"Berlin" appeared in Partisan Review. Russian
translations of "Rome" and "Palisades"
by Regina Derieva appear in The Coast (Russian font support required).
Paris (I)
What music in the courtly souls of men
Makes goddesses and stone a builder's bliss?
Athena soars from her Acropolis;
Our Lady plies her ark along the Seine.
We viewed her from a nearer window then:
The bateaux-mouches rode under with a hiss,
And nightly lit the curtains. Is it this
That lures me to her precinct once again?
We were imperfect builders in those years;
The weight of stone was more than I could carry;
Although no common lady in my eyes,
Your self-born mind was never meant to marry.
But she bears on our spirits in a guise
That builds a reminiscence without tears.
Paris (II)
Centre Pompidou
The city changes. Though no one could wrench
From me this mirror of my old desire -
The evening staining every dome and spire,
The river with its old beloved stench -
My mind amid this glass, above the clench
Of hawkers in the square, begins to tire.
The Arabs pluck their lutes; a man breathes fire.
The Africans sell charms and curse the French;
And I read of an Irishman here once
Who scolded one who had a wilder look.
The man was a musician of his tongue,
Though so far Paris was his only book.
"You are no mirror," was the poet's sense.
The other packed. His islands have been sung.
Rome
Out of the hordes that look for Rome in Rome,
And little trace of Rome in Rome can see,
I climb to where, with cold stone under me,
My throbbing eyes can bring some vision home.
I lie, and ruins, marble, concrete, chrome,
Jumble the eras of my reverie,
As great night builds a growing canopy
That overshadows every lesser dome.
Too solid, like its builders, was this city.
On all that fights with time, time has no pity.
But in its ancient bed, dark and diurnal,
The Tiber rolls, while high above the leaves
A Grecian race of swallows swirls and weaves,
In fleeting eddies, all that is eternal.
Florence
An arbor lovelier, with darker loam.
As always in this land, I seek a height
Among the swallows and the fading light.
Across the Arno, Brunelleschi's dome
Shines lovelier than anything in Rome.
Could older Romans credit such a sight,
When spirits once perennial in flight
To their emporium, now circled home?
I've walked across the city in an hour,
More statuary seen than common stone,
And thinking on some cheap monstrosity
The distant builders ordered for our town,
On which we spend more than the Medici,
I wonder, will we ever have our flower?
Berlin
Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne, To C. S.
Und die trägt er im Gesicht...
Brecht, Threepenny Opera
As Europe's demon slipped into the grave,
The tempest in these regions reached its height.
Now, in the angles of the floodlit night,
The future lingers like a frozen wave.
Our side is neon, pink-haired youth who crave
More welfare, swearing they will never fight.
Some cherish it, this Babylon the Bright,
While others can see nothing left to save.
The other side is silence. What's the power
We feel in it, my friend? Is it the loss
A weary singer might feel in the dawn
When "Mack the Knife" has captured half the town?
We linger at the window, and across
The shark's teeth shines the giant broadcast tower.
London
My speech again, but curiously new.
Another bright armada has been sunk;
The streets are all West Indian and punk.
The stage is lit, and standing in the queue,
I pay to hear their famous actress do
Our accent wrong. Back in my rented bunk,
The Bristol man below me blithers, drunk,
About the "niggers" and the dirty loo.
Still, little can annoy me here; I walk
Through St. James Park, and stopping bowlered men,
Imbibe directions from their tuneful talk;
I trace the Elgin centaurs' marble veins,
And over water more sealike than Seine,
The sparking sinews of the lighted trains.
Palisades
Born in a tempest, when my mother died, To M. Y.
This world to me is like a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends...
Shakespeare, Pericles
Beyond the rich craft in their idle slips,
We watch a lonely motorboat go by,
While over long dim blocks that crowd the sky,
The evening, on the harbor and the ships,
Begins to darken in apocalypse.
Amid such portents to the outward eye,
What can a clouded spirit here descry,
A new world, or an old one in eclipse?
Whatever came to us across the water
Seems to have fed of late on harder matter;
The heart in it has grown less serious,
Its dreams, inhuman and mysterious,
And how soon shall it be revealed, my friend,
If this is a beginning or an end?
Landing
Gray cables glide like penciled curves across
A wash of oil; from scraps a bargeman flings,
The brackish surface breaks in fleeting rings,
Where isolated seagulls wheel and toss.
Our old world's gone, and with each new one's loss,
A cold and heartless wind, returning, brings
The unendurability of things
Into this river's rank and rhymeless dross.
Under the mass of what one can't retrieve,
The old ecstatic numbers sound naive,
As if, to fructify a waste of time,
One's wishes could compel the world to rhyme,
Or were less earthly than the things that die
Beneath this alien, untransfigured sky.
The bridge is lit; our urban shadows warm
Their vagrant limbs around a blazing drum,
Too far to hear the automotive hum
That harps upon the steely rainbow form.
Across the Palisades, in lurid swarm,
Forged in the fire of some mysterium,
Belying all the waste from which they come,
The clouds evolve their slow and silent storm.
In spite of every overarching sense,
The world remains impenetrably dense.
Yet in its eye the troubled spirit lives,
And straining to the strands of sense it gives,
Longs to glide homeward to a perfect fall,
Where nothing but the sound remains at all.
© 1982-2002 Alan Shaw | alanshaw@prosoidia.com | home | links