Psalm, and: Variations

Psalm

The whale, says Jonah, is war and its black-outs.The whale is the city and its deep wells and its barracks.The whale is the country stuck in its mud and its one grocery  and the pulled punches and the unwashed crotches and the money.The whale is society, and its taboos, its vanity, its ignorance.The whale is (in so many cases, my brothers, my sisters) marriage.The whale is self-love. And still other things that I’ll tell youLater, when you are a bit less obtuse (after page x).The whale is incarnate life.The whale is creation, superfluous after all is said and done, but indispensable for that  gratuitous and after all almost incomprehensible experiment.The whale is always farther, vaster; believe me, you barely escape, you have a hard  time escaping from the whale.The whale is necessary.

And don’t think that you’ll understand everything all in one go.

    Because after all,    Of course war is a bloody bore    Of course society      Of course marriage        But we haven’t yet found a better way      So that in the end      In the last analysis, all that’s left as the source of bloody boredom      Is self-love.      For you must know, looking within or without      (As I did when the whale opened its jaws—or through me).      That precisely: war,      Society, marriage… there are those      Who make use of them      As a springboard to leap beyond themselves…

Variations

on a theme of Baudelaire« Mon enfant, ma soeur »

1

Unknown one, as if I had begotten you with a foreign woman,I can understand you, though, as if we came from the same womb.Against my neck your younger heartMarks a newer hour than mine, o confidentEnemy and sweet accomplice all at once, listenTo our linked bloodstreams filling with the same murmur that risesFrom the depths of our natal night.

2

Beyond the years where you did not come to join me, beyondThe useless totems’ defenses, so much newer than we are,I find you again.I should be able to smile at you at last and take your handTo lead you to the spouse from another tribe. O dangerous and secret one,I recognize your sullen, patient look that wordlessly reminds meOur thirst is not quenched.

3

Who will prove to me, silent one, that you are telling the truth? I doNot know you, Madam, and do not have what would satisfy you.Go back to your husband!I am not what you think. We are deceiving each other, lovely lady!This is a treacherous season, when everything labours hidden in the earth.But say something! speak! to refute at last the implacableCertainty of your silence.

4

The temples were new. We watched out for the columns’ fresh paint.This wasn’t our first life.When I came back caked with the blood of our brothers, of our enemies,You began to heat up a basin of pure water.(Some of them were our brothers and in fact our enemies, and some,Foreigners, nonetheless our allies.)In the firelight, I watched your narrow hands wash my slashed legs.

Later, you went aloneAfter your last night as a girlchild, to throw into the flames,On the altar of the impassive goddessThe innocent linen stained by the first blood that separated us for life.You followed meWith what was already a woman’s gaze when I left under the olive trees,When I went back to war.

5

Where, in truth, might we depart together? The poets ramble on.The braggart poets always forget the animals bleating in the barn,The wheat rising, the hungry children,The trees to be grafted, the rooftiles laid, after the squall.We have always been the ones who fed the fire and kept the feast-days.As long as I’ve known you, we have always had to wait, then depart,In different directions, on the last night.

6

There was a time when it was...