With a swell in space without—
or is it with a magic wand?—
I suddenly wave all outer sound,
and one ever lingers nearby,
comes closer still, as close as can be,
and my pose—offers him a bed
in which love obtains its weight
and body and breath blend as one
everywhere—all about—gap by gap,
track by track—thus I see and learn
what gem is but the briefest touch
and something of the mirror’s envy too
for its face knows nothing of the depth
where, across the world, souls of lovers fuse.
Vždyť i ty sochy chtěly by se hřát
Řezavý
a bílý sníh
Valeč pokryl zas
a z Doupovských hor,
vyhražených vojákům
a
válkám, vane teskný,
jako by cokoliv, co hlasem
chtělo by být na rtech,
ohlušivý, samotářský klid.
A staré
sochy z baroka,
nahé v opožděné kráse,
ustrnuly v parku,
než je
křísne někdo
vstřícným dotekem a pozvedne
k nim s teplem živý dech.
Even Those Statues Would Like to Be Warm
The
cutting, white snow
has covered Valeč again,
and from the Doupov Hills—
set aside for soldiers
and for
wars—there blows
a mournful,
as if anything that wished
to become a voice upon the lips
were
swallowed by a deafening,
solitary calm.
And the
old Baroque statues,
naked in their belated beauty,
have stiffened in the park,
until
someone rekindles them
with a sensing touch
and lifts them with a living breath.
Va et recherche, mon cher Chénier !
Good old Greeks! They knew
how to intone through ὄψ—
the eye, the face—becoming,
in raptus, elevating bliss—
a speech of sovereign poesy,
and somehow, by a yielding power,
to pass beyond even the hardest
brink of knowledge—
where soft and melting fingerprints
could draw to love a dizzy labyrinth!
O what else is as deadly to a stony cold
as eyes and faces taking light
and shade into their breathing braid,
fanned—descending—into a kiss?
“O absence makes the heart grow fonder,”
wrote Thomas Haynes Bayly in his song,
Isle of Beauty—and the state that stalks
the lonely strikes as an act of psychopomp,
who leads away and far off—
instead of letting us dally and abide;
oh, isn’t then the state of absence
a way of sending its own captive off,
just as the state of being seems—
to give itself away, to fold? Till a word
brushes another word, and the word
becomes a name, and the name—
a Muse’s shade, a falling silhouette
caught—and fastened to its ray.
Czech návštěva—visit;
and návrat—return.
Surely and strangely, I was drawn
to those ruins of old Pisidian Selge,
riding the crest of its remote mountain,
and there above all to what is left
of a little temple that turned out
to have been a monumental tomb—
a naiskos, a heroon, on a raised podium
on a ridge-ringed green meadow
in the northern acropolis,
outside the once-invincible city walls,
a place to which local village goats
seem pulled just as strongly,
amid scattered olive trees and oaks,
from where you can see higher still
the massifs of the robust Taurus;
as if the flanks of the beast ever
remained tightly gripped
by that Phoenician princess
they called Europa—
indubitably a euphemism
for a goddess and an ancient
nether rite and dauntless passage
between the world mortals
see as common and the other,
altogether different—
And from the tomb and temple
in the middle of the confined valley
hardly more than its foundation
and the bases of well-carved walls
have endured—withstanding the ages:
νᾱός and νόστος for the soul of the dead,
a place of homecoming, a locus of return,
for the immortal that touched on death,
a holy of holies for a divergent paradox.
Just as that naiskos—“a little shrine” and grave—
now without a roof, open widely to the sky,
is a living house—for a “little god”
who escaped us beyond the lids of time.
But if a god, how could she ever be
that little—divine and yet belittled?
And isn’t between immortal and mortal
always a crag, a gap, a wedge, a split,
however waxing now or waning then?
And yet—many paths and bridges,
we trust, come and go—both ways.
Just as νέομαι, its verb behind,
speaks of momentous turning,
of coming or going back,
and therefore of an act
of saving restoration.
As at those perplexing rendezvous
when two meet and suddenly enliven
what had concealed itself
far behind the eyes,
where hearts dwell unseen.
And likewise too
it can be with soul and love—
once two such “little gods”
return to one another
what the other missed.
Chorus of the Wall-Stones of Selge
We, the stones of Selge temples, were cut
to face inward—
to see and to guard
whoever comes in.
But when people lost their faith
in the abodes of the sacred,
they, newly unanchored,
also unanchored us—
and set us as convenient sentinels
into the gaps of outer walls
they learned to trust
instead of the inner flames
meant to be ever kept alive,
which they then did not bother to repair—
for it was the chill of the new interior darkness
they believed would make all less painful.
And so they turned the world inside out,
leaving the center ruined and hollowed,
and so, step by step,
the once marbled and polished spirit
became broken spolia, silt, and mud—
for the outer cannot hold
all by itself alone.
And even now—as we lie
scattered and cracked—
today’s young women and girls
of Selge, now called Altınkaya,
are not allowed to go to the hills,
to roam the ruins and forests—
they must stay by their homes—
unlike young men and boys
who bring animals to graze
in the orchestra of the Selge theater,
and who are not feared
to stop and tap
into us
and unmute wisdom
from its pristine ancient source.
O subtle and fine
is the geometry of our waiting,
holding its timelessness
on the final edge of breath,
as even now, in devoted silence,
we press our memories
back
into their speaking shape.
Not raised for a name,
even if a name
is like a trail—
both living and dead
can still travel it,
can still meet,
or touch the base—
between the ends—
or, like some lovers’ silence,
struck by a pronounced word,
granting us other eyes
with sight—
before lips recall a prayer
that shifts the weight
into the arms of one another’s wings,
so the soul may grow its face
and move—to dance—
strings of a strumming spine.
For what can a temple be
without its own tongue
and living flame—
without the adjourned return
and the entry through its quietude,
which, at last, grows old?
Then how could anyone forget
when beauty makes
such approach—
even with a tap
rising from below
your near sole?
So we learn
from mountains
that salvation
is such encounter—
and how to listen,
how to wait,
even through mist,
and to the farthest distance:
O you do remember—
I am
this same place.
