With the Terror of the Tightrope Walker
…the waters of the abyss
where I would fall in love with myself
Quevedo
There above the well
I thought only of touching the water.
Never of washing my hands there
of soiling them.
Only the well and my thirst.
Never of the old mouths
nor of the futile buckets.
Not of the water
gleaming against its comfortable roof
and the national passion of the drowned.
Never
the worried eye.
I speak in the voice
of the terrified tightrope walker.
This Will Be the Only Lie We’ll Always Believe
By force of admitting it so many times.
Today
someone will try to read his neighbor’s eyes
to find out if sadness
(that headstrong girl who goes about spitting love)
will be forever a sadistic friend
or a dead fish swimming in the throat.
Happiness wouldn’t be easy to hide.
(Her make-up is always smeared).
But you’ll have to forgive me anyway
if I don’t bark love in your ear.
Too many of the dead beneath our feet
might be awakened.
This is a sad business
this playing at being perfect.
Splinters
to my mother
You die by day sur-
vive by night.
A landscape of war
of postwar, a land-
scape of after-battle.
Stone upon stone where
only cats can be heard by night,
pairs of lovers with no place to go,
screaming.
Garbage, ratty grass, rags, condoms,
remains of bloody cans.
When I go into the street
like any anonymous hunger artist
more than one body has broken
the pretense of symmetry with a fatal leap.
Once I sat on your knees
Without shame, Shulamite,
your golden hair your ashen hair.
Ridiculous foreigners hanging
on nonexistent trees.
It’s cold.
The bloody crusts of autumn
squeeze like a shroud.
If I sit at the table
the void is too vast
for a fingernail to scrape it away.
Strong Bones
The wind enters
through the bones
a flute
a drainpipe.
‘We could play
all night
and beg
for three generations.
Seen close up
they’re not made
for work
and flaunt their poverty
in posters
written in a strange tongue.’
The gypsies
from the concentration camps
(and the others)
escaped in cattle cars
they falsified
passports
walked, were
turned away at neighboring
eastern
borders.
They tried again
(we’ll commit mass suicide).
Some succeeded
made it
to the South
(or death).
The Japanese Mask
I, Ito Toshitsugo
stuck my head from a hole all night
to devour the window of a business
in Japanese Venice.
Drawn out by the luminous lure
and plastic tubes.
Two months
eel-shaped
I stood in ecstasy
before the golden pavilion of the bazaar.
Long and skinny
gaunt with hunger
a freshwater eel
in the saltwater port.
Sixty million people
passed by
without seeing me.
Sixty million
busy with Christmas shopping
blinded by the artificial lights
in the (artificial) branches
of the tree I leaned against.
I, Ito Toshitsugo
became the cadaver of a man of sixty
with no known residence
in one of Osaka’s most crowded neighborhoods.
May somebody play the iron flute for me.
Translated by Mark Weiss
