—The Carpathian Frontier,
October, 1968 —for my
Once, in a foreign country,
I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the
Shaped like the bodies of sleeping women.
Often I had to slow down for herds of
Or cattle milling on those narrow roads, &
The narrower, lost, stone streets of villagesI passed through.
The pains in my stomach had
Gradually sharper & more frequent as the
Wore on, & now a fever had set up house.
In the villages there wasn't much point in
Anyone for help.
In those places, where
Were bivouacked in shade on their way
From some routine exercise
The Danube, even food was scarce that year.
And the languages shifted for no clear
From two hard quarries of Slavic into German,
Then to a shred of Latin spliced with
And hisses.
Even when I tried the simplest phrases,
The peasants passing over those uneven
Paused just long enough to look up once,
Uncomprehendingly.
Then they
Quickly away, vanishing quietly into
Moment, like bark chips whirled downriver.
It was autumn.
Beyond each village the
Threw gusts of yellowing leaves across the road.
The goats I passed were thin, gray; their hind legs,
Caked with dried shit, seesawed along—Not even mild contempt in their expressionless,
Pale eyes, & their brays like the scraping of metal.
Except for one village that had a
Of museum where I stopped to rest, & sawA dead Scythian soldier under glass,
Turning to dust while holding a small
At attention forever, there wasn't much to look at.
Wind, leaves, goats, the higher
Locked in stone, the peasants with their
Embroidering a stillness into them,
And a spell over all things in that landscape,
Like . . . That was the trouble; it couldn't
Compared to anything else, not even the
Of some asylum at a wood's edge with the
Of a pond's spillway beside it.
But as each
Grew worse & lasted longer than the one before,
It was hard to keep myself aloof from the
World walking on that road.
After all,
Even as they moved, the peasants, the herds of
And cattle, the spiralling leaves, at least were
Of that spell, that stillness. After a while,
The villages grew even poorer, then thinned out,
Then vanished entirely.
An hour later,
There were no longer even the goats, only wind,
Then more & more leaves blown over the road,
Covering it completely for a second.
And yet, except for a random oak or some
Writhing out of the ravine I drove beside,
The trees had thinned into rock, into large,
Tough blonde rosettes of fading pasture grass.
Then that gave out in a bare plateau. . . .
And then,
Easing the Dacia down a winding
In second gear, rounding a long, funneled curve—In a complete stillness of yellow leaves fillingA wide field—like something thoughtlessly,
Mistakenly erased, the road simply ended.
I stopped the car.
There was no wind now.
I expected that, & though I was sick & lost,
I wasn't afraid.
I should have been afraid.
To this day I don't know why I wasn't.
I could hear time cease, the field quietly widen.
I could feel the spreading stillness of the
Moving like something I'd witnessed as a child,
Like the ancient, armored leisure of some
Gliding, gray-yellow, into the slightly tepid,
Unidentical gray-brown stillness of the water—Something blank & unresponsive in its tough,
Pimpled skin—seen only a moment, then
As it submerged to rest on mud, or glided
Beneath the lustreless, calm yellow
That clustered along a log, or floated
In broken ringlets, held by a gray
On the opaque, unbroken surface of the pond,
Which reflected nothing, no one. And then I remembered.
When I was a child, our neighbors would disappear.
And there wasn't a pond of crocodiles at all.
And they hadn't moved.
They couldn't move.
Lived in the small, fenced-off
Of a canal.
I'd never seen them alive.
Were in still photographs taken on the Ivory Coast.
I saw them only once in a studio whenI was a child in a city I once loved.
I was afraid until our neighbor, a photographer,
Explained it all to me, explained how
Away they were, how harmless; how they were
In rituals as "powers." But they had no "powers,"He said.
The next week he vanished.
I
Someone had cast a spell & that the
Swam out of the pictures on the wall &
Silently & multiplied & then turned
Shadows resting on the banks of lakes &
Or took the shapes of fallen logs in
In the mountains.
They ate our neighbor,
Mr.
Hirata.
They ate his whole family.
That is what I believed,
Then. . .that someone had cast a spell.
I did
Know childhood was a spell, or that then
Had been another spell, too quiet to hear,
Entering my city, entering the dust we ate. . . .
No one knew it then.
No one could see it,
Though it spread through lawnless miles of housing tracts,
And the new, bare, treeless streets; it
Into the vacant rows of warehouses &
The padlocked doors of working-class
And union halls & shuttered, empty diners.
And how it clung! (forever, if one had noticed)To the brothel with the pastel tassels on the
Of an unlit table lamp.
Farther in, it
On the decaying light of failing shopping centers;
It spilled into the older, tree-lined neighborhoods,
Into warm houses, sealing itself into
Of bedtime stories read each night by fathers—The books lying open to the flat,
Light of dawn; & it settled like dust on
Downtown, filling the smug cafés, schools,
Banks, offices, taverns, gymnasiums, hotels,
Newsstands, courtrooms, opium parlors,
Restaurants,
Armenian steam baths,
French bakeries, & two of the florists' shops—Their plate glass windows smashed forever.
Finally it tried to infiltrate the
Center of my city, a small square
With palm trees, olives, cypresses, a
Where no one gathered, not even thieves or lovers.
It was a place which no longer had any purpose,
But held itself aloof,
I thought, the wayA deaf aunt might, from opinions, styles, gossip.
I liked it there.
It was completely lifeless,
Sad & clear in what seemed always a perfect,
Windless noon.
I saw it first as a child,
Looking down at it from that as yet Unvandalized, makeshift studio.
I remember leaning my right cheek againstA striped beach ball so that Mr.
Hirata—Who was Japanese, who would be sent the next
To a place called Manzanar, a detention
Hidden in stunted pines almost
The Sierra timberline—could take my picture.
I remember the way he lovingly relished Each camera angle, the unwobbling tripod,
The way he checked each aperture
The light meter, in love with all
That were not accidental, & I
The care he took when focusing;
He tried two different lens filters
He found the one appropriate for
Sensual, late, slow blush of
Falling through the one broad bay window.
I remember holding still & looking
Into the square because he asked me to;
Because my mother & father had asked me
To obey & be patient & allow the man—Whose business was failing anyway by then—To work as long as he wished to without
Irritations or annoyances
He would have to spend these years, my father said,
Far away, in snow, & without his cameras.
But Mr.
Hirata did not work.
He played.
His toys gleamed there.
That much was clear to me . . . .
That was the day I decided I would never work.
It felt like a conversion.
Play was sacred.
My father waited behind us on a sofa
From car seats.
One spring kept nosing through.
I remember the camera opening into the light . . . .
And I remember the dark after, the studio closed,
The cameras stolen, slivers of glass from the
Bay window littering the unsanded floors,
And the square below it bathed in sunlight . . . .
All
Before Mr.
Hirata died, months later,
From complications following pneumonia.
His death, a letter from a camp official said,
Was purely accidental.
I didn't believe it.
Diseases were wise.
Diseases, like the
My sister had endured, floating
And strapped into her wheelchair all
That war, seemed too precise.
Like photographs . . .
Except disease left nothing.
Disease was
And equation that drank up light & never ended,
Not even in summer.
Before my fever broke,
And the pains lessened,
I could actually
Myself, in the exact center of that square.
How still it had become in my absence, &
Immaculate, windless, sunlit.
I could
The outline of every leaf on the nearest tree,
See it more clearly than ever, more clearly thanI had seen anything before in my whole life:
Against the modest, dark gray, solemn trunk,
The leaves were becoming only what they had to be—Calm, yellow, things in themselves &
More—& frankly they were nothing in themselves,
Nothing except their little
Of persisting for a few more days, or
The year after, & the year after that, &
Year following—estranged from us by now—& clear,
So clear not one in a thousand trembled;
And always coming back—steadfast, orderly,
Taciturn, oblivious—until the end of Time.
