Rustum Kozain

Being on the inside is a privilege that is an affliction . . .
Because our interior is always . . . occupied and interrupted by others . . . we have developed a technique of speaking through the given, expressing things obliquely and . . . so mysteriously as to puzzle even ourselves.
Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky
Often now I turn away from things,
from jubilance save that
which from a quiet word
may grant my moment's wealth:
a hometown's olive orchard
that shivers in dusklight, the pit-pat
as fruit fall free to the ground;
or the homeless manic's quiet rage at grace
when a shop-owner hands him coffee.
Most of all, I walk
so I may reach home and try to know
myself, so I may turn to work.

And turn more from the racial rage
I need still in myself, as I turn
from the stone's articulate act
and seek the sentence long enough
to house my tribe, even as I know
of neither's existence. These are
rages which won't still, which need
thought. But thought fans flames.
And action in killing them
kills the word. Yet
in my silence there is
this rage, still this rage.

So I turn away from things
and read, dip into books;
wait thus for reports
from my race, choose not
speech. But sit in my silence
which broods to myself
myself. A self at least. And wait
more thinking not of exile from -
whether inside or out -
but exile through; how inside
the very head the tongue
is exiled through itself:
the tongue its own exile.

And I turn more away from things,
preferring solitude and work
to tongue at stories
from their silent insides: like an orphan
who in a new house senses an old taste
and quietly mulls thus a morsel
that brings memory darting
like a wasp in the head,
then withdraws his tongue
from probing. Back to the mute bed,
the civilizing cradle of the jaw.
...

for S. Ben-Tov
Afternoon sun of Ohio's August
daubs the classroom with early rust.

Eight of us bristle, apprenticed
to nail the world to its sentence.

Poet's poet, our teacher hands us
a copy each of Heaney's ‘Nerthus'.

A chill creeps in me as she reads.
From Heaney-soil, that concrete dark,

an unseen ash-fork staked in bog:
my first portents of winter north.

*

We have all heard the name
but not Heaney's Great Chain of Verbs.

We stall. And do not fathom
the quiet mesh of kesh and loaning

that lull and push of middle-voice
that verb say

the long-grained never static
of the poem's non-finite aesthetic
...

In any man who utters the other's absence
something feminine is declared.
Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
The hours will not freeze. This morning
you leave, cross the road and are gone.
Another hour passes, six more minutes.
Then there is the wine from last night
and the long day starting now. It all starts
now. It starts with this glass of wine I pour
at eleven or was it ten; your smell on my mouth
on my hands all of me I do not wash for days

but sit and drink myself back into the inescapable.
You are in a bath somewhere I believe,
somewhere I understand, somewhere
in a bath I believe I can imagine and
understand, deep and warm. Somewhere
in this washed, colour-fast suburb, this
impenetrable, unendingly quiet collection
of snapshots and romance novels and dreams

of another country. Somewhere for a moment
you are in that bath I imagine like a god.
But you are in a bath unknown to any god,
or me, or to the late, lone jogger in red shorts
who crosses and crosses the span of my window.
And now the day slows. Perhaps your cold tap drips.
Maybe you lift your leg and place your right toe
at its mouth to feel its chill. Maybe in the ache

of a muscle your body occupies itself
with memory; maybe it remembers mine.
Or now your mouth is dry with cinnamon
in a sudden addiction to spiced coffee.
And it remembers mine. I don't know. I sit here
and drink and all over again I cook
you a meal at midnight, open a second bottle
and lie next to you as if I were a woman;

or I am a moth perhaps; or a river-long
swathe of palmiet; or the soft lick
of water against the edges of a rock pool
where the rare leopard drinks;
or the pied crow that with three flaps
lifts, wheels, and flies off as if it was me
finding finally the inescapable. Or was it
the oak leaf that wakes to frost;

the buzzing filament of a word;
the suburb at rest after some resurrection
that cannot know the infinite;
a Spanish lament from a sunlit nave,
the singer's red dress a pennant
waving against dark stone, blue sky?
All these and also the unaccountable as
for one night the existence of everything

troubled no one and nothing, not you, not me;
not the meniscus of wine. Here, now,
in this sun-blessed room
where some re-ordering begins
the cosmos closing in around the space
where you stood or sat or lay
and air filling the emptying bottle,
I sit here, drink, do not know

and stare until at dusk
two Egyptian geese cross my window,
heading home. And my neighbours like me
grow drunk and make known to all
their private quarrel, looking not for any
infinite but that of alcohol. He bays
at her, she at him. They take it and take it.
I sit here as it starts. It all starts here. Now,

as I grow drunk on something else
...

I'm getting to know Mandelstam
and his careful, monochrome voice;
his slow, uncertain steps and turns
through Moscow's new times and sights.

This morning he greets me and hangs
his head, the winter sun spinning
off the bald dome. I join him
on his cold bench in Neskuchny Park.

Now and again he takes my hand
in his own, arachnid old and thin,
and squeezes it so gently
to stress a point or find comfort.

His voice often grows weak. And fails.
Dejected by these moments
he tosses bread crumbs at the birds.
They fight each other for morsels

the poet flings each time he gives up
on Time, the Time of God's tread.
A light cough, and he speaks again,
soft, but clear. So, as the meagre sun

stalks the heart of the sky, we talk
and talk past noon. His hands hint at
outlines and sniff the corners
as he describes how Time recoils

in the alleys of this town.
But he shakes his head. And stares.
Today he has once more failed
to capture Time, to freeze the clocks.

I know that plea in his hand's grip,
the sigh, the sudden loss of speech.
And when sun steeps the Moscow sky
in weak tea, Mandelstam pats my leg:

"Sunday, we'll feed the birds again."
Hunched over, he shuffles away.
The birds too already left.
Soon, the distance and the dusk

will set my friend, Mandelstam,
vibrating: a dark tuning fork
that stalks the sounding board of Time,
that hums continually its end.
...