209 Nostalgia poems

To go to Lvov. Which station for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew gleams on a suitcase, when express trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September or in March. But only if Lvov exists, if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just in my new passport, if lances of trees —of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud like Indians, and if streams mumble their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs in the Russian language disappear into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave without a trace, at noon, to vanish like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas of a Venetian café, the snails converse about eternity. But the cathedral rises, you remember, so straight, as straight as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket full of raspberries standing on the floor, and my desire which wasn’t born yet, only gardens and weeds and the amber of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro. There was always too much of Lvov, no one could comprehend its boroughs, hear the murmur of each stone scorched by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike that of the cathedral, the Jesuits baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew, grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills revolving by themselves, in blue teapots, in starch, which was the first formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window. The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets of nuns sailed like schooners near the theater, there was so much of the world that it had to do encores over and over, the audience was in frenzy and didn’t want to leave the house. My aunts couldn’t have known yet that I’d resurrect them, and lived so trustfully; so singly; servants, clean and ironed, ran for fresh cream, inside the houses a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski came as a visiting lecturer, one of my uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why, dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much of Lvov, it brimmed the container, it burst glasses, overflowed each pond, lake, smoked through every chimney, turned into fire, storm, laughed with lightning, grew meek, returned home, read the New Testament, slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug, there was too much of Lvov, and now there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners as always in May, without mercy, without love, ah, wait till warm June comes with soft ferns, boundless fields of summer, i.e., the reality. But scissors cut it, along the line and through the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked diligently, as in a child’s cutout along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan. Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched, cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees fell soundlessly, as in a jungle, and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death awaits you, why must every city become Jerusalem and every man a Jew, and now in a hurry just pack, always, each day, and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all it exists, quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere.

I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. You have been mine before,— How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow's soar Your neck turn'd so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore. Has this been thus before? And shall not thus time's eddying flight Still with our lives our love restore In death's despite, And day and night yield one delight once more?

I am so lonely for the twentieth century, for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti of armed men and the beautiful bridges that make them so small and carry them into the hearts of cities written like words across nothing, the dense void history became in my beautiful century. When a man talks reason, he postpones something. He gets in the way of a machine that knows him for the sad vengeance he is, somewhere close to the bald name of his city. "New York" means "strike back." "Attica" means "strike back" and so does anyplace in the world in the huge eyes and tender hands of my century. I went to the capital. I had a banner, and there were thousands of people like me. There was an airplane, and for a moment heavy with laurel and sprays of peach blossom something that has never happened before stretched like a woman's shadow on a hedge between the plane and the people who saw it flying. It was the real name of the century. It told everyone to strike back until there was no reason in the world except a machine stalled overhead that knows everyone and is as delicate as peach blossom. But the poor years come too late.

That autumn was abundant In Istanbul the ancient and platinum Women with their faces covered and discovered My grandfather arrived on foot to this Ottoman city From the desolate Sebastopol and from other burned villages, From the bloody snow. He spoke about its minarets Certainly he loved the fields of leaves. Autumn, like a river or a glowing bonfire And I don't know where he went to pray, Or perhaps he no longer did so in the city of the sultans But I know in his mouth he carried a needle Noble metaphor of his trade. Perhaps he wandered astonished throughout lovely Istanbul Searching for sustenance or clients Perhaps inclined, he entered one of the thousand mosques Where he prayed While the clocks stood still, Geographies were erased. Because the city was merely a golden breeze falling upon the leaves A multitude of lights upon the holy minarets, My grandfather, A Jewish tailor also took refuge in Istanbul Also another small Jewish city Among the thresholds of history.

Once we were in the loop . . . slick with information and the luster of good timing. We folded our clothes. Once we stood up before the standing vigils,before the popping vats,before the annotated lists of marshaled forces with their Venn diagrams like anxious zygotes, their paratactic chasms . . .before the set of whirligig blades, modular torrent. We folded our clothes. Once we remembered to get up to pee . . . and how to pee in a gleaming bowl . . . soaked as we were in gin and coconut, licorice water with catalpa buds, golden beet syrup in Johnny Walker Blue and a beautiful blur like August fog, cantilevered over the headlands . . . We tucked into the crevices of the mattress pad twirling our auburn braids, or woke up at the nick of light and practiced folding our clothes. Our pod printed headbands with hourly updates, announcing the traversals of green-shouldered hawks through the downtown loop, of gillyfish threading the north canals, of the discovery of electron calligraphy or a new method of washing brine. We smoothed our feathers like birds do, and twitched ourselves into warm heaps, and followed the fourth hand on the platinum clocks sweeping in arcs from left to right, up and down, in and out . . . We were steeped in watchfulness, fully suspended, itinerant floaters — ocean of air — among  the ozone lily pads and imbrex domes, the busting thickets of nutmeg, and geode malls. At night we told stories about the future with clairvoyant certainty. Our clothing was spectacular and fit to a T. We admired each other with ferocity.

I gcead do Kobus Moolman Poor deleted Tarragona, our city of bonfires. Our city of casual drug use and vinyl that’s been consigned to the archive of snow. What what what’s missing, what’s conspicuous by its absence from the main square and its tributaries: the future perfect or future continuous? I can’t find that beautiful thing you asked me for. I can’t find my memory of making it. When that device was triggered in Placa del Pi at first no one noticed anything. But then the different parts of speech began to shrivel and petrify, to disappear completely; interjections, measure words gone within a fortnight. We’d open our mouths to utter them but nothing. Shortly after that came the battalions, marching in ebony lockstep across a border we’d misplaced, had long ago forgotten ever existed. They just appeared one Sunday in their expressionless squadrons, they appeared like chimes solidifying in their obsidian fatigues. They occupied Jew Hill, the barracks, the Generality. By then all the hard-edged abstract words had rotted, had grown 
incontinent and squelching, as the canker advanced with terminal 
facility from diamantine epidermis to pulpy interior. No plums anymore. When they come they come in the predawn to confiscate recollection, targeting random apartments in the sour-milk light, each wears a helmet. No sausages. No . None of those lavender-remembering pears I’d bring in baskets for you every October. They’re unscrewing the street signs on and Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of I can’t find my memory of they can’t

“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.

All the kids came rumbling down the wood tenement Shaky stairs, sneakers slapping against the worn Tin tread edges, downhall came Pepo, Chino, Cojo, Curly bursting from the door like shells exploding Singing "I'm a Rican Doodle Dandy" and "What shall We be today, Doctors or Junkies, Soldiers or Winos?" Pepo put a milk crate on a Spanish Harlem johnny pump And drops opened like paratroopers carrying war news. Then Urban Renewal attacked the pump, cleared the slums Blamed Puerto Rico and dispersed the Spies, blasting Them into the Army or Anywhere Avenue in the Bronx. And nobody, but nobody, came back from that summer. Just as Korea was death in service to the warring Nation The Bronx was death in service to the negligent Nation

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye. Mull was astern, Rum on the port, Eigg on the starboard bow; Glory of youth glowed in his soul; Where is that glory now? Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye. Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone! Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that's gone! Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye. Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun, All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone.

My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whale bones: heirlooms from sea funerals. His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic, he froze women in his embrace. His wife thawed into stony water, her old age a clear evaporation. This heirloom, his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson, generations of snowmen on my back. They tap every year on my window, their voices hushed to ice. No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman, that I’ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.