EDWARD HIRSCH
Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.
Proposition: "Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.
Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed."
We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submi t
To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabi t the repeti tions,
To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.
She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to ...
Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens,
Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.
Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.
73
I love the "Lectures on Verse," and I like the notion so much that I've
written my own lectures on love; they are from a new book called 0/1.
LOlle.
The core of the book is a group of twenty-five poems, in which dif–
ferent speakers from the past step forward and give talks about love,
beginning with Diderot and ending with Colette. It's a sort of symposium
across the centuries. I've called on many figures from the past. I suppose I
should dedicate this poem to Aleksander War because the first speaker is
Tristan Tzara, and Polish Dadism is really a movement of the twenties.
Milosz is a poet of the thirties. Tristan Tzara,
lIee
Sami Rosenwieck, is from
Romania. This poem is a pantoum. [Reads "Tristan Tzara."]
Just one more poem: "Milena Jesenska," whom I first knew as the recip–
ient of an extraordinary group of letters from Kafka. But when I went to
