I remember now—
under the bright moon
the depth of night
became in you
its unrolled canvas.
How easy—and how perilous—
like pearls drawn from the sea,
polished, lustrous,
not yet touched,
to stand by the window
and enter fragrance
and myrtle shadows
falling from without.
You studied the curtain,
as if unsure
whether those feathers
were yours or mine—
or already one,
already risen
for a flight
beyond their time.
O Notre Dame! There over the Seine
you stand, your Lutetian stone
and its silent gravitas
measuring allotted time—
slipping through the grasp
of the voiding hourglass.
But you are a lady—
one of the many once
that men of faith rushed
to expunge from the ranks of gods,
whether from below
or even from the sky.
Thus here, in your loneliness
of naked beige and cream,
forged from the stranded sands
of long-bygone seas,
you still beautify yourself, coyly,
with violets’ shadow
and celestial blues
of your translucent eyes,
and hold your inflexible watch
as you weigh—day after day—
how much or how little, if at all,
the throngs stepping
inside through your carved gate,
heads bending back
to meet the lordly reach
of your ascending arcs,
can press your body downward
or lift you from the ground,
while you, yourself, a Charon’s
long and well-masked barque,
let them all come aboard—
and having taken them in,
you sail, and your silence
is the palladium none can clasp.
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.
