Penguin Modem European PoetsAdvisory Editor:A. Alvarez

Selected Poems . Vladimir Holan

Vladimir Holan was born in Prague in 1905.For seven years he worked in a pensionsoffice in Prague. In 1933 he became editor ofthe arts reviewZivot (Life), and since 1940has given all his rime to writing. He haspublished more than twenty books of poetry,four prose works, and translations of Rilke,Baudelaire, Ronsard, Lermontov, andselected Chinese poets. After 1948 Holan wasaccused of 'decadent formalism' and, though hecontinued to write throughout the fifties, nonew book, except for a few earlier narrativepoems, was published until 1963. In 1965, onthe occasion of his sixtieth birthday, he wasgranted the highest Czechoslovak literaryaward and in 1966 the internationalEtna-Taormina poetry prize for A Nightwith Hamlet, which has been translated into11;;ilian.French, German and Swedish.

Selected Poems

Vladimir HolanTranslated byJarmila and Ian Milner

Penguin Books

With an Introduction byIan Milner

Penguin Books Ltd, Hannondsworth,Middlesex, EnglandPenguin Books Inc., 7110 Ambassador Road.Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A.Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood.Victoria, Australia

First published by Penguin Books 1971Copyright (» Vladimir Holan, 1971

Translations copyright © Jarmila and Ian Milner, 1971

Made and printed in Great Britain byCox & Wyman Ltd,London, Reading and FakenhamSet in Monotype Bembo

This book is sold subject to the condition thatit shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, b~ lent,re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated withoutthe publisher's prior consent in any form ofbinding or cover other than that in which it ispublished and without a similar conditionincluding this condition being imposed on thesubsequent purchaser

Contents

Introducticm 9Translators' Note 16

from WITHOUT TITLBHoroscope 19No, Don't Go Yet 20The Hour 21

If·

from ADVANCINGNothing Mter All 25On the Pavement 26Dead Man's Complaint 27Building the Tower of Babel 21Death 29Today There Is . •• 30In a Village Cemetery by the Suicides' Wall 31Eodem anno pons ruptus est 32Encounter V 33She Asked You 34Passion Week 35Smiles 36Human Voice 37In the Kitchen 3&The Child 39Bequest 40October 41Presentiment 42Mother 43Still Life by a Lake 44Night After Night 45Rope ..• 46Yes or No? 47Stay 48Listening to a Record 49

from TRIALOGUBThe Wall 53

'Introduction

Vladimir Holan was born in Prague in 1905. He spent hischildhood in the rolling wooded countryside of centralBohemia but returned to Prague for his secondaryschooling. In 1926 he published his first book of verse. Forthe next seven years he worked in a social insurance(pensions)officeand during this time published two furthervolumes of poetry. In 1929 he visited northern Italy; thefascination of its architecture, scenery and cultural pastcolours some of his later poetry. In 1933 he became editorof an arts review, Zivot (Life), but since 1940 has givenall his time to writing. He has published more than twentyvolumes of poetry, apart from various selections andanthologies, and four prose works, including Lemuria(1940), his diary of the years 1934-8.

When Holan began writing in the late 1920S the pre-vailing poetic manner, practised by leading poets likeVltezslav Nezval, Jaroslav Seifert and Konstantin Biebl,was 'poetism', a Czech adaptation, with its own higWycoloured fantasy and easycharm, of surrealism and dadaism.Holan's early work went along with this mood of avant-garde virtuosity. His early volumes of poetry show acommand of inventive imagery, of metre and stmcture,and an unusual skill in verbal play. It is a self-sufficient,Mallarmean poetry of magic artifice. But the lights weregoing out in Europe and 'poetism' went with them. Theoutrage of Munich and the full Nazi occupation in March1939 caused Holan, like his fellow poets Seifert, Halas,Nezval and Hora, to respond with a new poetry: direct,focused on stark realities, impassioned in tone, voicing thepopular mood of shocked resentment at the Munich be-trayal, and an unbroken will to survive as a nation.

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The liberation in May 1945 brought its own kind ofpoetry. Collections like D{k Sovetskemu svazu (Thanks tothe Soviet Union, 1945), and Rudoarmljci (Red Army Men,1947), render, sometimes rhetorically, sometimes in-formally, both the hopes of the immediate postwar yearsand the genuine feeling of appreciation for the humanqualities of the ordinary Russian soldier.

After 1948, by one of the absurd yet tragic ironies inwhich recent Czechoslovak history abounds, Holan, theauthor of the postwar tributes to the Soviet Union and thenation-stirring anti-fascist poems of 1938-40, was accusedby party dogmatists of decadent' formalism' and was abused,or ignored, in the press. Until 1963 no further volume ofhis poetry was accepted for publication. By nature veryreticent, he responded to exclusion from public life andletters by withdrawing to his house in Prague on the smallKampa island on the Vltava; he scarcely left it for the nextfifteen years. From this long vigil comes his finest poetry,a poetry which fuses, with compelling force, personalfeelings of bitterness, scorn, anxiety, despair, mystification,with social moods of oppression and fear. To his officialcritics he replied with saeva indignatio in his 'To the Enemy'(1949) :

To be, you would have to live,but you will not be because you aren't alive,and you aren't alive because you do not love,because you don't love even yourselves, let alone your

neighbour ...

In 1963 the wind changed. Three volumes of his versewere published in that year alone, followed by three majorcollections, Na postupu (Advancing) and Trialog (Trialo-zue)in 1964, and Bolest{pain} in 1965. His long reflective-dramaticpoem Noc s Hamletem (A Night with Hamlet) was ahopublished in 1964, the year of Shakespeare' squatercentenary.

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On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1965, Holan wasgiven the title of National Artist, the highest official literaryaward.

A Night with Hamlet was written during 1949-56, thegrim years of isolation, and was finished in 1962. Interviewedin the weekly Literarn{ noviny, when the poem was firstpublished, Holan remarked:

The years of writing A Night with Hamlet were the cruellest ofmy life. In my desperate lonelinessI was well' earthed' to receive,and survive, all the horrors of that time. But it would 'be mistakento think of the poem as merely an expression of those particularevents, since I have always been concemed with man and thehuman drama in general, with man's condition and unhappy lot,which he endures at all times The question that was on mymind was: who was Hamlet? I'm sure of one thing: for manytragic nights he became my companion. He stepped through thewall and there he was. We talked to each other .... The conversa-tions went on ad infinitum, not always tolerant, not always friendly,but always passionate. Something of those talks I've caught, Itrust, in A Night with Hamlet.

The poem is a long, loosely connected sequence of dra-matic dialogues, in close-textured and finely modulated freeverse, between Hamlet and the poet; there is also an entractein which Orpheus and Eurydice, saved from the under-world, reflect on the nature of human love. The abrupt tran-sitions of theme, the wild plunges of poetic thought, bizarreimagery, the baroque rhetoric, are characteristic of the poemas a whole. Its semi-dramatic form is not there to drama-tize the inner world of the human personality and its tensions.It is more in the tradition of Socratic dialogue - polem-ical encounters in which the characters wrestle with ulti-mate questions: the nature of art and the artist, the eternalwar between those 'drest in a little brief authority' andthe human spirit, the meaning of death, the mystery ofbeing. In the poem Hamlet stands for the timeless and

II

indestructible spirit of man. He speaks as Renaissance andmodem man in the same breath.

Holan's poetic world, represented in this volume mainlyby work done during 1948-56, is frequently dark, gloomy,full of strange menace or mysterious presences. Death is arecurring motif: he sees the skull beneath the skin mockinghuman endeavour. Like some modern dramatists he isdeeply aware of the strict limits of effective human com-munication. Few other poets of our time know so intenselythe meaning of isolation, of being shut in by a 'wall' (hisown image: see the poem, ' The wall ') of uncomprehendingAuthority. Hence his 'Ubi nullus ordo, sed perpetuushorror':

To live is terrible since you have to staywith the appalling reality of these years.Only the suicide thinks he can leave by the doorthat is merely painted on the wall.There is not the slightest sign that the Comforter will come.

In me the heart of poetry bleeds.

The darker poetic moods come from a mingling ofpersonal and social impulses. Behind Holan's awareness ofthe fears, tensions and sense of alienation brought on by thecondition of society lies an older, personal conviction. Manhas been driven out of Paradise and is doomed to sufferhis exile. The suffering is in the remembering: he strives torecover his lost innocence. The recurring motifs of virginitylost or abused, of love frustrated, twisted, defiled, are theimage of man's fallen state. But there are other recurringmotifs, particularly those of mother and child: images ofsimple unsentimentalized motherly love and of the freshspuntaneity of the child's world. These are Holan's primarysources of hope and redemption. Behind them is somethingmore shadowy but distinctly felt: the presence of the divineSpirit of which maternal love and a child's innocence are

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expressions. Not that Holan is a religious poet in a strict,theological sense. He is more conscious of and interested inthe enigma of God's presence in a godless and.1awless world.His short poems are a kind of gnomic monologue in whichsome concrete, often everyday, incident is evoked. Then, inthe last line or two, the poem suddenly leaps away from theparticular, familiar experience and shows it as a smallfragment of the knowable in the void of the unknown. Inthat sudden confrontation of the tiny known and the vastunknown, the God of Holan's world is born.

In his constant relating of the concrete t'b the abstract,in his sensing of a numinous quality in the familiar featuresof the natural world, in his finding of analogies betweenthe natural and the human worlds, Holan is at times likeRilke, whom he admires and has translated into Czech.'Human Voice', especially the opening, is an example:

Stone and star do not force their music on us,flowers are silent, things hold something back,because of us, animals denytheir own harmony of innocence and stealth,the wind has always its chastity of simple gestureand what song is only the mute birds know,to whom you tossed an unthreshed sheaf on Christmas Eve.

To be is enough for them and that is beyond words. But we,we are afraid not only in the dark,even in the abundant lightwe do not see our neighbourand desperate for exorcismcry out in terror: 'Are you there? Speak!'

Holan's verse is often difficult to understand at a firstreading and sometimes remains obscure. His formalmethod partly accounts for this. In the work representedhere he has turned away from the earlier use of traditionalmetre and poetic forms and created his own adapted free

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verse. In an interview given to Literarn{ noviny in 1964, hesaid:

To write free verse meant for me a new search .•. a search forthe primordial meaning of words and a discovery of their innersemantics. By 'atonal harmony' (the term used in A Night withHamlet) I understand a special toneless instrumentation, a harmon-ious disharmony. I was interested in the inner rhythm of images,their tonelessharmony, and in the casual connections and mutualrelations between words, their hidden inner tension.

And in fact his poetry has in it a good deal of verbal playand semantic exercising. He likes to explore to the furthestlimits the expressive resources of the poetic word, arrangedin strange and startling combinations, placed in the mostunlikely context. His syntax is at times deliberately dis-torted, ellipsis a common device, and aposiopesis a charac-teristic ending. Like Eliot, he believes in 'dislocating thelanguage into meaning'. N ot, however, in the surrealistmanner of an unchecked tide of images. His free verse isfirmly knit, its structure and texture intellectually controlled,however abrupt the shifts of imagery.

Behind the verbal craft lies the poetic vision that it ex-presses and by which it is shaped. Here at times Holan isobscure, perhaps consciously. He uses ambiguity at anumber of levels, to heighten his sense of modern man'senigma. Sometimes the enigma itself seems impenetrable.This is Holan's way of showing the strangeness of humanexistence - the sudden intrusions of mystery, of the numin-ous, of God - in a world where the devices of scientific, socialand political control over individual life are more and moreintrusive. The elliptic idiom matches the enigmatic vision.

The range and variety of Holan' s work is very impressive.Few modern poets can show such creative developmentthrough more than twenty volumes of verse. The style,theme and genre constantly change and mature, but at any

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stage the poetry reveals a highly competent control of itschosen mode. In his own country, many regard him as theoutstanding living Czech poet. In 1966 he was awarded theinternational Etna- Taormina Prize for A Night with Hamlet,which has been translated, along with various selections ofshorter verse, into Italian, French, German and Swedish.

IAN MILNER

IS

Translators' Note

The poems are arranged chronologically according to dateof publication and their order is the same as in the originalvolumes in which they appeared. The period in which thepoems were actually written, often important for a fullunderstanding of mood and symbolic reference, is indicatedin footnotes.

The selection is intended to be as representative as possibleof the whole range of Holan' s work in the forties and fifties.In view of the limited space available, it was therefore de-cided editorially to include, along with the shorter poems,only the opening third of A Night with Hamlet. While thepoem's total effect cannot thus be felt, the opening is self-contained and gives a representative idea of overall method,theme and quality.

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from Without Title*

* Published 1963: poems from 1939-42.

Horoscope

Early evening .... Cemetery .... And the wind sharp asbone splinters on a butcher's block.Rust shakes its model out of tortured form.And above it all, above the tears of shame,the star has almost decided to confesswhy we understand simplicity only when the heart breaks,and we are suddenly ourselves, alone and fateless.

19

No, Don't Go Yet

No, don't go yet, don't be afraid of all the excitement,it's the bear opening beehives in the orchard.He'll soon be quiet. I too will hold backwords that rush like the serpent's spermto the woman in Eden.

No, don't go yet, don't lower your veil.The fuel of crocuses has lit up the meadows.That's what you are then, life, although you say:- By desire, we add something. But loveremains love.

20

The Hour

This is the hour: music cannotand the word is unwilling. The gloomy line of nothingdrawn by the breath hungrily showsthat the whole of reality is neededfor act to become image.

It is beginning to rain. Red fades from the dahlias.The murderer washes his hands at the well.

21

from Advancing*

* Published 1964: poems from 1943-8.

Nothing After All

Yes, it's dawn and I don't knowwhy the whole week I hurrieddown the cold avenues to this doorwhere now I stand before my time.

I didn't want to force the future.I didn't want to wake the blind man.He'll have to open the door for meand go back again.

25

On the Pavement

She's old and hobbles here every dayto sell papers.Tired and beyond itshe flops on her boodle of extrasand falls asleep.Passers byare so used to it they don't see her-and she, mysterious and mum as a sibyl,conceals what she should offer.

26

Dead Man's Complaint

I was allowed to return a while to my people.On home grooodI recognized the boat-houseand soon came to the village.The wind slid into the willow's sleeves.It was Sooday, the family were sitting in the orchard.My sister was taking the milk to the cellar.It didn't occur to me Iwould scare them.But since they didn't believe it was really meI shouldn't have said I was alive.Everything vanished in thin airamidst the cries of violets and pansies .and in front of me crumbled the webbed landscape,wild poppy, moonlightand alarm-clock on the cemetery wall.

Building the Tower of Babel

You were working off your sentence as a hodman.From dawn grimace to evening grin the workwas like winter earth to a gravedigger.Long ago it had knocked the wind out of usand hope of escape was no more than .a gob of spittle trodden by a bare foot.The transience of anything spiritual was so frighteningthat many of us would have gladly believedin the immortality of the flesh.We began to meet our doubles •••

As for you .... But no!It was enough for that woman of Babylonto walk across the high asphalt rampartand the whole vast inhuman pilemeant for eternitysuddenly seemed to you rather brash.

The ruins were so immediatethey were like the certainty of love.

Death

You drove it out of you many years ago,closed the place, tried to forget it all.You knew it wasn't in music and so you sangyou knew it wasn't in silence and so you were quietyou knew it wasn't in solitude and so you were alone.But what could have happened todayto ~are you like one who in the night suddenly seesa beam of light under the door of the next roomwhere no one has lived for years?

29

In a Village Cemetery by theSuicides' Wall

Here where the corn-cockle kisses the photo of the deadand the tombstone nun has the worn movement of marblein the cackling of geese ... ah yes, hereeverything nods the same approval that man was not createdbut ready-made. Things are also ready-made.Man and things made at the persuasion of the dead!Things wait. Man forebodes.Things importune. He resists.Things age and outlive their time. He is immortaland perishes.Things are desolate and he is alone,and is not alone only whenhis life turns against itself ...

31

Today There Is . . .

Today there is deep in you a not long dried-up spring,though how quickly it fills with tears.Today there is deep in you a not long abandoned airfield,though how quickly it's overgrown.You'll have to go on foot now, your spring of grief within.But you stand frozenwhile in front of youcockroaches cross the streetmoving from butcher to baker.

30

Eodem anno pons ruptus est Encounter V·

Joy!There is joy, there really is.And he felt it not as something mercilesswhich rushes on usand puts out our unguarded £trenor as a vertigo which in the double light of ironybrings us a bottle and shoes to make us dance -no, what he felt was a quiet, simple, unfounded joy,given rather than granted for an hour,the joy of a man walking over a bridgewho will go on singing for ever ...But it was enough for the wind to toss a withered leafat his feetand the bridge was overloaded.

Stopped by a woman at the gates of an unknown town,I asked her: Let me pass, 1'm only gomg inand out, and in and out again,because like any man I'm afraid of the dark.

But she said to me:I did leave the light on !

33

She Asked You

A girl asked you: What is poetry?You wanted to say to her : You are too, ah yes, you are,and that'in fear and wonder,which prove the miracle,I'm jealous of your beauty's ripeness,and because Ican't kiss you nor sleep with you,and because I have nothing and whoever has nothing to givemust sing ...

But you didn't say it, you were silentand she didn't hear the song.

34

Passion Week

Am I really alone again, loving a littleand keeping silent a little, suffering a littleand thinking myself freebecause I've never fulfilled my fate?

Don't I understand that a man givesonly because he was left short of something?Was Iso full of those proud coloursthat tease the empty light until it fades them?

Even art, where feeling serves the pulsesas the type-setter his lamp,has left me for my double .and is somewhere lowering my stocks, the better offthe more my barren husksdeserve trampling.

Outside it is raining, just the timethe wolf goes after the swan,while from the paranoiac river resoundsthe roar of floating logs,coffms for us all.

35

Smiles

There are many smiles.But I am thin,king of the most difficult,the simplest smile.It is deep-set, cuton every side by the vinegrower's blade of time,a smile that needs just one more wrinkleto unravel everything and be ready for God's full name.A smile like that stays on the facesomewhat longer than the joy from which it came _or it's the smile that goes before the joy •and disappearsleaving the whole face to joy alone.

Human Voice

Stone and star do not force their music on us,flowers are silent, things hold something back,because of us, animals denytheir own harmony of innocence and stealth,the wind has always its chastity of simple gestureand what song is only the mute birds know,to whom you tossed an unthreshed sheaf on Christmas Eve.

To be is enough for them and that is beyond words: But we,'we are afraid not only in the dark,even in the abundant lightwe do not see our neighbourand desperate for exorcismcry out in terror: 'Are you there? Speak!'

37

In the Kitchen

You haven't been here for almost a year.You were afraid to come in.And when you did, the emptiness once so entreatingand then spurned took its revenge,wilfully demanding you atonefor your presence with your presence.Everything here disgraces you:linoleum, kindling, dead flies,bread mould, the brackish vinegar of cracked plaster,the sorrel of stains and the tan of taut air,the sputter of spiders lurking in cornersand, underneath it all, the silencewhere the moon shines only in day-time.But in the middle of all this you suddenly see(with the finality of a lifetime,cruel, ordinary, mysterious)a coffee-cup stainedby the lips of the girl who left you.

II

I

The Child

A child with its ear to the railsis listening for the train.Lost in the omnipresent musicit cares littlewhether the train is coming or going away ...But you were always expecting someone,always parting from someone,until you found yourself and are no longer anywhere.

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Bequest

What poets leave behindhas always something in it hurt by time, sin, exile.The truest of them,the least known, quietest and most lovingdoesn't force anything on you: neither by his image,scorn nor solace, least of all by love;Present, he is absent. And Picassomaking a snowman well understoodthat the immortality of artis in time, sin, exile,which the sun must redeemin tears, springs, river, sea, and nothingness.

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October

The crystal air excludesany kind o£likeness. Even our doublesrefuse to give their ghostly evidence that we are alive.Invisibility grows so franticthat we simply close our eyes.Good wine needs no bush. Art neither.

41.

Presentiment

One December night you filled your glass with wineand went to the next room for a book.When you returned the glass was half-full.You were afraid and asked in a cracked, mad voicewho could have drunk it since you live aloneshut in by stone walls and wild thornand amidst such inhumanitythat long ago you drove away statue and chimera and ghost.

42

Mother

Have you ever watched your old mothermaking up the bed for you,how,he pulls, straightens, tucks in and smoothes the sheetso you won't feel a single wrinkle?Her breathing, the motion of her hands and palmsare so lovingthat in the past they are still putting out the fire in Persepolisand at this moment calming some future stormoff the China coast or in unknown seas.

43

Sti11 Life by a Lake

Yes, everything is here. Everything perfectand in place, quiet, luminous,there is wisdom dusted offby man, bread and books,no, not even a hair to blur your penand you won't have to wipe it on your sleeve,you know well the wine-cellar stores only wine,the elements are here, wind, stars, storm -and yet you are thinking up the names of sailing ships,eager for flight.

Before you dream them, maybe sooner,you will really run away, like that monkwho left Olympus becausehe didn't find a goddess there.

44

Night After Night

Only a virgin can enter by a closed doorher own bedroomin which everything that is called assurancehas long smelt of masturbation's sheets,of violence, of spittle in a well or wreath of resinflung voluntarily on the tower of man.If he is a poet, all will be ruined,if a murderer, then nakedness will reign hereand there will be an applauder, an applauderhired from the marble quarries of Aeschylus.

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Rope ...

Romeo's rope ladder!How lightly it sways in the evening wind,subtly hiding its hemp soul.Who went down it understands man's greatness,which unless dishonoured here wouldn't be complete.

And whoever climbs itlives a passion pure-blooded and young enoughto expect an echo,but too divinenot to perish in its own fire.

Yes or No?

Vie always look for the mean. But, as a point,it is blind. Seeking our heartwe seek blindness .... And blind for a long timewe become only touch.Touch which apologetically affirmsthere will always be rich and poor,

'not because the body is satisfied or hungrybut because every human soul is different ...Meanwhile it is mere touchthat unerringly gropesthrough the diverging alleys of the slave-market.

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Stay

Stay with me, don't leave me,my life is so emptythat only you can stop me, proudly humble,from asking further questions.

Stay with me, don't leave me,have pity on my impatiencewhich, scrawled in a prison.,..ship's log,will outlast eternity.

Stay with me, don't leave me,you don't know anger nor will your anger last-and where would you go, how would you feelwhen you are over it ? Wait a little, wait,wait at least untilthe postman comes with letters only for you!

Listening to a Record

. Only today somewhere or other they are plucking thepheasant

meant for King Sargon's'table.Only today the double quarter-tone oflong extinct birdslives in the music of barbaric dances.Only today the common quinsy of rock drawingsfinds animal glory in the throat of opera.Only today tantalum or bezoarshow up in the underbelly of an ancient statue.

Nothing returns from the other world. Everything is here.But even the spirit within usmust always be entering.

49

from Trialogue*

* Published 1964: poems froin 1949-55.

The Wall

Why is your flight so weighed with cares,why does the journey pall?I have been speaking fifteen years

.to a wall

and Ihave dragged the wall hereout of my own hellso that it can nowtell you all ••.

ZlJune 1963

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To the Enemy

I have had enough of your baseness and if! haven't killedmyself

it is only that my life is not my ownand Istill love someone because I love myselfYou may laugh, but only the eagle attacks an eagleand Achilles alone can pity the wounded Hector.To be is not easy .... To be a poet and a manmeans to be a wood without the treesand to see.... The scientist observes.Science can only rummage after the truth:by inches, not wings! And what for?Simple enough, and I've said it before:science is in the probable, poetry in parable,the big cerebral hemisphererejects a great poem by asking for sugar ...The cock shrinks from rain but that's another story,it's evening, you would say: sexually ripe,and the lady has such firm breastsyou could easily breaka pair of brandy glasses on them, but that's another

story.And imagine a lighthouse on a ship,a floating lighthouse: but that's quite a different story.And your whole development from stem of manto lichen spawn: but that's quite a different story.That cloud's going to vomit but you can't even belch,you are not able to be, not eventhe snake's scales can choke you, <_what God conceived, He wants to be full of feeling,children and drunkards know it,but they aren't rude enough to question

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why a mirror mists over when looked into by awoman in menses,

and from love oflife poets don't askwhy wine moves in the caskswhen she passes by ...

And I have had enough of your impudencewhich thrusts into everything it wants to possess,and yet does not know how to embrace.But disaster is on the waysomething you never could have dreamt ofbecause you do not dream,what God conceived, He wants to be full of feeling,disaster is on the way, children and drunkards know it,only from love could joy come,from love that was not passiononly from love could happiness come,from happiness that was not passion,children and drunkards know it ...To be, you would have to live,but you will not be because you aren't alive,and you aren't alive because you do not love,because you do not love even yourselves, let alone your

neighbour.And I have had enough of your coarseness,and if! haven't killed myself it is onlythat my life is not my ownand I still love someone because I love myself ...You may laugh, but only the she-eagle attacks an eagleand only Brises' daughter the wounded Achilles.To be is not easy .... Shitting is easy ...

28 September 1949*

*28 September is the name-day of St Wenceslas, patron saint ofBohemia and traditional symbol of Czech national feeling.

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Today Is Not the Time

Today is not the time for songs of the triple rose.You pledge your girl undying loveand soon after say you're sorrythat the wedding-dress hasn't come,and instead of the ring you hand herpoisoned gloves.

We visit neither hospital nor funeral.

The Last

The last leaf trembles on the plane-treefor it knows well that without shaking there is no firmness.I tremble, God, because I feelIshall soon die and should be firm.From every tree falls the last leaffor it is not without faith in the earth.From every man falls the last pretencefor the mortuary slab is utterly simple.The leafhas no need to ask you, God, for anything -

You made it grow and it has not spoilt Your hand.But I ...

57

Always

Not that I wouldn't like to live, but lifeis such a liarthat even ifI were rightI would have to look for truth in death ...

And that's what I'm doing.

Mi Lascio-

I learnt tonight from a book on astronomythat certain stars are the oldestand near to extinction .... Grateful for the newsI opened the windowand looked for the youngest star .... But I could seeonly clouds when someone's mean laugh(like the wind howling in a crematorium chimney)drove me to finda star in interstellar spaceas dawn was breaking ...

o my love, now shall we love and not despair,how be desperate and wise at the same time?

59

from A Night with Hamlet*

*Published 1964: written 1949-56 and 1962.Dedicated to VladimirJustL

MenippusI can see only bones and bare skulls; most of them lookexactly alike.

HermesThat's what the poets have admired, the bones. And onlyyou don't seem to think much of them.

MenippusWell, then show me Helen; I'll never be able to make herout myself

HermesThis skull is Helen.

Lucian

On the way from nature to beingwalls are not really kind,walls soaked with the urine of talents, walls running with the

spittleof eunuchs in revolt against the spirit, walls no smallerfor not yet bein g born,walls that enclose the ripened fruit ..•

The supple ripeness of Shakespeareinvites licence. Its meaning,which like amazement should befestive, with the decline of the times,(in face of the possible signs of his absence)becomes a supercharge levied on every apartment

63

into which a director has rudely shoved his way.Fraud alone is certainty here. And the spectator,crawling out before his time like St George's dragon,basks in the bile of the critics ...And those who dare to map desireare at their ease, though their bad tempershows that the brute is always with us ..•Nature is a signwhich, if not mute,denies itself. And the male of the species,that opener, feels dumb simply becausethe spirit always moves forwardwhile everything closes behind it ..•

And he was like that ... Hamlet!He had an arm missing and eveningrolled through the empty sleeve of his coat.as through a blind man's sex nipped by mUSIC.••Nature merged our contempt for the townwith the rock urine of mosses uprooted 'at the golden summit of power . .'and waited for the caterpillar of thevme to change roto a

butterfly,but waited in vain,for he despised wine from the dayhe was driven by thirst to open a horse's arteryand drink the blood ...So he made up his mind to admit the jinnand exclude the apparently unrevealed mysteries,and caught between himself and himself

, to plead for the abyss.Afterwards he spoke only from its depthseven when talking of a certain saintwho no long~r had anything except the painof remembering an ancient love,

a pain little enough to be easily hiddenin a hollow tooth •.•

It doesn't matterwhether what we heard was the sucked salivarunning from sleeping crickets' mouths,builders of Inidnight bridges,creators who made themselves double tombs,or phantoms whose wages is prophecy.Only art made no excuses •••And' also life insisted,

, insisted dangerously that we would survive,though we might really wish to die ...There was no refuge .... Nowhere, not even in the

unconscious ....But he was there, Hamlet, who like a Mozart-tippler6verturned the Alps in order to stand a bottle shakilyon the creaking stairs of the fear of death,so locked in himself that all immortalitycould fit inside him ...And it is true that in his presencethe knife raised above a sheepwould not cutand the melted pewter of old baptismal fontsreturned to its primal form.Anxiety endures. He got in the way of eternityand had to heal the wound. He was in the grave of the fatherand had to be the child of the sons .... He wasface to face with the holy spirit of music

. and had to live for the takings of a whoreor the price of a dog.

Oh, not that he knew everything, for he well understoodthat when egoism overeatsit doesn't throw up but digests and starts again -not that he was wise, like a single wooden pillar

among columns of stone -not that he trembled like an aspen facingthat ancient floor painted with menstrual blood -not that he was a miser, thinking of final thingsand living in King Atreus' tombwhere the treasury led straight to the charnel-house -not that it mattered to himwhether Alexander the Great's crooked neckhad straightened out anything in history -no, no, but I always see his grimaceat those for whom any mysteryis a void into whichthey hurl all the fury of the castrated ...

He who gives is still a miser ...But we who do not believe are always expecting

something, •and maybe people always expect somethingbecause they have no faith .... They are enlightenedbut don't give light .... They are thin-bloodedyet for them nothing exists unless blood is shed,they are damned though not yet excommunicated,they are curious but haven't found the mirrorin which Helen-Helenlooked at herself from below-from below,and they are so deaf they would like to hearChrises voice on a disc.

Meanwhile everything, everything hereis a miracle only once:only once Abel's bloodwhich was to destroy all wars,only once the irrecoverable, the unconscious of chi~dhood,only once youth and only once song,only once love, in the same breath lost,only for once everything against heredity and custom,

66

once only the loosing of contracted ties and liberationand so only once the essence of art,only for once everything against the prison,unless God Himself should wish to build a houseon this earth ...

A green hawthorn leaned over the wallscattering on the road the buds of its curiosity.The window opened the wind, bringing a draught:

Your deeds are many and yet none,but to do and to be is the envy of everyone!

Night smoked history, ate the fried wingscut from Mercury's ankles,and drank it downwith the sweat ofSt Tragedy's organist ....•Only when you make your peace with death,' said Hamlet,•will you understand that everything under the sun is really

new ....Our body is not a canvas hangarfor cutting into strips ...But our subconscious plays tricks .... Even if we givealms, it is we who profit!So it is when we make love in error .... Yet no!The groping sex of human beings means onlyto have the relation without the man .... And yetlove's liver is found in sin.The tensing of the body reminds you ofthe profaning and chastisement of the spirit ..•Even in the presence of the sleeping we are not at easefor we do not know where they will halt,while we are stuck in our tracks ...Consider how heavy a cat suddenly becomeswhen dead, while some manwill spend the whole day shooting sparrows!Yes, there is the shame of a man and the shame of a woman.

A man cannot bear to look at cotton-wool.And woman? No sooner born in the dry season,she is already flattering the rains .. .'

In a moment Hamlet added: 'Children are never satisfiedwith an answer ....

They will play with a cupboard full of secretsand finally carry off the key within themselves.Or they are ill and secretly open the lettersof an imprisoned poet who used topay for his own little room simply becausethe letter was opened by them. . . .Or when ill they see in their dreams a pIllar of fireand cry: It's a bough, a vein of God!Or in illness cannot free their mindsof the unending handwork of womenwhich aims only at keeping them warm .and would weave a man into its pattern or else seIze up .••Or they are well! Every momenthands reach for the slices of bread ...And when they run out of the barnthey may trample on the last grain oflast year's harvestso that soon they will be more temptc;d .to crown the skull of fire with a sheaf s golden Wig.They are as full oflife as a horsethat doesn't feel its rider a strangerbut its own thought .... Rejoicing, shouting,they have been a year together wi~hout rc;grets, .they have a sure remedy for anything that s not a nuracle -all stains are only mud-stainson a new dress and can soon be washed off ...Children! They have found the true names, we have only to

pronounce them!' ,-

I interrupted and told him he looked likea mill-stone quarry.

68

Have a drink, Hamlet! I said. Do·you want it along withthe oven, soul of the farm,or with the passion of the blood's cardinal points?But he didn't take it badly and said: 'Po-pa!'What's that? I asked and he replied:'They talk that way in Tibet!'and went on: 'Virgins, ah yes, they knowwhen a tree is unwell! ... But Ihave known convicts.For some of them it's enough to imaginehuge backsides, huge only becausethe leaden memory of the same crimeforces them to squat without legs,unless they are swollen from all the beatings,since they smell of tar ...."There was no tram!" said the woman. And the manreplied: "It's worse when a ship is late,you, I mean, who like a shipleave in you under you a continuous line .. ."Yes .... Whereas virgins, yes,they know when a tree is unwell .... And the cloth

of their 'innocencealways covers the niale graftings,even if their stockings are made from the hair of whores ...Freedom, you know, is always kinto voluntary poverty .. .'

Night overlapped night .... It bowed to the earthor became a tomb for everythingthe living and the dead were doing ...Maybe the living felt shy and were insolent ..•And the dead, envious, not deliberatelybut from heredity or ~engefulness.I understood when Hamlet said, not knowing my thoughts:'What only surrounds us now

. one day will bury us ...

Once I was present .at a fire .•.One of countless flames was enough for me to noticethat the whole hand of a fish-pond keeper who was therehad only a single jointand to make me think of the bony sculptureof nothing upon nothing ...The hair of a hanged manis more sensitive when silky on the spineand comes no closer to beingthan to the hairs of knowledge.But still more spaciousfor the shivering quinine of Elsinorewas the sound of Ophelia cutting her toe-nails •••You know .. .'No, I don't know, I said .... But right nowI'm expecting guests, I added, annoyedthat h.eplainly liked his own misfortune ..•

Again he was not offended and went on:'Querer la propria desdicha .... But whatmoves a motherwould shatter argosies on the open sea ...Besides .... If there is no God,no angels and nothing after death,why don't the worshippers of nothingness·bow down just to them,the non-existent?I had this feeling oncewhile hunting white falcon .... It also risesfrom Chinese tombs .... And the tables of Mosessay the same .... But from an inverted humilityor pride that is not yet clear -for the bellows are only now being stitched up -we would rather kiss a greyhound between the eyes and a

horse on the hoof,

7°

and are not afraid to enter a library ...While hunting white falcon I have felt rhythm,before the tables of Moses, movement,by the Chinese tombs, the symphony of rhythm,and, among the Ainus, gods, near, far, light and heavy ..•Besides, at the momentyou are expecting guestsand they are already here since they've come before their

time ...Yes, to see each other and talk togetherand feel a warm trustand heartbeat true as Rembrandt's needles,though each of us is different from the other(for that is what the soul does),and yet not to catch the serpent by another's hand.

A jet engine is not for the poet ...And as a tree remains a tree while it bears some fruitthat ripens too soonand some at the right time and some still later -no, one cannot hurry with wordsfor we do not nor have we comefrom the pitiable right of mankindto be human for man's sake!Effective love, you know? .. The everyday is the

miraculous ...

The greater the poem, the greater the poet,'and not the contrary!' he added,, And you are already a great poet if you ask yourself with

whom you are to be lost ...Yes, art as something that stops a swollen head ...I tell you, art is a lament,something for somebody, nothing for everyone,for simply by hoping you are already in the future ...There is always something that outstrips us, for even love

71

is only part of our certitude ..•. Atonal harmony .••And pain as punishmentfor being a fugitive ...Or is it that human aid,which might have helped,calls upon the aid of God?I don't know, but from the form of some people I have

recognizedthe true proportions of an octopus .• .'

The wind wrangled in the chimney .... And in some groveruffled the hair on a fallow-deer's penis ..•And somewhere in history it chased Raleigh's drunken

galleonsonly to rip them apart,as your mother once impatientlytore her sleeves listening to Wagner .•.But you can't drive out the soul by drinking, like a gopher

from its hole,for even if you think of it as so full-bosomedthat you say: what reserves! - you are still a being,ftxed in transitory form by the winged hateof man and woman.

'Salamander in the ftre !' Hamlet broke in.And then frying the seed of the Word on the meltedbacon of his tongue, hissed:'What a poet writes, an angel or demon does ...Thus dreams revenge themselves on uninterrupted

consciousness!I am always looking for a free canteenwhere the little window would not be thatof a prison cell through whichthe prisoner is watched,the peephole called the judas ..•"He that will not work shall not eat/" True,

72

but what is work? To befaithful to one's lot, unselfishly,or to sell indulgencesor become a zealous stoker in a crematorium,stick a thermometer in the rectum of waror have to sing at the vintageto prove you don't eat grapes,examine a horse's teeth or like an executionerrip out the nostrils of the condemned,be corroded by vinegar and bile and take revenge on othersor burn off a woman's right breastto make her an archer,to be the seed of fate in history's wombor the feeling that is condemned to forced labourunder the grey Siberia of old heads -or on penalty of death to ftle off your fettersand rather force your eyes outthan look at the horrors of today,and yet still hear the singersdead long ago, but free? ...

Composition's net at best gathers in the ornamental •••I'm not indifferent to one little step or fallof a child in the nettles .... Ifhis mother tells him:Go and get some rum for the tea,offhe goes, repeating: rum for the tea, rum for the tea,and ends up whispering: heaven for me* ...No, no, I'm not indifferent to the single fallof a child .... Yet evil always risesup humanity's spine, spattered with bloodlike a dentist's staircase .... Ancientand weary, at each step it recoils in disgust,yet rises again and again to the brain of pride,for after so many attempts

*In the Czech there is a jingle: 'rum do caje, Cum do clje'.

73

by saints and poets,after so many attempts by saints and poets to switch off the

current -it believes only in the moment of harmonywhen there is a short circuitbetween heaven and hell.But of course .... We can also waituntil something bursts and love falls on us.•••Maybe our hope is in patienceand waiting. Imaginelife's terminus ...An old man stands there, coweringlike words in the rain."I'm 'ere," he says, "waitin' for a gent'0 promised me a room, said it'd be unfurnished -wouldn't worry me a bit -"It was raining. And the old man's trustwas so blind or so openhandedthat it saw a snug future for himand only the passers-by understoodthat someone had taken him for a rideunder the mezzo rilievo of the moon .... But you know

how it is:suddenly nothing, absolutely nothing,absolutely nothing facing uslike the moment when it seemsthe future is behind us.Lovers should be gay!The universe, though as they say finite,is also unlimited .... A man is suddenly sick at heart,a woman cold, instead of killing each otherthey come together, gratefulonce again to see something of their fate,though it leads with shameless precisionto the poorhouse.'

74

from_Pain*

*Published 1965: pOems from 1949-55.

Daybreak

It is the hour when the priest goes to mass, up the devil's back.It is the hour when the heavy bag of dawnis zipped up the human spine.It is the hour of frost and no sunyet the stone is warmbecause it moves.It is the hour when the lake freezes round its shoresand man in his heart.It is the hour when dreams are nothing morethan fleas nipping the skin of Marsyas.It is the hour when trees ripped by the deerbind their wounds with resin.It is the hour when elves pick upthe splintered words of time.It is the hour when merely for loveone dares descend the stalagmite cave of tearswhich held back in secret worked their hidden will.It is the hour when you have to write a poemand say it differently, quite differently.

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Meeting in a Lift

We stepped into the lift. The two of us, alone.We looked at each other and that was all.Two lives, a moment, fullness, bliss.At the fifth floor she got out and I went on upknowing I would never see her again,that it was a meeting once and for all,that if! followed her I would be like a dead man in her

tracksand that if she came back to meit would only be from the other world.

Deep in thf!Night

'How not to be!' you ask yourself and in the end say italoud ...

But tree and stone are silentthough each is born of the word and therefore dumbsince the word is afraid of what it has become.But names they still have. Names: pine,maple, aspen .... And names: feldspar,basalt, phonolite, love. Beautiful names,afraid only of what they have become.

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Reminiscence I

The sun set on the dung-heaplike an office lamp~at before it goes out lights upa wizened acacia in the street below.A girl stood by the fountain in the square.Beautiful. I talked to her.She seemed almost grateful, every word of mineinvited her not to be only of this world,she knew nothing, not even that nakednesScan be so cladthat only a dress uncovers it,she laughed, played with her ring, coughed a little.Her ordinariness was so mysterious that it disappearedand she had to be kissed to become more mysterious.But when Iasked her laterthe way to the nearest villageshe pointed in the wrong direction.

Presence isn't only present tense!

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Early Spring

Light comes from a low bank of cloud.The snow is moving out.Air sleeks itself in the willows.Earth remembers. Springs are aware.From love oflife the crowflies without a soundand the seed is wordless ...

But not everything silent is dumb.That cave on the left of the landscape is very quiet.And if it quickly fills with soldiersSome big mouth has been at work.Homer before the belly of the Trojan horse •••

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Snow How?

It began to snow at midnight. And certainlythe kitchen is the best place to sit,even the kitchen of the sleepless.It's warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wineand look out of the window at your friend eternity.Why care whether birth and death are merely pointswhen life is not a straight line.Why torment yourself eyeing the calendarand wondering what is at stake.Why confess you don't have the moneyto buy Saskia shoes?And why bragthat you suffer more than others.

How to live? How be simple and literal?I was always looking for a wordthat had been spoken only once,or a word that had not been spoken at all.I should have looked for ordinary words.

Nothing can be addedeven to unconsecrated wine.

If there were no silence herethe snow would have dreamed it up.You are alone.Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.

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Once More

Even though a friend often failed to understand my verses(there are beings who cannot killfor all their wanting)though in despair and desolate(some statues were so appalledby the sins of men that they turned to wood)though suicide alone looked my way,Ialways had the same feeling: to become nothing,and yet to destroy that nothingness!

Once more Iwas in love ..•

When It Rains on Sunday

When it rains on Sunday and you are alone,open to the world but no thief comesand neither drunkard nor enemy knocks at the door,when it rains on Sunday and you're desertedand can't imagine living without the bodyor not living since you have it,when it rains on Sunday and you're on your own,don't think of chatting with yourself.Then it's an angel who knows, and only what's above,then it's a devil who knows, and only what's below.

A book is in the holding, a poem in release.

8S

After St Martin's Day I Verses

The first snow fell at dawn. Young and coy,merely a promise and token,a phantom to prove how beauty passes.And before mortalsaware of its presenceconfessed, if only with half-open eyes,the fever of their desire -the thirsty earth grew impatient and the thaw began.But by thenyou knew from several footprintsthat some walk, others mark time.

It is the time when the cabbage is served with wrathand the calf with hate,it is the time when death draws wine from nightshade,it is the time when the blinder you are the more you stare,it is the time when field boundaries are ploughed up,it is the time when the hot tear knowsthat it cries alone,it is the time when the wolf grabs letter and book,it is the time when the searchlight is on the spirit,it is the time when you cannot love your own unhappinessbecause it is everyone's.

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Non cum Platone

Her beauty destroys my love,for in destroying illusion she destroys reality.

His love destroys my beauty,for since Iwas given a mask Iwant a curtain too.

Heavy dawn .... Villagewhere they have eaten all the cocks.

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Reminiscence II

To Franti!ek Tichy

After hours of searching everywhere in vainfor pimpernel, we came out of the woodand halted at high noon in the heather.The air was baked like a sheet of tin. We lookedat the slope on the other side, thickly grownwith bushes and trees. They were rigid, like us.Iwas about to ask somethingwhen in the unmoving massof frozen enchantment a single treein a single spotsuddenly began to tremblelike a quarter-tone, yet soundless.You would have said it was from careless joy,the spirit of adventure.But the tree began to rustlelike the rustle of silver turning black.Then it began to quiverlike the skirt of a woman who touchesa man's clothes while reading a book in an asylum.And then the tree began to shake and swayas if shaken and swayed by someonestaring into the dark-eyed depths oflove -and Ifelt Iwas meant to die that moment •..

'n 'b fi"d ' f: h "d'" , ,on tea ral , my at er sal , It s an aspen.But Istill remember how he paledwhen we came there later onand saw beneath the tree an.empty chair.

Autumn II

Autumn twilight in the country,twilight that makes friends.But over the fields a couple came into viewwho kept asking the waysince a farmer had shown them his whip.

- 'I love you because -' the man was tellingthe woman the old old story.'r remember,' the woman said,'how they used to say whoeverslept under a yew would die .. ,Why don't we go on a bit further?'

The wild geese are on the wing.The cold is cleansing the river.The nixie's gone to warm up in the orchard shed.

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After St Martin's Day II

It was some time after Martinmas.I was walking across the Gahatagatplateau. I was in the sort of moodwhen I didn't know which day it was.But the snow had been falling and falling. It covered

everything.And at one moment the wind blew so sharplyI lowered my headand suddenly saw with shrinking heartalways a step ahead of mea fresh footprint.

There wasn't a living soul around.Who was it there in front of me?

It was r walking in front of mysel£

9I

Ubi nullus ordo, sed perpetuus horror

To live is terrible since you have to staywith the appalling reality of these years.Only the suicide thinks he can leave by the doorthat is merely painted on the wall.There is not the slightest sign that the Comforter will come.

In me the heart of poetry bleeds.

Night Watchman's Song

Burns was right .... But I am convincedthat we Catlnot imagine any womanfrom reading a book, still less from reality.She is. And thanks only to hermen are too, very often as murdererswho sometimes share royallythe diamond crown of her mystery.

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Without Title II

They say the Druid stones can be moved.But the beauty of women, their very motion, is much more

cruel.Broken-spirited the poet writes it down in this world,in this world which turns a sullen earto distance and adventureand eynic-eyed sells its wonder cheap ..•

The proud spirit cannot be tragic.

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Fourth Month

April mist. One ray of sunpale as a blind man's stick inches its way,though more certain than a week ago.Cold hands, warm heart.

You too have more than a feeling .... But that is all.If danger threatens, you have no defence.Ifhappiness, you are powerless.

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The Pine

How beautiful that old white pineon the hill of your childhoodwhich you revisited today.Beneath it$ murmur you remember your,deadand wonder when your turn will come.Beneath its murmur you feelas if you had written your last bookand now had only to be silent and weepfor the words to grow.

What life have you had? You left the known for theunknown.

And-your fate? It smiled on you only onceand you were not there ...

The, Chicken

The doors open by themselvesbefore an angel. At other times a chickencomes from the courtyard into the kitchenand looks round at the company with so critical an eyethat they do not wait to see how it will endbut quickly cross themselves in self-defence.

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Death

Once again he is going roundlike the sodden air on an incendiarist's skinor the whiff of a nearby brewery.I see him clearly through the linecut by Adam's black diamondin the glass of virginity.

In Nothingness

In nothingness larded like a fat bookabout a lost lyric;by an unknown poet,we, who sweat instead of weeping,we, who say a stone s-weats when it weeps,thought today of one who was drownedwhile learning to swim so as not to drown ..•

Meanwhile the park beyond the window, at other times soprim,

rubbed its green nose on the sleeve of the windand then looked at it through the eyes of the mistletoe.

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On a Freezing Night

One night I heard a walnut-treecrack with the frost.It went offlike the shrapnelat the storming of Babylon,shrapnel which is exploding only now.

The farmer ran out of his house, a horse from the stable,and I found myself openingthe white book of summonses to conscience ...

We don't have a single clueand then we are dumbfounded.

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.Glimpsed

Glimpsed from the train, which takes shadow for truth.But she was truly beautifuland bareheaded,bareheaded as if an angelhad left his head thereand gone off with the hat.

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Between

Between the idea and the wordthere is more than we can understand.There are ideas for which no words can be found.

The thought lost in the eyes ofa unicornappears again in a dog's laugh.

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Lovers

Time in the mountains: jealousy, fruit of unbelie£Time at the spring: infidelity, fruit of jealousy.Time by the river: jealousy without love,deaf, but gorged with sex ...

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Dream

The dry depths at the borders of memoryfray out into hairs that reach to hell.Continence is shamelessly insistent. Laughter.I have never taken men seriously,says Lady Macbethand she inspects her handbloody from the murder of drunken mosquitoes.

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During an Illness

A melting icicle, a leaking·tap,counting drops of medicine.

Tibet sees by water. We by tears.

lOS

Epoch

By the images of thingswe are still in time.

But today, before the sower has taken a step,the reaper is already there.

It seemsthere will be neither dead nor living ..•

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The Virgin

The party is over at which there were so many lightsthe dark was perfect.And he was there. She didn't mindifhis feelings were wine and his thoughtsgrapes.Towards morning he left her. She sat gazingthrough the small hole in her dressat Monday's naked nail.

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Twelfth Night

T4e day of candles which lickthe carp bones of Christmas Eve.But the wooden mortar for grinding poppy-seedis very beautifulin the deep foreground of the straw wall,and beautiful this antique stillness,and a week gone hasn't deceived time's seeming.It's freezing and yet the tombstone is warm.Because it moves.

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The Sparrow

Flying from a snowy branch a sparrowrocked it slightly and so noddedrefusal of blind feeling.

A little snow fell off the bough.Before long there will be an avalanche.

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Goodbye

Once more the storm is rising from fate's black quarter.The mind feels faint,bemused like a body turned inside out.Who is that dancing in the bats'-wing cloak?Who was struck dumb by the rattle of what he saw?The water in the well lures youth, a man seeks the spring.All that is over. There are wordsone must not speak o£You will never keep the promise you made.The skull has dreamed your eyes.

IIO

But

The god of song and laughter long agoshut the doors of eternity behind him.Since then only sometimesa dying memory echoes in us.And since then only the painis neverlife size,it is always larger than manand yet must lodge in his heart.

III

from At the Last Breath*

*Published 1967: poems from 1961-5.

You Can

There's room in me and morefor your grief and your blasphemingand for your joy. No, nothing hindersyour coming in on sunny days,not only when the storm is howling.Here you can cry and curseand, close to the mystery, laugh, even laugh -and nothing will stop your leaving.I am here, you only come and go.

IIS

Changes'

This is our hope: that we have passedthe limits of the last reality.But while consciousness disappearsit is the very consciousnesswhose constant changesremain ...

u6

Why Today?

You know very well that pain is ~ot made lessby comparing it with greater pain,but how is it your hands are bloody?You haven't killed anyone,you've never done that, you neverwould, it's only that you're going to,but why has it been today?

II7

Don't Cry!

It's getting dark, stop reading! Sun's coming out, don't cry !Maybe today or yesterday or after a whileyour fate and your willare going to be in harmony with life,even if minds are different.Of course if you step beyond wordsyou'll fall into the abyss.Blood enough for you, little to the murderers ..•

lIS

Whq Knows?

So you put down your cut braidsand plucked eyebrows on my bookjust becauseon your wedding-day you will wear one dressat the registry and another at the church,though since the linen's shortyou'll have to do the washing every week,while even now the bridegroom's selling the bedroom suite?Potentiana, who knows whether tearsreveal themselves only whennobody wants anything from them.

II9

Additional Poems*

*The first two published in aperiodical, 1967; the others written 1969.

Against

I would gladly tell you but I must not.Time dances badlyin tragedy's worn-out shoesand testifies against love.Though the trees blossomed there was no fruit.Living in life and existing in nothingnesswhatever happens, nothing happens .••And whar augury? Call a third time?

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We Too

Spring before its time. So uncertain a springthat the first shoots are its own doubts.If we are afraid the sneezing in the morguemeans snow and more frosts on the way,how are we to appease the riled and stingy sun?Heaviness of heart without freedomis only at its beginning. Somethingis missing in the earth's loins and navel.We too lack much when we love:such as love or self-forge~ting.

_You're Thinking of Children

You're thinking of children, of theirhere and now, everything now,without a thought of whenor where .... What's the good oflooking atyourself in a mirror, .they ask, simply becausethey haven't yet been in love .... Yes,only children don't need a double.

I2S

Joy

What you said and then Jivedwas for the dead .... But reallyonly joy exists in time,because it alone is instant.The most present. The most mortal.

126

For Himself

So many apples and no apple-tree! Butnow there are no more apples here.So much passion and no love! Butnow there are no unchristened here.Every man for himselfand we have time only for moments.It won't last.

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