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POEMS
by
JAN
SCHREIBER
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CHARCOAL
GHOSTS
The artist returns to the
classroom of his youth.
Skeleton in the corner,
odor of paint and clay,
unruly molded figures,
black crayons on a tray;
a staggered row of easels,
each with a mirror stopped
against a slanted backboard
on which a sketch pad’s propped,
and on each pad a likeness
just starting to emerge:
daring, discovery, error
quivering on the verge.
Out of the carbon haze,
a shocked and naked stare
of eyes not well aligned
but riveted on air,
as if developer washing
emulsion had begun
to reveal strange cabalistic
traceries of the sun.
Into the room they’ve
stumbled,
half-formed and half-defined,
fleeing inchoate passion,
awakening into mind,
leaving as testament this
shadow investiture,
fixed in a frame when youth
hesitates, not yet sure.
Alumnus in this room,
take stock of what you lost
when your audacious bloom
gave up its charcoal ghost.
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ELIZABETH
BISHOP
ATTENDS A
CONCERT
Vinalhaven, Maine, 1977
(based in part on notes in Bishop’s journal)
At the
quarry’s edge the tuba case
lies open in the waning light,
its scarlet lining mirrored in the water.
A plump man in a white
dinner jacket is holding
the tuba in a close embrace
while seated on a folding chair
on a flat ledge. Four other players
have joined him there
beside two thin, precarious birches.
On the tiered
rocks the audience stands;
young boys find higher perches,
stones in their hands
they’re told they mustn’t throw.
Some people sit and clutch their knees.
Some women wrap
their shawls against the breeze.
One holds a baby in her lap.
The trumpet
player has some words to say
about the number they’re about to play:
a rondo capriccioso.
The tuba makes some humorous sounds.
There’s laughter when a bullfrog answers “Glug.”
The brassy notes resound
from rock to rock,
and in its highest octave the trombone
traces a figure of Bartόk.
During a pause
somewhere a lone
birdcall sounds almost the same.
“The Bartόk bird,” says someone.
There is prolonged applause.
The dubious poet
is glad she came.
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THE
DEER TRAIL
From my small cottage, deep
in woods so dense that light
is lost, I hacked out, step
by step, a pathway straight
into uncertainty.
It took me years. I thought
by force I’d blaze a way
to rove and come back home
and in the effort I
might master at least some
mysteries of the place.
I had no certain aim.
Truly my urge was less
and more: I had a need.
Some woodsmen who lived close
to my expanse of sod,
having keen tools and skill,
aided me when they could.
But I had planned it all.
I sought no partners. Much
strength is required to fell
a giant dying birch,
all to extend a path
that then will only reach
ten feet through
undergrowth
beyond the previous mark.
And when you shear a swath
of brush where branches
fork,
they tangle, stab, and scrape
you everywhere. The work
exhausts. You can’t give up
or lose sight of your planned
direction. Saws can rip
into your flesh. The honed
ax gleams with danger. More
than once I felt the wind
of death stir in my hair.
Along the way I spied
traces of tawny fur
caught on a thorn, and
blood
dotting the fallen leaves.
But now and then I strayed
from the defile that moves
through granite walls and towers
of oak, to where sun paves
the rock, and sky acquires
an unaccustomed glow
refracted through the layers
of mist and cloud that lie
over the forest with
the waning of the day,
and my quixotic path
became a trickster’s maze.
Years of such labor both
tired me and gave some ease
when, deep in the woods, I came
upon a new trail. Was
this a device of some
intruding neighbor who,
confused or on a whim,
had thrust his own way
through
protected land? A glance
corrected me. I saw
abundant evidence
of deer. Scat on the ground
and dirt with clear hoof-prints
had marked the spoor.
Beyond
my path it traced a ridge
that led down to a pond
with cress along its edge
and mushrooms clustering
among the foliage.
Rising from there along
a sheer escarpment where
small curling ferns had sprung
up among pine and fir,
the deer trail opened out
on a vast reservoir
of dappled moss, sunlit
and undulant, all green
and yielding underfoot.
I stood there, quite alone
and yet surrounded by
fantastic spirits, kin
of my pathless ecstasy.
Silence enveloped all
the woods. The far-away
sounds of motors grew still
and I, godless and awed,
humbled, stumbled and fell.
There on the moss-deep bed
stretching through pine and oak
under sky without cloud,
I relearned how to walk
and, facing steep rock and thorn,
turned and made my way back.
* * *
Whatever a man might learn
from so much solitude
runs like a strand of yarn
along the path I made
through wilderness to reach,
finally, the village road.
But I have been too much
in my own company.
Those who could only watch
my slow advance now stray
onto the trodden trail
or venture out with me,
sometimes with chains to pull
trees from the path, sometimes
only to watch until
light in the forest dims
and sky turns violet.
Slowly the way becomes
familiar as regret,
and we retrace our steps,
struck inarticulate.
Then, after a moment’s
lapse,
with jovial wit one says,
“You realized your hopes –
you have achieved a blaze
of glory!” And I recall
how once, for no clear cause,
I grew weak-kneed and fell
on the thick moss. Though I
have traced their fleeting trail
through mysteries, I see
that even here there are
a thousand ways I may
pursue the elusive deer
as they retreat beyond
our human register,
yet doubt that I shall find
all I have left behind.
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THE
WEB
A thousand strands of
tensile gauze
held in a net of filament,
it sways and bounces in the breeze
as if kept whole by accident.
At its midpoint the spider
clings
and tosses with the weather’s whim,
bedizened in the sticky rings
of toil to snare the seraphim.
Hunger is long, but life
depends
on stern endurance, patient lust.
He scurries when his quarry lands
and seizes heaven as he must.
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THE
THINKER
O’Reilly lies abed awake.
The world, alluring, lies opaque.
He knows its parts, not why they move.
He has some guesses he can’t prove.
A fly disturbs his sense of
calm
and artfully eludes his palm.
He’s helpless to unfold its plan;
a fly’s a mystery to a man.
His mind sees patterns everywhere,
elusive figures in the air,
a deconstructed how and why
in random dartings of the fly.
They must be part of some
great whole
that lies just wide of his control.
Perhaps a theoretic twist
will help explain why they exist.
He thinks when he can say “because”
he’ll gain a glimpse of nature’s laws.
Surely there’s nothing on this sphere
he cannot reverse-engineer.
But theory’s still a mystery.
Why can O’Reilly never see?
To pin a fly with word on word
impugns the observer as absurd.
What would it mean to understand?
Make houseflies hop to your command?
Create one similar but new?
Avoid it when it flies at you?
Might human-wrought intelligence
with artificial elegance
contrive to imitate the creature
and turn the bug into a feature?
The mind’s a fly that darts and swerves,
spurred by percussions in the nerves,
as restless and persistent as
the improvising hand of jazz.
Men make their store of knowledge dense
by piling up experience,
and when in scores of years they die . . .
they feed descendants of the fly.
In human beings ideas are rife,
surpassing thoughtless insect life,
so they aspire with all due speed
(but scant success) to vanquish need.
And those who made society
a marvel of complexity
have come to see it’s now too late
to solve the problems they create.
As hard-learned truth accumulates,
the questioner who contemplates
feels wisdom settle on the brow.
O’Reilly swats it anyhow.
Whoever views the scene concludes
that understanding still eludes
the thinker with the cheek to try
to pit his wit against a fly.
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SELF/SYLPH
The self’s a butterfly. The poem’s a pin,
the page a board for the display I’ve planned.
But self’s a shadow; just as I begin,
colors dissolve and flutter from my hand.
THE
POET'S
ECSTASY
The air above is lively with balloons
tied by thinnest threads
to objects here below.
Some are loose and lightly hover
near heartbreak, random memories,
or nights from long ago.
Beautiful they are, and grander
than the world of every day.
Oh, I would pass my life
among
those splendid colorful confections
and I’d blend them into new
patterns that I hope
against experience
might rearrange the earthly things
they’re lightly tethered to.
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MAGGIE
AND FAITH
Maggie and
Faith, single and middle-aged,
were best of friends. Each summer without fail
they headed north to rooms they had engaged
in a large private home. (Though, truth to tell,
one room, since cash was scarce, but with twin beds.)
“Such lovely maiden ladies,” people said.
It was
Grandmother’s house they hosteled in;
she rented rooms and had some time to spare
to wash the sheets and towels, dust and clean.
She charged them, but the price was more than fair.
Unlike the other guests blown by the winds,
she thought of Faith and Maggie as old friends.
Maggie was
large and jolly, plump and round,
with stories and a cheerful sort of wit.
Faith was reserved and prim, and when she found
a chair outside the bustle, she would knit
and watch the fun, and smile a thin-lipped smile,
as Maggie kept us chuckling all the while.
And they
adopted all our family
as if they had no people of their own.
“Aunt Maggie” and “Aunt Faith” they were to me.
We hardly ever saw the two alone.
They came to family picnics in the park
and brought hot dogs and talked long after dark.
They played
canasta and they watched the soaps.
They walked along the harbor where the yachts
bobbed in the breezes, straining at the ropes.
They went to plays and criticized the plots.
And if they ever longed for life to bloom,
they kept that longing in their single room.
One summer –
maybe it was late July –
we went to watch the sunset on the bay,
and Faith had something odd about her eye
that puzzled me, though why I couldn’t say.
When Maggie made a joke, I saw her lift
an eyebrow, but I didn’t catch the drift.
Next winter
came a letter and a shock.
“I’m getting married,” Maggie wrote. The man,
whose name was Jimmy, made his wealth in stock
and would be good to her. It was their plan
to visit at the usual time, she said,
if they could get a room with double bed.
Come summer,
heartening as sunny days,
Maggie was there, with Jimmy by her side
to join the family outings and to raise
a glass to toast the sweetness of the bride.
But Faith was ill that year and never came,
and after that ...nothing was quite the same.
We heard she
moved down south and tended gardens
and was content, from all that we could learn.
Some people say a heartwound dries and hardens,
yet years went by and Faith did not return.
Perhaps she thought that none of us would care,
but something faded when she was not there.
She was the
dimmer light. We looked her way
only when nothing bolder caught the eye.
But still she had a minor part to play
until the headlong action passed her by.
She’d known a world in which she might discover
a vision of herself. Now that was over.
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____________
ON
LETITIA'S
TOES
Wherever my Letitia goes
she is preceded by her toes.
And as the wise observer knows,
on every toe a toenail grows.
It grows without impedance
till
it overfills the shoe, and still
torments her like a hedgehog’s quill.
Then will she have it trimmed? She will.
And so Letitia, lover,
friend,
finding it difficult to bend,
requests I intervene to end
a soreness that a blade can mend.
With fetching faith does
she surrender
toes exquisite, soft and tender
to offices she prays I’ll render
although she knows my skills are slender.
Then I, with eyes precise
and keen,
address the toe with my machine,
intending to produce a clean
division at the golden mean.
O brave campaigns that go
awry!
O roads too often traveled by!
O blades that close when flesh is nigh!
Letitia shrieks! (A crystal cry.)
Now gentler than the
poppy’s dust
and softer than a zephyr’s gust
yet urgent as a satyr’s lust,
I pant to save her fainting trust.
With mien morose and
melancholic
and stratagems near-diabolic,
I ward off curses vitriolic
while feigning virtues apostolic.
Again I face the trembling
digit
and force my fingers not to fidget,
maneuv’ring all the while the widget
to make that giant nail a midget.
While she endeavors not to
flinch,
I promise her it will not pinch,
and with a superhuman clinch
curtail the nail by half an inch.
One down. Now only nine
toes left
to be of excess claws bereft
by moves so intricate and deft
her feet will celebrate the theft.
Ascending the chromatic
scale,
I conquer each successive nail.
Resistance is of no avail.
At last Letitia can exhale.
So lovers, let us celebrate
collusion to abbreviate
mad outgrowths, and our not-too-late
avoidance of a tragic fate.
Set free at last, Letitia
springs
through woods, past streams and fairy rings,
and overleaps all earthly things
as if her toes had sprouted wings.
TWO BY
RAINER
MARIA RILKE
from the Book of
Hours
TRANSLATED
BY JAN
SCHREIBER
1
As the watchman in the vineyards
from his cottage waits for light,
in your hands, Lord, I’m the cottage,
and the night, Lord, of your night.
Vineyard, meadow, apple orchard
never skipping spring’s new twigs,
figtree that in marble-hardened
earth still bears a hundred figs:
Fragrance is flowing from your branches.
You do not ask who wakes or dreams.
Your depths, dissolved in sap, are rising
past me in quiet, fearless streams.
1
Wie der Wächter in den
Weingeländen
seine Hütte hat und wacht,
bin ich Hütte, Herr, in deinen Händen
und bin Nacht, o Herr, von deiner Nacht.
Weinberg, Weide, alter Apfelgarten,
Acker, der kein Frühjahr überschlägt;
Feigenbaum, der auch in marmorharten
Grunde hundert Früchte trägt:
Duft geht aus aus deinen runden Zweigen.
Und du fragst nicht, ob ich wachsam sei;
furchtlos, aufgelöst in Säften steigen
deine Tiefe still an mir vorbei.
2
These must be mountains I pass through alone,
embedded in hard veins like so much ore,
and I’m so deep I see no end in store,
no distance either; everything is near
and all the nearness solid stone.
I am
not yet a master of my pain,
so this great darkness only makes me small;
but if you are, grow heavy and break in:
that your whole hand upon me may befall
and I on you with cries I can’t restrain.
2
Vielleicht, daß ich durch schwere
Berge gehe
in harten Adern, wie ein Erz allein;
und bin so tief, daß ich kein Ende sehe
und keine Ferne: alles wurde Nähe
und alle Nähe wurde Stein.
Ich bin ja noch kein Wissender im
Wehe, –
so macht mich dieses große Dunkel klein;
bist Du es
aber: mach dich schwer, brich ein:
daß deine ganze Hand an mir geschehe
und ich an dir mit meinem ganzen Schrein.
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