Closed Fists

Nezval, Bartusek, Hanzik, says the poet, reading the spine of a book. Weores, Juhasz. Poet's names, says the poet, poet's names. The poet should always have a circumflex in his name somewhere, says the poet. All poets – all European poets – should be East European, he says. Mitteleuropean, whatever that means, he says.

They should at least be East European, he says. They should have passed through the horror of really existing communism, he says. They should still have burning memories of the war, he says, and of obscure conflicts we don't even know about over here, he says. They should have been resistance fighters, he says. Partisans.

He sees them in his mind's eye, wandering through the fields, lost in the long grass. He sees them in the forest after the rain, drops falling from the boughs. He sees them wading across marshes, composing verses in their head, remembering them, for theirs is the time of fighting, not of writing. He sees them locked up in solitary confinement, curled up on the floor, shuddering with cold and with hunger, but with poems locked up inside them.

Mitteleuropa, he says. East Europe, he says. Where all poems come from hardship. Where all poems are secret signs, passwords. Where words matter, and poetry is more important than bread, the poet says.

Ah, what it would be to read over there, in Eastern Europe, in Mitteleuropa!, the poet says. To read, which is to say, to listen. To take in. To enclose in your heart. To repeat it in the darkness before you're led in for interrogation.

*

Holan, the poet says. Herbert. What names! What names these are! He can't imagine them, the bearers of these names. He can't form an image of them, not a real image.

Herbert by the water pump (they have to pump water in Mitteleuropa). Holan in the grocery queue (they have to queue for food in Mitteleuropa). Men closed up against the world. Men holding themselves tight as a fist, clutched.

And what are they holding? What in the closed fists of their mind? The poem, the poet says, leaning forwards. The poem!, he says.