Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

A Requiem

A Modern Fable Once upon a time a man stole a wolf from among its pack and said to the wolf, "Stop, you're snapping at my fingers," and the wolf replied , "I'm hungry. What have you got to eat?" And the man replied, "Chopped liver and sour cream." The wolf said, "I'll take sour cream. I remember having it once before at Aunt Millie's. May I bare my teeth in pleasure?" And the man replied, "Of course, if you'll come along quietly," and the wolf asked, "What do you think I am? Just because I like sour cream you expect me to change character?" The man thought about this. After all, what was he doing, stealing a wolf from its kind, as if he were innocent of wrongdoing? And he let the wolf go but later was sorry; he missed talking to the wolf and went in search of it, but the pack kept running away each time he came close. He kept chasing and the pack kept running away. It was a kind of relationship. A Requiem My father, listening to music, that's me, my legs outstretched upon the bed as I lean back in my chair. I think of him in his chair, legs crossedcarelessly and with his musing smile recallinghis first wish, to become a baritone, his smile seeking after his youth or watching it in the distant past, untouchable. I am alone, and the operaplaying heightens my loneliness, without son, without father, without past or present, and my future a problem. Eh, father, as I listen to your favorite opera you would have enjoyed my listening and approved emphatically, while I'd withhold myself, tentative towards opera, as other matters burned in me, such as the need to be free, and so we would argue but soon fall silent and go our separate ways. 125 I am alone in my apartment, alone as you were without me in your last days at about my age. I am listening to Rossiniand thinking of you affectionately, longing for your presence once more, of course to wrestle with your character, the game once again of independence, but now, now in good humor because we already know the outcome, for I am sixty-six,going on sixty-seven, and you are forever seventy-two. We are both old men and soon enough I'll join you. So why quarrel again, as if two old men could possibly settle between them what wasimpossible to settle in their early days? 1905 While my father walked through mud in shoes borrowed from his sister, all Kiev attended Prince Igor and cheered, and while he worked in a cellarbindery and slept on workbenches rats leapt over at night, Dostoevsky's White Nights and Anna Karenina were being read avidly amid joy, tears and protests. My father was the silent one, walking through the streets where the hot arguments went on about poverty and guilt. He walked, his work bundle under arm, from cellar to monastery, to bind holy books and volumes of the Russianclassics, and when they had had enough of classics and needed blood, he fled, for his blood was real to them; only he had worked and starved. All others were but characters in a novel or a play— bless Chekhov, Gogol and others for their genius, but my father was the one who had not been 726 | Poems of the 1980s ...