? If I could hear you what would you say? Your answer, Mosquito! Above all, beware of sadness on earth we can do —can’t we?— what we want.

Motionless forgetful music of women and men

Each man has a quiet that revolves around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka and toast the gray wall. I say we were never silent. We read each other’s lips and said one word four times. And laughed four times in loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncover the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair. And whoever listens to me: being there, and not being, lost and found and lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue, thank you for our argument that ends, thank you for my deafness, Lord, such fire from a match you never lit.

Love cities , this is what my brother taught me as he cut soldiers’ hair, then tidied tomatoes watching Sonya and I dance on a soapy floor— I open the window, say in a low voice, my brother. The voice I do not hear when I speak to myself is the clearest voice. But the sky was all around us once. We played chess with empty matchboxes, he wrote love letters to my wife

I remember Tony arguing in front of his mirrors, the soldiers were painting the trees, Tony sat on the floor of white hair, and all the trees were painted white. And he spat at Alfonso’s irony, but when they played accordion, the fourth among us had no name. “I am not sleeping with Tony! He simply cuts my hair!” —but our dinner is a tiny blue fish and, with my lean brother-in-law, we are playing cards. I pull spade after spade after spade but this skinny sparrow, this barber no simple soul, takes me with his fingers by my nose and kisses me, quickly, on the lips! When Tony washed my hair, when Alfonso kissed between my toes, when my lips trembled, when the fourth one laughed, when Tony slept, slept in the earth, on the empty streets of our district, a bit of wind called for the life which no one knew, a life which daily took all of us: my neighbor taken, his wife taken, their apartment quiet. I say this slowly, as if unaffected: their apartment quiet, on the floor, dirty water from their boots.

It is December 8 and my brother Tony was killed by the soldiers. December 8 and the police are reopening the Southern Trolleyways. December 8 when my wife lifts Tony’s body from the ground, his arm tied over her shoulder—her face is damp, her hair dirty. And the soldiers unveil the damn Trolleyways, and I stand feeling (a quick march of bumps across my back and thighs) nothing. When she comes home, I run a bath for Sonya and wash her hair, gently mixing the finest of my brother’s shampoos with quiet precision, while Sonya cries and cries.

I kissed a woman whose freckles aroused our neighbors. Her trembling lips meant come to bed. Her hair falling down in the middle of the conversation meant come to bed. I walked in my hospital of thoughts. Yes, I carried her off to bed on the chair of my hairy arms. But parted lips meant kiss my parted lips, I read those lips without understanding soft lips meant kiss my soft lips. Such is a silence of a woman who speaks against silence, knowing silence is what moves us to speak.

Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air, a story sung by those who danced before the Lord in quiet. Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that rise with no protection but each other’s ears. We are on our bellies in this silence, Lord. Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection. Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand. For the secret of patience is his wife’s patience Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat, he who loved roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and her forgetting, a man with a fast heartbeat, a woman dancing with a broom, uneven breath. Let them borrow the light from the blind. Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle. What is silence? Something of the sky in us. There will be evidence, there will be evidence. Let them speak of air and its necessities. Whatever they will open, will open.

Watch — Vasenka citizens do not know they are evidence of happiness in a time of war, each is a ripped-out document of laughter. God, deaf  have something to tell that not even they can hear — you will find me, God, like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am pecking every way at astonishment. If you climb a roof in the Central Square of a bombarded city, you will see my people and me — one neighbor thieves a cigarette another gives a dog a pint of sunlit beer.