The Half-Finished Heaven Read online

  except one. Dreyfus’s face looked out from that one.

  IV.

  Radical and Reactionary live together as in a miserable marriage,

  diminished by each other, leaning on each other.

  But we, their children, have to find our own road.

  Each problem cries out in a private language!

  Walk down any path where there is a trace of truth.

  V.

  In a field not far from the subdivisions

  a newspaper has been lying for months, full of news.

  It is aging because of days and nights, rain and sun.

  It’s on its way to becoming a plant, a cabbage head. It’s starting to

  join the field,

  like an old memory gradually changing into you.

  After a Death

  Once there was a shock

  that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.

  It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.

  It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

  One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun

  through brush where a few leaves hang on.

  They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.

  Names swallowed by the cold.

  It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat

  but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

  The samurai looks insignificant

  beside his armor of black dragon scales.

  Under Pressure

  Powerful engines from the blue sky.

  We live on a construction site where everything shivers,

  where the ocean depths can suddenly open.

  A hum in seashells and telephones.

  You can see beauty if you look quickly to the side.

  The heavy grainfields run together in one yellow river.

  The restless shadows in my head want to go out there.

  They want to crawl in the grain and turn into something gold.

  Night finally. At midnight I go to bed.

  The dinghy sets out from the ship.

  On the water you are alone.

  The dark hull of society keeps on going.

  Slow Music

  The building not open today. The sun crowds in through the

  windowpanes

  and warms the upper side of the desk

  which is strong enough to bear the fate of others.

  Today we are outdoors, on the long wide slope.

  Some have dark clothes. If you stand in the sun, and shut your eyes,

  you feel as if you were being slowly blown forward.

  I come too seldom down to the sea. But now I have come,

  among good-sized stones with peaceful backs.

  The stones have been gradually walking backwards out of the sea.

  Out in the Open

  I.

  Late autumn labyrinth.

  At the entry to the woods a thrown-away bottle.

  Go in. Woods are silent abandoned houses this time of year.

  Just a few sounds now: as if someone were moving twigs around

  carefully with pincers

  or as if an iron hinge were whining feebly inside a thick trunk.

  Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they have shriveled up.

  They look like objects and clothing left behind by people who’ve

  disappeared.

  It will be dark soon. The thing to do now is to get out

  and find the landmarks again: the rusty machine out in the field

  and the house on the other side of the lake, a reddish square

  intense as a bouillon cube.

  II.

  A letter from America drove me out again, started me walking

  through the luminous June night in the empty suburban streets

  among newborn districts without memories, cool as blueprints.

  Letter in my pocket. Half-mad, lost walking, it is a kind of prayer.

  Over there evil and good actually have faces.

  For the most part with us it’s a fight between roots, numbers,

  shades of light.

  The people who run death’s errands for him don’t shy from

  daylight.

  They rule from glass offices. They mill about in the bright sun.

  They lean forward over a desk, and throw a look to the side.

  Far off I found myself standing in front of one of the new

  buildings.

  Many windows flowed together there into a single window.

  In it the luminous night sky was caught, and the walking trees.

  It was a mirrorlike lake with no waves, turned on edge in the

  summer night.

  Violence seemed unreal

  for a few moments.

  III.

  Sun burning. The plane comes in low

  throwing a shadow shaped like a giant cross that rushes over the

  ground.

  A man is sitting in the field poking at something.

  The shadow arrives.

  For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross.

  I have seen the cross hanging in the cool church vaults.

  At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something

  moving at tremendous speed.

  Solitude

  I.

  Right here I was nearly killed one night in February.

  My car slewed on the ice, sideways,

  into the other lane. The oncoming cars—

  their headlights—came nearer.

  My name, my daughters, my job

  slipped free and fell behind silently,

  farther and farther back. I was anonymous,

  like a schoolboy in a lot surrounded by enemies.

  The approaching traffic had powerful lights.

  They shone on me while I turned and turned

  the wheel in a transparent fear that moved like eggwhite.

  The seconds lengthened out—making more room—

  they grew long as hospital buildings.

  It felt as if you could just take it easy

  and loaf a bit

  before the smash came.

  Then firm land appeared: a helping sandgrain

  or a marvelous gust of wind. The car took hold

  and fishtailed back across the road.

  A signpost shot up, snapped off—a ringing sound—

  tossed into the dark.

  Came all quiet. I sat there in my seatbelt

  and watched someone tramp through the blowing snow

  to see what had become of me.

  II.

  I have been walking a while

  on the frozen Swedish fields

  and I have seen no one.

  In other parts of the world

  people are born, live, and die

  in a constant human crush.

  To be visible all the time—to live

  in a swarm of eyes—

  surely that leaves its mark on the face.

  Features overlaid with clay.

  The low voices rise and fall

  as they divide up

  heaven, shadows, grains of sand.

  I have to be by myself

  ten minutes every morning,

  ten minutes every night,

  —and nothing to be done!

  We all line up to ask each other for help.

  Millions.

  One.

  Breathing Space July

  The man who lies on his back under huge trees

  is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.

  He sways back and forth,

  he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.

  The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against

  the water.

  Docks get old faster than men.

  They have silver-gray posts and boulders in their gut.

  The dazzling light drives straight in. />
  The man who spends the whole day in an open boat

  moving over the luminous bays

  will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp

  as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.

  The Open Window

  I shaved one morning standing

  by the open window

  on the second story.

  Switched on the razor.

  It started to hum.

  A heavier and heavier whirr.

  Grew to a roar.

  Grew to a helicopter.

  And a voice—the pilot’s—pierced

  the noise, shouting:

  “Keep your eyes open!

  You’re seeing this for the last time!”

  Rose.

  Floated low over the summer.

  The small things I love, have they any weight?

  So many dialects of green.

  And especially the red of housewalls.

  Beetles glittered in the dung, in the sun.

  Cellars pulled up by the roots

  sailed through the air.

  Industry.

  Printing presses crawled along.

  People at that instant

  were the only things motionless.

  They observe their moments of silence.

  And the dead in the churchyard especially

  held still

  like those who posed in the infancy of the camera.

  Fly low!

  I didn’t know which way

  to turn my head—

  my sight was divided

  like a horse’s.

  Preludes

  I.

  I shy from something that comes scraping crossways through the

  blizzard.

  Fragment out of what is to come.

  A wall gotten loose. Something eyeless. Hard.

  A face of teeth!

  A wall, alone. Or is a house there,

  even though I can’t see it?

  The future … an army of empty houses

  feeling their way forward in the falling snow.

  II.

  Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the

  other from outside,

  and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

  The man who sees what’s about to take place cries out wildly: “Stop!

  Anything, if only I don’t have to know myself.”

  And a boat exists that wants to tie up on shore—it’s trying right

  here—

  in fact it will try thousands of times yet.

  Out of the darkness of the woods a long boathook appears, pokes

  in through the open window,

  in among the guests who are getting warm dancing.

  III.

  The apartment where I lived over half of my life has to be cleaned out. It’s already empty of everything. The anchor has let go— despite the continuing weight of grief it is the lightest apartment in the whole city. Truth doesn’t need any furniture. My life has just completed a big circle and come back to its starting place: a room blown out. Things I’ve lived through here become visible on the walls like Egyptian paintings, murals from the inside of the grave chamber. But the scenes are growing fainter, because the light is getting too strong. The windows have got larger. The empty apartment is a large telescope held up to the sky. It is silent as a Quaker service. All you can hear are the doves in the backyard, their cooing.

  The Bookcase

  It was moved out of the apartment after her death. It stood empty several days, before I put the books in, all the clothbound ones, the heavy ones. Somehow during it all I had also let some grave earth slip in. Something came from underneath, rose gradually and implacably like an enormous mercury column. A man was not to turn his head away.

  The dark volumes, faces closed. They resembled the faces of those Algerians I saw at the zone border at Friedrichstrasse waiting for the East German People’s Police to stamp their identity books. My own passbook lay for a long time in the glass cubicles. And the dusky air I saw that day in Berlin I see again in the bookcase. There is some ancient despair in there, that tastes of Passchendaele and the Versailles Peace Treaty, maybe even older than that. Those massive black tomes—I come back to them—they are in their way passports themselves, and they have got so thick because people have had to collect so many official stamps on them over centuries. Obviously a man can’t overestimate the amount of baggage he’s expected to have, now that it’s starting to go, now that you finally …

  All the old historians are there, they get their chance to stand up and see into our family life. You can’t hear a thing, but the lips are moving all the time behind the pane (“Passchendaele” …). It reminds me of that tale of an ancient office building (this is a pure ghost story), a building where portraits of long dead gentlemen hung on the wall behind glass, and one morning the office workers found some mist on the inside of the glass. The dead had begun to breathe during the night.

  The bookcase is even stronger. Looks straight from zone one to the next! A glimmery skin, the glimmery skin on a dark river that the room has to see its own face in. And turning the head is not allowed.

  Outskirts

  Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.

  It’s a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.

  Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap, but

  the clocks are against it.

  Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.

  Auto-body shops occupy old barns.

  Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.

  And these sites keep on getting bigger

  like the land bought with Judas’ silver: “a potter’s field for burying

  strangers.”

  Going with the Current

  Talking and talking with friends I saw heard behind their faces

  the current

  dragging with it those who want to go and those who don’t.

  And I saw a creature with its eyes glued together

  who wants to leap right into the middle of the stream

  throw itself out without a shiver

  in a ravenous thirst for the simple answer.

  Faster and faster the water pulls

  as when a river narrows down and shoots over

  into rapids—I stopped to rest at a spot like that

  after a drive through dry woods

  one evening in June: the transistor told me the latest

  on the Extra Session: Kosygin, Eban.

  One or two thoughts bored their way in despairingly.

  One or two men drown in the village.

  And huge masses of water plough by under the suspension

  bridge. Down comes the timber! Some trunks

  just shoot straight ahead like torpedoes. Others turn

  crossways, sluggish, and spin helplessly away,

  and others follow their nose onto the riverbank,

  steer in among stones and rubbish, get wedged,

  then in a pile turn up toward the sky like folded hands,

  prayers drowned in the roar …

  I saw heard it from a suspension bridge

  in a cloud of gnats

  together with a few boys. Their bicycles

  buried in the bushes—only the horns

  stood up.

  Traffic

  The semitrailer crawls through the fog.

  It is the lengthened shadow of a dragonfly larva

  crawling over the murky lakebottom.

  Headlights cross among dripping branches.

  You can’t see the other driver’s face.

  Light overflows through the pines.

  We have come, shadows chassis from all directions

  in failing light, we go in tandem after each other,

  past each other sweep on in a modest roar

  into the open where th
e industries are brooding,

  and every year the factory buildings go down another

  eighth of an inch—the earth is gulping them slowly.

  Paws no one can identify leave a print

  on the glossiest artifacts dreamed up here.

  Pollen is determined to live in asphalt.

  But the horse-chestnut trees loom up first, melancholy

  as if they intended to produce clusters of iron gloves

  rather than white flowers, and past them

  the reception room—a fluorescent light out of order

  blinks off and on. Some magic door is around here! Open!

  and look downward, through the reversed periscope,

  down to the great mouths, the huge buried pipes

  where algae is growing like the beards on dead men

  and the Cleaner swims on in his overcoat of slime

  and his strokes weaker and weaker, he will be choked soon.

  And no one knows what will happen, we only know

  the chain breaks and grows back together all the time.

  Night Duty

  I.

  During the night I am down there with the ballast

  I am one of those dead weights that say nothing,

  that keep the sloop from turning over!

  Fuzzy-edged faces in the dark, like stones.

  All they can do is hiss: “Don’t touch me.”

  II.

  And other voices push through, the listener

  is slipping over the luminous radio

  dial like a slender shadow.

  The language marches in perfect step with boots.

  Therefore: go out and pick a new language!

  III.

  The wolf is here! Our helper and friend!

  And against the windows he lays his tongue.

  The valley is full of crawling ax-handles.

  The night jet roars over the sky

  as if it were a wheelchair running on its rims.

  IV.

  They are digging the place up. But it’s quiet now.

  In the empty cemetery under the elms:

  an empty steam shovel. Its bucket on the ground—