TOMAS VENCLOVA

Poems

The Member of the Landing Crew

The hardest thing to do was to hide the boats they had dragged up onto the sand,
to cut up the tight rubber, shove the scraps under the bushes,
to ignore the prickly rain that comes before the dawn,

inundating the spine. The low pines kept silent across the dunes.
When the line moved, he sighed. His esophagus
recalled the memory of yesterday's seasickness,

and his shoulders, the strap of the backpack. Penicillin, binoculars,
ammunition, written off army storage the year before last,
a letter from an old minister with the words "long live unity",

a radio. Never having been to this seaside before, he sank
in the sand, pressed the pineneedles, aligned himself with his friend's jacket,
knowing his homeland by the shape of the cumulus cloud.

X

The needle of the compass danced out the ritual klumpakojis dance.
Eight kilometers down the road, next to the deserted farm,
he'd have to encounter the Bear, the Fern Blossom and the Goat -

nicknames from fables. An unfamiliar group stomped its feet
in the glade. The commander, whom he had seen somewhere before
in the unfinished war, said the password.

Alleviated, his companions disappeared in the dug-out, but he lagged behind. His boot
slipped on the mossy tussock by the stream, and the blow,
missing the back of his head, landed in his elbow. Grabbing

his holster in a rush, he was able to feel
the muscles in his kneeling leg tense; he saw the black aperture
before his eyes and grasped: well, that guy is quicker.

X

His brains, clinging to the stem of a reed, dried up long ago.
The rest soaked into the sand. At least he's lucky:
the secret service couldn't extract any codes from it,

since, were it not for the wet hummock, probably he, like his two friends,
who were less fortunate that morning, say what you will,
would have misled his people in the dark games of the Great

Powers, would have reached old age in the stinging cigarette smoke
in a provincial cafe with a hundred grams of cognac,
trying persuade everyone, including himself, that he saved

young people from bullets and nooses - or, maybe
having been across the Arctic Circle and back, he would have striven
in vain in ignorant offices for compensation for the lost time.

X

It's better the way it turned out. No cross, no memory.
The trucks stagger on the bumpy strip of gravel road
a few steps away from the place where it all happened.

The sweat-soaked drivers play the brakes like piano keys,
an axe is heard in the pine forest, the farmstead walls turn white,
the cuckoo promises we'll live long yet:

three times or maybe even four times as long as he.
Whoever died will never return; what's lost it gone.
Only the scraps of the rubber boat under the seaside willow

still await the Lord's Judgement, and the outline of the cloud,
exactly the same as then, crawls over the forest glade,
and the algae sway in the stream, which he didn't reach then.

A View From an Alley

Where gooseberries used to grow, new landlords have turned up thesoil.
The courtyard is tightly sealed from the street's chestnut trees
by a dark bluish double fence. All dimensions have shrunk,
expect for time. There was more space here than childhood alone can explain.
Squinting, you can still climb the dissolved staircase

up to the attic, where the floor still squeaks under your cousin's steps.
For long? He asked us then. Only for one night (but that happened later).
On the first floor a mass of mirror turned to stone, easily meshing
the hoarfrost of a faraway storm, the crown of a plum tree, a flask
rich with dense scents. These early insomnias: the chime
through the wall, helping us understand that everything passes,
but not soon; that time depends on speech,
that the worst case scenario turns out a little less
than what we can bear. A heaven of photographs behind the door.
In one I make out a shadow with a glass of cherry juice
and a dog. These snapshots still live somewhere,
although few people today would be able to figure them out.
The dog is buried in the corner of the kitchen garden
(now I cannot see the place behind the double fence)
and the shadow, pressing the glass to his mouth, still glides
on the surface of objects, next to the ribbed wallpaper,
the destitute greenery, the littered years, which belong
not to him, nor to the new landlords, a little more real than he.
No one knows what matches this dead space,
this empty cell in the net of alleys:
indifference or pain? Strangely, they coincide.