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Jacket 18 — August 2002 | # 18 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
José KozerFour poemstranslated by Mark Weiss |
Kafka RebornIt’s a modest two-story house not far from the river on a narrow street in Prague. In the early morning between the 11th and 12th of November he awoke with a start and descended the stairs to the small kitchen with its round table and linden-wood chair, its portable stove and methyl-blue flame. He lit the burner and the fire became at once (three) flames reflected in the window’s three panes: smell of sulphur. He wished to go to the dining nook to drink a medicinal tea of honey and boldo leaves, he moved the chair and settled in before a sienna-colored clay bowl which he had placed, he’d forgotten when, on the six-colored wicker tray, Felicia’s gift; and once again Felicia appeared her hair in braids and the radiance of candles reflected on the white oval of that face greedy for consecrated loaves and cakes, that face three times a burst of flames in the window pane: she appeared and was again three times the child of her dead, a few chamber players responded to the stroke of a triangle and the stroke of a bell (at three) in the high belfry not far from the river: they took their ease, ten cups, ten chairs in the immense country house with its mansard roofs, the house in which bay windows and glass doors (barns and sheds) were open day and night, the water and the sponges shone. Yes: it was another time, and a chorus of girls tended the tea pots (boiling) the eucalyptus (boiling), the marjoram and a digestive water (mint leaves) respiratory waters: at peace at peace (at last), he climbed the stairs and saw himself stretched out in the window pane (at last) no crowd of birds
in the window. |
DiasporaThe shop in Havana is dust and the Irish cotton is dust and my father, a dusty Jew, day after day comes home with a loaf of bread beneath his arm. Day after day, each day alike, his eyes oblique as striped cashmere, not like the restless eyes of a captain searching the shallows he returns to the house, a rough and bubbling crater. Papa arrives: we eat lunch, our eyes fixed on the ceiling’s ornate moulding, I have never seen the water come in, have seen neither fish nor flowerpot. My mother enters and polishes the furniture’s heavy carving, changes Thursday’s sheets, no flower ever to be seen in any bedroom. All of the shops in Havana have closed, the workers, in a noisy fever, file through the streets, and my father, a dusty Jew, bears once more the Ark of the Law
when he leaves Cuba... General CleaningAll of the shades of the house were drawn, all of the neighborhood’s windows shuttered, before the great door of Thursday could be opened in all its glory. And then they erased my grandfather’s contrite corpse the sulphuric, the naphthalene, Abraham’s steps a portent of my mother’s slippered progress through the rooms, polishing the seven arms of the candelabra, bringing order to the flatware for milk and for meat, frying the foods of exodus and abundance while outside was a tumult of inflamed mulattas the street overflowing with the triple flame of the bongo and three lovely Cubans, their cheeks quivering, swayed to the rhythm of a song
while my mother straightened the mirrors for once and all. The OfferingI was born in the house of the dying man; I no longer shake his exhausted corpse, he rests in peace now. He is laid out, his feet face eastwards. They are enormous; two stems of the same bloodline: from them in that far-off country the scent of camomile rises in spirals; ovoid: the oval of his shaved head withered rests as ever upon a pillow; look, they have limned on the pillowcase a fish with golden scales the arrow’s-flight of a diagonal bird: entranced, it prays on the linen of the pillowcase; it is far from the white space of the linen; its piety empowers it to soar above the fish the seamstresses have simulated an outburst: of hops. The scales reanimated by their golden yarn. I know them well: they sit to their embroidery on lyre-backed mahogany chairs, for each corpse a burlap robe smelling of sweat or lavender, a fish a bird for the head’s repose in the dirt: the seamstresses do their touch-up; the head of the corpse is luminous, luminous its feet: the robe silk, soft beyond softness the cloth of the pillowcase. The corpse of an old toad. It has not shrunk: flies nibble at an intact body. It is an intact mass of suppuration glowing from its pores, open-work cloth: all things that fly are his; the quiet chrysalis. All things that fly come forth overflowing from ever more hidden cavities: from those depths the seamstresses pull the yellow basting of the dregs, they shake the larva. They exude a filament of glass. Timeless concavity: a sketch. And on the bed he is not dead: they dress him. He is renewed: a red plush shirt, wide, wrinkled beige pants; they have woven garlands of leguminous flowers through the braids hanging above his chest: impartial. He sits up; they have helped him. His large bare feet secrete the rust of nails that ants sip in their holes; the petals that fall from his clothing amass in an insatiable empurpled wasp’s nest at his feet; birds of the dregs linen fish rush to submerge themselves: he smiles. He sees in the shoetrees of space a door.
Levantine suns: the local silversmiths smell of cardamom, the necromancers, resuming their work, position him. And they carry to the plaza troughs abundant with ovals of sifted flour: flocks of birds peck at the crumbs refulgent between his lifted arms. |
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Jacket 18 — August 2002
Contents page This material is copyright © José Kozer and Mark Weiss
and Jacket magazine 2002 |
