Dancing in Odessa Read online

  Dancing in Odessa

  “This is an intricate, muscular, startlingly powerful collection, one that amazes by image and statement, by its shaped whole, and by the sheer scope of its poetic observation. Kaminsky is truly a descendant of Odysseus, after whom his birth city was named. . . . Inventiveness of language, the investigative passion, praises, lamentation, and a proper sense of the ridiculous are omnipresent. . . .This book is a breathtaking debut.”

  —Jane Hirshfield, Ploughshares

  “A superb and vigorous imagination, a poetic talent of rare and beautiful proportions, whose work is surely destined to be widely and enthusiastically noticed and applauded. This is the start of a brilliant career.”

  —Anthony Hecht

  “With his magical style in English, poems in Dancing in Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. . . . Kaminsky’s imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration.”

  —American Academy of Arts and Letters’

  Citation for the Addison M. Metcalf Award

  “Like Joseph Brodsky before him, Kaminsky is a terrifyingly good poet . . . who, having adopted English, has come to put us native speakers to shame. . . . It seemed to take about five minutes to read this book, and when I began again, I reached the end before I was ready. That’s how compulsive, how propulsive it is to read.”

  —John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Winners of The Dorset Prize

  Ice, Mouth, Song by Rachel Contreni Flynn

  Selected by Stephen Dunn

  Red Summer by Amaud Jamaul Johnson

  Selected by Ray Gonzalez

  Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky

  Selected by Eleanor Wilner

  Dismal Rock by Davis McCombs

  Selected by Linda Gregerson

  Biogeography by Sandra Meek

  Selected by the Tupelo Press Editors

  Archicembalo by G. C. Waldrep

  Selected by C. D. Wright

  Severance Songs by Joshua Corey

  Selected by Ilya Kaminsky

  After Urgency by Rusty Morrison

  Selected by Jane Hirshfield

  Dancing

  In

  Odessa

  Ilya Kaminsky

  TUPELO PRESS

  North Adams, Massachussets

  Dancing in Odessa.

  Copyright 2004 Ilya Kaminsky. All rights reserved.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-932195-12-5

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-936797-31-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2003115523

  Cover and text designed by Bill Kuch, WK Graphic Design.

  First paperback edition: 2004.

  Other than brief excerpts for reviews and commentaries, no part of this book may be reproduced by any means without permission of the publisher. Please address requests for reprint permission or for course−adoption discounts to:

  Tupelo Press

  P.O. Box 1767, North Adams, Massachusetts 01247

  Telephone: (413) 664−9611 / Fax: (413) 664−9711

  [email protected] / www.tupelopress.org

  Tupelo Press is an award−winning independent literary press that publishes fine fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in books that are a joy to hold as well as read. Tupelo Press is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, and we rely on public support to carry out our mission of publishing extraordinary work that may be outside the realm of the large commercial publishers. Financial donations are welcome and are tax deductible.

  for my family

  Contents

  Author’s Prayer

  Dancing in Odessa

  Musica Humana

  Natalia

  Traveling Musicians

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Prayer

  If I speak for the dead, I must leave

  this animal of my body,

  I must write the same poem over and over,

  for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

  If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge

  of myself, I must live as a blind man

  who runs through rooms without

  touching the furniture.

  Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”

  I can dance in my sleep and laugh

  in front of the mirror.

  Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

  I will praise your madness, and

  in a language not mine, speak

  of music that wakes us, music

  in which we move. For whatever I say

  is a kind of petition, and the darkest

  days must I praise.

  Dancing in Odessa

  Dancing in Odessa

  In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows, doves covered the main district, and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbor’s backyard, producing a four-digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to the voice on the line.

  My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolley, a one-armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country. Yet my country cannot be found, its citizens meet in a dream to conduct elections. He did not describe their faces, only a few names: Roland, Aladdin, Sinbad.

  In Praise of Laughter

  Where days bend and straighten

  in a city that belongs to no nation

  but all the nations of wind,

  she spoke the speech of poplar trees—

  her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose

  composed odes to barbershops, drugstores.

  Her soul walking on two feet, the soul or no soul, a child’s allowance,

  she loved street musicians and knew

  that my grandfather composed lectures on the supply

  and demand of clouds in our country:

  the State declared him an enemy of the people.

  He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat

  and danced naked on the table in front of our house—

  he was shot, and my grandmother raped

  by the public prosecutor, who stuck his pen in her vagina,

  the pen which signed people off for twenty years.

  But in the secret history of anger—one man's silence

  lives in the bodies of others—as we dance to keep from falling,

  between the doctor and the prosecutor:

  my family, the people of Odessa,

  women with huge breasts, old men naive and childlike,

  all our words, heaps of burning feathers

  that rise and rise with each retelling.

  Maestro

  What is memory? what makes a body glow:

  an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed

  when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden

  —I write this now and I feel my body’s weight:

  the screaming girls, 347 voices

  in the story of a doctor saving them, his hands

  trapped under a wall, his granddaughter dying nearby—

  she whispers I don't want to die, I have eaten such apples.

  He touches her mouth as a blind man reading lips

  and yells Shut up! I am near the window, I

  am asking for help! speaking,

  he cannot stop speaking, in the dark:

  of Brahms, Chopin he speaks to them to calm them.
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  A doctor, yes, whatever window

  framed his life, outside: tomatoes grew, clouds passed and we

  once lived. A doctor with a tattoo of a parrot on his trapped arm,

  seeing his granddaughter's cheekbones

  no longer her cheekbones, with surgical precision

  stitches suffering and grace:

  two days pass, he shouts

  in his window (there is no window) when rescue

  approaches, he speaks of Chopin, Chopin.

  They cut off his hands, nurses say he is “doing OK”

  —in my dream: he stands, feeding bread to pigeons, surrounded

  by pigeons, birds on his head, his shoulder,

  he shouts You don’t understand a thing!

  he is breathing himself to sleep, the city sleeps,

  there is no such city.

  Aunt Rose

  In a soldier’s uniform, in wooden shoes, she danced

  at either end of day, my Aunt Rose.

  Her husband rescued a pregnant woman

  from the burning house—he heard laughter,

  each day’s own little artillery—in that fire

  he burnt his genitals. My Aunt Rose

  took other people’s children—she clicked her tongue as they cried

  and August pulled curtains evening after evening.

  I saw her, chalk between her fingers,

  she wrote lessons on an empty blackboard,

  her hand moved and the board remained empty.

  We lived in a city by the sea but there was

  another city at the bottom of the sea

  and only local children believed in its existence.

  She believed them. She hung her husband's

  picture on a wall in her apartment. Each month

  on a different wall. I now see her with that picture, hammer

  in her left hand, nail in her mouth.

  From her mouth, a smell of wild garlic—

  she moves toward me in her pajamas

  arguing with me and with herself.

  The evenings are my evidence, this evening

  in which she dips her hands up to her elbows,

  the evening is asleep inside her shoulder—her shoulder

  rounded by sleep.

  My Mother’s Tango

  I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—

  she rides a wild pony for my birthday,

  a white pony on the seventh floor.

  “And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”

  the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.

  At the center of my life: my mother dances,

  yes here, as in childhood, my mother

  asks to describe the stages of my happiness—

  she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:

  between the regiments of saucers and towels,

  she moves so fast—she is motionless,

  opening and closing doors.

  But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!

  My mother’s past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.

  I draw an axis through the afternoon

  to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—

  young, not young—my mother

  gallops a pony on the seventh floor.

  She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens

  what is shut, shuts what is open.

  American Tourist

  In a city made of seaweed we danced on a rooftop, my hands

  under her breasts. Subtracting

  day from day, I add this woman’s ankles

  to my days of atonement, her lower lip, the formal bones of her face.

  We were making love all evening—

  I told her stories, their rituals of rain: happiness

  is money, yes, but only the smallest coins.

  She asked me to pray, to bow

  towards Jerusalem. We bowed to the left, I saw

  two bakeries, a shoe store; the smell of hay,

  smell of horses and hay. When Moses

  broke the sacred tablets on Sinai, the rich

  picked the pieces carved with:

  “adultery” and “kill” and “theft,”

  the poor got only “No” “No” “No.”

  I kissed the back of her neck, an elbow,

  this woman whose forgetting is a plot against forgetting,

  naked in her galoshes she waltzed

  and even her cat waltzed.

  She said: “All that is musical in us is memory”—

  but I did not know English, I danced

  sitting down, she straightened

  and bent and straightened, a tremble of music

  a tremble in her hand.

  Dancing in Odessa

  We lived north of the future, days opened

  letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.

  My grandmother threw tomatoes

  from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket

  over my head. I painted

  my mother's face. She understood

  loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.

  The night undressed us (I counted

  its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past

  with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter touched my eyelid—I kissed

  the back of her knee. The city trembled,

  a ghost-ship setting sail.

  And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew.

  He was an angel, he had no name,

  we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought

  the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full

  of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled,

  a ghost-ship setting sail.

  At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.

  We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.

  At the local factory, my father

  took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth.

  The sun began a routine narration,

  whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving

  as the darkness spoke behind them.

  It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.

  I retell the story the light etches

  into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me.

  Musica Humana

  [an elegy for Osip Mandelstam]

  [A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in case they were found by Furies with a search warrant.]

  While there is still some light on the page,

  he escapes in a stranger’s coat with his wife.

  And the cloth smells of sweat;

  a dog runs after them

  licking the earth where they walked and sat.

  In the kitchen, on a stairwell, above the toilet,

  he will show her the way to silence,

  they will leave the radio talking to itself.

  Making love, they turn off the lights

  but the neighbor has binoculars

  and he watches, dust settling on his lids.

  It is the 1930s: Petersburg is a frozen ship.

  The cathedrals, cafés, down Nevski Prospect

  they move, as the New State

  sticks its pins into them.

  [In Crimia, he gathered together rich ‘liberals’ and said to them strictly: On Judgment Day, if you are asked whether you understood the poet Osip Mandelstam; say no. Have you fed him?—You must answer yes.]

  I am reading aloud the book of my life on earth


  and confess, I loved grapefruit.

  In a kitchen: sausages; tasting vodka,

  the men raise their cups.

  A boy in a white shirt, I dip my finger

  into sweetness. Mother washes

  behind my ears. And we speak of everything

  that does not come true,

  which is to say: it was August.

  August! the light in the trees, full of fury. August

  filling hands with language that tastes like smoke.

  Now, memory, pour some beer,

  salt the rim of the glass; you

  who are writing me, have what you want:

  a golden coin, my tongue to put it under.

  (The younger brother of a cloud,

  he walks unshaven in dark-green pants.

  In cathedrals: he falls on his knees, praying HAPPINESS!

  His words on the floor are the skeletons of dead birds.)

  I’ve loved, yes. Washed my hands. Spoke

  of loyalty to the earth. Now death,

  a loverboy, counts my fingers.

  I escape and am caught, escape again

  and am caught, escape

  and am caught: in this song,

  the singer is a clay figure,

  poetry is the self—I resist

  the self. Elsewhere:

  St. Petersburg stands

  like a lost youth

  whose churches, ships, and guillotines

  accelerate our lives.

  [In summer 1924 Osip Mandelstam brought his young wife to St. Petersburg. Nadezhda was what the French call laide mais charmante. An eccentric? Of course he was. He threw a student down the staircase for complaining he wasn’t published, Osip shouting: Was Sappho? Was Jesus Christ?]

  Poet is a voice, I say, like Icarus,

  whispering to himself as he falls.

  Yes, my life as a broken branch in the wind

  hits the Northern ground.

  I am writing now a history of snow,

  the lamplight bathing the ships

  that sail across the page.

  But on certain afternoons