Letter to My Wife

Lager Heidenau, about Zagubica:

in the mountains. Aug.-Sept. 1944

Beneath, the nether worlds, deep, still, and mute.

Silence howls in my ears, and I cry out.

No answer could come back, it is so far

from that sad Serbia swooned into war.

And you're so distant. But my heart redeems

your voice all day, entangled in my dreams.

So I am still, while close about me sough

the great cold ferns, that slowly stir and bow.

When I'll see you, I don't know. You whose calm

is as the weight and sureness of a psalm,

whose beauty's like the shadow and the light,

whom I could find if I were blind and mute,

hide in the landscape now, and from within

leap to my eye, as if cast by my brain.

You were real once; now you have fallen in

to that deep well of teenage dreams again.

Jealous interrogations: tell me; speak.

Do you still love me? will you on that peak

of my past youth become my future wife?

-But now I fall awake to real life

and know that's what you are: wife, friend of years,

-just far away. Beyond three wild frontiers.

And Fall comes. Will it also leave with me?

Kisses are sharper in the memory.

Daylight and miracles seemed different things.

Above, the echelons of bombers' wings:

skies once amazing blue with your eyes' glow

490 are darkened now. Tight with desire to blow,

the bombs must fall. I live in spite of these,

a prisoner. All of my fantasies

I measure out. And I will find you still;

for you I've walked the full length of the soul,

the highways of countries!-on coals of fire,

if needs must, in the falling of the pyre,

if all I have is magic, I'll come back;

Pll stick as fast as bark upon an oak!

And now that calm, whose habit is a power

and weapon to the savage, in the hour

of fate and danger, falls as cool and true

as does a wave: the sober two times two.

FOAMY SKY

June 8th 1940

The moon sways in a foamy sky.

How strange that I'm alive. A bland,

efficient death searches this age

and they turn white on whom it lays its hand.

Sometimes the year looks round and shrieks,

looks round and faints away.

What kind of autumn lies in wait,

what winter dulled with agony to grey?

The forest bled, and every hour

in that revolving time bled too.

The wind was scrawling numbers, huge,

and darkening in the unsettled snow.

I have seen certain things, such things

that now the air feels dense as earth.

A rustling tepid silence holds

me fast, as in that time before my birth.