Vilna

1

Someone in a tales is walking your rooftops. Only he is stirring in the city by night. He listens. Old gray veins quicken – sound Through courtyard and synagogue like a hoarse, dusty heart. You are a psalm, spelled in clay and in iron. Each stone a prayer; a hymn every wall, As the moon, rippling into ancient lanes, Glints in a naked and ugly-cold splendor. Your joy is sadness – joy of deep basses In chorus. The feasts are funerals. Your consolation is poverty: clear, translucent – Like summer mist on the edges of the city. You are a dark amulet set in Lithuania. Old gray writing – mossy, peeling. Each stone a book; parchment every wall. Pages turn, secretly open in the night, As, on the old synagogue, a frozen water carrier, Small beard tilted, stands counting the stars.

2

Only I am stirring in the city by night. No sound. Houses are rigid – bales of rags. A tallow candle flutters, dripping, Where a cabalist sits, tangled into his garret, Like a spider, drawing the gray thread of his life, “Is there anyone in the cold emptiness? In our deafness – can we hear the lost cries?” Raziel is standing before him; he gleams in the darkness, The wings an old, faded parchment. The eyes – pits filled with sand and with cobweb. “There is no one. Only sorrow is left.” The candle drips. Stupefied, the weak man listens. He suckles the darkness out of the angel’s sockets. The garrets breathe – lungs of The hunchbacked creature who is drowsing in the hills. O city! You are the dream of a cabalist, Gray, drifting in the universe – cobweb in the early autumn.

3

You are a psalm, spelled in clay and in iron. The letters fading. They wander – stray. Stiff men are like sticks; women, like loaves of bread. The shoulders pressed. Cold, secretive beards. Long eyes that rock, like rowboats on a lake – At night, late, over a silver herring, They beat their breasts. “God, we are sinful... sinful.” The moon’s white eye, bulging through the tiny panes, Silvers the rags that hang on the line, Children in beds – yellow, slippery worms, Girls half undressed, their bodies like boards – These gloomy men are narrow like your streets. The brow mute – a rigid wall of a synagogue yard. The eyebrows mossy: like a roof above your ruins. You are a psalm inscribed upon the fields. A raven, I sing to you by the flow of the moon. No sun has ever risen in Lithuania.

4

Your joy is sorrow – joy of deep basses In chorus. The quiet Maytime is somber. Saplings grow from the mortar. Grasses push from the wall. Sluggishly, a gray blossom crawls out of the old tree. The cold nettle has risen through mud. Dung and rigid walls are steeping in their damp. It may happen by night that a breeze blows stone and roof top dry, And a vision, moonbeam and drops of water, Flows through the silver, tremulously dreaming streets. It is the Viliya, cool, mistily arising, Fresh and baby-naked, with long, riverlike hands, That has come into the town. Blind windows are grimacing. Arching bridges are crooked on their walls. No door will open. No head will move To meet the Viliya in her skinny, blue nakedness. The bearded walls marvel – the hills around you. And silence. Silence.

5

You are a dark amulet set in Lithuania. Figures smolder faintly in the restless stone. Lucid white sages of a distant radiance, Small, hard bones that were polished by toil. The red tunic of the steely bundist. The blue student who listens to gray Bergelson – Yiddish is the homely crown of the oak leaf Over the gates, sacred and profane, into the city. Gray Yiddish is the light that twinkles in the window. Like a wayfarer who breaks his journey beside an old well, I sit and listen to the rough voice of Yiddish. Is that the reason why my blood is so turbulent? I am the city: the thousand narrow doors into the universe, Roof over roof, to the muddy-cold blue. I am the black flame, hungry, licking at these walls – That glows in the eyes of the Litvak in an alien land. I am the grayness! I am the black flame! I am the city!

6

And, on the old synagogue, a frozen water carrier, Small beard tilted, stands counting the stars.

Translated by Nathan Halper