Note to the eBook Reader
Correspondences is a unique accordion-style book. On one side is a long poem by celebrated poet and novelist Anne Michaels; and, on the other, portraits by acclaimed artist Bernice Eisenstein, which are accompanied by quotations. In the physical book, the pages unfold, and can refold in a myriad of arrangements, the voice in the poem mingling with the voices that accompany the portraits, the portraits themselves resonating with the words, “just as a conversation can become/the third side of the page.”
To see the actual accordion format, with its singular approach to a continuous textual conversation, photographs of the printed book appear here.
When reading this eBook, you can “enter” the experience in either direction, starting with the poem or the portraits. Choosing one of the two links on the following page will bring you to the selected title page, and in turn to the contents of that side of the book.
PLEASE NOTE that the poem's line breaks will vary across e-reading platforms. To experience the intended presentation of the poem and portrait pages, please set text to the smallest comfortable reading size. Enlarging the text too much will cause the poem’s lines to break in places the author did not intend, and might cause the short quotations that accompany the portraits (in the physical book on the left-hand page across from the portraits) to break and go on to a separate page.
When looking at a portrait, if desired, you can click on the name of the subject below it to jump to a short biography and the source information for the quotation on that page.
Entering the Accordion
a poem
portraits
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Text copyright © 2013 by Anne Michaels
Artwork copyright © 2013 by Bernice Eisenstein
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013001299
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96251-5
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96249-2
ANNE MICHAELS is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry, The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, and Skin Divers, and two celebrated novels, The Winter Vault and the award-winning international best seller Fugitive Pieces, which was made into a feature film. She has also published works for theater. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in translation in thirty-seven countries around the world.
BERNICE EISENSTEIN is the author of the internationally praised graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, which has been translated into ten languages and won the Jewish Book Award. Eisenstein’s artwork has appeared in exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
The biographies and endpapers were written by Anne Michaels.
The quotes accompanying the portraits were selected and arranged by Bernice Eisenstein.
In Anne Michaels’s poem, lines by Anna Akhmatova are from “Requiem” from Poems of Anna Akhmatova (translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward), translation copyright © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, granted by Darhansoff & Verrill, Literary Agents, on behalf of Gretchen Kunitz and the Estate of Stanley Kunitz, Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 1973; quote by Albert Camus is from his book-length essay The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (translated by Anthony Bower), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1956; quote by Albert Einstein is from his lecture at the University of Kyoto in 1922, as it appeared in the magazine Physics Today, August 1922; lines by Franz Kafka are taken from Franz Kafka: A Biography by Max Brod (translated by G. H. Roberts), Schocken Books, 1947; quote by Helen Keller was taken from her essay “Three Days to See” in Atlantic Monthly magazine, January 1933; lines by Primo Levi are from Collected Poems (translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann), Faber and Faber, 1992; quote by Fernando Pessoa is from his poem “Henry, Count of Burgundy” in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (translated by Richard Zenith), Penguin Classics, 2006.
Thanks to Ellen Seligman, Deborah Garrison, Helen Garnons-Williams. To Kendra Ward for her assistance. To David Ward for production expertise and support. A special thank you to CS Richardson for his valuable and insightful design contributions.
v3.1
in memoriam Isaiah Michaels
—
for R and E
Contents
Cover
Copyright
Endpapers 1
Title Page
Dedication
Correspondences
The wet earth. I did not imagine
your death would reconcile me with
language, did not imagine soil
clinging to the page, black type
like birds on a stone sky. That your soul – yes,
I use that word – beautiful,
could saturate the bitterness from even
that fate, not of love
but its opposite, all concealed
in a reversal of longing.
First the stag came, alone, hooves wet
with light, to read the stones
in the graveyard. Then the waterbird rising
sudden beside me, the depth of
dusk in its throat. A faithless
cry. And then eyes
so close and harsh among the trees
I will not say I was not
afraid, seeing your will equal my yearning,
transforming matter this way;
even as I felt the cost of it,
this last shattering effort of love,
a sign.
They wanted you to shout oranges
in the street, a few coins from the grocer
to raise your voice. But you stared
at the pyramid of perfume and oil,
and instinctively smelled your fingers
for the vanished scent, and felt into
your pocket for the bit of peel carried
since. And stood,
the mud of another country
still on your shoes. Silenced
by that bit of earth.
While Celan in Paris wept
for the same contraband,
ronger and grincer
gnawing and grinding
between voix and voie
voice and path,
between converse and its converse
between Ancel and Celan
between Mayer and Amery
between the Nemen and the Prut
between the Prut and the Seine
between sauf and soif,
rescue and
thirst.
They met in Zurich’s “Stork” on Ascension Day,
26 May, 1960, and each touched the face of the other
to read what was no longer there. All the ways
we say goodbye for the last time: this,
their first meeting.
At the café, the radio was tuned
to silence; Celan asked the waiter
to turn it down.
Even in their stillness, in their perfect
camouflage, even hidden among the baby’s blankets,
it found them. They both heard
the white cornfield, restless
above the squealing trams.
Celan rushed from Paris to Stockholm
and stood, forever
unadmitted, outside
her hospital door.
“Come as quickly as possible,”
Sachs had written
and then:
“Don’t, under any circumstances, come.”
So
on others began to gather at our table,
each brought another and another, stuttering,
a hand on a shoulder, a hand
resting on a cheek, a fall of hair,
a face hidden, and like any conversation
with the ineffable, they came
to suffocate, to surrender,
to moan, to turn away,
to implore, to deplore, shame so deep
there was nothing shame would not
speak, to ruin, to undo, to rectify,
to sanctify, to blaspheme by believing,
to draw us near, to whisper, to reveal,
to signify, to not be kept away,
to keep us close.
He met his German language under the Goethe Eiche,
the bombed stump of Goethe’s oak,
and for twenty years they lay together
in its non-embrace.
Names were changed
ronger, grincer
so valleys and mountains
would not be stained
Two names for one place,
to each
his own tortured solace,
mouth
to mouth.
Forgive me, for beginning
at the end, the place
they said, you could no longer
comprehend, as if your silence
were proof of it. ich bin
mit meinem selbst allein
I am with my self, alone.
Ten years of silence when I would not
stop talking, like a mother
speaking to the child inside her,
remembering everything
before it happens.
As if I still knew how the body
cries out under a tongue.
It startled even me, who believed,
when you wept suddenly at the familiar name,
at the story of the rain on the lake, and of
grandchildren in that place
you loved.
And when your brother
died,
when we brought you
to his funeral,
you sat so mute and lost,
even I, the Foolish Daughter,
wondered if it had been right
to bring you. Until the coffin
was carried from the room
and you reached
suddenly
and rested your hand there.
We used to stand beside the water
and together on the northern road,
as if we’d watched each other approach
for hours, shadows barely moving
across a great expanse of desert
vater father
wasser water
He was a socialist when he listened to music, when he
brushed his teeth, when he took the pipe filled with tobacco
from my mother’s hand, passing it to him as he drove. He was
a socialist when he looked at the trees, and when he carried the
canoe on his back, and when he swam almost out of sight.
He knew his heart would get him into trouble. Like any worker,
he was afraid. But he never turned away except
to weep. His children understood him. He
understood them. I brought boulders from the lake
200 miles in the trunk of the car to
place by his grave. He was a socialist
when he pulled over to the side of the road
to eat bread and honey. When he looked at paintings.
When he sang Vir ’o mare quant’è bello
ispira tantu sentimento
look upon the sea, how beautiful, how much feeling,
as we fell asleep in the back seat.
each night the same sun
passes through the trees
without burning,
the same absence falls through the Sunday
dusk, nothing gathered
the bird browns in the oven, the table’s
set, the music stops
time, as the spring light, waxy and
listless, falls on the blank river,
and the right thing passes
one dimension to another
the limp jumping, the electrodes
on the skull, the water spreading forever
outward from that moment
the falling body, the still body
the surface blank again without
a shore or passage back, the single
moment that
no one living
remembers
A true realist, wrote Celan, believes
in miracles, even if useless
there are eyes that never change,
no matter the age,
never stop seeing
the same moment
There was among us a young woman
whose task was to turn solid to liquid,
solid to gas – fusion and sublimation –
earth into soil and for this pressure
of the heart, she was seized
for the look on her face
for two years after they had died,
Celan thought his parents
still alive
events homeless in time
The scribe speaks aloud each word
as he writes,
wipes clean the quill
and bathes himself entire,
Woman washes woman,
man washes man
before writing His name.
in the water’s flow,
never turn the face
from the sky,
The holy ink is ritually prepared:
tannic acid, crystals of iron sulfate,
ground gallnut.
the body must never be alone,
never so vulnerable the soul
as when first
separate
No two letters
may touch each other.
not from the moment of death
to the moment of burial,
not while the soul still hovers
From the top of each line,
one fringe of the prayer shawl must be cut away
each letter is suspended.
for that shawl will not be used anymore for prayer
in life
please understand
ich bin mit meinem selbst allein
No page bearing His name
may be discarded.
vater father, wasser water
A holy book
you must wash the body and
the soul guarding the body
must be buried.
with water and with prayer
not our memory of the dead,
but what the dead
remember
The same question endlessly repeated,
fingers grasping the same crumbling edge,
one of the first signs of illness
never allowing a lesion to form.
How to cope financially, how to make
nothing into something. When I was still a child
you asked my brothers and I to sit with you
at the table; I implore you,
it is all I ask: do what you love, only
choose work you love, no matter what it is.
Not like me, making nothing
out of nothing. Though at least you came out ahead
on one side of the ledger, the side of love dark
with pencil marks, the black of my mother’s hair
as she sat in the row ahead at the concert hall
the night you met. Unlike me, with both
blank pages. How are you coping, you asked,
over and over, financially.
The dreaded endless question born of worry and
helplessness. At least, I always joked, when
you have nothing, nothing can be taken from you,
but we both knew that was bad math, that there was
always someth
ing to be taken from you,
not lost, but taken. And so that was the one question
on which you alighted, in the last months
before that decade of silence,
an endless painful longing to rescue,
the repetition of the plough horse,
majestic head bent to earth,
turning the same direction
at the end of each row.
cold deep Prague dusk
Paris dusk, Stockholm dusk
black branches across a small window,
dusk a black river
poems arrive in the mail
like an old friend on a rainy afternoon
Sachs’ “homesickness scar”
some madness is smashed perception,
mental rubble,
some madness a rigor mortis
to turn one’s head is to be
severed
after all, after all
there was no longer paranoia,
no such category as too much
fear
Celan saw into the same water
where his son and his wife had so recently floated –
a school excursion on a riverboat –
unhurried as the current,
as still as a surface before it is touched
by consciousness
On this Easter Sunday
what rises
a woman from her bed suddenly
alert for all she loves,
an instinct,
a willow branch lifted by the wind
loosening its downward sorrow,
a verbal gesture unnoticed at the time
an almost indiscernible release
of the tongue, like a man
loosening the knot of his tie
at the end of the day,
the long day;
like a doorknob being slowly turned
from the outside, in the hallway;
a dream of emptying moonlight from the water
with her hands,
the crunch of mayflies underfoot,
their lives’ single day;
how many minutes does an unborn child
outlive its mother
in the chamber,
it’s late, it’s raining, time to
turn for home, the distance