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.
…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.