For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

  The individual is the measurer, the world is what is measured, and the language of poetry is the measure. There! Now you can hang me by my tongue!

  How do we know the Other? By being madly in love.

  Comes a time when the living moment expands. The instant becomes roomy. It opens up. Suddenly everything inside and outside of ourselves is utterly different. I know what I am, and I know what I am not. It’s just me and It.

  Is the clarity of consciousness the negation of imagination? One can imagine plenty in a state of semi-consciousness.

  The highest levels of consciousness are wordless and its lowest gabby.

  The tribe always wants you to write about “great and noble subjects.”

  When I was little, bad boys in my neighborhood advised me to grab my balls every time I saw a priest. It’s the first lesson in the arts I was given.

  Seeing the familiar with new eyes, that quintessential idea of modern art and literature, the exile and the immigrant experience daily.

  Here’s Konstantin Nojka’s observation, with which I agree completely: “Thought precedes the word—as in the example of a little kid who calls a strange man ‘dad.’ The adults correct him and say it’s not daddy, but what the kid means is that he’s like dad—has the same height, glasses, etc.”

  The academics always believe that they have read more than the poets, but this has rarely been my experience. Poets of my generation and the preceding generation are far better read than their academic contemporaries, with exceptions, of course, on both sides.

  Christ, like Sappho, challenges the tribe. Their message is, you have no tribal obligations, only love for the Father in the first case and love of your own solitude in the second.

  Consciousness: this dying match that sees and knows the name of what it throws its brief light upon.

  Imagination equals Eros. I want to experience what it’s like to be inside someone else in the moment when that someone is being touched by me.

  I’m in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.

  Ars Poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh.

  Two young birch trees wrestling in the wind. The crow in the snow refereeing.

  Here where they make piggy banks with the face of Jesus.

  Strafford, New Hampshire, Orpheus assuaging the fierceness of wild beasts with his new kazoo.

  The day I went to make funeral arrangements for my father-in-law, I caught a glimpse of the mortician’s wife nursing the mortician’s new daughter. Her breasts were swollen huge with milk.

  A sequel to Dante’s Divine Comedy: The modern hero retraces his steps from heaven to hell.

  I have a House of Horrors the size of my head, or the size of the known universe. It doesn’t matter which.

  Like everybody else, I’m betting everything on the remote possibility that one of many lies will come true. I say to myself in moments of tenderness, perhaps you’re more of a philosopher than you know.

  As for the ALWAYS OPEN, always brightly lit House of Horrors, it’s just a windowless room, empty except for some trash on the floor.

  The Gestapo and the KGB were also convinced that the personal is political. Virtue by decree was their other belief.

  The closeness of two people listening together to music they both love. There’s no more perfect union. I remember a summer evening, a good bottle of white wine, and Helen and I listening to Prez play “Blue Lester.” We were so attentive, as only those who have heard a piece a hundred times can be, so this time it seemed the piece lasted forever.

  The lost thread of a dream. What a pretty phrase!

  Cioran is right when he says that “we are all religious spirits without a religion.”

  Eurocentrism is the dumbest idea ever proposed by academics. The notion that all European history—all its philosophy, literature, art, cuisine, martyrdom, oppression—is the expression of a single ideology belongs in The National Enquirer on the same page with “I Was Bigfoot’s Loveslave.”

  Even as I concentrate all my attention on the fly on the table, I glance fleetingly at myself.

  America is the only country in the world where a rich woman with servants can speak of being a woman oppressed and not be laughed at.

  What the lyric poets want is to convert their fragment of time into eternity. It’s like going to the bank and expecting to get a million dollars for your nickel.

  I agree with Isaiah Berlin when he says in an interview, “I do not find all-embracing systems congenial.” I have a horror of minds who see all events as instances of universal rules and principles. I believe in the deep-set messiness of everything. I associate tidiness with dictatorship.

  How to kill the innate poetry of children—the secret agenda of a conference on primary school education. I met teachers who fear poetry the way vampires fear the cross.

  For a man like Teller, science meant new and much-improved ways of killing people, and he was enthusiastically received in high places.

  It is in the works of art and literature that one has the richest experience of the Other. When the experience is truly powerful, we can be anybody, a nineteenth-century Russian prince, a fifteenth-century Italian harlot.

  Most of our political writers on the left and the right are interchangeable. That’s why it was child’s play for so many liberals to become neoconservatives. What serenity the day one realizes that!

  Here’s one firm law of history: Truth is known at precisely that point in time when nobody gives a shit.

  A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

  To be an exception to the rule is my sole ambition.

  Twenty years ago the poem for me was still mostly an inspired and unpremeditated utterance. My friend Vasko Popa on the other hand, was all calculation. A poem was an act of supreme critical intelligence for him. He had already thought out everything he was going to write for the rest of his life. Once late at night, after much wine, he described to me in detail his future poems. He wasn’t putting me on. In later years I’d see these poems come into print one by one, and they were just as he described them that night.

  Popa’s metaphysics was Symbolist, and yet it’s not so much that he used symbols in his poetry, and he did. What he really wanted to understand is the secret of how symbols are made. Poetry is sacred action, it’s been said. Popa’s poems demonstrate how the laws of the imagination work.

  “The salad bird” writes Lucian, “is an enormous bird covered all over with salad greens instead of feathers; its wings look exactly like lettuce leaves.” For Popa, language was not an abstract system but a living idiom, an idiom already full of poetic invention. In that respect, his imagination and his poetry are wholly determined by the language in which he wrote. In his poems the reader enters the Serbian language and meets the gods and demons hiding there.

  Little said, much meant, is what poetry is all about. An idiom is the lair of the tribal beast. It carries its familiar smell. We are here in the realm of the submerged and elusive meanings that do not correspond to any actual word on the page. Lyricism, in its truest sense, is the awe before the untranslatable. Like childhood, it is a language that cannot be replaced by any other language. A great lyric poem must approach untranslatability.

  Translation is an actor’s medium. If I cannot make myself believe that I’m writing the poem I’m translating, no degree of aesthetic admiration for the work can help me. The philosophical clear-sightedness of a man who is taking a long siesta on a day when many important matters should be attended to. As somebody said, cats know laziness is divine.

  Blues musicians do not doubt that music touches the soul.

  My poem “Midpoint” is a reduction, the cutting down to a kind of algebraic equation of a ten-page poem on cities where I have lived. The paring down occurred when I realized that all my future cities are the ghost images of the city where I was born. In my imagination I’m always at midpoint.

  To be bilingual is to realize that the name and the thing are not bound intrinsically. It is possible to find oneself in a dark hole between languages. I experience this now when I speak Serbian, which I no longer speak fluently. I go expecting to find a word, knowing that there was a word there once, and find instead a hole and a silence.

  1 grew up among some very witty people, I now realize. They knew how to tell stories and how to laugh and that has made all the difference.

  The restaurant is Greek. The waiter’s name is Socrates, so Plato must be in the kitchen, and Aristotle is the fellow studying a racing form at the cash register.

  Today’s special: Grilled calamari with fresh parsley, garlic, and olive oil.

  When I started writing poetry in 1955 all the girls I wanted to show my poems to were American. I was stuck. It was never possible for me to write in my native language.

  I prefer Aristophanes to Sophocles, Rabelais to Dante. There’s as much truth in laughter as there is in tragedy, a view not shared by many people. They still think of comedy as nose-thumbing at the serious things in life.

  My second-grade teacher in Belgrade told me more than forty-five years ago that I was a “champion liar.” I still remember being mortally offended and kind of flattered.

  Only through poetry can human solitude be heard in the history of humanity. In that respect, all the poets who ever wrote are contemporaries.

  A scene from French movies of the fifties that I still love: A fly gets shut in a room with three armed thugs and a woman, gagged and bound, who watches them with eyes popping. In front of each man on the table there is a sugar cube and a pile of large bills. No one stirs. A naked bulb hangs from the ceiling by a long wire so they can see the fly count its legs. It counts them on the table, tantalizingly close to a sugar cube, and then it counts them at the end of someone’s nose.

  I have no idea if this is the way it really was in the movie. I’ve worked on the scene over the years, making little adjustments in it as one does with a poem.

  My life is at the mercy of my poetry.

  I thought “nosology” had to do with noses. Something like a science of noses. Many noses coming to be examined. The perfect nose in the lobby of a grand hotel lighting a gold-tipped cigarette behind a potted palm. The pretty nosologist examining my nose and almost touching it with her own.

  Nosology, unfortunately, has nothing to do with noses.

  O beau pays! The monkey at the typewriter.

  In a neighborhood frequented by muggers and rapists after dark, I bring out my soapbox and shout: “Everything I have ever said has been completely misunderstood!”

  In a room with a noisy window-fan I’m reading Meister Eckhart’s sermon, the one in which he says: “The moment in which God made the first man and the moment in which the last man will disappear, and the moment in which I’m speaking are all one and the same moment.”

  Little ideas and big ideas are buzzing in my head when I look up from the book and see my grim face looking back at me from the mirror across the room.

  Thoreau loved ants. He’d meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him. Poe often dreamed he was a black pullet pecking in the graveyard on moonlit nights. Hawthorne kept a rusty nail in his shoe as a pet. Melville nursed his melancholy by eating fresh strawberries in cream on summer mornings. Come evening, Emily Dickinson could see the shadow her brain cast on the bedroom wall. Whitman’s beard once caught fire. The firemen came from as far as Louisiana to put it out. Emerson said, “The world is an immense picture book.” “Everybody’s using its pages to wipe his ass,” wrote in response an unknown American genius in the margin of my library book.

  The air is full of flying cinders this morning. Whole neighborhoods could be going up in flames while the children chase each other in the playground, while they kick the one fallen against the high, peeling wall of the school they go to and scream in mock terror, fleeing the girl with crossed eyes. All that, mind you, behind a rusty fence firmly secured with a chain and a heavy padlock.

  The windows of Hotel du Nord have a view of the snows of Labrador that are famous for their yellow sunflowers. The white paint in our room is peeling; the old beds and chairs have gone to China to be missionaries; the desk clerk is as deaf as a shoe brush. When somebody knocked, we ran to open. There was never anyone there. The quiet that reigns in the hotel is like that of an Egyptian pyramid in a hundred-year-old postcard with an address in Oklahoma on the other side.

  The sky is blue and so is the ceiling. Glued to the wall, there’s a cutout of a blonde child pointing to a picture of a camel that could have come out of a long-discontinued breakfast cereal. Over him, hung from a silver rod by a metal hook, there’s a postage stamp with a picture of another smaller child dressed in a Renaissance costume. This one appears to be saying his bedtime prayer. Their father, the prince, has gone off to stand on the parapet with his beard and hair dripping red paint.

  If the night ever falls, we will light matches and invite the children to be our guests at a meal of watch wheels and watch faces.

  The kid torturing the cat next door has a great future in store for him. His mama loves him, his daddy does too. They live in a pretty white house, with two columns. Their trimmed hedges and trees keep their sober dignity even when I yell for him to stop.

  He sits on his back steps lonely, sweet-looking and idle. The cat is nowhere to be seen. The weather is beautiful.

  Angelic birdseed on the tip of Martha’s pink tongue while she speaks of her faith in God’s benevolence.

  It was the first day of spring. Birds were singing. Romeo loved the smell of his shit, but when he smelled Juliet’s rose-scented farts, he ran out on the balcony screaming, “Give me air!”

  Old man eating soup with his hat on, slurping and wiping his mouth with a sleeve while pointing with the spoon at the crows sitting on the top of a white church. “Like the devil himself,” he says, “Yes, sir, like the devil himself.”

  In a zoo I noticed many animals who had a fleeting resemblance to me.

  “Dear Comrade Stalin,” he wrote, “my dream is to see the whole world become a collective poultry farm.”

  At Nick’s, today’s special was bean soup with sausage. You could hear everybody ordering it, even the bag lady we often saw sleeping in doorways.

  “I used to read palms for a living,” she told me with her mouth full. And then, taking a swig from a brown paper bag from under the table, “Lift your hand, everybody, so that I may read your future.”

  The evening is coming. Someone milks a black cow. Someone reloads a different gun at the fair and fires. “Return of the Invisible Man is on the late show,” someone says as he bends down to pick a wild poppy in the darkening meadow.

  As the curtain goes up, there’s a gasp of surprise and terror from the audience. The lovers on the stage have two heads on the same shoulder. They’re sitting in the same chair at the same round table, gazing at each other lovingly.

  People rarely doubt what they see, more often they doubt what they think, says one head to the other. We in the audience are too busy counting the lovers’ eyes and noses to listen to their words.

  The twelve girls in the gospel chorus sang as if dogs were biting their asses.

  A dream: In a burning house I’m reading a book on fire.

  The July night was smothering the avenue with its steamy kisses. The purse-snatchers were already cracking their knuckles in doorways while we strolled arm in arm, stopping only to grab each other by the crotch and talk breathlessly of Calabrian sausages and Romano cheese.

  The entire play consists of monologues and asides by a dozen actors who are on the stage all at the same time. They pay no attention to each other even though their speeches are inordinately passionate. They rant, snort, foam at the mouth for almost three hours. One of the actresses is stark naked, one of the actors is dressed as a general, another has a rope around his neck, there’s an old woman scrubbing the floor under his feet and a dog who walks on his hind legs.

  And in the background, canned laughter by a Chinese audience.

  Melancholy Senorita Miranda waiting for me on her veranda. “I’m an obituary writer on a holiday,” I said to her.

  “When the entire world was covered with ladybugs,” she sighed, “and we made love on the ceiling.”

  Dog races in dreams: I occasionally saw a man on all fours trying to keep up.

  Compose yourself, my friend, these must be the madonnas of Hieronymus Bosch riding the A-train after midnight.

  “Do I look like Nostradamus?” he says to his reflection in the window of a store selling fire-damaged furniture.

  I ask about heaven and hell. X ponders with eyes closed. Y continues to gorge himself on bread and butter, and Z studies the ceiling as if it were his navel.

 

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