140
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
Bypassing rue Descartes
I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler,
A young barbarian just come to the capital of tht: world.
We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and L3ucharest,
Saigon and Marrakesh,
Ashamed to remember the cUStolllS of our homes,
About which nobody here should t:wr be told:
The clapping for snvants, barefoott:d girls hurry in,
Dividing food with incantations,
Choral prayers recited by master and household together.
I left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.
Soon enough, many fi'om Jassy and Koloshvar, or Saigon and Marrakt:sh
Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of
their homes.
Soon enough, their peers were st:izing power
In
order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas.
Meanwhile the ci ty behawd in accordance wi th its nature,
Rustling with dreary laughter in the dark,
Baking long breads and pouring wine into clay pi tchers,
Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets,
Indifferent as to honor and shame and greatness and glory,
Because that had been done already and had transformed itself
Into moments representing nobody knows whom,
Into arias hardly audible and into turns of speech.
Again I lean on the rough grani te of the embankment,
As if I had returned from travels through the underworlds
And suddenly saw in the light the reding wheel of the seasons
Where empires have fallen and those once living arc now dead.
There is no capi tal of the world, nei ther here nor anywhere else,
And the abolished customs are res tored to their small fame
And now I know that the time of human generations is not like the
time of the earth.
As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly:
How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream,
[ pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.
