Eternal Garments Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

I

In our hovel, as far back as I can recall, loomed dark
A hunchbacked old ruin, an otherworldly room.
As if someone has spun a canopy of clouds
Over shadow figures, born of shimmering glow.
The mute walls howled with dog mushrooms
In grandmotherly-blind darkness, knotted up in an elflock.
And suddenly, silvery flickers would flood
Like drops, leaking from cracked wooden buckets —
It was the moon, dropping by through the chimney,
Sneaking out of the stove, and straight — into green
Cat eyes hanging alone like untimely plums.
Then, it would leap, caught in a net of spiderweb —
A young mermaid in the hands of an old fisherman —
With silvery spasms, it would torment the room,
The clay ribs of the ceiling, the hook in the middle,
And all the figures born of the shimmering glow …
The hook — a question mark, hanging upside down,
A twisted leather strip always swinging on it,
Here, a man once hanged himself like a chicken,
For a girl poured poison on his words.
I loved to hide here alone, against my will.
To lie on a meadow of garments — and dream,
Facing the cat in the crumbling, cold stove,
And see the mermaid gushing in through the chimney.

II

A pleasure overcomes you feeling the mystery of solitude,
Inhaling the fragrance of homey, flowery garments.
Here my poem splashed, floating in seas of beauty,
I would not have traded that room for a splendid palace.
The sooty stove reigned hollow with fears.
Like lusterless black pearls, the darkness under the bricks.
Here my mother hid the eternal garments —

A bundle of linen like dazzle of angel wings.
A young widow at thirty — she bought them in advance,
In holy longing for father. His face, lucid
In the Siberian taiga, yearned from afar.
With eternal garments, it's nicer to live here without him.
And once, oh God, when I was still a boy,
In secret, she donned them on her living body.
The room, illuminated by the sun shining from her golden ring,
Beaming from the cracked mirror's tear-filled eyes:
Four brides with the same faces flushed with happiness…
Four brides with golden rings in silken flames …
The dark little door was unhooked at that moment —
And, like a stone, my oy struck my mother.
Ever since, the eternal garments are hidden away
In the dark stove along with bottles for Pesakh.
Only in her hair, a thread from the linen remained,
Fanning out threads, thin whitenesses, all around her head.

III

Oh, destiny, shadow with bloodshot eyes, you swam,
Invisible, after me and my thoughts, you swimmer!
And lo, you yourself were transformed in a flood,
A flood of two-legged men, sweeping her room.
Mama quickly dipped her hand in the stove,
Roamed among the sounds in the darkness-violin,
And soon the bundle of linen bewitched with sparks
Hung on her little shoulders, in the coffin of her room.
Instead of a mermaid, a crow flew in from the chimney,
Hitting its beak on the old, wounded mirror.
And the widow shone in her sunny snow —
A cherry tree under a saw in a circle of buds.
But a five-cornered abyss was impaled on her heart,
The image was left of her own soot-dipped fingers.

Blackness gushed like a spring in the sunshine of her heart,
And her eyes alone sparkled younger.
This is how mama walked to the light of sacrifice,
To father the snowman with his red violin — she walked,
A snowstorm's yearning ignited them both together.
And then, the room too went down in the storm.
And I, all alone, an Adam thrown out of Hell,
Am still a slave to the Voice that makes me a singer.
My flesh is cloaked in her white, eternal garments
And my heart is sealed with five soot-dipped fingers.

1950