1. 

Revelation came to you on a September day,

not on top of a barren mountain but in the chemistry lab

during the last class period when you were starving,

when, after Hamlet’s monologue and equations with two

     unknowns,

it became clear there was nothing more to learn. 

 

“Human beings are simply made of water and carbon,” he

     declared,

and drew a long formula with many holes on the chalkboard

that looked like a metal trap for rabbits.

He was the messenger, St. John the Chemistry Teacher,

drenched in sweat, his belt buckled tight. 

Face cleanly shaved, hair trimmed and parted flat with Figaro

     oil . . .

 

Wasn’t he supposed to look a little more miserable?

Wasn’t he supposed to have a long beard?

Wasn’t a bush nearby supposed to have burst into flames?

 

“Simply water and carbon!

Maybe even a little magnesium, nitrogen, calcium, and

     phosphorus . . .

In short, little choice involved.”

And he chucked the chalk into the air

as if a key to a door without hinges.

He clasped his hands. Mission accomplished!

The last words already spoken.

Now disperse and spread the good news!

Or go to hell—who cares! 

 

A bitter relief in the air, the scent of freshly cut grass.

Suddenly, we no longer knew who we were;

suddenly we were all the same. 

 

So why the eternal worry on my mother’s face?

And what sort of chemical compounds

were Adler and Schopenhauer talking about in the other

     classroom

from which only a thin wall separated us

or was it an entire existence?

 

2. 

Water and carbon. Measurable.

When you’re born they measure your weight, your height and

     heartbeat;

they encase and stamp you with a belly button like a leaden seal

you have no authority to open! (You have no authority over

     yourself.)

They measure your temperature, in the shade of course,

your sugar levels, albumen, iron, reflexes on your knees,

your tongue, twice, before and after a meal.

(What does this have to do with speaking?!)

 

They measure the circumference of your head

to fit you with a hat so you can think with a cool brain,

and your chest for a suit, the tailor’s

icy cold hands tickling your armpits and ribs,

and making you nervous.

They fill your clothes with padding

so no one can hear what’s going on inside you. 

Double-breasted, single-breasted, spare buttons, fake pockets

     on your pants.

All yours! Now you’re one of us!

Welcome to the kingdom of water and carbon! 

 

When they recruit you they give your naked body a check-up.

You have to be healthy, the impeccable lamb of the herd

for a sacrifice in the name of your country.

Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. 

 

But you’re unsure what to cover with your hands.

Between your genitals and shaved head

you choose your genitals

forgetting that the mane

is precisely what makes a lion king. 

 

“To protect what? Where my territory begins and ends?”

Nothing is yours.

Attack and invade. Use trickery like the knight in a chess game:

two squares horizontally, one vertically.

Ambush your fate, face to face, or from behind,

when it least expects you.

 

And don’t forget: as soon as you plant your feet somewhere,

hang a torn shirt or a pair of ragged pants outside on a clothesline,

enough to frighten the crows.

This is your passport—

poverty makes you a citizen anywhere you go;

poverty makes you indigenous. 

 

3. 

Your body throws you under the bus; your body betrays you.

Your body is simply water and carbon. 

 

 

I was seventeen one morning in my prison cell

when after a night of delirium, running a 107-degree fever

caused by bronchopneumonia,

I woke up drenched in my own urine.

I was neither a child nor a man anymore.

 

Then in the labor camp, out in the marsh,

I saw the theologian gathering rotten bits of cigarettes,

smelling the butts, trying to take a single drag.

 

But when I saw the former Sorbonne professor

secretly digging through the trash and pick up a piece of

     watermelon rind,

which he then wiped on his pants and swallowed whole

     without chewing,

I knew I witnessed five thousand years of civilization

extinguished in one moment.

 

Of course, it’s always the fault of the witness,

the wrong eyes at the wrong place.

Without a witness we wouldn’t even have crematoriums

and only white fumes would leak out of history’s nostrils.

 

4. 

He had such dignity, the old man who hung himself

(rejected here on earth and now also in heaven),

his bare feet like a saint’s, his body a frozen planet

revolving one last time around itself,

his head drooped to one side,

as if he were refusing to witness even his own death . . .

 

But it didn’t end here; they plucked out his gold teeth

as if removing three generations of his history.

Declassed, disgraced, even among the dead.

How can a toothless man protect himself at the Last Judgment?

How could he formulate his arguments?

The dead would laugh; angels would shake their heads. 

 

And so he too would be forgotten.

Simply water and carbon like everyone else.

 

The living went back to work, eyes cast down as if at their own

     funeral.

The whips against their joints and back

gave them no time to think much.

You can’t be last in line—this was the goal,

morning to night.

 

 

But where was our country at that moment?

Where was Caesar?

 

 

5. 

“They stripped us naked

and beat us under cold tap water

with Soviet boots. We fainted.

But . . .”

 

“But?”

 

“But the next day all four of us were still alive at roll call.

And the officers made a bet for a case of beer on the boy from Tropoja

having left him outside in the snow all night long

naked as the day he was born.

But . . .”

 

“But?”

 

“But one of them lost the bet.”

 

“. . . ?”

 

“When they beat the old man like a child, slapping him in the

      face,

I did nothing to help him . . .”

 

“. . . ?”

 

“Then I knew that even death didn’t give a damn about us. It

      approached us like a dog, sniffed us then left us alone . . .”

 

“. . .”

 

“We were simply femur bones, without marrow.”

 

And his eyes suddenly beamed, as if he had just found

a nail on the wall where he could hang a painting:

“However, Sergeant Halim was a good man . . .”

 

“What good things did Sergeant Halim do?”

 

“He didn’t do anything good,

but he didn’t do anything bad either.”

 

 

6. 

Then one day you became one with suffering,

as it transformed into a limb

that must be treated generously like your other limbs:

wash it, clean it, cut its nails carefully, keep it warm,

feel its numbness

like when you placed your arm beneath your head late at night,

dumping all your sleepless weight onto it, and the searchlight

scanned the camp

moving cunningly across the brown blankets

like the eye of a jackal preying on the weakest animal in the herd. 

 

Nothing and no one came between you and your suffering.

One dissolved into another like salt in water

(and now you can’t remember which one of you preceded the

     other).

 

And you quit complaining.

From your lungs carbon streams out freely.

 

 

7.

“I’m tired of listening to you. Enough now.

Tell me just one thing: Why did you tolerate all this?”

asks his brother from an ocean away

groomed by Hudson’s breeze.

He lives in a country where the right to pursue happiness

is guaranteed by the constitution. 

 

“And what should we have done according to you?”

 

“Some of you should have been killed

so the rest could live with dignity.” 

 

But this doesn’t follow chemistry’s laws.

The sole mission of water and carbon

is to stay alive at all costs. 

 

And to stay alive they simply need their basic instincts,

as basic as the words and phrases in the small pocket dictionary

tourists carry in foreign lands.

Like for example: “bread” “water” “How do you get to the

     nearest town?”

“Do you have a vacant room for tonight?” “I can pay cash.” 

 

Because of these instincts

some of us returned home alive

with a pair of borrowed shoes.

We built a hut of reeds and mud where we could begin again

under a sky where a colorless porridge cooked in a pot

with all the leftover seeds

like Noah’s porridge.

 

We were guns without latches.

We softened walls with our shadows.

And we bore children, two-dimensional children,

like ribbons of light that enter through the crack of a door

or through the torn tarp on a roof.

Daydreaming children, the children of survival

who noticed only the bonny haunches of the farm oxen,

and at night, like a secret sect,

gathered around Dickens.

 

 

8.

You can’t conquer evil. Evil ends on its own.

 

No matter how great, every evil has its moment of saturation:

murderous sharks, wars, inquisition fires,

cholera and the plague, destructive glaciers too . . .

Even dictatorships reach their saturation point

when sulfur spills out of their sickened stomachs. 

 

And blessed is the one destined to live through the Epoch of

     Saturation:

like paradise in those illustrated religious flyers

where tigers and humans bask peacefully together under the sun,

in an apple orchard by a river of honey, co-sufferers and

     co-citizens.

 

Fault is not a feature of water or carbon.

Fault doesn’t exist.

 

 

9.

Children, yes,

but adults never abandon their toys.

 

Among tin bowls and aluminum spoons,

coats and clogs of the same size, among shaved heads

we were identified by our lost causes:

one believed in “the republic,” one in “the monarchy,”

one in “the revolution,” one in “the truth,”

and one simply in “health.”

 

(A little too much faith there in thirteen square feet of space). 

 

And the one who used to talk to himself or to a corner of the wall

once got a little carried away when he claimed to be Constantine

     the Great.

Mind separate from body,

he was more akin to the Constantine Colossus

with two right hands in the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

 

You have no right to occupy two places in this world;

even in prison there is no space for two selves.

So one day they took him away, all of his pieces,

to who knows where; whichever piece ended up in court

and whichever in the madhouse . . .

And he was only twenty-five years old. 

 

Observed from above

we were simply part of a museum—

somewhere a millwheel shone, somewhere a parchment yellowed,

and somewhere else a horseman’s costume hung

without a horseman in sight.   

 

 

10.

Water is recyclable.

Nature is a good housewife and lets nothing go to waste.

 

They say the one who posed for Jesus’s portrait in The Last Supper

was the same person who posed for Judas’s four years later,

though this time not the soft-skinned, golden-haired choir boy

anymore, but the man in a prison in Rome, convicted of

     serious crimes.

 

Water

can do wonders in four years—

it can freeze, turn cloudy or stale, flow out of its bed—

wonders that even da Vinci’s eagle eye

couldn’t predict.

 

And so each of us could have four lives.

In the most fortunate case

we could be recycled from a balloon into cleaning gloves,

then into a car seat, and in the end into the synthetic snow

that falls on a romantic Christmas scene shoot in mid-July

until the director is satisfied and yells, “Cut!”

 

Where there’s hope, there’s compromise.

 

But what can be said of the man

who willingly chose to die of starvation?

Ecce homo they shouted mockingly—people in uniform,

the materialists who couldn’t wait to wash their hands.

 

Because dignity, if not inherited, can be contagious.  

 

 

11.

Water has a short memory.

 

From Palm Sunday to Good Friday there were five blessed days;

the one they welcomed as triumphant into Jerusalem

was nailed as “faithless” on the fifth day. 

 

“But, if we’re only water and carbon,

then what is love? How do we know it’s love?”

 

You can’t know but others can;

when they see you roofless, they think:

“There was a fire there!”

 

At the camp, when mail arrived on Tuesdays—letters from wives,

fiancées, lovers—one of us always ended up empty-handed; 

“No letters for you!” meaning, “She left you.”

In that moment all eyes seized you

and conjugated the verb “to leave” into all the tenses, forms,

     persons

beyond etymologies, all the way to Salome

and the “Dance of the Seven Veils” . . . 

Never before did you feel so naked,

so naked that they could count the hairs and pores on your

     body,

the nerves firing under your skin like frantic moles.

They could easily make out your heart

a late tomato on the vine, unripe, green, so green

you were stunned. 

 

From war and love

you return even more ignorant

than when you first set out.

 

 

12. 

“You are free,” they told him after forty-five years.

“Where will you go now?”

They could’ve been asking someone on death row,

“What song do you want to hear?” Or more precisely,

“Do you know what you’ve lost?”

A second punishment, a second execution. 

 

It was the end of June. The sky opened its mouth ear to ear

and laughed brazenly, exposing a cluster of clouds

above some lonely mountain peaks,

and the ticket seller her wisdom teeth

when he asked, “A ticket to the sea, please!”

 

The journey was long,

the longest our kind of water and carbon could ever take,

in a boxcar that smelled of freshly baked buns and sweat.

He stopped at the wrong station.

Traveled the rest of the journey on foot.

The breeze from the poplars blew softly against his neck;

he felt like a newlywed entering the bedroom for the first time,

not knowing if that gesture was meant to be congratulatory or

     consoling. 

 

And here’s the sea!

How can man hide such a miracle from man?

How can you hide water from water?

 

Where had he seen that white ship leaving the dock before?

In the dreams of the father, grandfather, great-grandfather?

Around him circled men and women in speckled bathing suits

and joyous children with sunburned shoulders.

He was the only one in the wrong season—

late, premature. 

He was the only one fully clothed, from head to toe,

as if a black piano shut in the corner of a hall

around which the world revolves undisturbed. 

 

He touched the sand—

only a single grain finds its way into the belly of an oyster

with time and pain, to be transformed into a pearl.