FROM HABRY

The Chorus... Variations On A Theme

A survivor walks among the war hungry

It smelled so good to him, he came closer,
asked questions, licked at the images,
felt his blood, went hunting in my neighborhood for more—
I live among those deprived of war,
the blunted workaday ones
who would never think of planting a garden.

Once I met someone so jealous that he went there.
Only no one knew him, it wasn't the same.
He had gotten so dressed up for the occasion,
wearing his best coffins, so to speak
and no one knew his name, poor man.
No one even knew he was there.

He wants my ghost to introduce him.
While we who were there dance and dance
and plant roses and petunias.
He looks on, silent and dim.
And we feel so sorry for his peaceful kingdom
but then this chorus begins, all of itself....

Snow Is Falling On The Underground

For Joseph and Bella in the Underground

These are biblical times.
You move with the crowd
you have to move with the crowd.

Snow is falling on the horse's head
into his great dead eyes,
falling as they sit gathered together,
in the country of white thanksgiving,
as they watch the body divided
and thrown to the doglike
hunger of the dwindling,
weakening crowd. And the birds overhead
and the child staring at the horse's head
take with them the odor of blood,
the whiteness of snow.

When they saw the horse coming,
led by the forerunners, the scouts,
to some he looked like a god,
while others waited, cold
as kings and queens, frozen
to their chore of receiving.
Yes he said unto them
out of his flat, snowed-over eyes,
I am neither deaf nor dumb nor blind
but I can't understand you,
I am made differently—
and snow kept falling
on their hands, their thighs,
as they cut him up, as they ate,
those who could neither choose nor be chosen,
but moved, just ahead of the enemy behind them
and the bombs descending from
the holiest aspects of height,
like the snow—
it was too cold to wonder about it,
though the wonder lives on.

They ate the horse.
The child whimpered.
And the snow kept falling.
Even into the holes
they had dug for hiding.
To the very far and wide
circumference beyond the world,
which must be the end of the war.

It was as if someone were singing
the same daily song
out of the same buried songbook:
These are biblical times,
this is winter beginning,
these are the days of the
vanishing horses.

Light

We live in a prison, Mirenka.
The one called Adam
said, 'We'll manage—if the world
were lit with a single candle
we would all live by that dim light
and the candle? would become the sun.'
But we live in a prison.
When I'm free I'll live by
the sun and the moon, not this
lonely beam from the outside
they call 'the light of freedom.'
Only, to escape, someone
must open the gate for me, and
a guard guards the gate,
a giant drunken guard.
They say that sometimes
I sound like a child—but they
only huddle in the pall of this
prison light. I thought
only prisoners were unhappy, but the guards
drink and are unhappy.
They resent us and are so unhappy.
And they are afraid of us.
The Commandant himself
is a child, who never wanted this job of
running a prison, who schemes now
to save us; and he
is the saddest and dearest
bad man in the prison. He actually
let us see him cry. Yes he is the one
who cries. And brings us oranges and Easter eggs.
While the sick lightbulb wanes to the sound of
evening gunfire. Oh evening, the dying
of all light except for this bulb
hanging from the dead center
of the room. In tuberculin light
two black eyes sparkle
and they are the windows.
Those two views of darkness more alive
than the light we live by.

I remember coming into Warsaw, a child

out of a sheer, sunlit countryside,
where sometimes a goat made the only sound in
all the universe, and a car engine would certainly
tear the wing of an angel. Entering burnt Warsaw
and the Sound of the World, how strange, how lonely
the separate notes of Everything, lost in a smell of
spent shots still smoking, a ghost of bombs, a silence
of so many voices, the ruined city singing not only
a post-war song but an Everything hymn of dogs wailing,
a car, a horse, a droning plane, a slow, distant
demolition, hammers like rain, the hum, the hum,
bells and levers and voices leveled and absorbed
into the infinite hum in which the ruins
sat empty and low like well-behaved children,
the ruins, their holes, like eyes, secretly open,
passing on either side, as we entered Warsaw, an air
of lost worlds in a smoky sweet light ghosting
and willing their sounding and resounding remains

The Faces, Up There

I think of my parents, who died naturally.
I think of all the movie stars with them.
Are they forced to mingle?
I think of Helen Vendler, who will
follow me up to heaven one day.
She'll say to me, looking down,
look at them, still coming, a steady stream
of poets, would be poets, great poets,
closet poets and poets without a clue.
And who will be the next I to judge them
as we are judged in this - blue?
She will look around at the brilliance
of heaven, its uncanny intelligence
of light, and then see my parents,
eternal immigrants
still holding on by the elbows,
still looking around suspiciously,
beside Bogie and Helen Hayes and,
in another corner entirely, the faceless,
all with the same face, who came up
merely as smoke and were given the
face of God

and everyone will look away from them,
for how can one look at so much holiness,
and they will be alone, once again,
even in heaven.

And I will stand there staring
through the eyes of Cary and Judy and Frank, because
soon we will all be there, trailing
our little eternities, populating every inch
of the galaxies and the cities between
the stars.

And there will be Jane Eyre, and
there, The Man with the Iron Mask, and all
the Lilliputians, and of course Sisyphus,
for heaven loves the struggle and the brave
faces of fiction, and no one
no one will look upon the holy, for
the face of the holy is ashes and smoke.