A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

Excerpt from “Musica Humana”

282 A Face to Meet the Faces Excerpt from “Musica Humana” Ilya Kaminsky —an elegy for Osip Mandelstam [In summer 1924 Osip Mandelstam brought his young wife to St. Petersburg. Nadezhda was what the French call laide mais charmante. An eccentric? Of course he was. He threw a student down the staircase for complaining he wasn’t published, Osip shouting: Was Sappho? Was Jesus Christ] Poet is a voice, I say, like Icarus, whispering to himself as he falls. Yes, my life as a broken branch in the wind hits the Northern ground. I am writing now a history of snow, the lamplight bathing the ships that sail across the page. But on certain afternoons the Republic of Psalms opens up and I grow frightened that I haven’t lived, died, not enough to scratch this ecstasy into vowels, hear splashes of clear, biblical speech. I read Plato, Augustine, the loneliness of their syllables while Icarus keeps falling. And I read Akhmatova, her rich weight binds me to the earth, the nut trees on a terrace breathing the dry air, the daylight. Yes, I lived. The State hung me up by the feet, I saw St. Petersburg’s daughters, swans, I learned the grammar of gulls’ array and found myself for good 283 From the Page to the Pen down Pushkin Street, while memory sat in the corner, erasing me with a sponge. I’ve made mistakes, yes: in bed I compared government to my girlfriend. Government! An arrogant barber’s hand shaving off the skin. All of us dancing happily around him. [He sat on the edge of his chair and dreamt aloud of good dinners. He composed his poems not at his desk but in the streets of St. Petersburg; he adored the image of the rooster tearing apart the night under the walls of Acropolis with his song. Locked up in the cell, he was banging on the door: “You have got to let me out, I wasn’t made for prison.”] Once or twice in his life, a man is peeled like apples. What’s left is a voice that splits his being down to the center. We see: obscenity, fright, mud but there is joy of shape, there is always more than one silence. —between here and Nevski Prospect, the years, birdlike, stretch,— 284 A Face to Meet the Faces Pray for this man who lived on bread and tomatoes while dogs recited his poetry in each street. Yes, count “march,” “july” weave them together with a thread— it’s time, Lord, press these words against your silence. * —the story is told of a man who escapes and is captured into the prose of evenings: after making love, he sits up on a kitchen floor, eyes wide open, speaks of the Lord’s emptiness in whose image we are made. —he is out of work—among silverware and dirt he is kissing his wife’s neck so the skin of her belly tightens. One would think of a boy laying syllables with his tongue onto a woman’s skin: those are lines sewn entirely of silence. ...