INTRODUCTION
Kenneth Rosen
FORGING REALITY, THE POETRY OF OSWALD LE WINTER
Karl Krolow
EXCERPT FROM THE JUDGE'S STATEMENT ON AWARDING
THE INTERNATIONAL RILKE PRIZE TO OSWALD LE WINTER
CONTENTS
THE POETRY OF OSWALD LE WINTER
A MAGNASCO SEA
TRIBAL WARS
LEDA
WHAT OF THE QUARRY?
MRS. TAYLOR'S LIFE
THE DANCER AT VERSAILLES II
HISTORY
AN AMERICAN REQUIEM
A TINY MIRACLE
TRUE SCALE
EQUINE LOVE
ADAM ANSWERS EVE
ADRIFT ON THE ICEBERG OF TIME
SOLDIER’S FAREWELL
THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM
IN TENEBRIS
BENNINGTON, JULY 1955
ENTOMBED NIGHT
DEATH OF A BULL RHINO
HOELDERLIN AT HEIDELBERG
BLACK SUN
BOATING A SHARK
JOSEPH CONRAD BEFORE THE NELSON MONUMENT
FATIMA
COSTA DA CAPARICA
PORTUGUESE FLIES
LIKE A RIDDLE-POTENT KNOT
COSSACKS
BEACHSIDE CEMETERY
IN THE HOSPITAL BEHIND THE FRONT
BREAKFAST IN HELL
NOCTES IRAE
BORDER TRADE
YOU CAN'T MAKE POETRY FROM A FART
Translated by Mirja Kraemer
POST SCRIPTUM
Oswald Le Winter
Credits
Kenneth Rosen
FORGING REALITY, THE POETRY OF OSWALD LE WINTER
Oswald LeWinter is an American poet living in Portugal. He was born in
Vienna, Austria, separated from his family and shipped by boat to America
to escape the holocaust of the Third Reich. In the United States he lived
in a Philadelphia orphanage for Jewish refugees and did not see his parents
again until he was ten and they had immigrated. He was educated at U. Cal.,
Berkeley, where he lettered in track and was an all-star football player,
declining an opportunity to try-out with the San Francisco professional
football team in order to become a U.S. Ranger and serve in Korea. Eventually
LeWinter completed his advanced degrees at Columbia University, and acquired
a doctorate in psychology in Germany. LeWinter worked on many continents
for many years, primarily in disinformation and disruption, for American
Central Intelligence. Most recently he was for three years in Vienna,
place of his birth, as an involuntary guest of the Austrian government,
for seeking to provide the aggrieved Egyptian billionaire Mohamed El Fayed
with documents illustrating Buckingham Palace and British intelligence
services' involvement with the death of his son Dodi El Fayed and Dodi's
fiancee Princess Diana, in return for money. Mohamed El Fayed subsequently
and unsuccessfully sued the American government under the Freedom of
Information Act for the same papers he declined to purchase from retired
General LeWinter, explaining in court that LeWinter's papers were forgeries
of genuine documents.
Thus besides intimate acquaintance with America's principal poets and
critics of the last fifty years, which LeWinter accomplished by energy,
acumen, and poetic versatility, literary lights whose reputations have
fluctuated like American allegiances in the Middle East, American loyalty
to hard-pressed or compromised intelligence operatives, or the American
stock market, LeWinter's stream of surprise and disillusioned realpolitik
is informed by his extraordinary involvement in the international intrigues
of the same period. Like his life, LeWinter's poetry dramatizes the
"American" centuries' violent inversion of vivid realities: physicians
attempt to make human limbs from mud, blood-puddles and bone crumbs "In
the Hospital Behind the Front"; a dog is lovingly appreciated for its
misconception of itself as a snapping crocodile in "Portuguese Flies"; and
in "Tribal Wars," the ‘mambas' of intra-familial antipathy between cousins,
in both his father's generation and his own, are deadlier than the bullets
of Nigerian inter-tribal hostilities, where the poet had been sent to
assess contending factions for their prospective contribution to American
regional interests, presumably oil. Morever, the cousin Joe with whom the
poet has no hope of rapproachment, once sealed their mutual love "in
childhood when each pressed/His nicked wrist against the other's as a bond."
Rage at the confusion over what is essentially human that has infested our
civilization, and the inevitable betrayal of essential humanity our
arrogant hysteria entails, is expressed by the force with which LeWinter
forges a lyric utterance from an immense historical and literary erudition,
and from an equally immense stylistic range. Oswald LeWinter's poetry is
the bad news that comes closer to the truth than most of the poetry
currently read and written, and his vision and authority were earned the
hard way.
Kenneth Rosen is author of the recently published collection of poems, THE
ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY, CavanKerry Press, Fort Lee, NJ.
Portland, Maine
April 6, 2003
EXCERPT FROM THE JUDGE'S STATEMENT ON AWARDING
THE INTERNATIONAL RILKE PRIZE TO OSWALD LE WINTER
January 1997
Oswald LeWinter is one of a kind in contemporary American poetry. He may,
in fact, be unique in the annals of modern poetry in any country. His life
sounds like a tale composed by Baron Munchhausen and edited by John Le
Carre. Born in Vienna in 1931, he escaped the Holocaust by being chosen as
one of only 1,000 Jewish children from all of Europe, tested for their
intelligence quotients and permitted to enter the United States in 1939.
After two years in an Orphanage, he was united with his parents. He grew
up as a street child, since both parents had to work, in one of the poorest
sections of New York. He graduated from High School at 16 and from a major
university at 19. He has confirmed that he entered the Army in 1950, in
time to take an active part in the Korean conflict, more out of gratitude
to the country that had adopted him than out of patriotism. He became a
highly decorated war hero and prisoner of war and came home in 1953. He
fulfilled his service obligations until 1959 rising to the rank of Major,
when he transferred to the reserves and returned to the university to
obtain his doctorate and to teach. He had begun to write poetry in his
thirteenth year and saw his first poems published in 1948, and collected
in two books that friends had paid for, in 1959 (To Encircle the Center)
and 1962 ( A Horse of Air). Although both editions were severely limited
in number, his work was noticed and he began to receive the acclaim and
the friendship of a number of older poets and some of his own generation.
William Carlos Williams praised him in a letter (published in his Selected
Letters), Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse corresponded with him, and his
friend and near contemporary, Robert Lowell said of his poetry that it
"brings together the richness of European philosophical poetry.with the
muscularity of the American idion more successfully than any poet of his
generation." He began to receive prizes and his work attracted translators
such as Juan Liscano in Venezuela, and major poets in France and Germany.
He enjoyed the friendship of the finest poets of his time, men like James
Dickey, Karl Shapiro, De Witt Snodgrass, Louis Simpson and Thomas Merton.
His poems were anthologized (Best poems of 1962) and he was invited to
give readings in many universities. In 1963, he published a scholarly work,
(Shakespeare in Europe) which established his reputation as a serious
Shakespeare scholar. A devoted admirer of the life and work of the
soldier-poet, Sir Philip Sidney, he left the academic world in 1965
desiring to be an actor in the history of his time rather than a spectator.
He entered one of the intelligence services of his country, was activated
by the Army and served 20 years with both, rising to a high rank, and
playing a major role in some of the most dramatic events of the second
half of this century. In 1985, he was forced to resign from both for
having been part of Iran-Contra and was jailed for two years. He had
stopped publishing in 1965. His last poem had appeared in the American
quarterly, The Sewanee Review and had earned him a letter of praise from
T.S. Eliot together with an invitation to submit a book manuscript to
Faber and Faber. Le Winter never responded to this invitation. His
silence deepened, felt himself deeply wronged by the country he had
served with such dedication and which had criminalized him and he
slowly became a forgotten man and one despised by former friends who
took his acceptance of a position with an intelligence agency as a sign
that he had developed what one of them wrote in a letter "faschistoid"
tendencies. His silence continued but he never stopped writing. He began
to write poems in his mother tongue as well as in English in 1988. In 1994
he published a book of poems in German (Qualverwandtschaften, 'Tormenting
Relations"), stunning, awesome in its breadth and power dealing chiefly
with the unique relationship between Germans and German Jews. These poems
are not accusatory. They are subtly filled with the problems in that
relationship, latent envy, suppressed mutual admiration and its tragic
results in the Nazi era. They are wise poems, courageous poems and poems
full of powerful metaphors and a directness which privileges le mot juste,
the precise word to convey compactly and fluidly a multitude of levels
that is the reality of the poet's life. Oswald LeWinter most assuredly
deserves the prize with which we honor him today. He follows Yvan Goll,
Giuseppe Ungaretti and the first recipient, Fernando Pessoa. He adds his
own distinction to their august company.
Karl Krolow
Translated by Heidrun Boeker
THE POETRY OF OSWALD LE WINTER
A MAGNASCO SEA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For Yael
White caps mime a school of dolphins
arching through swift water; a Magnasco sea.
In memory's Cyclops eye, I see my daughter
astride the spume. Her glazed eyes turn to me.
Then, swift as western light, she vanishes
beneath the ocean’s skin and I am left behind
with a soul, robbed of joys, now full of night,
aged, steadied by a cane: My future blind.
Her fingers raced across the ivory keys
chasing arpeggios with girlish glee. She lay
beside the pool, a Nereid, sunning,
or wound daisies in her hair on a rainy day.
She was the sum of love the first moment
she appeared, smeared with blood. I stood
and watched her curled in fetal sleep,
before the antiseptic glass as often as I could.
These days I walk beside the ocean, slow,
laced with pain. Can I accept the mystery
of the sea, that I won't see or listen to her again,
and learn that loss remains loss, finally?
TRIBAL WARS
~~~~~~~~~~~
My father and his Mandel cousin
Fired epithets at each other
For two decades. Deadlier
Than mortars or mere bullets,
The verbal mambas killed
The spirit, and left the body
A husk of crushed memories.
They had been born hours apart
And slept in the same bed
Before steerage took Max to America
While father, glued to Vienna,
Needed the threat of extinction
To move his ass, and my mother,
To the new world's ghetto.
Cousin Max, moneyed from bread
He baked each morning at four,
Took me to the shelter for refugees
Where he told my father to expect
Nothing from him except old coats.
"In America," he said with his Yankee-
Yiddish, "a real man finds his own way."
2.
In 1967, Thirty-six years old, I was
Ordered to Nigeria where the mambas
Had become bullets. A tribal war,
Between secessionist Biafra
And the legal dictator was piling
Corpses up and down the roads.
The savannahs had turned red and wet.
Taxiing the 25 kilometers into Lagos
From the sandbagged airport,
I dissected my assignment: To discern
The side America should embrace.
Who held the kings and aces that would
End in the annihilation of opponents?
Who was ready to embrace America?
The hotel was worse than substandard
And the mosquitoes hummed louder
Than the yawing fans in my room.
Moving between the combatants
Without making my shaved white face
A target was an exercise in craftiness
I perfected with the sweating speed of fear.
Ojukwu and Gowon, the two opposing
Generals, glowered at me from walls
Scarred by bullets in Kano and in Lagos.
I was to recommend which of them
Should die, an accident of assassination.
Induced suicide was an alternative.
I had been schooled in how Lumumba died.
I was reprieved when events overtook
My waffling and the shooting stopped.
History forced the two Generals to accept
Its own preconceived design. The war came
And the war went. The tribes lost no love
For each other after mortar shells
And bullets stopped parceling out the air.
3.
Max and my father both died
Without having taken one another's hand
Or traded one forgiving word.
Their tribal war created its own history
That found heirs in my cousin Joe and me.
We never even speak to one another.
Ours is no war of attrition, only a dumb conflict
Disguised by strict silence and the pretense
That neither of us, the two survivors,
Cares that we continue to betray
The common childhood when each pressed
His bloody wrist against the other's as a bond.
LEDA
~~~~
For Jill Johnston
Of such a madder music he was made,
That swan, Leda gasped beneath the billowing
Of his uncommon wing. Silent, resigned
To glories which she knew no more of yet
Than instinct's random summoning, she seized
The trumpeting breast and cowered under
Arrogance until, transported to a calm
Beyond fear, she succumbed and sank to rest
Beside what seemed once more merely fowl.
WHAT OF THE QUARRY?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What of the quarry
The hunters abandon?
What shall be done
With the furtive doe?
When shout and shot
No longer resound,
When flagging leaves
Fall free of their boughs,
How shall the hunted live,
Freed from the chase
That circled their hours
And muscled their feet,
That taught them the lore
Of shadow and woods
And widened their world
With staggering paths?
MRS. TAYLOR'S LIFE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She lives in a porcelain ghetto,
Among Wedgwood, Sevres, Meissen,
Noritake and Limoges; her skin
With its fine lines, needle-thin fingers
And feet, pale as the dancer's that adorns
The mantel above the still virgin fireplace,
From the hand of some master artisan.
Looking at her one might suppose
We treasure most what is nearest
Our own image in the soul: Or
That what's beyond nature finds us
Mysteriously and joins with us in a new skin
To perfect all that the impure world
Perceives as wrought perfection.
For us, nature and art are split like a tree
Through which lightning raced leaving a veneer
Of carbon on its path. Art imitates art, and only art.
The Chelsea dancer is eternal. Even if she broke
In a thousand shards, a life like mine or Mrs. Taylor's
While achieving at the final breath a wholeness,
Passes like storms, but not like inspiration.
THE DANCER AT VERSAILLES II
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She danced on ice
So tissue-thin
Yet never spied
The Sea god's grin,
But waltzed along,
Grew so expert
That when it thawed
She stayed unhurt,
And over water
Skated on,
Nor ever guessed
The grin was gone.
HISTORY
~~~~~~~
My fathers sat in sooty rooms
Where candles wept
Until their eyes burned shut,
Until the universe
With all its angels
Moved in the hollows
Of their hands.
They earned the Law
They lived by,
And lived on bloodless meat
And shunned air,
Until crowded
Into showers in Poland
To become the Germans'
Ovens' favorite fare.
AN AMERICAN REQUIEM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For Bayard Rustin
(Quamquam animus) meminisse horet (luctuque
refugit, incipiam)
Virgil
I
Why was the bus growling,
Disgorging passengers
At crumbling corners?
Why were the black streets
Holding the white at bay,
While furious eyes
Knifed passing cars?
Bricks, knives and black despair!
Blue helmets over faces cooked with rage
While light blue arms and dark blue legs
Race to outrace the waves
Of boiling rage and the smashed impotence
Of windows: tongueless
Glass where mourners pass.
II
Rats, and children's screams
That answer parent's calls.
Blue hands like blazing trees;
Cinders and cobblestones fall like a storm,
Like spears of fire loosened
Against trembling rooftops and dark blood
Crawling past children aged to numbness.
Hands, feet streak
Across the caterwaul of sirens
Conceived in some Euclidian orbit of the state.
Some Cyclops of justice, red with fear and hate,
Driven sandbagged into the breech,
Directed by electric mouths, crackles
Instructions to a nightscape gone berserk.
III
The streets lie unwashed and rich
In garbage; feverish tar, soft under foot,
In glistening furrows, as if a thousand shards
Lay planted in its mass. The wind
Is cooling the green suburbs.
Young and old clot doorways
And, after dark ooze onto corners
Toward a dance of neon signs.
The mob suffers from its size.
For the despised, history is no flight
Of anecdotes returning like plump geese
From pleasant winters
To the graciousness of spring in Doric fields.
Here there is only the present,
Pale as a TV screen fading off
To gray snow, leaving the cat,
Tissue thin, to prowl from hall to hall.
A man, half awake
Amid furtive lice, forgets the honest axe
In the cherry grove, or the bearded boy
Running from grave books
To find the owner of some pennies.
Myths have no calories. He feels
The miserly wind through torn windows.
The grandfather, rotting in the back room,
Breathing like a far-off train,
Hears the close gaggle of a phonograph
And the child coughing in the coffin of his bed,
And remembers nothing, not the legends
Nor the scars. He hardly even sees
The stripe of morning when it comes.
IV
But morning comes! A last
Incendiary wake arches from some dark hole
Across the almost empty street.
The helmeted patrol in double pairs.
The dream of freedom leaves a fine debris.
But go into the park nearby
Where all is paradise as in another country.
The ducks are gliding on the polished pond.
They live off visitors,
Off children who come laughing,
To throw crumbs of extra bread and cluck.
Sometimes the ducks tear suddenly at one another
For bread, to taste strange blood,
From mere immortal whim.
They do not dream of freedom or of trying
To find blind woodland streams.
They have no history that tortures pride,
And have no future they cannot keep from lying.
(written after the Harlem riots following the assassination
of Dr. Martin Luther King.)
A TINY MIRACLE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The rose in the vase on the table
Trembles in the breeze.
I notice it and sense
A sudden movement in the heart.
I deed it words, but tell you now
This tiny miracle will be brief
Like the breeze that stroked the rose,
Tender as a breath,
Because your speech is strange to me
Although the feelings that rouse my voice
Are familiar to me as my skin
And like a rose, as real and blossoming.
TRUE SCALE
~~~~~~~~~~
How frequently we wake to dirty light,
Lie shaken, knuckling grit out of one eye,
Recalling how, the slow ticking night
Pressed us against the bed, cold, knobby
As a wall of brick, our shoulders clenched,
While all the day's words and events
Formed in a firing squad, the stench
Of execution seeping into every sense.
One moment, if we cease remembering,
Is all we need to know that we alone
Judge, we pilot the pencils summoning
The hulking bullies, we invent each fingerbone
That trains a candled barrel on our eye.
But no! A corner turned, a word, a look
Remain the night's qualms. And instead we lie
Under our heaped anxieties, swindled of luck,
Certain the night’s alarms were real,
Certain we are heroic to bestride another day.
We tremble up, victorious, but not enough to feel
Our lives were never black, not even gray.
EQUINE LOVE
~~~~~~~~~~~
You were the mare I rode to sleep,
Saddled with my ripening hopes,
That held me firmly on steep slopes;
Where grease lurked, urging me to slip.
How many nights did I caress your mane
Before you ran to be another rider's prize?
I never set my brand on you, hugely unwise.
Now I will never mount your like again.
ADAM ANSWERS EVE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How can I be my own destroyer
When the teat that suckled me with bile
Became the chilling, rouged smile of a wife
I kicked out of my bitter life into the blind
Streets, where old Falsehood trolls for men?
I slept a decade with Derision in a bed
Bought by diluted lust and puzzled over
By the crow of shame. Words that had learned
My name and knew where in my memories
To rummage for dismay, had come to stay.
To say I lost all rights to rail against the way
My days were minced like meat
To make a pie no starving dog would crave,
Because I bit into the offered apple willingly,
Is to deny that all that followed was a lie.
There never was an Eden, never sapient fruit.
The sanguine gate, breached well before I came,
was daubed with chicken blood. A Joke? The angel
With ignited sword groomed his smirk, and swelled
paternally as I turned into air, where I stood.
ADRIFT ON THE ICEBERG OF TIME
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Most of my life is no longer visible,
what's left above the waters' skin is a tip
wrinkled from experience and infirm
as weather. I've outlived my strength.
A horde of years has grazed my scalp,
leaving bare areas amid graying turf.
Brigades of pain invade stiff joints,
colonize my brain, and move me with a cane.
Who shall I blame for the catastrophe
of growing old? Young, no one warned me
Time might wreck my sturdy skiff,
leaving me to drift on freezing floes
that would keep moving south inexorably
until a tropical wind melts them to waves
and surrenders me to mysteries. Who
do I curse for the donation of this finite life?
SOLDIER'S FAREWELL
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If I should not return,
Let my brothers sow
The fields next Spring.
Their plows will fold
My spoiled bones
Into the soil they churn.
One morning, while dew
Hovers on ripe fields,
Go, take some rye,
Some heavy sheaves.
Hold them in your arms
As once you held me.
Then kiss me, without pain.
Crush me to your breast
And slowly let me fall.
I will forever reappear
There, where I drop,
In each new grain.
I will forever reappear
There where I grip
The waiting plain,
Year after year.
THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Downpours reign in Portugal in November,
winds wind ropes of water hawser-like,
clouds, dark and sluggish, crowd the sky.
Night comes so soon it seems never to have left.
None savor the sad spectacle of men and women
bent into curtains of wet air, trying to keep
umbrellas tasked, keep them from being seized
and flown into trees or twisted into metal pretzels.
The leaden sky leads my heart to old sadness.
Torrents of grief overflow the sluiceway
of my feelings. I wear regret next to my nakedness
like a hair shirt. Guilt inundates my thoughts.
This state of being me is as old as inclement weather.
It comes and goes like seasons, hardly warning.
One day sun clears the cerulean air,
the next, the sky falls on felsic mountain peaks.
I have forgotten what I mourn or why, denied
guilty verdicts but admitted crimes to punish
days I cannot help but live. No matter how I heft
I can't heave love into my blood or enter the storm's eye.
IN TENEBRIS
~~~~~~~~~~~
The days were trees struck by lightning
and the nights granite rising from the sea.
Love was a volcano once, its fire frightening.
Its lava flood no longer scorches me.
Bodies entwined, are meant to be consumed
like kindling against winter's chill.
But seasons change and every fire is doomed,
when passions yield to habit's will.
And so we age, partakers of life's jests
all the while sad or gay, busily believing
we are more than actors, more than guests,
saved, by having been aflame, from grieving.
BENNINGTON, JULY 1955
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For Marta Gautier, who brought back the memory.
We barely closed our eyes at night,
sleeping three or four hours, but hardly
finding rest, brief, deep, troubled.
For creeping hours, we spied on darkness,
on winds traversing cirrus streamers
flat as sheets on my divorced ironing board.
There was the occasional late bird
with no nest, darting from one rooftop
to another in restlessness.
I sat by a window open to the garden
gazing at tall New England Asters,
diurnal flowers, A. novae-anglia,
six feet tall with silky, slender rays
In purple, white and red, surrounding
disks of orange filaments now invisible.
In the bed, below a sampler that proclaimed
"God is love" your almond-colored body
stretched;a jungle cat feigning sleep,
the rhythm of your gourmet passion echoed
by the soft wind outside. We had made love,
and I wondered if that made us lovers.
I feared the dawn, when sun would open
the Starflowers like a carpet on which
butterflies rest to lay their eggs.
I’d seen Boloria astarte with orange-
brown wings that were invisible among these
flaming Michaelmas Daisies, if the dark
markings near the wings' bases hadn't betrayed
their presence, gluing new generations
to the rosettes of leaves, and feeding
on treacly nectar at the flower's heart.
I knew that soon you'd rise, shower,
return to books and I to sour lectures,
interrupted for this night, and I'd become
the Aster, closed, almost sufficient in myself,
waiting for sun to unlock me as you had,
with your fugacious radiance and heat.
ENTOMBED NIGHT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now the season's lost its sunny grace,
its skin tanned rust and mottled gray.
I wake in a tight, darkened space
to a dirge invisible musicians play.
I remember well when blood ran high.
Salt striped my lips as if I'd kissed the sea,
I left some place where seagulls cry
and frowning vultures leaf a tree.
Life was my shovel, Death a buried bone.
I dug for love, a man wild for treasure,
and found only an old, broken stone
I stuck in a green heart, desiring it to grow.
With every thought, I took its measure.
The metamorphosis of Lapis is less slow.
Show me a Phoenix in his lambent nest,
reveal the field where Pegasus must go,
help seek a Unicorn, and I'll forego the rest.
No prize I’ve wanted, none I've claimed
ranks with the flooded eyes of the one face,
long vanished, that I stood before, ashamed,
trapped in a crippled dream, in a strange place.
DEATH OF A BULL RHINO
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANGOLA, 1975
A slow barge seeking a safe harbor,
the Rhino moves into the water hole,
sending the sludge his legs stir up
in eddies to the surface. He moves,
a heavy dancer; muscles visible
beneath his hide, flex and relax in a rhythm
so well practiced even his approaching end
can’t alter it. The sign that death
has entered his huge frame to do its work,
is in the visible desertion of the flock
of small birds that have used the broad back
as an island in the muddy water.
With no talent for philosophy, introspection,
and intimation of its own mortality, the Rhino
senses, somehow, that the end is near,
that Death, in a span only I can measure
with my watch, is growing larger as life
evaporates from the no longer strong, young frame.
I wonder why he wades into this forsaken hole?
Is it to die unseen by others of his kind?
I’ve heard that Elephants lumber off, sometimes,
into thickets far from the herd to await the end.
Old as the Rhino, and sick of hosting parasites
who've fed in me, death is no fitting friend.
HOELDERLIN AT HEIDELBERG
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fireflies skating on the night-dimmed Neckar
and fat pigeons roosting finally
in the crenellated eaves of the wrecked castle:
Heidelberg sleeps after a day when poetry
sprung the stubborn boundaries of language,
and a herd of feelings ran into eternity
like the wild bulls of Pamplona, between
crooked houses, along narrow, winding streets,
goring nothing except the checked imagination.
Mad Hoelderlin is dead in Tuebingen,
in the tower room above the sawdust workshop
of the joiner, Zimmer, he imagined, in the Patmos
of his mania, was Christ. He is buried in his words,
in the syllables his Muse granted him to the end,
in the sane gyres of suffering and doubt. He was
never in Heidelberg, except as poems, a fate
not uncommon for those who trust their lives
to despair, emerge diamond hard, and live in air.
BLACK SUN
~~~~~~~~~
A season of ashes, the sun's disk
turned obsidian, clouds wallowed in blood.
The black flower of Brzezinka* bloomed
behind the steel lace of the electric garden
where fire digested morsels of expendable flesh
spiced with crystals of an all-consuming salt.
It blossomed on a tower with eyes, shedding
its gold on boxcars rolling to a destiny conceived,
by hate, for yellow-starred herds discharged
to nakedness and ordained death, a short march
along narrow alleys between wooden huts
to chimneys that smoked like Satan's nostrils.
That past gassed all our futures, stripped
the visions of our sleep to one naked vision
of the black flower of Brzezinka sweeping
the lethal columns as they held onto a vain hope.
The ashes scattered over alien fields claim love
that never reached fulfillment, not even now.
Only those whose memories are steeped
in hemlock, whose blood stopped measuring
segments of time, know the absurdity
of survival, of moving through canyons of cities
like shadows no light casts, never drunk
on forgetfulness, or leavening the bread of shrift.
---
*the spotlight in the main tower over the entrance
to the unloading ramp at Birkenau. Under its glare
rolled the transports bringing mostly Jews, but also
Gypsies and others, to their deaths.
BOATING A SHARK
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For Olle Alsen
nos cantabimus invicem
Neptunum et viridis Nereidum comas
Horace
How to evoke in dry, fluent words
the open ocean shrinking to the size
of a tub, or the cupped sky's light
coruscating from the enameled wings
of the few insects that venture this far out?
Waiting shrinks pleasure like dried fruit.
Expectation is a large, baited hook
no fish mouth flashes by to strike;
the red and white ball doesn't bob,
except in dumb obedience to waves.
Marlin and Barracuda slide about
the silted bottom among blind crabs,
apparently too canny to be lured
by curved steel buried in a dead sardine.
Hunger rarely foils experience.
Strapped in the fighting chair, I survey
my wet range with a kingfisher's eye
seeing no tail or fin that breaks
the water's crinkled foil. The morning
wanders on as heat expands the air.
The float is sucked from the surface.
The sardine has been swallowed
and the hook buried in red, swimming flesh.
The diesels roar. Whatever struck the bait
pits instinct now against learned skill.
My shoulders clench as the rod bends
nearly double and I feel as if a behemoth
struggles on the steel line’s other end
for its gilled life. A shark parts the surface,
twists, dives deep. The reel hums its unwinding.
We contend for five excruciating hours
until the gray, shot in the brain, is hoisted
by crewmen to the deck, just another dead fish.
My swollen arms won’t rise. We aim for port,
the traditional broom tied to the mast.
On the dock, the captain takes my picture,
a stunned pigmy posturing beside
nearly a dozen feet of glistening isurus oxyrinchus
hanging tail up from a tackle, pulleys squealing
with the weight. The head wound bleeds again.
I yearn to shower and sleep, but arrangements
linger; the taking of teeth for a necklace,
dollars for the taxidermist to create a trophy
for a long wall to awe LaQuinta neighbors
and a check to the air-freight forwarder.
Docksiders convince me such victories
over nature require their stuffed evidence.
The money goes but the shark never rolls west.
Perhaps a Japanese restaurant paid more.
The forwarder’s phone’s been disconnected.
No trace exists anywhere of the sea's champion
barely defeated by exertions that nearly tore
my arms out of their sockets. I'm left with a tale
worth a drink among friends, a lost Polaroid,
and fifty-five lines; the only tangible reality.
JOSEPH CONRAD BEFORE THE NELSON MONUMENT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That Stone's no steadier than a deck,
your laurel heaves like breakers,
crowds disperse in tides below your gaze.
Each night the sun descends behind the froth
of London's attics. Each day, fattened pigeons
flap like headsails on their trek.
Horatio, Horatio, be glad that last day sealed
your memory. No matter in which rooms
you might have lain your glove, or
on which hook your sleeve hung; Every man
meets death at some disordered moment
of surprise, when blood and future are congealed.
Mad England, seeing only what he's told,
sits by the speaker now in slippers and suspenders,
behind torn shades. I've thought it's time
to lift the megaphone, spread furled sheets,
tack windward and haul anchor out of this slime.
Instead, I hear my voice grow old.
We two have straddled our share of sudden gales.
I stand beside you last command,
a debonair old man whose legs are failing.
At least we’ve had our brief say, framed dispatches,
walked the pitching sea. Tonight my ceiling
may be full of billowing, black, endless sails.
FATIMA
~~~~~~
Although I was going further than Fatima,
I had to share the rattling bus with old women
exuding the odor of mothballs, their matchstick
legs barely protruding from faded black skirts.
Higher, starched blouses the same color
as the black cloth pocketbooks, pressed
by prehensile fingers into clenched laps.
Despite their unfeigned poverty,
the pious ladies each wore a thin cross of gold
hung on a thinner gold chain circling
a wrinkled neck and cushioned on a bulbous udder.
The tired Franciscan slumped alone at the rear
and accompanied the slap of tires with his snores.
The female driver listened furtively to rap.
Is this what God wants from us, I asked myself;
rituals free of doubt, to creep along potholed roads
in tight seats whose worn springs have torn
the flimsy green-checkered upholstery?
Is this the service he requires us to perform
to earn a place at his healed side in a heaven
none has ever really seen except in films?
I pivoted on disbelief long ago, in a time
when I could see men brandishing his symbols,
mouthing his name reverently while the brains
of children, parents and the aged became
pulp beneath their hobnailed boots. Was God one
of that group smiling in their sunny pictures;
young soldiers playing football or carousing?
I found no answer, and as time aged, I forgot
my questions and repeated the expedient creed
that God fights with equal fervor on all sides.
I became one of those laughing youths. Today
I watch the women, some caressing rosaries,
some soundlessly reciting prayers, and wonder
if I, too, travel toward unhesitating truths?
COSTA DA CAPARICA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For George Santayana
Beyond the farthest gusts of spray, sails pierce
Gull wing and heaven simultaneously.
Beyond that is the calmness of a sea
No mind can rouse, or quell, and yet no nemesis.
The sun has called old women out, and young men
Who build tower upon tower of muscle
With prehensile arms, then leap to wrestle
With the surf, go under, twist, come up again.
They have the genius of eternity, who hang
Upon the moment like a gymnast, who
Fill every inch of that unsettling blue
With a Pythagorean form dumb as a boomerang.
Youth is no guarantor of victory, or age of defeat.
Tenacity is Time’s ally, and a kind of strength.
An old Atlantic shears this coast along its length.
The young, at best, are nature incomplete.
Why envy them the suppleness with which they climb
My limbs surrendered in a changing season long ago?
Years have increased the swiftness of my passion's flow,
And turned experience into wisdom in good time.
I have no wish to leave my natural state,
Or to become some artifact that conquers age.
I seek only to write memorable words on every page,
Full of my passing life, as homage to our fate.
PORTUGUESE FLIES
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All Portuguese dogs are crazy,"
Says Luisa, my neighbor. Her runt,
Black, brown and white spotted,
One-fourth Terrier, one-eighth Spaniel
And assorted fractions of other breeds
That roam the streets of Lisbon after
Dark, sniffing at bitches whose tails
Stiff as a finger, probing the sky, signal
Mating fever, is called Cao, which
Is Dog in Portuguese; simple and
Undistinguished as his whelping
In some cellar among stone washtubs.
Cao chases flies. Thinking he is a crocodile,
He snaps at them, but never manages
To bag one, which is not surprising.
Sometimes, in the cool rose dusk
Of Alcantara, my borough, I stroll
Into the pocket park on Alto Santo
Amaro, near my old house and take
A bench. Cao is usually there, running
Like a halfback, broken field style,
Trying to maul flies that keep evading.
It's easy for them. Portuguese flies are
Small, like fruit flies elsewhere.
Portugal itself is small. It fits easily
Into the trouser pocket of a Texan, or so
A clerk at the American Embassy said,
The day I came. He was from Amarillo.
Luisa, her husband, or her son Paulo
Are usually in the park. Cao barks
In shrill bursts, more like yelping than
Like threats. The flies stay high enough
To entice, but also to escape, his teeth.
But Cao never tires of the chase. It is
His mutt nature he obeys doing it. Just
As the flies express theirs by escaping.
LIKE A RIDDLE-POTENT KNOT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
for Italo Calvino, dear friend
Like a riddle-potent knot, the sheet
I thought would cover me
When I began to cool with sweat
During the heat of this midsummer night,
Lies tightly wound around my knees,
Playing its minute part, gaoler
In the drama of imaginings and sounds
Conspiring to prevent my sleep
By tugging with ominous persistence at my heart.
The chant of crickets in the massive dark,
The battering of insect wings
Against the window screen, the grate of autos
On the road below the house, the brunt
Of jasmine which invades my room,
All bring my mind no ease, all
Metamorphose into complexities. I am possessed
By an unrest so rigid it defies the pleasure
I might have from the flashing of some fireflies.
Nothing will give me peace this night
Though I have labored all day as best I could:
Begun a letter owed for weeks,
Climbed the hill from which the bay had spread
Before me like a blue fan, bit my axe
Deep into three dead maples in Paine's wood.
Now, past the crest of night, I see the skimming
Blade, the splintered bark, the hill;
Each scene precisely incomplete as in a dream.
What seeks solution now? I ask myself
Knowing too well that some immense necessity
Sleeps in me while I cannot sleep. Foreboding
Over world-crumbling bombs no longer cowers me,
Nor do I suffer for the fate of poetry.
The prime events that rob us of our lives
Our sole insomnias will not deter.
Dread is a waste before the inevitable. Flight
Won't flee the doer as the flier can the deed.
If only I imagined fear as in my youth
When I would huddle in a squeezing room
And conjure up the worst; a giant pillow
Stifling me, or being swallowed in the jaws
Of some whale-bowelled calamity, all
The most terrible to trick me into courage
Which would never come before exhaustion
And childish trust carried me to sleep
As perfect as the danger which inspired me.
But pillows have diminished and my jaws
Are tight. The terrors that in childhood
Yielded looming fright have lost their grandeur,
Their ability to make infinitudes of courage
Still attainable. Complexities return each night.
What taunts me now will not be caught
By galloping on Alexander's horse in dreams.
Its hooves once roused my skin; its mane
That flying mane, beckoned, and not in vain.
Over the east the sky grows pearl as the night
Defers. Who but the child of that dark world
Summoned by less alterable terrors, sat here
And stared at ghosts of dreams that lied?
Who shivered, hearing the first sparrow's tweet,
And twisted in his sheet, wishing an ancient saber
In his hand, still moist from heat, a blade
Such as the Macedonian could flourish, when
Hindered by a riddle only slicing could defeat?
COSSACKS
~~~~~~~~
Where are the Cossacks,
The horse raiders with sabers
Sharp enough to cut God's beard,
Who would have whipped my father
All the way from Kiev to the Czar's war,
Had he not chopped off his trigger finger
At the knuckle, in one stroke.
Better to be maimed than a murderer,
He had whispered to the Rabbi
Who had been stunned to unbelief
By the cleaver still bleeding furiously.
What has death to do with a Jew?
I would ask him that now
Seeing his dead face
Return in this repose to a clear happiness
I had not seen in it for years,
Eyes lidded in contemplation
Of absolutes his life had moved
Too swiftly from, as wind
Will sometimes chase
Smoke from a moist fire.
Here lies the man, expensively,
In one of his ten Sabbath suits,
His right hand holding down
His talked-out heart as in some final oath,
The four remaining digits
So fleshed with the gold moments
Of the gold country he espoused
The severed one is not missed, seems
Merely to be bent at the healed knuckle
Pointing inward at the heart
Long since delivered from its terror.
I would ask him now,
Was it a Gentile angel
Who tumbled him into black nets
Like the short of breath fish he had become?
I would ask him.
But he would laugh and lift both chins
Saying: Forget this foolishness.
Go make a dollar. Why are you boring
Into my ribs with your questions?
Who remembers Russia after all these years?
Cossacks were Cossacks, a cholera take them.
But he is dead, and in those last years
His memory turned fat, and choked his understanding.
The finger he would rather lose
Than curl around the trigger of a gun
Is missed by no one. But I
Wish I could ask him now
Where are the Cossacks,
Do they never ride?
Without the devils we give fingers for
Can the Messiah come?
Well fed in death
He lies patriarchally composed,
As if to say: What Cossacks?
Go make a dollar. Be something.
BEACHSIDE CEMETERY
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When the August rains had died
leaving no trace on the eroded stones,
no dark stain where names had been,
no sign but pockmarked soil
below whose borderless rows cadavers
lay, consigned to memory, now feeding
legions of blind worms, I came to sit.
I had been trapped inside an old house
with a sofa that regurgitated springs,
torn from their moorings on the frame
like hawsers that have lost their dock,
while storms gnawed at houses
groping coastal sands giddily in winds
that tore clouds unabatedly.
I came to sit and wonder, steeped in awe
at the unforgiving force of disaster;
a storm diving like a swarthy vulture
inward from the lumbering ocean
to depose the houses and disturb
the conjugal sleep of the long dead.
Nothing surprised me more than my calm.
The one-armed Postman, resident
for more than sixty years since birth,
had told me these half-vanished graves held
the first settlers, even a few Kiawahs
that some charitable and rebellious Jesuit
had baptized and buried here in ground
hallowed by ignoring trivial differences.
I sat all afternoon, while the sun pursued
the weakened downpour slowly westward
toward the Appalachians, where it would hide
all night; a story an old Seminole
woman had told me once near Table Rock.
I found her explanation more congenial
than the scientific legend taught in school.
The following day, the wind clothed itself
in waving blades of Fescue grass,
to say goodbye to remnants of the storm.
Parts of damaged cottages littered the beach,
flotsam of rural culture, but the limestone
cemetery tablets stood undisturbed, stubborn
witnesses to pious ritual and ageing doubt.
IN THE HOSPITAL BEHIND THE FRONT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Soldiers are
citizens of death's
grey land.
Siegfried Sassoon
No one can knead mud and puddled blood
into a replacement arm, or mold shreds of flesh
and crumbs of bone dripping with marrow,
thick as a veloute, into a leg. The hovering Doctor
only thinks he's God, but God has been discharged,
unfit for war. His angels pasted, stiff as the ground,
on stretchers at a door, big toes tagged, "unidentified".
Death, dressed in ice, recruits at Chosin reservoir.
Water meant life before the sky froze and the stars,
brittle from anti-aircraft fire, turned the firmament
to flakes. None dream of heaven anymore, none feel
that hell’s merely a lie like lists of casualties. The songs
extolling bravery reach our ears off-key and weird,
as if sung by a choir of Vampires who suck hope out
of the loud air. The air’s a pudding, blood thickened
by cordite. Breathing it feels like death.
In the tent where many wounded wait on cots
for surgeons’ expert hands to save enough Marine
to send to Iowa, Brooklyn, San Francisco, or Duluth,
screams so intense none listen anymore. All hope
for specks of pity reeling nurses parcel out among the few
far enough from being bagged to use them well; a sign
that tells us who’ll be living in another hour. The dead
are history, pearls cast into standard texts for telegrams.
BREAKFAST IN HELL
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The yolks are jungle green or bloody,
depending on which blasted tree you squat against
to try and hoist the greasy, lukewarm chow
in your tin canteen cup to your leathery mouth.
A colony of spores thrives on humidified bread
And fried insects pepper blackened bacon.
Breakfast in hell, three days soaked-loping
from Firebase X where Charlie waits along the trail,
black mosquito with a stinger, copper-jacketed,
that ruptures trained brains or a fresh chest.
Nothing reminds us of a Diner in Indiana or New York.
This is a kitchen where disease drips from trees.
We're happy for a moment's peace to swill dry mouths
out with a brew the hue of coffee
but the taste of burnt tires our guts have learned
to tolerate along with shrapnel crumbs.
Too tired to ask ourselves why we're here
we light joints to avoid being besieged by answers.
Patriots all, we huddle, ready to salute death,
the general who's drafted tens of thousands on all sides.
The heat is stifling and makes us wish
we could pull on Charlie's thin black pajamas
and still serve our violent mission as good grunts
who keep metaphoric dominoes from tumbling.
There’s Tex from Arizona who rode a bus
through a Panhandle night to Benning
and swears he'll move to Amarillo if he outlives 'Nam.
Wash, from Harlem, paid a seamstress, who sits
near Saigon’s Paris brothel, to create a pair
of boxer shorts for him from a nylon Old Glory.
In lying joy we swear to hide a pessimistic truth
these months have buried in stoned memories:
we’ll reunite ten years from now.
Many will be long dead, and the rest will live
in furnished nightmares and forget the wish
to elbow to the bar in Denver's Brown's Hotel.
Some will go home to beat their wives again,
others to pump gas near flying Turnpikes
or deliver milk in Boston suburbs before dawn.
We have learned to commit crimes like murder,
without facing trial. Some will try that. I'll wake
from night-sweats to write poems, still breakfasting in hell.
NOCTES IRAE
~~~~~~~~~~~
The night is made for love and night patrols.
Army Field Manual
Curled like sausage in a shallow hole,
gouged out of Play Cu dirt under fire,
head tucked between my shaking knees,
I think neither of love nor the patrol.
Why think of Novalis and his verse,
in cratered landscapes, colored pus,
where night inspires no hymns, and serves
as talisman against a bullet's curse?
Old letters, smudged and greasy, keep
breast-pocket Camels nearly dry;
mortars diminishing their clich‚ news,
this night in which only the bagged find sleep.
Arms and lips that write they've strayed
and will not find their way to me again
are dwarfed by bursts of terror that usurp
the time to feel I have been twice betrayed.
This nail of land where benumbed men strive
to annihilate each other, has no time for love,
only for five dollar minutes to forget the thud
of mortars, whose landing few survive.
I want no cross for dying well, no jug of wine
to drown the moans of silenced friends. Can
medals compensate maimed grunts? Woes
vanished when I cradled minced Billy Cline.
That war is boredom, none of us was ever told.
We pass our days waiting to die, our nights
in clinging to the hope darkness will change
us to a mound of dirt, or to a corpse already cold.
But new cadavers, black from swarming flies,
pile up like trash. We know the hero myths
we heard from fathers or were told in school, are lies
that mock our concealed relief, when a friend dies.
BORDER TRADE
~~~~~~~~~~~~
You start by snowing salt behind the index knuckle
to prepare the tongue for the Tequila's bite. Then,
head tilted back, you gulp the golden shot, ending
with tartness teeth squeeze from a lemon quarter-moon.
One, two, then to the inspection of the ochre-skinned
wares, none older than fourteen, who assault
the fumes of the pomaded hall with homemade Chanel
and watered vinegar. The file moves on, and on:
Long fuchsia nails and a thin, arch of legs, unsteady
in nailed heels. Screened bouquets glare on nylon skirts
slit to the talced navel, to provide minute glimpses
of pubes prickling from congested heat.
The Gringos, some gray, sit on splintered chairs,
cracking arthritic knuckles. Some laugh-- Masons
on a lewd holiday. Marines nearly as green
as their prey wait passively to ban zits of late puberty.
Rubbers and a mild carbolic rinse free tricks of fleas
and worries of disease from the hurried conjugation,
keep the unwelcome yellow drip of venery also,
south of the sifting border and sleepy midnight eyes.
For sworn love, you get amateurs who wait in San Diego.
In Tia Juana, you buy thirty minutes for two Georges
on a hollow mattress, under nicotine stained sheets,
with a professional who moans as if you'd hit the bell.
YOU CAN'T MAKE POETRY FROM A FART
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Delmore Schwartz)
Kennedy listened or pretended to.
Both from Boston, one patrician,
the speaker, partisan. Frost, an icon,
hung in one corner, half encircled
by a fence of adoring cabinet wives
whose chiffon afternoon ensembles
betrayed thick grapefruit thighs
and waistlines leaning over pantyhose.
Black waiters snaked among poets
with trays of drinks and canapes. Cal
abstained, Berryman imbibed for both.
It's 1962! A National Poetry Festival,
with peacocks of iambics herded
to readings, asked to preen, to prove
Camelot loves culture, perhaps more
than a swinish bay in Cuba, or the sly
insinuation of advisors armed
like condottieri into Cochin China.
Masques are diversions whose purpose
mimes the covering of wood with veneer,
History will have to buy, astonished
by waxed surfaces, while termites
keep digesting grain and substance.
A nervous time was had by all.
Poetry and acknowledged legislators
mix like oil and alcohol. Frost,
doddered on thrombotic legs in a wind
that tweaked the nostrils of assembled
solons, recited "The Gift Outright"
hatless, from memory, his cap
and papers winged down the mall
like butterflies, from Lincoln's steps.
At 1600, in the garden, rose petals
had begun to fall, and cherry trees,
near the yacht basin, sagged with clouds
of blooms that never became fruit.
All Poems Copyright (c) 2003 Oswald Le Winter
Oswald Le Winter Credits: A number of these poems first appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Chelsea, Shenandoah, the noble savage, Contact, Epoch, The Prairie Schooner, New Mexico Quarterly, Adelphy Quarterly, Occident, Argonaut, Best Poems of 1962, Beloit Poetry Journal, Botteghe Oscure, Tarpaulin Sky, Ygdrasil, The Richmond Review (U.K.), Poets Against the War.
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