House of Language

The poem was and always will be your only home,
Marina Tsvetaeva! Today I know this with more certainty
than ever, myself a homeless man who remembers,
like you did, the acrid taste of the fruit tasted long ago,
from the branch of a tree in a faraway native town,
and even more distant childhood. In a time so
comparable to yours for its abundance of evil and misery
that there is no need of stating how the hysteria of history
repeats itself. Myself of the same age in which you,
taking long before coming to this decision, at the threshold
of reaching fifty, had finally left this world. Feeling
the lingering warmth of the rope that embraced
your neck with more passion than the hands of any lover.
Compassionate towards everything that befell you,
intense, and wild-haired, made of seeing and hearing,
of silver and sparkling, on the sombre paths
of life, and as you made your way
through the virgin blankness of paper. Blinded
by its whiteness. Intoxicated with the music of the spheres
which poured through your lines like cascades of light.
Separated, like you were, from your loved ones,
whom life took from both of us as ruthlessly
as only death can separate. The life
which exposed you, self-willed from your youth
but upright, even in the fiercest storms, and lavished
abundantly with the priceless treasure of your gift,
to the ordeals of hardship and human conceit,
to misapprehension in your homeland and in foreign lands.
To humiliation. To horror and despair.
The life which punished you unduly,
inexorably. Which flogged you for your every joy,
every sinful laughter. With your body,
with the fruit of your womb wasting
in camps and dying on the front lines, you paid dearly
for your every line. The incurable sleeplessness and
racking hunger I should not even mention. Nor, likewise,
the unbearable loneliness, which goes without saying,
like your love, which you did not hide.
Your stubborness and your battling against the clock
and fate. Even so, untimely death separated you from
your mother, then the father, and the husband,
just as it had separated you prematurely from your children.
Or perhaps gathered you all, at last, together in the home
you had never made. If there is a home at all for anyone
condamned to the emigrees’ platform! A home for those
who were strangers in every home, whether they were
fleeing or returning, like you, who had refused
to howl with the pack.
And your writing desk was your only homeland,
as it is in the end to every poet.
Sitting up late behind it you wrote your testament.
Your poems that grew, as you yourself
used to say, like the stars and like roses. Believing,
despite everything, that their time will come,
like the time of a good vintage.
You wrote letters to Pasternak and Rilke. … The letters
which I read as if they were also meant for me, just as all
my letters are also meant for you. You, whose soul has
wings from birth, who were taken, weary to death,
to immortality by the train of life. Who had no one
to walk with you to your resting place, and whose grave
remains unknown. You who in death possess as much
as you possessed in life: everything and nothing.
For the poem was and always will be
your only home, Marina Tsvetaeva!
Your home and your tomb. Your eternal
dwelling place. A house I enter as my own.
Without knocking.