Theodore Weiss

“I busy too,” the little boy said, lost in his book about a little boy, lost in his book, with nothing but a purple crayon and his wits to get him out. “Nobody can sit with me, I have no room. I busy too. So don’t do any noise. We don’t want any noise right now.” He leafs through once, leafs twice; the pictures, mixed with windy sighs, grow dizzy, world as difficult, high-drifting as the two-day snow that can not stop. How will the bushes, sinking deeper and deeper, trees and birds, wrapt up, ever creep out again? Any minute now the blizzard, scared and wild, the animals lost in it—O the fur, the red-eyed claws, crying for their home—may burst into the room. Try words he’s almost learned on them? He sighs, “I need a man here; I can’t do all this work alone.” And still, as though intent on reading its own argument, winter continues thumbing through itself.

“Your great-grandfather was . . .” And Mrs. C, our tart old Scots landlady, with her stomping legs, four bristles sprouted from her chin- wart, she who briskly chats away about Montrose, founder of her clan, as though she’s just now fresh from tea with him, regards you incredulously, a bastard gargoyle off some bastard architecture, one grown topsy-turvy: “Not to know your great-grandfather! How do you live? O you Americans!” She cannot see what freedom it affords, your ignorance, a space swept clear of all the clutter of lives lived. And yet who can dismiss her words entirely? It burdens too, this emptiness, pervasive presence not a room away that, no matter how you hammer at its wall, refuses to admit you. As though you woke and in a place you thought familiar, then had a sense (what is it that has been disturbed?) of one you never met yet somehow knew—looks echoing among the dusty pictures: that myopic glass reflecting, like a sunset lingered inside trees, a meditative smile: a breath warm to your cheek, your brow: the hand (whose?) moving on your blanket in a gesture that you fail to recognize yet know it as you know the taste through oranges of sun- light current in them still— then gone as you began to stir. And for a moment dawn seems lost as in a mist, seems wistful for a feeling it cannot achieve . . . the sun breaks through, an instant medleying the leaves.

The amities of morning and the buxom habits of birds that swing a bell-bright city in their intelligent wings; last night’s squall has drawn off like anger’s tide, the remote and muffled waters beating solitudinous rocks and murmurous in the hidden parts, ebbing and beating, of the mind as some half-forgotten name . . . the rain has withdrawn like the tents and the Greeks, like the hard-to-believe- in days of our childhood. Light moves, the whole massed flotilla of morning, kin to the upward flight of birds returning; and brutality, the hungers and the hatreds seem fabulous, seem members; the gouty rat and straggly root collaborate. Earth in wounds, deaths, decays— past hours its rutted crusts— with the billowy sky is the field- upon-field, and all one, of one master observing the various fruits: somewhere a child in a cage, inferior bodies making a passable road, a girl passionate with pain, an old man watching the earth escape like his once endless strengths, his poems head- long. And one fills with awe—as the town with morning, every cranny, the birds brimming fire- escapes and broken windows— that the earth like some wise breath never balked, a many- membered bird-flight, should include all, must be a terrible good. The eyes passing, contracted from night and war the stars undertook, finally emerge the topgallant of morning, and those eyes roam free as the Greeks: wherever a drop of water is, spindrift city of water gleaming, there is home.

Some seventy years later your father, sitting at your table over wine he savors, last rays mellow- ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt, Rifka. “Just naming her shoots rifles off again inside the morning square, rifles she aimed into the air for certain customers, the pigeons erupting.” Handsome, clever, but with little actual schooling, she, a Jewess, kept a shop in Moscow, stocking horse- and battle-gear, bustling all day long. Powders, braided with his laboring breath, still prickle inside his nostrils; like the wayward flickers cast by lazily swimming, naked limbs, leathers polished, buckles, gleam; and the oats banked in their bins, heavy August winds drowsed in them, at one glance, a single sniffing, bloom; the harnesses and bells, by gaslight starred, send out appeals, while sleighs collect for midnight junkets. He smitten with it all, like those officers of the Czar who, admiring her wit, her seasoned gaiety, forever jammed the shop. “Even the city’s metropolitan, young despite his full, black robes, took to dropping in on her, his jagged, bushy beard awag with chat. One balmy summer evening, I remember, the three of us, laughter brimming like wine (he turned his glass to the lessened light), relaxed in her snug flat. The next morning at breakfast, talk going on as if we’d never stop”— he, a startled look lit on his face, breaking in upon himself, exclaims, the pigeons crackling through the air— “My God, he spent the night with her!” He, sipping the last drop, sits back, as much as he’s amazed amused to see this special virtue of old age, the oats ripening only in slow time.

for Yehuda Amichai Though you live in a little country, crammed and crisscrossed with debris, the past oppressive many times over— where you buy your grapes David, pausing, eyes a fiery dark girl, a lusty song riding his breath, the old dance urgent at his body; where you buy your bread Christ, stumbling, stoops to heavy lumber— you insist on your own loves and griefs, on living your own life. So you love this city, but mainly as it goes on living its own life, across its roofs the lines flapping, not gaudy banners, but sheets and diapers, pants and slips, as if rehearsing private pleasures. And though you know you cannot win, you play the game with all the skill and love that you can muster, hoping to keep it, keep it going, whatever the fierceness in it, while you learn the repertoire of your opponent’s wrist, the repertoire your own commands, with every stroke surprising you, as in a woman’s glance the abundance glinting of her passion stored away. Those opposing roles, victor, victim both, when they require re-enacting, the moon as ever plays the luminous dome above your god-and-man-scarred rock, responsive to each nuance of the light informing it with this, the latest scene. The sweat you’ve shared between you, juices drying on your hands and moon- lit belly, swirls out of the rutted, stain- stiff sheets a fragrance stronger, more anointing, than the myrrh, the frank- incense the magi brought, a gleam that would eclipse their beaten gold.

Framed by our window, skaters, winding in and out the wind, as water reeling so kept in motion, on a well-honed edge spin out a gilded ceiling. Fish, reflecting glow for glow, saints around the sun, are frozen with amazement just one pane below. Skates flash like stars, so madly whirling one can hardly tell which is sky and which the watery floor ... one night two straitlaced couples, a footman over them, rode out in a dappled-horse-drawn sleigh onto the river, a moonlit lark. The ice broke and they—sleigh, footman and all—riding in state, rode straight on into the lidded water. That winter all winter folks twirled over them who—framed in lace, frost the furs, the shiny harness and their smiles the fire that keeps the place—sat benignly watching. “One foot out, one foot in, are we real,” thought one, “we who wander sheepishly in dreams, or they, the really sleepless eyes, under us? And every night who knows (a laughter troubles us like dreams) who skates (a thousand watch fires the stars) above, peering through the pane?”

... who can bear the idea of Eternal Recurrence? I Even as you went over, Nietzsche, in your last letter, as ever, you tried to reach him: “Dear Herr Professor, When it comes to it I too would very much prefer a professorial chair in Basel to being God; but I did not dare to go so far in my private egoism as to refrain for its sake from the creation of the world.” The past before him, the hateful present stifling no end of futures with noisy smoke, what could the Dear Herr Professor, magnificently sober Jacob Burckhardt, do or do for you; how thrust pitiful hands into what proclaimed itself a sacred solitude? Maybe too at times, syringa blowing through his classroom (gape- mouthed angels Paracelsus pressed into his lectures in this very room, throwing all Basel into an uproar and a hatred that finally drove him out, familiars also like a rout of mornings bickering to swell the retinue of Dr. Faustus after breakfast), trumpeting through the profundity of his pauses, maybe he could let that host, with nothing to lose in being, be themselves, especially as there sprang among them heroes out of Raphael with everything to gain. Even now Astorre the horseman, in the twinkle of that scholar eye, spurs quarrying the dark, falcon-plumed, plunges, a warrior of Heaven, to the rescue of a youth, fallen with copious wounds, by this aid exalted. II Alas, for all Astorre’s audacious charging down the margin of the page, the Professor’s age, parading with its Sunday family-walks and the thundrous drummers of Basel in trim, upholstered parks, benumbed him. What was there for him to do who saw his begetters, fighting men, furious, mighty in their pride, tumbled to such petty end? That beauty being slain on the high places in the midst of its noblest battle, should he, exclaiming, dare to tell it, publish it in the streets so prim and polished, to see the daughters of the philistines rejoice? He let you go, best emparadised, or so you said, in the sparkling shadow of a sword, retiring into frozen heights, a terrible loneliness, enhanced by sun. III At the end, rocks breaking their doors for you, out poured the shaggy men, hordes of flame and drunkenness. Solitude, dressed in winds and falcons, rang, a honeycomb of voices hailing: dancer David; Agamemnon, amethyst with proud and deadly twisting; Dr. Faustus; Borgia and Astorre, those human hours, sowing splendors with their wily wrists. The peaks, much moved, conscious of the love that guides by the same capricious path as stars the agony, the maggot’s tooth, hurtling to your beloved town, stormed its arcades past the drowsiest beds. God was dead, long live the gods. In that third-floor room, still going about in your academic jacket and down at heel, all the heavens rejoicing, laughing, lifting up your legs, into the middle of the rout you leaped, a satyr’s dance, as always, the conclusion of the tragic truth . . . IV You in what we are, alas, and by your effort that had to fail have reached us. And we go, perhaps as the Dear Herr Professor did, saddened that we cannot give ourselves, the Greeks at last, Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin too, surpassed by the resolution—not time could tame it, not the mob’s indifference—of your fury.

Once in late summer, the road already deep in twilight, mixing colors with some straggly wildflowers, I came to a village I did not know was there until I stepped into its narrow street. Admiring the prim, white houses nestled among their veteran, lofty trees, I found myself in a tiny square with a little dawdl- ing fountain and a rickety tower, its owlish clock absentmindedly counting minutes now and then. And in the fountain the face of morning seemed to linger as though searching. The air was fresh, breathing out the fragrances of a recent shower. I luxuriated in my senses, like meeting unexpectedly a pack of friends years and years unthought of, laden with all kinds of gifts. Then as I stopped to knock at the door of a house that had seemed occupied with happy noises, a silence fell on it, the light went out— and was it instant eyes like flakes, ten thousand, thousand flakes, and all unknowing, flurried round me? Wherever I turned I was met by the unmistakable accusation, “Stranger!” I, who had, I thought, begun here and who now required lodgings for the night, was denied and from the start.