502 War poems

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain, Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.

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.

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.

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

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.

Motionless forgetful music of women and men

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.

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

Don’t forget this: Men who live in this time remember the price of each bottle of vodka. Sunlight on the canal outside the train-station. With the neighbor’s ladder, my brother Tony “Mosquito” and I climb the poplar in the public garden with one and a half bottles of vodka and we drink there all night. Sunlight on a young girl’s face, asleep on the church steps. Tony recites poems, forgets I cannot hear. I watch the sunlight in the rearview mirror of trolleys as they pass. Don’t forget this. There sat in the poplar two brothers, the barber and podiatrist, in love with the same woman. They drank there and recited each poem they knew. Not a soul noticed: notasoul.

“You must speak not only of great devastation but of women kissing in the yellow grass!” I heard this not from a great philosopher but from my brother Tony