IGNATOW, David


To Nowhere

I carry my keys like a weapon,

their points bunched together

and held outwards in the palm

for a step too close behind me

as I approach the subway through the

dark.
…..


A Summing Up

Perhaps a table set for two, or a garden

at the end of day, but no more.

Mostly a walk through vacant spaces

in which sound assails us, and shapes

that are not visible oppress us with their weight.

We feel them about our faces, arms and shoulders

but see nothing and nobody, concentrated

on one thing -- to eliminate or at least prepare

for those sounds.

If we are able by a sudden turn down one street

to block off those noises and those weights

upon us, we may find ourselves in a small room

fit for two persons, with a table between,

where they may eat or listen in silence

to one another's complaint of the outside --

and a garden that we had no idea could exist

in the rear. As we enter, its odor assails us

and since we are then out in the open

these sounds again and a noise of the invisible

shapes colliding among themselves.

Are the voices of these shapes in conflict?

We sit there but we cannot communicate their beings,

the noises in us, it seems, and the shapes

we cannot see making our bodies their weight,

they have become so familiar to us.


After writing a poem

I do not want to be seen or heard or spoken to.

In the house I am grateful if it is empty

except for me. Only with wincing do I emerge

from my room, even into my wife's presence.

I am clean of all desire and passion,

clamor has died out in me. I am still

and peaceful. I think I exist

not in myself but in the air, unseen,

as I feel, unliving. I should say,

like Merton, that I sense myself in God

and do not wish to come out to live again.

I have lived and died by my own hand

and to come back is to break this pact

with myself, once more the crime committed

and I again without faith. But in presence

of my sin I grow restless and once more turn back

to rhythms of silence and alone again

take up a pen with which to commit myself

for one hour to eternity.


I surmount

pain at fraud, believing

in my own principle of joy,

that if I would live

as I imagine, each difficulty

must be turned to my employ;

that when I discover its use,

nothing is left

by which I may refuse my joy,

for in my possession is the meaning,

and I am of what each meaning consists,

giving as its reason that myself exists.

Earth Hard

Earth hard to my heels

bear me up like a child

standing on its mother's belly.

I am a surprised guest to the air


In A Dream

at fifty I approach myself,

eighteen years of age,

seated despondently on the concrete steps

of my father's house,

wishing to be gone from there

into my own life,

and I tell my young self,

Nothing will turn out right,

you'll want to avenge yourself,

on those close to you especially,

and they will want to die

of shock and grief. You will fall

to pleading and tears of self-pity,

filled with yourself, a passionate stranger.

My eighteen-year-old self stands up

from the concrete steps and says,

Go to hell,

and I walk off.


If We Could Be Brought

If we could be brought to the surface

like a gleaming fish and served for supper,

if we could eat and swallow our own life

to make a good meal, if we could go fishing

for ourselves and feed on the gleaming

swimmer below the surface of our skin-

the fish that is our slippery life

and death.


Moving Picture

When two take gas

by mutual consent

and the cops come in

when the walls are broken down

and the doctor pays respects

by closing the books

and the neighbors stand about

sniffing and afraid

and the papers run a brief

under a whiskey ad

and the news is read

eating ice cream or a fruit

and the paper is used

to wrap peelings

and the garbage man

dumps the barrel

into the truck

and the paper flares

in the furnace and sinks back

charred and is scooped up

for mud flats and pressed down

by steam rollers for hard ground

and a house on it

for two to enter


Two Poems

Trees are human:

they too have to stand

and take it. And see

how beautiful they are

holding their leaves

above the ground

as if to bless.

*

The trees are tall gods

commanding a view
of my study. I bow

my head over my typewriter

and start the ceremony
of a prayer.


Melpomene In Manhattan

As she walked she would look back

over her shoulder and trip

upon sidewalk cracks or bump

into people to whom she would apologize

profusely, her head still turned.

One could hear her murmur to herself

tearfully, as though filled with a yearning

to recover what she was leaving behind

as if she would preserve it

or do for it what she had neglected

out of ignorance or oversight

or from sheer meanness and spite

or simple helplessness to do better,

her voice beginning to keen

as she tripped or steered blindly

into the gutter

Coupling

Wherever he looks, standing still in the city,

are people born of coupling, walking in gray suits

and ties, in long dresses and coiffed hair,

speaking elegantly, of themselves and of each other,

forgetting for the moment their origin,

perhaps wishing not to know or to remember.

They dress as if having been born in a clothing store.

They were born of men and women naked

and gyrating from the hips

and with movements up and down

and with climactic yells,

as if losing their lives

in the pleasure and so glad,

so wildly glad.

From this rises the child

from between the wet crotch, blood and mucus,

He stands upright and pronounces himself

humankind and steps from bed and clothes himself

in a gray suit and from the next room of birth

steps a woman in a long dress. They meet

in the corridor and arm in arm walk its length

in search of one room, empty of inhabitants

but prepared for them.


Kaddish

Mother of my birth, for how long were we together

in your love and my adoration of your self?

For the shadow of a moment, as I breathed your pain

and you breathed my suffering. As we knew

of shadows in lit rooms that would swallow the light.

Your face beneath the oxygen tent was alive

but your eyes closed, your breathing hoarse.

Your sleep was with death. I was alone

with you as when I was young

but now only alone, not with you,

to become alone forever, as I was learning

watching you become alone.

Earth now is your mother, as you were mine, my earth,

my sustenance and my strength,

and now without you I turn to your mother

and seek from her that I may meet you again

in rock and stone. Whisper to the stone,

I love you. Whisper to the rock, I found you.

Whisper to the earth, Mother, I have found her,

and I am safe and always have been.


It is

It is heart-rending to know a kiss

cannot cure the world of its illnesses,

nor can your happiness, nor your tragedy

of being a discrete person, for the bodies

fall like rain into the ground

and merge only to make an ocean

of bones and closed eyes, our identities

merged, as we had wanted

when we were persons

in each other's sight and touch.
If we could be brought

If we could be brought to the surface

like a gleaming fish and served for supper,

if we could eat and swallow our own life

to make a good meal, if we could go fishing

for ourselves and feed on the gleaming

swimmer below the surface of our skin-

the fish that is our slippery life

and death.
I like rust on a nail,

fog on a mountain.

Clouds hide stars,

rooms have doors,

eyes close,

and the same words that began love

end it with changed emphasis.


Rescue The Dead

Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,

is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,

is to respect fire,

is to study man's eyes and his gestures

as he talks,

is to set bread upon the table

and a knife discreetly by,

is to pass through crowds

like a crowd of oneself.

Not to love is to live.

To love is to be led away

into a forest where the secret grave

is dug, singing, praising darkness

under the trees.

To live is to sign your name,

is to ignore the dead,

is to carry a wallet

and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.

My boat wallows in the sea.

You who are free,

rescue the dead.


An Ecology

We drop in the evening like dew

upon the ground and the living

feel it on their faces. Death

soft, moist everywhere upon us,

soon to cover the living

as they drop. This explains

the ocean and the sun.


Promenade

His head split in four parts,

he walks down the street—pleasant

with shady trees and a sun softened

by leaves touching it. He walks,

a revolving turret for a head,

from each slit of which he looks guardedly:

the enemy approaches or he approaches

the enemy. At any moment the chatter of differences

will break out; the four parts of his skull

revolve slowly, seeking the time.

In there they do not know of each other,

sealed off by steel walls. They are safer

together singly and apart; and shouting,

angry or in pain, have only themselves to listen;

while overhead, ignored in the walk,

are the leaves touching each other and the sun.


Brief elegy

In every beautiful song is a promise of sleep.

I will sleep if you will sing to me,

but sing to me of sleep

when the bells have hushed in the towers

and the towers have hushed from their sounds.

Sing to me, strolling through silent streets.


All Quiet

How come nobody is being bombed today?

I want to know, being a citizen

of this country and a family man.

You can't take my fate in your hands

without letting me know in advance

through a news leak

at which I could have voiced a protest,

running my whole family off a cliff.


Europe and America

My father brought the emigrant bundle

of desperation and worn threads,

that in anxiety as he stumbles

tumble out distractedly;

while I am bedded upon soft green money

that grows like grass. Thus,

between my father who lives on a bed of anguish

for his daily bread, and I who tear money

at leisure by the roots,

where I lie in sun or shade,

a vast continent of breezes, storms to him,

shadows, darkness to him, and hills,

mountains to him, lie between us …


Permanence

I am leaving earth with little knowledge of it,

without having visited its great cities and lands

I was here for a moment, it seems, to praise,

and now that I am leaving I am astounded

So what does cruelty mean in these circumstance

and what does triumph, empire and domination,

but waves upon the still sea beneath.

And what does failure mean but to sink below


An Illusion

She was saying mad things:
'To hell with the world!
Love is all you need! Go on
and get it! What are you
waiting for!' and she walked,
more like shuffled up the street,
her eyes fixed upon the distance.
People stepped self-consciously
out of her way. Straight up
stood her hair, wild.

What are you waiting for,
snarled from her lips.
it seemed directed to herself
really, to someone inside
with whom she fought.
The shredded hem of her dress
rustled around her.

Listening

You wept in your mother's arms

and I knew that from then on

I was to forget myself.

Listening to your sobs,

I was resolved against my will

to do well by us

and so I said, without thinking,

in great panic, To do wrong

in one's own judgment,

though others thrive by it,

is the right road to blessedness.

Not to submit to error

is in itself wrong

and pride.

Standing beside you,

I took an oath

to make your life simpler

by complicating mine

and what I always thought

would happen did:

I was lifted up in joy.


Information

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves.

Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant

at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch

and marked down on paper with pencil each total.

Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand;

I did something on my own that was not dependent on others,

and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars,

as astronomers are always doing.

They want the facts to be sure they have them all.

It would help them to know whether the world is finite.

I discovered one tree that is finite.

I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too.

We could swap information.


The Journey

I am looking for a past

I can rely on

in order to look to death

with equanimity.

What was given me:

my mother’s largeness

to protect me,

my father’s regularity

in coming home from work

at night, his opening the door

silently and smiling,

pleased to be back

and the lights on

in all the rooms

through which I could run

freely or sit at ease

at table and do my homework

undisturbed: love arranged

as order directed at the next day.

Going to bed was a journey.


Against the Evidence

As I reach to close each book

lying open on my desk, it leaps up

to snap at my fingers. My legs

won’t hold me, I must sit down.

My fingers pain me

where the thick leaves snapped together

at my touch.

All my life

I’ve held books in my hands

like children, carefully turning

their pages and straightening out

their creases. I use books

almost apologetically. I believe

I often think their thoughts for them.

Reading, I never know where theirs leave off

and mine begin. I am so much alone

in the world, I can observe the stars

or study the breeze, I can count the steps

on a stair on the way up or down,

and I can look at another human being

and get a smile, knowing

it is for the sake of politeness.

Nothing must be said of estrangement

among the human race and yet

nothing is said at all

because of that.

But no book will help either.

I stroke my desk,

its wood so smooth, so patient and still.

I set a typewriter on its surface

and begin to type

to tell myself my troubles.

Against the evidence, I live by choice.


I close my eyes

I close my eyes like a good little boy at night in bed,

as I was told to do by my mother when she lived,

and before bed I brush my teeth and slip on my pajamas,

as I was told, and look forward to tomorrow.

I do all things required of me to make me a citizen of sterling worth.

I keep a job and come home each evening for dinner. I arrive at the

same time on the same train to give my family a sense of order.

I obey traffic signals. I am cordial to strangers, I answer my

mail promptly. I keep a balanced checking account. Why can’t I

live forever?


The Bagel

I stopped to pick up the bagel

rolling away in the wind,

annoyed with myself

for having dropped it

as if it were a portent.

Faster and faster it rolled,

with me running after it

bent low, gritting my teeth,

and I found myself doubled over

and rolling down the street

head over heels, one complete somersault

after another like a bagel

and strangely happy with myself.

Dilemma

Whatever we do, whether we light

strangers’ cigarettes—it may turn out

to be a detective wanting to know who is free

with a light on a lonely street nights—

or whether we turn away and get a knife

planted between our shoulders for our discourtesy;

whatever we do—whether we marry for love

and wake up to find love is a task,

or whether for convenience to find love

must be won over, or we are desperate—

whatever we do; save by dying,

and there too we are caught,

by being planted too close to our parents.


Here in bed

Here in bed behind a brick wall

I can make order and meaning,

but how do I begin? How do I

emerge without panic

to the sounds and mass

of people in the street?

Are they human who stare

as I pass by, as if sizing me up

for a mugging or a filthy proposition,

and am I human to have to be

frightened and on guard?

It's people I'm afraid of, afraid

of my own kind, knowing their angers

and schemes and violent needs, knowing

through knowledge of myself

that I have learned to resist,

but when I can't I have seen

the havoc I have made.

It's this, knowing their desperate motives,

as I have known mine, I'm afraid of

in them. I hide upon a bed

behind a brick wall and listen

to engines roaring up and down

the street and to voices shouting

to one another and find no meaning

or order in them, as there is none

in me when I am free of self-restraint.

The bed is my victory over fear.

The bed returns me to my self

as I was young and dreaming

of the beauty of the trees

and faces of people.


I dream

I dream I am lying in the mud on my back and staring up into the sky.

Which do I prefer, since I have the power to fly into the blue slate of

air? It is summer. I decide quickly that by lying face up I have a view

of the sky I could not get by flying in it, while I'd be missing the mud.


Self-Employed

For Harvey Shapiro

I stand and listen, head bowed,

to my inner complaint.

Persons passing by think

I am searching for a lost coin.

You’re fired, I yell inside

after an especially bad episode.

I’m letting you go without notice

or terminal pay. You just lost

another chance to make good.

But then I watch myself standing at the exit,

depressed and about to leave,

and wave myself back in wearily,

for who else could I get in my place

to do the job in dark, airless conditions?


Last Night

Last night I spoke to a dead woman with green face.

She told me of her good life among the living,

with a faithful man. He was right there

beside her as tall as I, and moving

like me, with kind motions. If she did breathe,

it was just to talk and tell her life

in their basement smelling moist

like freshly opened earth. He was good to her

and she had worked as a typist

every day and came home to cook.

It was a good life with her husband,

he was kind; and she took hold of his hand

and said, 'In this basement we've made a home,

with me working as typist and he studying

his music.' She was dead, that much she understood

herself by her tone; and she looked at me

with green eyes.

For My Daughter

When I die choose a star

and name it after me

that you may know

I have not abandoned

or forgotten you.

You were such a star to me,

following you through birth

and childhood, my hand

in your hand.

When I die

choose a star and name it

after me so that I may shine

down on you, until you join

me in darkness and silence

together.

Ritual One

As I enter the theatre the play is going on.

I hear the father say to the son on stage,

You-ve taken the motor apart.

The son replies, The roof is leaking.

The father retorts, The tire is flat.

Tiptoeing down the aisle, I find my seat,

edge my way in across a dozen kneecaps

as I tremble for my sanity.

I have heard doomed voices calling on god the electrode.

Sure enough, as I start to sit

a scream rises from beneath me.

It is one of the players.

If I come down, I-ll break his neck,

caught between the seat and the backrest.

Now the audience and the players on stage,

their heads turned towards me, are waiting

for the sound of the break. Must I?

Those in my aisle nod slowly, reading my mind,

their eyes fixed on me, and I understand

that each has done the same.

Must I kill this man as the price of my admission

to this play? His screams continue loud and long.

I am at a loss as to what to do,

I panic, I freeze.

My training has been to eat the flesh of pig.

I might even have been able to slit a throat.

As a child I witnessed the dead chickens

over a barrel of sawdust absorbing their blood.

I then brought them in a bag to my father

who sold them across his counter. Liking him,

I learned to like people and enjoy their company too,

which of course brought me to this play.

But how angry I become.

Now everybody is shouting at me to sit down,

sit down or I-ll be thrown out.

The father and son have stepped off stage

and come striding down the aisle side by side.

They reach me, grab me by the shoulder

and force me down. I scream, I scream,

as if to cover the sound of the neck breaking.

All through the play I scream

and am invited on stage to take a bow.

I lose my senses and kick the actors in the teeth.

There is more laughter

and the actors acknowledge my performance with a bow.

How should I understand this?

Is it to say that if I machine-gun the theatre

from left to right they will respond with applause

that would only gradually diminish with each death?

I wonder then whether logically I should kill myself

too out of admiration. A question indeed,

as I return to my seat and observe a new act

of children playfully aiming their kicks

at each other-s groins.

Without Sexual Attraction

Without sexual attraction, there is

the brutal movement of the sea.

The face peers out of its skeletal frame

and hands reach like bone.

Without love, the streets

are hollow sounding

with wooden, hurried steps,

voices like caverns of death.

We pass each other as trains do,

whistling screams.

Brightness as a Poignant Light

I tread the dark and my steps are silent.

I am alone and feel a ghostly joy - wildly

free and yet I do not live absolutely

and forever, but my ghostly joy

is that I am come to light

for some reason known only to the dark,

perhaps to view itself in me.

As I tread the dark,

led by the light of my pulsating mind,

I am faithful to myself: my child.

Still, how can I be happy

to have been born only to return

to my father, the dark, to feel his power

and die?

I take comfort that I am

my father, speaking as a child

against my fatherhood. This

is the silence I hear my heart

beating in, but

not for me.

From the Observatory

Each step is to and from an object

and does not echo in heaven

or in hell. The earth vibrates

under the heel or from impact

of stone. Many stones fall

from outer space and earth itself

is in flight. It heads out

among the stars that are dead,

dying or afire.

The seasons doubt themselves and give way

to one another. The day is doubtful of itself,

as is the night; they come, look around, slowly depart.

The sun will never be the same.

People give birth to people, flourish

and then die,

and the sun is a flame of doubt

warming to our bodies.

With the Sun's Fire

Are you a horror to yourself?

Do you have eyes peering at you

from within at the back of your skull

as you manage to stay calm, knowing

you are being watched by a stranger?

Be well, I am seated beside you,

planning a day's work. We are contending

with the stuff of stones and stars,

with water, air, with dirt, with food

and the sun's fire.

When I Am Dead

Examine me, I am continuous

from my first memory and have no memory

of birth. Therefore was I never born

and always have been? As told

in my breathing which is never new

or tired?

Face in the mirror

or star hidden in the sun's rays,

you are always there but which am I

and who is the mirror or the hidden star?

Explain me as you are that I may live

in time and die

when I am dead.

The Two Selves

I existed before my mind realized me

and when I became known to myself

it was with the affection for warmth

beside a radiator.

So you began for me

and I will whisper to your self

to give in, to surrender, to close

in remembrance, and I will give you up

and withdraw into a stone, forever

known to you.

Paint a Wall

cover the weather stains

and spider webs: who's happy

You who don't exist

I make you

out of my great need

There is no prose for this

no ordered syntax

no carefully measured holy tread

I am falling beyond depth

into oblivion

breathing

I hear breathing

Something must be said

of nothing

I am as queer as the conception of God

I am the god and the heaven

unless I scatter myself

among the animals and furniture

of earth.

Streets and Bars

The sky makes no sense to me.

What is it saying? Blue? That blue is enough?

The blue of emptiness?

A small cloud trails beneath the sky

as if to make a point

about its own pride in being a body,

white, welcome to the eye.

The cloud drifts out of sight.

In its absence, I will take a walk

beneath the sky, slowly drifting

in and out of streets and bars.


My skeleton, my rival

Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton.

It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it

with me—this other thing I will become at death,

and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk,

my rival.

What will the living see of me

if they should open my grave but my bones

that will stare at them through hollow sockets

and bared teeth.

I write this to warn my friends

not to be shocked at my changed attitude

toward them, but to be aware

that I have it in me to be someone

other than I am, and I write to ask forgiveness

that death is not wholesome for friendships,

that bones do not talk, have no quarrel with me,

do not even know I exist.

A machine called skeleton will take my place

in the minds of others when I am dead

among the living, and that machine

will make it obvious that I have died

to be identified by bones

that have no speech, no thought, no mind

to speak of having let themselves be carried

once around in me, as at my service

at the podium or as I lay beside my love

or when I held my child at birth

or embraced a friend or shook a critic's hand

or held a pen to sign a check or book

or wrote a farewell letter to a love

or held my penis at the bowl

or lay my hand upon my face at the mirror

and approved of it.

There is Ignatow, it will be said,

looking down inside the open grave.

I'll be somewhere in my poems, I think,

to be mistaken for my bones, but There's Ignatow

will be said. I say to those who persist,

just read what I have written.

I'll be there, held together by another kind

of structure, of thought and imagery,

mind and matter, love and longing, tensions

opposite, such as the skeleton requires

to stand upright, to move with speed,

to sit with confidence, my friend the skeleton

and I its friend, shielding it from harm.


At this moment

I'm very pleased to be a body. Can there be someone without a body?

As you hold mine I feel firmly assured that bodies are the right thing

and I think all life is a body. I'm happy about trees, grass and water,

especially with the sun shining on it. I slip into it, a summer pleasure.

I have hurt the body. That's when I know I need it most in its whole

condition. If I could prove it to you by giving pain you would agree

but I prefer you with your body pressed to mine as if to say it is how

we know. Think, when two must separate how sad it is for each then

having to find another way to affirm their bodies. Knock one against

another or tree or rock and there's your pain. Now we have our arms

filled with each other. Could we not grow old in this posture and be

buried as one body which others would do for us tenderly?