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Ilya Kaminsky – Ⅰ

Praise 

 

        …but one day through the gate left half-open

        there are yellow lemons shining at us

        and in our empty breasts

        those golden horns of sunlight

        pour their songs.

                                                                         – Montale

 

 

Praise

 

We were leaving Odessa in such a hurry that we forgot the suitcase filled

with English dictionaries outside our apartment building. I came to America

without a dictionary, but a few words did remain:

 

Forgetting: an animal of light. A small ship catches a wind and sails.

 

Past: figures coming to the water’s edge, carrying lamps. Water is

suspiciously cold. Many are standing on the shore, the youngest throwing

hats in the air.

 

Sanity: a barrier separating me from madness is not a barrier, really. A huge

aquarium filled with water weeds, turtles, and golden fish. I see flashes:

movements, names inscribed on the foreheads.

 

A swift laugh: she leaned over, intrigued. I drank too fast.

 

Dead: entering our dreams, the dead became inanimate objects: branches,

teacups, door-handles. I wake and wish I could carry this clarity with me.

 

Time, my twin, take me by the hand

Through the streets of your city;

My days, your pigeons, are fighting for crumbs—

 

*

 

A woman asks at night for a story with a happy ending.

I have none. A happy refuge,

 

I go home and become a ghost

searching the houses I lived in. They say –

 

The father of my father of his father of his father was a prince

who married a Jewish girl

 

against the Church’s will and his father’s will and

the father of his father. Losing all,

 

eager to lose: the estate, ships,

hiding his ring (his wedding ring), a ring

 

my father handed to my brother, then took. Handed,

then took, hastily. In a family album

 

we sit like the mannequins

of school children

 

whose destruction,

like a lecture is postponed.

 

Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging

this dream. Her love

 

is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries

in my mouth.

 

On my brother’s head: not a single

gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son.

 

And my father is singing

to his six-year-old silence.

 

This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.

The darkness, a magician, finds quarters

 

behind our ears. We don’t know what life is,

who makes it, the reality is thick

 

with longing. We put it up to our lips

and drink.

 

*

 

I believe in childhood, a native land of math exams

that return and do not return, I see—

 

the shore, the trees, a boy

running across the streets like a lost god;

the light falls, touching his shoulder.

 

Where memory, an old flautist,

plays in the rain and his dog sleeps, its tongue

 

half hanging out;

for twenty years between life and death

 

I have run through silence: in 1993 I came to America.

 

*

 

America! I put the word on a page, it is my keyhole.

I watch the streets, the shops, the bicyclist, the oleanders.

 

I open the windows of an apartment

and say: I had masters once, they roared above me.

 

Who are we? Why are we here?

A lantern they carried still glitters in my sleep.

 

in this dream: my father breathes

as if lighting a lamp over and over. The memory

 

is starting its old engine, it begins to move

and I think the trees are moving.

 

On the page’s soiled corners

my teacher walks, composing a voice;

 

he rubs each word in his palms:

“hands learn from the soil and broken glass,

 

you cannot think a poem,” he says,

“watch the light hardening into words.”

 

*

 

I was born in the city named after Odysseus

and I praise no nation—

 

to the rhythm of snow

an immigrant’s clumsy phrases fall into speech.

 

But you asked

for a story with a happy ending. Your loneliness

 

played its lyre. I sat

on the floor, watching your lips.

 

Love, a one-legged bird

I bought for forty cents as a child, and released,

 

is coming back, my soul in reckless feathers.

O the language of birds

 

with no word for complaint!—

the balconies, the wind.

 

This is how, while darkness

drew my profile with its little finger,

 

I have learned to see past as Montale saw it,

the obscurer thoughts of God descending

 

among a child’s drum beats,

over you, over me, over the lemon trees.

 

 

 

 

 

Reprinted from Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press: 2004) by permission of the author.

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