USA

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Elegy for Joseph Brodsky 

i
In plain speech, for the sweetness
between the lines is no longer important,
what you call immigration I call suicide.
I am sending, behind the punctuation,
unfolding nights of New York, avenues
slipping into Cyrillic -
winter coils words, throws snow on a wind.
You, in the middle of an unwritten sentence, stop,
exile to a place further than silence.

ii
I left your Russia for good, poems sewn into my pillow
rushing towards my own training
to live with your lines
folding into my life like an evening light.
To live with your lines, those where sails rise, waves
beat against the city's granite in each vowel, --
pages open by themselves, a quiet voice
speaks of suffering, of water.

iii
We come back to where we have committed a crime,
we don't come back to where we loved, you said;
your poems are wolves nourishing us with their milk.
I tried to imitate you for two years. It feels like burning
and singing about burning. I stand
as if someone spat at me.
You would be ashamed of these wooden lines
how I don't imagine your death
but it is here, setting my hands on fire.

Procession

Evening lengthens and bends. Cautiously
boats steam downriver - in this direction
and onward through the quiet and cool possessions.
In the dark houses windows light up.

Love cities. This is what my father taught me,
walking the streets half sleeping, singing,
ships swaying in the distance.
The lamplight falls and follows my hand.

Things give themselves away, a chair, a glass of wine,
small islands, helplessly half-flooded. The darkness 
is uncertain. The world falls between here and
where I sit writing an elegy for my father.

Here is his picture. Something is shaping in my mind,
I open the window, say in a low voice, my father.
The rain begins far off and comes no closer.

LADA

I imagined myself a caravella 
sinking towards sleep,
four-years-old on a summer night,
listening for my father's return.
He steps into the darkened room,
touches my cheek.
Father the wind. Child the boat.
Wind touches the sail!
In the morning secretly, in his ear,
I whisper the dream.
And he smiles, saying, Lada.
"Dear" and "Ship," two words in one,
dynasty of green light,
deep, under the water tree.
A word harbor welcomes us, saying:
in this we can hide, we can live.
Lada, my father's voice. This sea.
This sail. This tender wind.

Paul Celan

He writes towards your mouth
with his fingers.

In the lamplight he sees mud, wind bitten trees,
he sees grass still surviving this hour, page
stern as a burnt field.

He whispers. The words leave the taste of soil
on his lips:

Light was. Salvation.
The night. The words. The cold stones in his throat.

© All Copyright, 1/1/1999, Ilya Kaminsky. 
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.