Report Of A Journey Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

A ship slid me off and
Off.
Slid me off a fat butcher table and
Off.
Slid me on a strange island
With Indonesians, Burmese, Malayans.
I run up to my neck in water. Want to catch up with the sinful,
Catch her by her braid
Of smoke and fire —
In vain. No ship. Her braid has turned
Into a tongue. It seems: the tongue sticks out a tongue
To the cheated, stranded islander who will nevermore see
A beloved. Not a familiar face. Not a Yiddish book.
I felt like Napoleon on St. Helena.
A chill ran down my back.

No one here understands my language. It's mutual. Man, where to?
I see a sign: a painted bread. I ask in sign language for a loaf.
A dwarf with the face as large as a lemon
Serves me instead of bread a snake with hissing sulfur.

I show the address of the poet Machayo,
The world-famous, the papers sing his praise —
And the driver bows sadly and takes me around
An hour, and two, and three, and leaves me over an abyss
Where lepers, with little hammers on metal plates
Ever beat and ring so no one should approach.

Back in the city —
And there is no more city, but a blend
Of pieces of night and sea and stone and smell of hashish.
But where the night leaves a trace there is a woman.
'She will understand my non-language on the horror island.'

I ask her where Buddha lives,
Sakya-Muni,
Buddha.
She points at her diamond hump: a child,
And dancing out of her, the she in the mirror of a knife.

But when I lie down to sleep on a mattress of the ground,
I hear a familiar language: a cat's meow.
I answer her in the same tongue. She — back. I — again.
Such intimate talk you will not hear
Between two sisters. Bride and groom. Brothers.
Where else can you find such universal chatter?
Two lonelinesses never understood each other better.

1968