The Word
When you moved farther
out among terrifying constellations
and left me on this side of the Jordan
you took a half-finished homeland with you.
I became a heap of lost bones
gnawed by vultures and hyenas
and burnished by wind and sand.
But what remained of my rib-cage
retained what the akward one understood.
And what really is myself in me
didn’t give up. This lost flickering flame
has roved on dusty roads,
being neither dust nor roads,
to seek you, my kin.
I wanted to lay my old-fashioned word
in your dreams, without awaking you, whispering:
Creation is not yet finished.
And it’s you it’s hoping for.
I imagine how you turn in your sleep，
your hands grasping empty air
as if defending themselves.
But why do so many of you lie,
helplessly pressed against one another,
on some kind of beds made of filthy boards?
And why are you so emaciated?
I want to spread in you what I’ve understood
like rings on sleeping water.
But why is the water so dark?
And why does it quiver all the time?
Arioso
Turned into flames I dashed out
from the library in Alexandria.
The nine rolls of papyrus that had contained me,
still crackling of jilted love,
were turned into sparks and rising flakes.
And I died a second time.
Fragments of me were left as quotes.
My word for heaven grabbed a learned pedant
clinging firmly to his desk
when the blue suddenly deepened into blue.
A pronoun used in a strange way
bewitched a grammarian. The word
written in gold and green ─ a beetle!─
opened its wing sheats and rose
to carry its context through centuries.
Other fragments of what was Sappho
were left as flakes on those who passed by
“to call back the one she long had loved”.
Words that scorched the wind: What did you want with me
when I was split like a log of wood,
“shaking from desire and suddenly weak-kneed”?
Yes, my intoxication remained,
spared by fire, its brother,
and found refuge with a lonely woman
in the green light from an oil lamp
soughing in the evening among startled crane-flies.
She scribbled poetry on torn-off scraps of paper.
Looked up when someone shouted: Emily!
─ for a moment defenceless.
Then my dizziness flew into her head.
The ringing in what were my ears
took place in hers
and I sweated in her skin
at the thought of the loved one.
I may not have understood her language
and the pain from the kidneys wasn’t mine.
But her shiver required no translation,
nor did the sudden blush
that was felt far down the neck.
The power of signs
You know me as Yan Zhenqing,
Master of the upright brush.
But the emperor had another use for me.
Rebellions tore the country apart at that time.
Sons took their knives to their fathers
and women were torn open like chickens.
The reality we had inherited fell apart.
Yes, even the moon was burnt to ashes.
My courage during the resistance
had made me a minister.
But my straight criticism of corrupt courtiers
aroused the anger of the highest councilor.
He sent me to reprove
Li Xili, leader of the rebellion,
and pay with my life for that affront.
But Li wanted to buy me over. It’s told
that he lit a pyre in the yard,
threatening to throw a no into the fire.
And that I gained his respect
when I voluntarily approached the flames.
What really happened memory wishes to erase.
My style which I found when after fifty
will tell you all about this.
Soft is the beginning and end of a brush stroke,
soft like the woman I had long loved.
But the sign has a warrior’s body.
Only thus, script is capable of intervening.
I was now lodged on the tip of my bowing blade of grass.
The last night in the Longxing monastery
I wrote, waiting for the executioner.
The straight, matter-of-fact script
restored the meanings of plundered words.
It forced the ashes again to become moon,
filled the pond to serve as its mirror
and returned his arms to Buddha in the monastery.
Those who came to strangle me
were frightened by the power of the signs.
The Sibyl
My one wish is to be allowed to die.
My wish was denied, since the beginning of time.
I hang here, upside-down, in my bottle
like a sleeping bat in its cave.
Since I’ve been at it so long
I’m supposed to know the future─
that’s a logic as topsy-turvy as the skirt
falling over my breast
exposing my withering genitals to the world.
It’s the past being written on my skin.
I’ve seen my children and grandchildren die
and their grandchildren’s grandchildren disappear.
My eyes have been dried out by tears
into pellets of senseless bone. And my heart
─ it’s of wrinkled leather─
beats only once a minute.
Helpless I perceive how the centuries pass
drowned in blood and excrement
and shivering from the terror of children.
The world seems to have the same brown color
as my body and my worn skirt
as if I were part of its creation.
Yes, perhaps you are all my children,
I can’t remember. I hear you suffer
but can’t lift a finger
in your defence. All I dare hope for
is that sweat and tears shall mist over the glass
so that I shall be spared the sight.
If only this persistent tone,
so high that only I and the dogs can hear it,
wouldn’t torment me with its hope.
Chorus
We were the ones that were blinded early,
who sought out the Sun’s yard
to steal his horses for you
but were caught in the stable door─
we still stagger, our arms of darkness
raised to protect our scorched eyes.
Remember us.
We were the slaves that rose
against the shining helmets
covering but greed under the metal.
We tried to rescue women and children,
stooping under centuries of stone,
stone for the building of the victors’ history.
And we were nailed on cross upon cross
along the road from Rome to Capua.
Remember us.
It was we who harvested cotton in the fields
even at night after we had fallen
and gave you the privilege to dream.
Our faces are a piece of the darkness.
Remember us.
We are those who were strangled by steel wire
after a failed attempt to assassinate the dictator
but had time to breathe our hope into you.
Remember us.
We are the people without a name ─
it’s you who have borrowed our names.
Nor do we have any graves ─
it’s you who have the right to die.
Evangelist
A haze lit by the sun
moves across the Sea of Galilee
where we stand in the leaning boat,
slowly, slowly drawing up our net.
The rail is dangerously close to the water
when the floundering glitter tears across the floor.
No, this isn’t fish─ it’s the souls of human beings.
This is the hard year 1749
when my sight gets lost among the pains.
It’s then I gather all my catch,
my whims and the glittering thoughts of others,
sighs, memories and scaly wrath
into a mass groping for the coat-tail
of him whom, for lack of words, we call God.
I know that when I’ve ceased breathing
there will be no notices in the German papers.
And later on, when tormented consciences
seek me they shall find no Bach.
Friends who poured through our home
kept nagging me: Write down your memories.
Didn’t they understand that I had done that?
All I have been and all I remember
have been written into my score
like a heart placed in the floor of the cathedral,
like a chest joint to its vault.
You wish to press upon me an instructive biography,
a body with a stiff wig
and features of pretentious stone.
Do call me the fifth evangelist if you like,
but let me keep modest measurements ─
you forget that we were simple fishermen
in the service of him that came over the water
breathing forth a fair world.
And the lambs running in front of my legs
were ordinary lambs with earthly droppings.
My seven exact tones subjugated
a chaos of noises and irresolution.
Their strictness is close to dance
and cancels any obedience
to far too human authorities.
It’s getting dark.
The map of Europe is stained with blood.
But the cello insists.
And the chorus creates the order
that the world has bungled.
The Chain
I was the local know-all
that they laughed at on the church green,
those wise men who sit so straddle-legged in life.
But believing that one has a grip on reality
is like carving a notch in the rail
to mark where the pike was biting.
I was good at Latin. And while sneering at me
the village clubbed together a sum
to let me study at the university in Jena.
There I was even allowed to take a doctorate
and defend the thesis that man exists
in spite of all signs to the contrary.
I possibly failed.
I don’t want to remember, a year of despair,
holding forth that man is man’s wolf.
But then I happened to listen to a philosopher,
Schelling was his name, and I understood at once
our task in this world. The Bible is wrong ─
Creation isn’t finished yet. Needs help.
It’s full of traces waiting for steps,
trains of thought that never have been followed.
Heaven is still being hammered out.
And history, I was taught, is a chain
to which we are supposed to add link upon link.
Even in this village we can help the blacksmith
to forge a link containing our love
to add to that which begins in the haze.
My knowledge makes me serve as a kind of secretary
with a home-made shorthand
to catch the ambiguities of the clouds,
the portents of the flights of birds
and the growing light in man’s eyes.
It’s only that my clumsy peasant hands
find it hard to catch up.
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