A Blaze in a Desert Read online

  the rope around the neck.

  Sing, Alexis, your number’s up,

  old insurgent,

  with that coolie’s mug,

  life’s not so easy.

  Row, Vassily, row, let’s all

  row together, we are brothers

  in defeat and hard times—

  our defeat is prouder and greater

  than their lying victory …

  Rowing upstream is fine

  as long as our backs can take it …

  We’ll hold on as long as we can.

  Kiss the girl you fancy …

  Jacques purses his thin lips a little

  like a wise Jew who will grow old.

  Boris with the profile of a hungry wolf

  drinks in the sadness of an evening without drink.

  No one doubts you, my friend,

  if you are lost, what can we do?

  Our time is short,

  fill my glass …

  Whether Gypsy or Egyptian

  she grasps at pleasure as it slips away

  (where are thesis, antithesis,

  where is love, the divine synthesis?)

  and dips her hands in the water

  —against the current.

  Yesterday, twenty-six and eleven fell

  from heaven to a brilliant death.

  Deaths of others, how light you are!

  Joys of others, how bitter you are!

  Where are the troubled waters,

  troubled like you?

  Softly the chorus begins again—

  —no! full-throated in this empty evening,

  this evening without struggle and without hope,

  full-throated one last time:

  If the wind raises barricades,

  if the paving stones flash like lightning,

  before the people, comrades …

  Night falls, the boat pulls in,

  stop singing.

  Exile relights its captive lamps

  on the shore of time.

  Oh solitudes, here we are,

  upright and free and willing,

  faithful to what people are making

  of these times.

  Orenburg, 20 May [19]35.

  (About a boat trip that we six deported Communists took.)

  Tête-à-Tête

  Sane as I am, there are moments when I feel I’m going mad,

  my psychiatry manual has nothing to say about that, the specialists

  would say: “It’s strange, but you do seem normal, those are just ideas,

  get some rest, my friend, get some rest,

  and before you go to sleep at night, whisper ‘everything is OK, everything is OK’

  thirty-three times”—

  and when these specialists spoke to me in such an amicable way,

  pity would rush in like the tide,

  for I know they are mad.

  Sane as I am, only the nutcases would welcome me like brothers

  with their definitive laughter

  bursting out at the beginning of the world.

  You whom they welcomed, a specter of yourself,

  I see your face change as if at the memory of a crime,

  lit from below by an inexpiable light,

  my lover, my enemy, enemy to yourself,

  but you are the victim and your hatred your punishment.

  My eyes are stones in sockets of flesh,

  and these stones hurt you,

  these stones wound you,

  for you think my eyes strip you and judge you,

  but it is you who judge me, my poor pitiless love,

  and I who am stripped bare.

  I feel storm and rage rising within you, no one can say

  whence it comes, how it erupts, exceeding the boundaries of the human,

  inhuman,

  this demented tempest where you are no more than an ardent shadow,

  where I am but a mask—a mask on a gravestone.

  Time weighs less heavily than a ravaged mask.

  And when your features grow calm and brighten, oh alive all the same!

  you say: “Ah, I would just like some peace …” and in that great word peace there are already

  slack waves at dawn under new leaves,

  innocent leaves,

  a welcome, a presence, a fulfillment,

  there is what is not, what will never be.

  (We know it so well, you and I, everything is there:

  my strength forever strained to the point of death,

  your defeat forever feeding on itself.)

  They are quite wrong to say mad people’s ideas are not reasonable,

  because they outstrip our commonplace reasons for doing absurd things,

  our petty reasons for blindness, dullness, gratification,

  our unreasonable reasons for escaping genuine anguish.

  Old Sigmund Freud explains it in his delirium:

  The Oedipus complex has a Gorgon’s head.

  Old Skardanelli answers old Sigmund:

  “On the splendor of man depends the splendor of life.”

  O[renburg], 1935.

  Note. – Near the end of his life, Hölderlin, a schizophrenic, signed the name Skardanelli to poems antedated by a century.

  Dialectic

  I.

  We were born

  in the time of the first perfected machine guns;

  They were waiting for us, those excellent perforators

  of steel armor plating and brains haunted by spirituality …

  Make no mistake, ever since we began to ply the trade

  of most unwilling victim

  —almost since the beginning of time—

  we have known how to drink every bitter cup,

  gall, hemlock—very much out of style—the guillotined man’s little glass of rum …

  Jamaica rum, the sap of life of the tropics,

  be sweet on the palate of the ashen-faced fellow who’s paying for other people’s crimes

  and ours,

  and drop into our mouths a little of the bitterness

  his mouth distills for the peace of better men.

  We know how to bear all the crosses, wooden crosses, swastikas,

  climbing a little Calvary is really not such a big deal

  for the thieves and Christs the whole lot of us are.

  We have guts.

  Ecce Homo proletarians

  and ever-serviceable intellectuals.

  And if we must end up again with our backs to the wall of the desperate Communards

  —that is where we will be!

  No doubt somewhat despite ourselves, once the wine is poured, we’ll drink it.

  Long live the Commune, hail world, long live man!

  Cream of assassins, brass hats, hey, Versaillais!

  Watch out, Signor Capitan, for the last step

  in the last cellar:

  my check is cashed at the Cheka.

  II.

  These are leaders of armies, big bourgeois, great executioners?

  Heroes of the battles of Polesye, Volhynia, the Carpathians?

  These are generals, these trembling, stubby-legged, lachrymose old men

  with wet eyes and muddled hearts?

  These are Chevaliers-Gardes, with the Cross of Saint George, the Cross of Saint Andrew?

  Hey, go on then, Saint Capitalist the Assassinated,

  it’s your turn now.

  As for me, I don’t give a damn if you don’t know what

  Monsieur le Marquis de Galliffet did,

  Me neither, I know nothing about it, I’m just an overseer from Gorlovka,

  I haven’t read any books.

  But there is someone greater than us who hasn’t forgotten a thing.

  III.

  By order of the Rev. Comm.

  they perish in a ditch in Chernavka,

  under the sabers of metalworkers from Taganka, miners from Kashtanka,

  and an anarchist bleeding from the deat
h of his dream.

  They perish exactly as did Messieurs de Montmorin,

  de Sombreuil, de Rulhière, Gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber,

  on the second of September seventeen ninety-two, at the Abbaye prison.

  Throat-slitting makes a muffled sound, a mad,

  disgusting sound,

  the sound of a crowd, the wild and sinister

  sound of waves.

  Bailiff Maillart consulted a big register.

  “To La Force!” He wiped his face with the back of his gray hand.

  Ah, a strong hand is needed to serve the first republic!

  At dusk Citizen Billaud came to harangue the killers:

  “Sansculottes! Brutus, Cinna, the splendors of Rome,

  the revolution will live forever and ever,

  the Commune is sending you a cask of good wine.”

  IV.

  “See,” said the young, freckle-faced propagandist,

  “see how materialist history repeats itself.”

  V.

  So well have you taught us the dirty trade of the strongest

  that in the end we will become passed masters at it.

  We too will have ringing hearts, pulsing brows,

  eyes full of images as horrible as remorse …

  And then let them bury us and then let them forget us,

  so that nothing begins again and the earth might flourish …

  Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!

  Orenburg [19]35.

  Be Hard

  (Fragment)

  Not a single new thought comes to you, comrade,

  your problem has no solution,

  your problem’s made of reinforced concrete, with a steel reinforcement bar,

  and we’re inside it.

  Let’s be hard, as hard as chains, in time the flesh will wear out chains,

  in time the spirit will snap chains,

  in time and with Bickford fuses, of course, and the meticulous clockwork of machines very mistakenly called infernal—for the others are more infernal—

  we will need time, flesh, spirit, technology, we will need them, that is certain:

  let’s be hard for a long time to come.

  (And you, be hard after we’re gone! And pass on the watchword till the end of time!)

  Constellation of Dead Brothers

  André who was killed in Riga,

  Dario who was killed in Spain,

  Boris whose wounds I dressed,

  Boris whose eyes I closed.

  My dear camerado

  David, dead without knowing why

  in a sweet orchard in France—

  David, your astonished suffering

  —six bullets for a twenty-year-old heart …

  Karl, whose nails I recognized

  when you had already turned to earth,

  you, with your brow of such lofty thought,

  ah! what was death doing with you!

  Tough, dark human vine.

  The north, the waves, the ocean

  capsize the boat, the Four, deathly pale,

  drink deeply of fear,

  farewell to Paris, farewell to you all,

  farewell to life, God damn it!

  Vassily, through our sleepless midnights

  you had the soul of a fighter

  from Shanghai,

  and now the wind erases your grave

  in the cornfields of Armavir.

  Hong Kong lights up, the hour of tall buildings,

  the palm tree resembles the scimitar,

  the square resembles the cemetery,

  it’s a sweltering evening and you are dying,

  Nguyen, in your prison bed.

  And you, my decapitated brothers,

  the lost ones, the unforgiven,

  the massacred, René, Raymond,

  guilty but nowise denied.

  Oh rain of stars in the darkness,

  constellation of dead brothers!

  To you I owe my blackest silence,

  my resolve, my indulgence

  for all these seemingly empty days,

  and whatever is left to me of pride

  for a blaze in a desert.

  But let silence descend

  on these lofty figureheads!

  The ardent voyage continues,

  the course is set on good hope …

  When is your turn, when is mine?

  The course is set on good hope.

  (1935.)

  Max

  Max,

  you died

  at twenty-three,

  died without knowing peaceful work

  or love.

  Max,

  you were condemned by your youth.

  It weighed

  on your shoulders like a cross

  in the cities and in the prisons

  of Europe.

  Your youth condemned you

  to the certain death of soldiers

  —because all the human springtime

  of that era had to die.

  What was avenged on your

  proletarian destiny

  through prison, through famine,

  through the vermin

  that gnawed your flesh, your heart

  when we were under guard back there

  behind barbed wire,

  penned in sordid jails back there

  by obscure and doleful men,

  by cowardly and sad and desolate men?

  —How we died there, my brother!

  With bitter hearts, hungry bellies,

  lice sucking our skin, hate

  making its rounds in our brains,

  its old rounds,

  its exasperating, fortifying

  old rounds.

  But you remained like a child,

  purer, better, like a vaguely

  triumphant child

  and far away, right here, you loved

  the great suffering for the great dream,

  the great conquest begun

  by murdered communes.

  In the sea’s salt breeze

  hope unfurled in you

  all one morning and all one evening.

  That was very good and very bitter.

  Then through days of riot,

  through long days of hunger,

  through long days of war,

  you bore the sadness

  and distress

  of your doomed youth.

  You suffered at not finding

  in the sky of this poor country

  the star glimpsed at sea.

  (We have yet to conquer that star,

  we have yet to create it ourselves

  with our hands, with our lives,

  with our deaths,

  with your death …)

  The city with its cold palaces

  where the revolution is hungry,

  with its gray people in arms,

  with those girls on the streets,

  and all those soldiers departing,

  and all those women in tears

  in the railroad stations—

  the wounded city suffered in you.

  And that was the sum total of your life.

  And our mutilated victories

  were your faith.

  Max,

  among the sacrificed young lives

  your young life was needed, Max.

  All the broken young wings,

  all the slaughtered valor

  are necessary to what is being born.

  Max,

  for the silent rising of the sap

  in the branches of the young birches,

  for the sprouting of the wheat,

  for the future glory of ideas,

  for all this ascent of mankind,

  the deaths of thousands of young men

  were necessary.

  For the victory

  of workers republics

  come to rebuild the world

  upon the graves,

  your anony
mous death,

  your forsaken death,

  your loveless death,

  your forgotten death,

  your death, Max,

  was no doubt necessary

  on that wretched hospital bed,

  amid what mortal agonies—

  through what immense shipwreck of everything in you?

  Max,

  your last look of reproach

  and anxious questioning

  toward the indifferent living

  at the hour of reckoning when the final sweat

  moistened your poor unhaloed brow

  was necessary.

  And you died like the others:

  Forgive us for outliving you.

  Petrograd, 1921.

  City

  Ash, granite,

  ice, snow, gold,

  on metal and on flesh

  (crushed).

  Your cathedrals are icebergs,

  your estuary is an ice field.

  Cold torments your granite

  and your granite enchains a river.

  Your river is made of crystal under a meter of snow,

  but under this river, in the darkness, another river

  sweeps the secret waters of the North to the ocean.

  Architects designed your least features,

  vast curves, right angles, colonnades,

  dead city ideal for future tourists.

  In your squares bronze horsemen immortalize

  their ancient despotic gestures

  much prized by filmmakers.

  Poets lived glumly

  among your vanquished population.

  Engineers, despots, and poets,

  your people without rights or joy nourished them,

  glorified,

  understood,

  betrayed them,

  carried them to their graves

  in the purest winters

  under the whitest snows.

  City, city, vast city,

  vast immobile city,

  I know full well there are flames

  devouring you beneath the snow.

  In the depths of your wide-open northern skies,

  in the depths of the wide-open eyes of your dead,

  the steely North Star

  inscribes its lofty certitude.

  City, city, vast city,

  golden spires, granite, domes,

  sail on, sail on toward the pole.

  All life under granite,

  all fervor under ice.

  You are no cemetery,

  you are an immense vessel,

  the first one bound

  for the dawn or for death.

  This is a voyage of no return,

  city, city, it’s time to set off.

  Petrograd, 1920.

  26 August 28

  I ran through the city, I read the newspapers

  and I saw people in offices;