A note on the poems: Retelling can be a mug’s game, especially if one is retelling a great writer’s short stories by condensing them further into verse. All I can say in my defense is that I was moved to do it. In awe of Anton Chekhov’s lapidary brilliance, I wanted perhaps “put on his knowledge with his power” as Yeats says, or maybe, rather, to put on his power with his knowledge, in order to understand how it was done. And so, I would internalize a story, its details, how it developed, and then, in a kind of practice parallel to the oral tradition of storytelling, I would rewrite the stories from memory. One thing that happened was that scene and detail unfolded differently — often in a different order; often leaving things out to keep the momentum of the telling going. And because retelling is a de facto form of interpretation — for me, a way of understanding the story — my own voice would appear responsively, sometimes at the start, sometimes at the end or even mid-stream. If the poems work, it might be as crystallization. Mainly it's my hope that they will lead the reader back to the stories themselves, which you can find easily since the titles are Chekhov’s titles, in translation.
- David Weiss
Not Love
And many things which would
have made me wince in the old days
move me to tenderness and even rapture
In Chekhov, the final mystery
is a veil that can’t be pulled aside.
Not that Chekhov is reluctant to
unmask how ill-fitted are wishes
to daily life or how deluded
the wishes themselves. Ironic
illumination is a well-tempered
spade that bites into flinty
soil until stopped cold
by a stone so large
that wherever you plant the blade
you can’t find an edge
to pry it up.
In a snapshot
I keep preserved in a notebook,
she has turned to face the camera
when no one else has,
my young, my beautiful, mother —
not the boy with his earmuffs still on
nor the man he calls Richard
who is helping him open a chess
set and remove the pieces.
She is
sitting beside them on the sofa
but gives the appearance of having
been set there by some trick of
collage or time travel which only
she and the camera are privy to.
She is not at home, her eyes
say, not in this room or in
this dress or in this body or even
in this face. Dec. ‘57 the photo
is stamped.
When the spade knifes
in, it goes only so far; it rings
with that clear, hard sound
of the unyielding. And the hands
hurt hitting this stratum of
the inexplicable, which in Chekhov
often is love or life force itself
but in this case goes by the name
of unbelonging.
The Kiss
. . . groundless joy . . .
She kissed you in that darkened room.
She thought you were someone else.
You had never been kissed like that before,
and though no one will ever kiss you again,
it doesn’t matter, nothing will be the same.
You drift through the party and wonder,
was it this girl in the black dress or
the woman in lilac with the beautiful voice?
As the brigade pulls out early the next morning
you imagine her asleep, breathing into her pillow.
That one chance moment: you nest in it,
her arms about your neck, her cheek against yours,
and you feel yourself joined in the ordinary
fellowship of soldiers who have fallen in love
and married and had children as you might now do.
When you tell the story during a night of drinking,
you are surprised how little there is to relate.
You had thought it would take the entire evening to tell.
Later in the autumn returning to that town
as if back home, you wonder if you will meet her
again at the general’s, and what you will say.
No invitation comes; O the fantasies
put back like shots of vodka! It’s a joke,
and you’re the butt of it. A hundred scenes
you’ve lived and relived, cocooned in
the details you’ve spun. But no butterfly
is going to emerge. You will not see her again,
she whom you never actually saw even once.
And when the general’s invitation to the officers
finally does arrive, you pinch like a candle wick
between your fingertips the joy that flares up in you
and sour with spite confine yourself to barracks.
* * * * *
Whenever I read this story I am surprised
afresh that Chekhov ends it with rage
turned inward, a self-lacerating revolt
against impoverished actuality. And yet
chance itself — the kiss, the weight of her body
pressed to his — these things are not nothing,
just as this tale which Chekhov has fired
in the storyteller’s alembic is not nothing,
so long as we read it and it lives in us.
How different is reading from the kiss,
which changes him for the better at first?
Aren’t the things we’ve lost preserved in what we wish?
Enemies
There are no hierarchies of sorrow,
no scale of greatest to least.
Grief takes us down in its undertow,
and we’re Niobe, then, or Duncan
or Juliet, gazing on that loveliest face.
When Abogin leaps from his Victoria,
distraught, urgent with hope, and rings
the doctor’s bell, he doesn’t know
the doctor’s son is five minutes dead,
the boy calm at last, a look, now, of
wonder on his face, or that his wife
has sunk to her knees beside the bed,
arms unraveling across the small body.
Abogin doesn’t see, as the door
swings open, the doctor’s hands
burning with carbolic, or his stunned disarray
and numbed exhaustion from the three-
day pitched battle with diphtheria.
Thank God you’re home, he says,
my wife is ill, she collapsed as we sat to tea,
I’m afraid it’s an aneurysm, just like
her father, you must come with me
at once, if you saw the way she was
clutching her heart!
But he is floored at their twin
catastrophes, when he finds out. My god!
he cries out. What an unhappy moment!
Yet he implores, for his wife’s sake,
not his own, where else can he turn?
He’ll understand if the doctor is
truly incapable of coming, but his wife
might still be saved, the horses are swift,
he’ll have the doctor back in an hour.
And the doctor does come; that is, he refuses
yet puts on his coat and, like a sleepwalker,
climbs into the waiting carriage.
* * * * *
When Abogin stumbles back down
the curving stairs of his dacha
to the smaller drawing room where
he’s left the doctor to wait,
he is a different man altogether,
able to think of nothing but the blow
that’s just struck him: — his wife
not ill or dead but gone, run off
with the very friend who’d stayed behind
when Abogin rushed for help. Why hadn’t
he seen it coming? Idiot! Deceived!
Deceived! he exclaims, hardly aware
of the doctor, who asks, perplexed at first,
where the patient is. Patient? She isn’t ill,
she’s despicable! Better had she died!
Nothing like this has ever
happened to him before! Never!
The doctor’s anger begins to stir
at this rich, well-fed man
who resembles the wolf’s head
mounted on the wall.
My child is dead, the doctor says,
his rage gathering, my wife is in grief,
and I am made to play a part
in this disgusting farce like a stage prop?
Oblivious, Abogin throws his wife’s crumbled
note to the floor with all his strength.
He has given up his music, his position,
quarreled with his family over her.
If she did not love him, why hadn’t
she said so? She knew he believed in
candor, in openness, why trick him this way?
What are you telling me this for? shouts
the doctor. I am not a flunky you can
tell your vulgar little secrets to!
What gives you the right to make
a mockery of another man’s suffering?
You are ungenerous, stammers Abogin,
I, too, am unhappy. Unhappy? replies
the doctor. The spendthrift who can’t
raise a loan calls himself
unhappy, too! Both now are
as red as the lampshade
in the music room at the affronts
they have received; Abogin flings
money onto the table — Paid! he yells —
which the doctor swats to the floor
with a sweep of his hand.
Unhappiness
does not bring people together,
says Chekhov, who can’t help
but step from the wings and expatiate
on egoism, cruelty and spite.
It’s true: misery is an airless space
which has no room for others
though sorrow like Priam’s and Achilles’
can disarm and weep with a single voice.
No, it’s insult that rankles, grievance
the choking vine that overgrows grief.
The two men luxuriate in their contempt
and scorn, wives and child swept aside
like ten ruble notes. The carriage takes
the doctor home.
Time will only sharpen
his conviction about those scented,
self-absorbed, pointless people;
that hatred will remain more
enduring and unalterable in him
than tender, loving memory itself.
What’s stupid in us burns like coal.
What grieves decomposes like a tree,
lightning-struck. Why does this happen?
How is it that we do this to ourselves?
Troth
In Chekhov’s final story
“The Betrothed,” life doesn’t
end with marriage, that locked
box; it ends even earlier,
with Nadya’s engagement
to the priest’s son, a stout
young man, handsome and happy,
who provides entertainment
in the evenings with his violin,
and who loves dearly his sweet
father (for whom no riddle
in God’s universe is insoluble).
Nadya, too, he loves,
and he circles her waist when he can
like a barrel hoop.
Here
in this white night
with the lilacs full in bloom,
Nadya lies awake
in the half-dark and listens
to the grim, convivial crows
as far off and yet
as near as her impending
marriage, and she wonders
if this is all there is —
talk of the wedding and the weather
and the wonders of running water.
Wind makes the stovepipe
moan, it slams the shutters, and
when her mother, alarmed, hurries in,
Nadya for the first time sees
that this person she’s always admired
is just an aging, unhappy woman
made weepy by novels,
who never loved her husband
and has bowed to the punishment
of enforced dependence
that her mother-in-law has inflicted
on her ever since his death.
If
this were a love story,
Nadya, to escape her dread
of a life unlived,
would fly into the arms
of the bearded and sickly Sasha,
the son of a poor relation
who comes to stay each summer.
It’s Sasha, after all,
who with his long, ascetic
fingers has pointed out
like a broken record that
nothing ever changes here,
the servants still sleep
huddled on the kitchen floor.
You must go to St. Petersburg,
you must turn your life
upside down — which,
with his connivance, she does,
remaining on the train when he gets
off in Moscow.
A possible ending,
perhaps, but premature. Yet,
this isn’t the story of Nadya’s
success or of her failure, either.
For Chekhov, the soul, that part
of us which yearns, is a young woman
awakening to its possibilities,
which she experiences, obscurely, as
a spacious vista, mysterious,
beckoning, new.
Nevertheless,
she returns home, forgiven,
to walk the fence lines and
drab streets of her town,
“alien, isolated, useless,”
and she wonders when
life for her will truly
begin. She has visited Sasha’s
room above the lithography
shop where he works, and she’s seen
the disorder in his indifference to
worldly concerns: all that
sputum dried on the floorboards!
When news of Sasha’s
consumptive death arrives,
the inertial past turns
to ash and blows away;
Nadya leaves home,
a second time no regrets,
“as she supposed forever” –
the story’s concluding words.
All of Chekhov is in that “supposed”
and its unimagined futures.
But because Nadya is the soul,
and this is Chekhov’s final story,
his irony has less to do
with Nadya’s short-sightedness,
which none of us escape,
than with the dangers inherent
in attachment and unattachment
alike: constraining attachment
and unattachment’s lonesome
thrill walk on either side of us
like mother and unknown father
each tugging us by the hand,
the way betrothed means both
engaged to and truth-bound.
How to solve this dilemma, then?
All Chekhov can do
is hint: love, that great
awakener, is not the answer,
but useful work may be,
and staunch vitality, too:
each is like a hand
free to seize hold of . . .
of what, exactly? Even
Chekhov can’t—or won’t—
say. And perhaps it doesn’t
matter. Enough that some
unleashed and fervent thing
sends you on your way.
Life Glad
Should she
come breezing in just now without a knock
– Hi, Pop! —
I will look up and forget the mourning dove
I’ve been listening to
whose whoo has the timbre of shadow
and regret,
yes, I’ll forget some slight I may have only
imagined,
and I’ll meet her gaze which gives off sparks,
pure zhiznieliubie,
a concept in Russian for which we have no word,
as in Chekhov
when Anna, married off to a wealthy
and corpulent
toady almost thrice her age in order to
save
her alcoholic father and young brothers,
dances waltz
after waltz at the Charity Ball until the sun
comes up;
It doesn’t matter that from this night on Anna
will care
only for herself and her own pleasures,
neglecting
even her family, it is zhiznieliubie,
nonetheless.
Should she come sweeping in,
the April scent
of hyacinth and magnolia in her wake,
I’ll remember
neither this train of thought nor the cardinal’s
penny-whistling
as her entrance excites the somnolent air.
She’ll kiss my brow
(a nineteenth century locution and gesture)
and say she’s off
to a friend’s, to a play or quartet practice, with a
[no break]
— Bye, Pop! I will! —
to whatever I say, it won’t matter what,
even to me —
I’m in thrall to this force which showers
down from her
like the minute white petals of spirea
when a gust
of wind disturbs its countless delicate heads.
You can see them
blowing along the road long after she’s gone.
A Medical Case
. . . it was not a law but a logical incongruity when strong
and weak alike fell victim to their mutual relations,
inadvertently obeying some controlling power, unknown,
extraneous to life, alien to man.
She’s sick — it’s unclear from what —
this heiress who lives with her mother
and governess near their factory
which makes calico of the cheapest kind,
for export. A gray film from the smoke
stacks coats the massive buildings,
the warehouses and barracks
where two thousand workers live;
the young doctor who’s been sent for
notices the drunkenness and exhaustion,
the bewilderment on the faces of
those his carriage-driver won’t
slow down for.
Later, he will listen to the hours
of the watch hammered out from plant
to plant in a white night neither he
nor his young patient can sleep through.
The mother is fearful of her daughter’s
pounding heart, the headaches and shrieks
of hideous pain, and he’s consented
to stay over. The intern is astute, perhaps
Chekhov himself — which means this story
is not about him, or about her and him,
it’s not a love story at all, though these two
have a certain affinity. Examining her, he’s
understood that she needs to talk, to be
heard; she is a lonely, intelligent girl, a reader,
who lacks not love so much as fellowship;
when he talks to her, it’s a form of listening,
of hearing what hasn’t been said,
for she is ill from more than just her underused,
unproductive life: it’s the new ugliness
and impersonal conditions of factory life
whose sole perverse purpose, it seems, is to
provide the old maid governess with
[no break]
sturgeon and Madeira to her heart’s content.
He senses the devil at work here, by which
he means organized misery from which
no one benefits or is made the happier. . .
he lets Christina Dmitrievna know that
it’s this which is the source of her illness,
and he counsels her to go live elsewhere.
Only in their children’s generation
will the right and wrong of this
irrational force, “extraneous to life,
alien to man,” be resolved.
It’s
spring, the quiet of a Sunday morning,
as he readies to leave; he hears larks,
the church bells ringing, and he puts
aside the devil and the overtaxed workers:
to ride in a troika — to feel the sun’s
warmth on your back is a good thing.
Even today, it makes one feel
that a life this “bright and joyful” might
be near at hand.
Take a deep breath.
Why, more than a century later,
should this be any less possible?
Forget-me-nots are sweetening
the grass, the breeze is fresh,
sun-drenched. Never mind
how much fiercer the hold
such dispossession has on us.
Never mind that nothing has been resolved.
The Black Monk
You know how it goes: one day the words just fall into place,
you feel powerful, attuned, in a state of grace.
The next no words come or only vapid ones,
and it’s all too clear: you’re a charlatan.
One day, you admire your wife more than you can say —
her laugh, the bones of her cheeks, a turn of phrase,
and your daughters too—confident, loving, quick —
strike you as rare beings, fantastic, really,
and then one is calling you a tyrant and a bully,
and the cold look your wife gives you doesn’t go away.
One summer day, Kore’s flower-picking with her friends,
the next it’s a winter that doesn’t end.
Life itself is bi-polar. One moment it’s
all in your grasp, and the next you’re in its.
In “The Black Monk” the secret lies in the smoldering fires
of dung and straw that keep pear and apple blossoms
from freezing. Yegor Semyonitch and his daughter Tanya
take turns through the night warming the air; later,
they’ll pack the plump fruits with care and ship them to Moscow.
Loving it’s the key, Yegor Semyonitch tells Kovrin,
the frayed, brilliant scholar he raised as a son
who will soon marry his daughter. That’s why
this garden thrives. I must do all the grafting, the pruning,
the planting, otherwise I’m jealous and out of sorts.
Loving it’s the feeling that when you’re away even
for an hour something’s gone wrong and that you must
get back. Loving’s the key. And Kovrin is moved
tremendously. Ecstatic, he scarcely sleeps, writes all night,
and converses with the black monk whirling down from the sky
who affirms that his work bears the stamp of the Divine.
And when his beloved Tanya finds him talking to
an empty chair one night, he agrees, in her fright,
to treatment; the monk disappears, as do Kovrin’s
inspiration and brimmed-over feelings. In their place?
Smallness, boredom, irritation, coldness and spite.
He ruins their life and her father’s, too,
who will soon die of grief, his famous gardens
falling into the hands of strangers.
And Kovrin also
will die — in a hotel room overlooking
the bay at Sevastopol, restored at the last,
however, by a visit from the monk. He’ll recall,
then, the gorgeous flowers in the great
garden of her father and, hemorrhaging,
call out to Tanya, life again lovely
as it was before the bromides,
the meanness, the fearful tending to.
Loving it’s
the key, Yegor Semyonitch tells Kovrin.
Why did you stop believing in your genius?
the black monk asks. There you have it.
Apple Blossoms versus Eternal Truth.
But because this is Chekhov,
both gardener and phantasm mean
the same thing by them. Apple
blossoms and Eternal Truth. Only
one thing can save the former;
one thing alone can reveal
the latter; just one thing can
join the two arm in arm, wed them
despite irreconcilable differences.
David Weiss’s most recent books of poems are Little Mirror (Lynx House Press), and No One Sleeps Tonight (Tiger Bark Press). His neo-noir novels, Ditch Witch, Burying Ground and Everybody Doesn’t are available on Amazon.