All of Us: The Collected Poems

  are trapped at the mouth

  of the Yukon River in Alaska

  and weigh upwards of 1,900 pounds.

  This particular specimen

  — I am quoting —

  was killed in the exploratory dynamiting

  that went on in the summer of 1951

  at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River.

  I remember my father told me

  a story then about three men he knew long ago in Oregon

  who hooked what must have been the largest in the world.

  So big, he said,

  they fastened a team of horses

  to it—the cable or chain, whatever

  they were using for line —

  and for a while, even the horses

  were at a standstill.

  I don’t remember much else —

  maybe it got away

  even then—just my father there beside me

  leaning on his arms over the railing, staring, the two of us

  staring up at that great dead fish,

  and that marvelous story of his, all

  surfacing, now and then.

  Night Dampness

  I am sick and tired of the river, the stars

  that strew the sky, this heavy funereal silence.

  To while away the time, I talk to my coachman, who

  looks like an old man.… He tells me that this dark, forbidding river

  abounds in sterlet, white salmon, eel-pout, pike, but there is no one

  to catch the fish and no tackle to catch it with.

  — ANTON CHEKHOV

  “Across Siberia”

  Another Mystery

  That time I tagged along with my dad to the dry cleaners —

  What’d I know then about Death? Dad comes out carrying

  a black suit in a plastic bag. Hangs it up behind the back seat

  of the old coupe and says, “This is the suit your grandpa

  is going to leave the world in.” What on earth

  could he be talking about? I wondered.

  I touched the plastic, the slippery lapel of that coat

  that was going away, along with my grandpa. Those days it was

  just another mystery.

  Then there was a long interval, a time in which relatives departed

  this way and that, left and right. Then it was my dad’s turn.

  I sat and watched him rise up in his own smoke. He didn’t own

  a suit. So they dressed him gruesomely

  in a cheap sports coat and tie,

  for the occasion. Wired his lips

  into a smile as if he wanted to reassure us, Don’t worry, it’s

  not as bad as it looks. But we knew better. He was dead,

  wasn’t he? What else could go wrong? (His eyelids

  were sewn closed, too, so he wouldn’t have to witness

  the frightful exhibit.) I touched

  his hand. Cold. The cheek where a little stubble had

  broken through along the jaw. Cold.

  Today I reeled this clutter up from the depths.

  Just an hour or so ago when I picked up my own suit

  from the dry cleaners and hung it carefully behind the back seat.

  I drove it home, opened the car door and

  lifted it out into sunlight. I stood there a minute

  in the road, my fingers crimped on the wire hanger. Then

  tore a hole through the plastic to the other side. Took one of

  the empty sleeves between my fingers and held it —

  the rough, palpable fabric.

  I reached through to the other side.

  IV

  Return to Kraków in 1880

  So I returned here from the big capitals,

  To a town in a narrow valley under the cathedral hill

  With royal tombs. To a square under the tower

  And the shrill trumpet sounding noon, breaking

  Its note in half because the Tartar arrow

  Has once again struck the trumpeter.

  And pigeons. And the garish kerchiefs of women selling flowers.

  And groups chattering under the Gothic portico of the church.

  My trunk of books arrived, this time for good.

  What I know of my laborious life: it was lived.

  Faces are paler in memory than on daguerreotypes.

  I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.

  Others will take over, always with the same hope,

  The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to.

  My country will remain what it is, the backyard of empires,

  Nursing its humiliation with provincial daydreams.

  I leave for a morning walk tapping with my cane:

  The places of old people are taken by new old people

  And where the girls once strolled in their rustling skirts,

  New ones are strolling, proud of their beauty.

  And children trundle hoops for more than half a century.

  In a basement a cobbler looks up from his bench,

  A hunchback passes by with his inner lament,

  Then a fashionable lady, a fat image of the deadly sins.

  So the Earth endures, in every petty matter

  And in the lives of men, irreversible.

  And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?

  What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

  — CZESLAW MILOSZ

  (translated by Milosz and Robert Hass)

  Sunday Night

  Make use of the things around you.

  This light rain

  Outside the window, for one.

  This cigarette between my fingers,

  These feet on the couch.

  The faint sound of rock-and-roll,

  The red Ferrari in my head.

  The woman bumping

  Drunkenly around in the kitchen…

  Put it all in,

  Make use.

  The Painter & the Fish

  All day he’d been working like a locomotive.

  I mean he was painting, the brush strokes

  coming like clockwork. Then he called

  home. And that was that. That was all she

  wrote. He shook like a leaf. He started

  smoking again. He lay down and got back

  up. Who could sleep if your woman sneered

  and said time was running out? He drove

  into town. But he didn’t go drinking.

  No, he went walking. He walked past a mill

  called “the mill.” Smell of fresh-cut

  lumber, lights everywhere, men driving

  jitneys and forklifts, driving themselves.

  Lumber piled to the top of the warehouse,

  the whine and groan of machinery. Easy

  enough to recollect, he thought. He went

  on, rain falling now, a soft rain that wants

  to do its level best not to interfere

  with anything and in return asks only

  that it not be forgotten. The painter

  turned up his collar and said to himself

  he wouldn’t forget. He came to a lighted

  building where, inside a room, men played

  cards at a big table. A man wearing

  a cap stood at the window and looked

  out through the rain as he smoked

  a pipe. That was an image he didn’t

  want to forget either, but then

  with his next thought he

  shrugged. What was the point?

  He walked on until he reached the jetty

  with its rotten pilings. Rain fell

  harder now. It hissed as it struck

  the water. Lightning came and went.

  Lightning broke across the sky

  like memory, like revelation. Just

  when he was at the point of despair,

  a fish came up out of the dark

  water under the jetty and then fell back


  and then rose again in a flash

  to stand on its tail and shake itself!

  The painter could hardly credit

  his eyes, or his ears! He’d just

  had a sign—faith didn’t enter

  into it. The painter’s mouth flew

  open. By the time he’d reached home

  he’d quit smoking and vowed never

  to talk on the telephone again.

  He put on his smock and picked up

  his brush. He was ready to begin

  again, but he didn’t know if one

  canvas could hold it all. Never

  mind. He’d carry it over

  onto another canvas if he had to.

  It was all or nothing. Lightning, water,

  fish, cigarettes, cards, machinery,

  the human heart, that old port.

  Even the woman’s lips against

  the receiver, even that.

  The curl of her lip.

  At Noon

  You are served “duck soup” and nothing more. But you

  can hardly swallow this broth; it is a turbid liquid

  in which bits of wild duck and guts

  imperfectly cleaned are swimming.…

  It is far from tasty.

  — ANTON CHEKHOV

  “Across Siberia”

  Artaud

  Among the hieroglyphs, the masks, the unfinished poems,

  the spectacle unfolds: Antonin et son double.

  They are at work now, calling up the old demons.

  The enchantments, etc. The tall, scarred-looking

  one at the desk, the one with the cigarette and

  no teeth to speak of, is prone to

  boldness, to a certain excess

  in speech, in gesture. The other is cautious,

  watches carefully his opportunity, is effacing even. But

  at certain moments still hints broadly, impatiently

  of his necessarily arrogant existence.

  Antonin, sure enough, there are no more masterpieces.

  But your hands trembled as you said it,

  and behind every curtain there is always, as you

  knew, a rustling.

  Caution

  Trying to write a poem while it was still dark out,

  he had the unmistakable feeling he was being watched.

  Laid down the pen and looked around. In a minute,

  he got up and moved through the rooms of his house.

  He checked the closets. Nothing, of course.

  Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He turned off the lamps and sat in the dark.

  Smoking his pipe until the feeling had passed

  and it grew light out. He looked down

  at the white paper before him. Then got up

  and made the rounds of his house once more.

  The sound of his breathing accompanying him.

  Otherwise nothing. Obviously.

  Nothing.

  One More

  He arose early, the morning tinged with excitement,

  eager to be at his desk. He had toast and eggs, cigarettes

  and coffee, musing all the while on the work ahead, the hard

  path through the forest. The wind blew clouds across

  the sky, rattling the leaves that remained on the branches

  outside his window. Another few days for them and they’d

  be gone, those leaves. There was a poem there, maybe;

  he’d have to give it some thought. He went to

  his desk, hesitated for a long moment, and then made

  what proved to be the most important decision

  he’d make all day, something his entire flawed life

  had prepared him for. He pushed aside the folder of poems —

  one poem in particular still held him in its grip after

  a restless night’s sleep. (But, really, what’s one more, or

  less? So what? The work would keep for a while yet,

  wouldn’t it?) He had the whole wide day opening before him.

  Better to clear his decks first. He’d deal with a few items

  of business, even some family matters he’d let go far

  too long. So he got cracking. He worked hard all day—love

  and hate getting into it, a little compassion (very little), some

  fellow-feeling, even despair and joy.

  There were occasional flashes of anger rising, then

  subsiding, as he wrote letters, saying “yes” or “no” or “it

  depends”—explaining why, or why not, to people out there

  at the margin of his life or people he’d never seen and never

  would see. Did they matter? Did they give a damn?

  Some did. He took some calls too, and made some others, which

  in turn created the need to make a few more. So-and-so, being

  unable to talk now, promised to call back next day.

  Toward evening, worn out and clearly (but mistakenly, of course)

  feeling he’d done something resembling an honest day’s work,

  he stopped to take inventory and note the couple of

  phone calls he’d have to make next morning if

  he wanted to stay abreast of things, if he didn’t want to

  write still more letters, which he didn’t. By now,

  it occurred to him, he was sick of all business, but he went on

  in this fashion, finishing one last letter that should have been

  answered weeks ago. Then he looked up. It was nearly dark outside.

  The wind had laid. And the trees—they were still now, nearly

  stripped of their leaves. But, finally, his desk was clear,

  if he didn’t count that folder of poems he was

  uneasy just to look at. He put the folder in a drawer, out

  of sight. That was a good place for it, it was safe there and

  he’d know just where to go to lay his hands on it when he

  felt like it. Tomorrow! He’d done everything he could do

  today. There were still those few calls he’d have to make,

  and he forgot who was supposed to call him, and there were a

  few notes he was required to send due to a few of the calls,

  but he had it made now, didn’t he? He was out of the woods.

  He could call today a day. He’d done what he had to do.

  What his duty told him he should do. He’d fulfilled his sense of

  obligation and hadn’t disappointed anybody.

  But at that moment, sitting there in front of his tidy desk,

  he was vaguely nagged by the memory of a poem he’d wanted

  to write that morning, and there was that other poem

  he hadn’t gotten back to either.

  So there it is. Nothing much else needs be said, really. What

  can be said for a man who chooses to blab on the phone

  all day, or else write stupid letters

  while he lets his poems go unattended and uncared for,

  abandoned —

  or worse, unattempted. This man doesn’t deserve poems

  and they shouldn’t be given to him in any form.

  His poems, should he ever produce any more,

  ought to be eaten by mice.

  At the Bird Market

  There is no deceiving the bird-fancier. He sees and

  understands his bird from a distance. “There is no relying on

  that bird,” a fancier will say,

  looking into a siskin’s beak, and counting the feathers

  on its tail. “He sings now, it’s true, but what

  of that? I sing in company too. No, my boy, shout, sing

  to me without company; sing in solitude, if

  you can.… Give me

  the quiet one!”

  — ANTON CHEKHOV

  “The Bird Market”

  His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes

 
Talking about her brother, Morris, Tess said:

  “The night always catches him. He never

  believes it’s coming.”

  That time I broke a tooth on barbecued ribs.

  I was drunk. We were all drunk.

  The early sixteenth-century Belgian painter called,

  for want of his real name,

  “The Master of the Embroidered Leaf.”

  Begin the novel with the young married couple

  getting lost in the woods, just after the picnic.

  Those dead birds on the porch when I opened up

  the house after being away for three months.

  The policeman whose nails were bitten to the quick.

  Aunt Lola, the shoplifter, rolled her own dad

  and other drunks as well.

  Dinner at Doug and Amy’s. Steve ranting, as usual,

  about Bob Dylan, the Vietnam War, granulated sugar,

  silver mines in Colorado. And, as usual, just

  as we sit down the phone rings and is passed around

  the table so everyone can say something. (It’s Jerry.)

  The food grows cold. No one is hungry anyway.

  “We’ve sustained damage, but we’re still able

  to maneuver.” Spock to Captain Kirk.

  Remember Haydn’s 104 symphonies. Not all of them

  were great. But there were 104 of them.

  The rabbi I met on the plane that time who gave me comfort

  just after my marriage had broken up for good.

  Chris’s story about going to an AA meeting where

  a well-to-do family comes in—“freaked out,”

  her words—because they’ve just been robbed at gunpoint.

  Three men and a woman in wet suits. The door to their

  motel room is open and they are watching TV.

  “I am disbanding the fleet and sending it back

  to Macedonian shores.”

  Richard Burton

  Alexander the Great

  Don’t forget when the phone was off the hook

  all day, every day.

  The bill collector (in Victoria, B.C.) who asks