The Things

The walking stick, the few small coins, the key-ring,
The passive lock, late notes on which the days
Still left to me will never turn their gaze;
The bare chessboard, the playing cards, the uncaring
Book that enfolds a faded violet,
Monument to an afternoon, for certain
Unforgettable and now long since forgotten;
The radiant mirror on the west wall, lit
With a wholly illusory dawn. So many things!
Nail files, lintels, atlases, cups and keys,
Unspeaking slaves that serve us as we please,
Unseeing too, and strangely self-concealing.
After we are forgotten they will stay on,
Nor will they ever know that we have gone.

Key in Salonika

Abarbanel, Farías or Pinedo,
Persecuted and driven out of Spain
By the unholy Inquisition, still retain
The key to a certain dark house in Toledo.

All liberated now from hope and fear,
They look at it in the last light of day:
Its bronze speaks of the past, the far away,
Old fires, and quiet suffering year by year.

Now that its door is fragments, it has thinned
To a cipher for the Diaspora, for the wind,
Like to that other key of the Second Temple

Which someone flung up when the Roman legion
Fell on the Jews to make them an example,
And which a hand reached down for out of heaven.

Spinoza

The fine translucent fingers of the Jew
Are grinding lenses in the luminous shadow,
And the dying afternoon is fear and chill.
(All afternoons are the same, all evenings too.)

The thin hands and the haze of hyacinth
Growing wan in the confines of the ghetto
Almost do not exist for the man sitting still
And dreaming of a radiant labyrinth.

Fame does not trouble him, that dreamed shimmer
Reflected in the dream of another mirror,
Nor a young girl's love, shy and delicate.

Free of all myths, free of all metaphors,
He grinds the hardest glass: the infinite
Map of the One who is one with all His stars.

Chess

                I
Abstracted in their nooks, the players push
Their lagging pieces into line. The board
Detains them till all hours with its scored
Perimeters wherein two banners clash.
Wherein formations throb and radiate
Magical lines of force: Homeric tower,
Light cavalry, forward queen, king without power,
Sidewinder bishops, pawns that move like fate.

And when the players one by one are gone,
When time has taken each one like a pawn,
By no means will the ritual have ceased.
This war was kindled in the glowing East;
Its theater now is everywhere, wherever
The game is played. The game goes on forever.


                II
Lame king, slant bishop, queen of bloody arts,
Straight-charging rooks, and pawns with heavy loads
Over the light and shadow of the roads
Seek out and strike their bristling counterparts.

None of them knows that the much-noted hand
Above them governs their foreshadowed fates,
Nor that their little tours and desperate straits
Are subject to implacable command.

In the same way, the player is the ward
(The phrase is Omar's) of the other board,
Our daily board of black nights and white days.

God moves the player as the player the piece.
What god behind God opens this caprice
Of dust and dreams and time and agonies?

Mirrors

I who have felt an unrelenting horror,
Not only before the impenetrable glass
That holds an uninhabitable space
That can't exist, the room inside a mirror,

But also above still water that resembles
In its blue depths the deep blue of the sky
In which birds flying upside down glide by
Or which, to put an end to all that, trembles,

And also before the polished ebony whose
Dark silences and subtle gloss of light
Reflect as in a dream the ghostly white
Of a vague marble tracery or a rose,

Now, having wandered year after baffled year
Under the changeable moon early and late,
Wonder by what mysterious quirk of fate
Mirrors should fill my being with such fear.

Mirrors of metal, or masked mahogany
That in its reddish-brown and twilit haze
Softens and blurs a face that looks at its face
And is looked back at simultaneously,

I see them in their infinite witnessings,
Executors of a primeval pact
To multiply humanity, like the act
Of generation. Sleepless, unlucky things.

In their vertiginous web they lengthen and spread
This world, such as it is, vain and deluded;
Sometimes in the long evenings they are clouded
By the moist breath of one who is not yet dead.

The blank glass waits in ambush. If on one
Of the four walls in a bedroom there's a mirror,
I am no longer alone. There is another,
Who rigs a stealthy theatre in the dawn.

Nothing's remembered, everything comes to pass
In these strange crystal cabinets where our eyes,
Like those of some fantastical rabbis,
Read books from right to left in the anti-glass.

Claudius, king in a dream, and for a time,
Never felt he was a dream till on a day,
In the elaborate dumbshow of a play,
An actor brought to light his secret crime.

How strange that dreams and mirrors should even be,
That the day's worn repertory we all know
Should have within it the disturbing show
Of another world, deep and illusory.

God (I have come to think) takes special pains
With all the airy intangible edifice
That constructs light out of the slipperiness
Of glass, and darkness out of sleep's domains.

God has created night with its brocade
Of dreams, and mirrors with their forms of fiction,
That man may feel that he is a reflection,
An emptiness. And so we are afraid.

Amorous Anticipation

Neither the intimacy of your forehead, vivid as festival,
nor the practice of your body, still mysterious, still girlish and wordless,
nor the daily happenings of your life, taking on speech or silence,
can be as unfathomable a gift
as to gaze upon your body evenly breathing
in the wakeful night of my arms.
Virgin once more, miraculously, through the absolving power of sleep,
serene and radiant as a happiness memory chooses,
you will give me that outskirt of your life that you yourself do not possess.
and I will see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you,
beyond the smoke of Time's illusions,
apart from love,
apart from me.