Monday, April 25, 2005

To Robert Lowell and Osip Mandelstam by Frederick Seidel I look out the window: spring is coming. I look out the window: spring is here. The shuffle and click of the slide projector Changing slides takes longer. I like the dandelion-- How it sticks to the business of briefly being. Shuffle and click, shuffle and click-- Life, more life, more life. The train that carried the sparkling crystal saxophone Osip Mandelstam into exile clicketyclicked Through suds of spring flowers, Cool furrowed-earth smells, sunshine like fresh-baked bread. The earth was so black it looked wet, So rich it produced Mandelstam. He was last seen alive In 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok Eating from a garbage pile, When I was two, and Robert Lowell was twenty-one, Who much later would translate Mandelstam, And now has been dead two years himself. I sometimes feel I hurry to them both, Stand staring at the careworn spines Of their books in my bookshelf, Only in order to walk away. The wish to live is as unintentional as love. Of course the future always is, Like someone just back from England Stepping off a curb, I'll look the wrong way and be nothing. Heartbeat, heartbeat, the heart stops-- But shuffle and click, it's spring! The arterial branches disappearing in the leaves, Swallowed like a tailor's chalk marks in the finished suit. We are born. We grow old until we're all the same age. They are as young as Homer whom they loved. They are writing a letter, not in a language I know. I read: "It is one of those spring days with a sky That makes it worthwhile being here. The mailbox in which we'll mail this Is slightly lighter than the sky." 4:41:07 PM    comment []