Must present alternatives.
Change, but on condition that nothing changes.
That is easy, impossible, difficult, worth trying.
Her eyes are, as required, now deep blue, now grey,
black, sparking, unaccountably filled with tears.
She sleeps with him as one of many, as the one and only.
She’ll bear him four children no children, one.
Naïve, but gives best advice.
Weak, but she’ll carry.
She has no head, so she’ll have a head,
reads Jaspers and women’s magazines.
Has no clue what that nut is for and will build a bridge.
Young, young as usual, always still young.
Holds in her hands a sparrow with a broken wing,
her own money for a long and distant journey,
a chopper, a poultice and a glass of vodka.
Where is she running, perhaps she’s tired.
But no, only a little, very, it’s no matter.
She either loves him or she’s just stubborn.
For better, for worse and for love of God.

In my dream
I paint like Vermeer of Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.

I drive a car
which obeys me

I am gifted,
I compose epic verse.

I hear voices
as clearly as genuine saints.

My piano performances
would simply amaze you.

I fly the way prescribed,
that is, out of myself.

Falling off a roof
I know how to land softly on the lawn.

Breathing under water
is no problem.

I’m not complaining:
I managed to discover Atlantis.

It’s a pleasure always
to wake before death.

Immediately war starts
I turn over to a better side.

I exist, but don’t have to be
a child of the times.

Some years ago
I saw two suns.

And the day before yesterday a penguin.
as clearly as this.

A strange planet with its strange people.
They yield to time but don’t recognize it.
They have ways of expressing their protest.
They make pictures, like this one for instance:

At first glance, nothing special.
You see water.
You see a shore.
You see a boat sailing laboriously upstream.
You see a bridge over the water and people on the bridge.
The people are visibly quickening their step,
because a downpour has just started
lashing sharply from a dark cloud.

The point is that nothing happens next.
The cloud doesn’t change its colour or shape.
The rain neither intensifies nor stops.
The boat sails on motionless.
The people on the bridge
run just where they were a moment ago.
It’s difficult to avoid remarking here:
this isn’t by any means an innocent picture.
Here time has been stopped.
Its laws have been ignored.
It’s been denied influence on developing events.
It’s been insulted and spurned.

Thanks to a rebel,
A certain Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being which as it happens 
has long since and quite properly passed away)
time stumbled and fell.

Maybe this was a whim of no significance,
a freak covering just a pair of galaxies,
but we should perhaps add the following:



Here it’s considered proper
to regard this little picture highly,
admire it and thrill to it from age to age.

For some this isn’t enough.
They even hear the pouring rain,
they feel the cool drops on necks and shoulders,
they look at the bridge and the people
as if they saw themselves there
in the self-same never-finished run
along an endless road eternally to be travelled
and believe in their impudence
that things are really thus. 

My apologies to the accidental for calling it necessary.
However, apologies to necessity if I happen to be wrong.
Hope happiness won’t be angry if I claim it as my own.
May the dead forget they barely smoulder in my 
                                                                         remembrance.
Apologies to time for the abundance of the world missed
                                                                     every second.
Apologies to my old love for treating the new as the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, that I prick my finger.
Apologies to those calling from the abyss for a record of a
                                                                                 minuet.
Apologies to people catching trains for sleeping at dawn.
Pardon me, baited hope, for my sporadic laugh.
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing with a spoonful of water;
and you too, hawk, unchanged in years, in that self-same
                                                                                       cage,
staring motionless, always at the self-same spot,
forgive me, even if you are stuffed.
Apologies to the hewn tree for the four table-legs.
Apologies to the big questions for small replies.
Truth don’t pay me too much attention.
Seriousness—be magnanimous.
Mystery of Being—suffer me to pluck threads from your
                                                                               train.


Soul—don’t blame me for having you but rarely.
Apologies to everyone for failing to be every him or her.
I know that while I live nothing can excuse me,
since I am my own impediment.
Speech—don’t blame me for borrowing big words
and then struggling to make them light.

An island where everything becomes clear.

Here one can stand on the ground of proofs.

The only road has its destination.

Shrubs are burdened with answers.

Here grows the tree of Proper Conjecture,
its branches eternally untangled.
The dazzlingly straight tree of Understanding
is next to a spring called Ah So That’s How It Is.

The deeper you’re in the wood, the wider grows 
the Valley of Obviousness.

Whatever the doubt, the wind blows it away.

Echo speaks uncalled
and readily solves the mysteries of the worlds.

On the right a cave where sense reclines.

On the left a lake of Deep Conviction.

Truth stirs from the bottom and lightly breaks the surface.

Unshakeable Certainty dominates the vale
and Essence of Things spreads from its head.

Despite these attractions, the island is deserted,
and the tiny footmarks seen along the shores
all point towards the sea.

As though people always went away from here
and irreversibly plunged in the deep.

In life that’s inconceivable.

Reality doesn’t vanish
the way dreams do.
No rustle, no bell
disperses it,
no cry or thump
rouses from it.

Images in dreams 
are blurred and uncertain,
open to many interpretations.
Reality denotes reality,
and that’s a greater puzzle.
Dreams have keys.
Reality opens on itself
and won’t quite shut.
It trails
school reports and stars,
it drops butterflies
and the souls* of old irons,
headless hats
and shards of clouds
resulting in a riddle
that’s insoluble.
Without us there would be no dreams.
The one, without whom there would be no reality,
is unknown
while the product of his sleeplessness
affects everyone
that wakes.

It’s not dreams that are mad,
reality is mad,
if only because of the tenacity
with which it clings
to the course of events.

In dreams our recently dead
still survives,
he even enjoys good health
and recovered youth.
Reality displays
his dead body.
Reality retreats not an inch.

The volatility of dreams
allows memory to shake them off.
Reality needn’t fear being forgotten.
It’s a tough nut.
It sits on our shoulders
lies heavily on our hearts,
bars the way.
There is no escape from her,
she accompanies each flight.
There is no stop 
on the route of our journey
where she isn’t waiting.

Common miracle:
The happening of many common miracles.

Ordinary miracle:
invisible dogs barking 
in the silence of the night.

A miracle among many:
a tiny ethereal cloud
able to cover a large heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
An alder reflected in water
moreover turned from left to right
moreover growing crown downwards
yet not reaching the bottom
though the waters are shallow.

An everday miracle:
soft gentle breezes
gusting during storms.

Any old miracle:
cows are cows.

And another like it:
just this particular orchard
from just this pip.  

Miracle without frock coat or top hat:
a scattering of white doves.

Miracle—what else would you call it:
today the sun rose at 3.14
and will set at 20.01.

Instant living.
Unrehearsed performance.
Untried-on body.
A thoughtless head.

I am ignorant of the role I perform.
All I know is it’s mine, can’t be exchanged.

What the play is about 
I must guess promptly on stage.

Poorly prepared for the honour of living
I find the imposed speed of action hard to bear.
I improvise though I loathe improvising.
At each step I trip over my ignorance.
My way of life smacks of the provincial.
My instincts are amateurish.
The stage-fright that is my excuse only humiliates me more.
Mitigating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and gestures that cannot be retracted,
stars that counted to the end,
my character like a coat I button up running—
this is the sorry outcome of such haste.

If only one could practice ahead at least one Wednesday, 
repeat a Thursday!
But now Friday’s already approaching with a script I don’t
                                                                                   know.

Is this right?—I ask
(in a rasping voice,
Since they didn’t even let me clear my throat in the wings).

You’re deluded if you think it’s only a simple exam
set in a makeshift office. No.
I stand among the stage-sets and see they’re solid.
The revolving stage’s been turning for quite some time.
Even the nebulae are switched on.
Oh, I have no doubt this is the opening night.
And whatever I’ll do
will turn for ever into what I have done.

The drop of water on my hand
is drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,

From the sky-ascending hoar on a seal’s whisker,
from broken jars in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index-finger
the Caspian Sea is an open sea

and the Pacific meekly drains into the Rudawa,
the very river that sailed in a cloud over Paris

in the year seventeen-hundred-and-sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three in the morning.

There aren’t enough lips to utter
your fleeting names, Oh water!

I would need to name you in every tongue,
voicing together every single vowel

and simultaneously keep mum—for the benefit
of the lake still awaiting a name,

with no place on earth—and for
the heavenly star reflected in it.

Someone’s been drowning, someone dying has been calling
                                                                                         you.
That was long ago and happened yesterday.


You’ve dowsed homes, you’ve snatched them
like trees, snatched forests like cities.

You were present in baptismal fonts and courtesans’ baths.
in kisses, in shrouds.

Biting stones, feeding rainbows.
In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light a drop of rain.
How gently the world touches me.

Wherever, whenever, whatever took place
is recorded on the waters of Babel.

That’s where one should have started: the sky.
A window without a sill, without frames or panes.
An opening, and nothing besides,
but gaping wide.

I needn’t wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
The sky is behind me, under my hand, on my eye-lids.
The sky wraps me up tightly
and lifts me from below.

Even the highest mountains
are not nearer the sky
than deepest valleys.
At no point is there more of it
than at another.
A cloud is crushed by the sky
as ruthlessly as a grave.
A mole as sky-ascending
as a wing-flapping owl.
An object falling into an abyss
falls from the sky to sky.



Granular, fluid, rocky
fiery and airborne
expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,
gusts and snatches of sky.
The sky ever-present
even in darkness beneath the skin.

I eat sky, I defecate sky.
I am a trap inside a trap.
A dwelt-in dweller,
an embraced embrace,
a question in answer to a question.

The division into sky and earth
is not a proper way
of considering this whole.
It only allows one
to survive under a more precise address,
quicker to find,
should any one seek me.
My distinguishing marks
are wonder and despair

It’s come to pass that one sunny morning
I am sitting under a tree
on a river-bank.
It’s a trivial event
history will not record.
It’s not like wars or treaties
whose causes await scrutiny
nor memorable assassinations of tyrants.

And yet I am sitting on a river-bank, that’s a fact.
And since I am here,
I must have come from somewhere,
and earlier
I must have been around many places,
just like conquerors of kingdoms
before they set sail.


The fleeting moment also has its past,
its Friday before Saturday,
May proceeding June.
Its horizons are as real
as they are in commanders’ field-glasses.

This tree—a poplar with ancient roots.
The river is the Raba: flowing since beyond yesterday.
The path through the thickets: made not the day before.
To blow away the clouds
the wind must first have blown them here.
And though nothing significant is happening nearby,
the world is not therefore the poorer in details,
the less justified, less well defined
then when it was being conquered by nomadic people.

Silence is not confined to secret plots,
the pageant of causes to coronations.
Pebbles by-passed on the beach can be as rounded
as the anniversaries of insurrections.

The embroidery of circumstance is also twisty and thick.
The ant’s seam in the grass.
The grass sewn into the earth.
The pattern of a wave darned by a stick.

It just so happens I am and I look.
Nearby a white butterfly flutters in the air
with wings that are wholly his
and the shadow that flies over my hands
is not other, not anyone’s, but his very own.

Seeing such sights I lose my certainty
That what is important
is more important than the unimportant

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place 
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what 
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you 
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake 
a life,

questions 
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions 
that have no right
to go away.

An open sandy shell 
on the beach
empty but beautiful
like a memory
of a protected previous self.
The most difficult griefs
ones in which
we slowly open
to a larger sea, a grander
sweep that washes
all our elements apart.

So strange the way
we are larger
in grief
than we imagined
we deserved or could claim
and when loss floods
into us
like the long darkness it is
and the old nurtured hope
is drowned again
even stranger then
at the edge of the sea
to feel the hand of the wind
laid on our shoulder
reminding us
how death grants
a fierce and fallen freedom
away from the prison 
of a constant
and continued presence,
how in the end
those who have left us
might no longer need us
with all our tears
and our much needed 
measures of loss
and that their own death
is as personal 
and private
as that life of theirs,
which you never really knew,
and another disturbing thing,
that exultation
is possible without them.

And they for themselves
in fact
are glad to have let go
of all the stasis 
and the enclosure
and the need for them to live
like some prisoner
that you only wanted
to remain incurious
and happy in your love
never looking for the key
never wanting to
turn the lock and walk
away
like the wind
unneedful of you,
ungovernable,
unnamable,
free.

Good poetry begins with 
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.