Old conversations Poem by Emmanuel Moses

He had remembered old conversations with this one and that one,
Viaticums which seemed to him to be past use,
In a room almost entirely occupied by a baby grand piano,
While in the middle of the square a streetlight crackled,
A little square, German and eastern, in a pine-tree's shade,
But especially on the bench at Greenwich,
The sky immense, dusk falling
On the line of poplars bordering the lawn
Where children played football, people walked their dogs,
As a few old men strolled before returning to the close air
And medicinal odor of their rooms,
And a biplane descended towards a neighboring club.
Mim had told him one had to be able to talk about oneself
Or one would end up talking about nothing else,
The former breaker of hearts from Moscow to Czernowitz,
The guitarist with chestnut curls and a childish pout,
At present a little man approaching fifty,
Stooped, with an émigré's timid smile,
With his cabled sweater, his bargain boots,
The bitter fatalism of someone who's known hope,
Has seen it grow and fly away
Leaving him alone with his risky, if not pitiful present,
The two-room apartment in a working-class suburb, the pursuit of fees,
The candle-end economies,
The son who stayed in the old country, the daughter who left,
The wife hardened by betrayal and neglect,
Showing by every word and gesture
That it is too late to start over,
Content to drift without resistance
And with an infinite patience
For what has she to expect that she hasn't already lost,
Even Grad, pacing the apartment from end to end,
Probably already invaded by metastases,
Had shown reticence.
One does not try to escape the Almighty's will with impunity,
Even in embarking for far-away places.
By stretching over the sheet-music and giving in to sleep,
He had gotten his fingers burnt -
No one else here, between the Hôpital St-Louis and the Institut Curie
Had had the guts to do it -
And no one would be saved without embarking on the same road,
Bitter, hard.

Translation: 2009, Marilyn Hacker