d
translated from the Yiddish by Mildred Faintly
In the rich keen colors . . .
In the rich keen colors
of a deeply overgrown garden
where willow trees hang their pallid manes
and the pines, like low clouds,
cool and shade the day,
where tulips flicker their garnet and gold—
in a garden transfixed, made drunk, by sunbeams,
the locust, with its deafening, metallic cry,
forges autumn.
Fresh grass that remembers
the morning’s fateful taste of frost
adds its slightly desperate note of green
to the song of fall.
The tops of the trees,
brilliantly colored as flowers,
sway in time to it;
birds gilt-edged in October light,
balance on branches, depart like sparks
from the anvil of time. In the jewel-toned leaves,
wind-stirred, flickering,
bright as blown-on coals,
autumn screams.
The Sun
I’ve learned
the sun is God’s golden mask,
for often, when fury and loathing made my pulse
thud in my skull, the blood
abated its race as I felt God smiling
from behind that mask of splendor.
It can happen, that in a garden richly green
and golden with afternoon light,
I’ll see the sun through the trees,
hanging from a branch like some beautiful fruit.
Once, in such an illuminated hour,
as my mouth fell open in awe,
I could taste its juice.
And once, as day waned into evening,
I saw it setting on the sea like a swan made of flame,
and I rode on its back, pale and tall,
raising a silver trumpet to my lips.
The Masquerade is Over
I too have seen colossal figures in the clouds,
seen elves in place of rats
scamper in confusion across the asphalt;
stars bloomed atop steel streetlamps;
out of dark bushes no unseen pigeon
but an alto sang tremulous cadenzas.
Night and sunset were a young black man
who bent down to offer me a rose.
Now I’m old.
The masquerade is over.
I lie among the very roots of things,
I feel the pulse of being itself thud,
a heavy, fast gallop, through my astonished heart.
It’s a fermentation, an awakening,
a long, noisy vigil over the dead,
an agonized climb to the light
pushing through rocks and dirt,
while the earth, the place of graves,
with all its sickly dreaming cities,
grandly rotates
with its mountains, forests,
its lands begirt with shimmering seas,
and above it, the perplexing fiery omens
of stars, dawns, sunsets,
in a shapeless, incomparable, unending night
that doesn’t recognize time,
and extends as far as the fear of death
—a vision we frame with myth
and the gentle gold of poetry—
and every life is much like every other,
and it’s all so huge and incomprehensible.