A line on which letters
flow and curl
to catch your breath and eye,
the delicacy of an arachnoid leg,
its sole, ankle, calf, and thigh,
to pin and plot and map
with the finest of the rifts
which pull and tie
as if it too sought to compete
with Pallas’ subtile weaving art—
sub tela—written finely—
under a cobweb’s geometric loom
for text was once a woven thing,
logos or speech by tekne
was to whirl and twine
rays by rays arrayed
and catch the lightest beat,
heart’s finely strumming pulse.
I. Fifty Years Later from Another Continent
A funny thing or—to be
more reverent—it’s fair
now to say, after half
a century—how one
sentence of a mere two
or three small words
set the compass
of my life and poems—
it must have been in 1976 or 75
in the history class I enjoyed much
till we came to where our current
world and age began and our book
and what we were made to learn
suddenly became all too shallow
and way too grey and hollow
to my mind and innate taste—
II. The Classroom at the Ostrov School on the Hill
And by the Street That Used to Be “Of the May Uprising”
But, after 1989, Was Changed Simply into “May Street”
But that, at that moment,
had happened yet
when we, little whelps and ducks,
were sitting in a study
generally assigned to botany
with skeletons and samples
of long-dead animals
and our teacher asked:
“Could you tell me, guys,
what the Romantic is,
what means and what it does?”
III. A Schoolgirl’s Defining Answer: The Annunciation
Admittedly, back then I was,
as we say in Czech,
I was still "unkissed"—
that is,
completely innocent of the matter,
and yet, naively ambitious,
I raised my hand, hoping
to concoct something smart
but before I was called,
my class-fellow Jitka Železná,
“She of Iron Will Be Praised,”
was picked up first—
and so she spoke
those fatal words:
“Something very beautiful.”
Each line and every touch
Adds another shade.
That is what a painter does,
And women too
Draw upon the selfsame art.
Yet each also adds
A little death—
The one that cleaves
And separates
What once was joined
In the endless play
Of bringing forth
A view,
A newly rising path,
While all the rest
Recedes from sight,
As though the world itself
Were one vast cosmic
Leela dance—
That strangely common wonder
Of ever-washing,
Ever-veiling waves,
Where nothing leaves
The unfolding stage.
