Prologue
Retinue of iron warriors, peasant girls:
these are the boundaries of your world,
Janus-headed eagle.
Between the savagery of west and east
you are the fierce Chimera, the mythic beast
of Poland.
Chasten with winged fury the Teutonic hordes,
with talons break the Russian swords,
vaunting Polish glory.
The Germans lie in disarray.
The hunters now become the prey
to their own tyranny.
But Russia, to whom tyranny is second nature,
obeys the vanity of its royal creature:
Ivan.
Thus the Russian shadow intervenes,
encroaching on Polonia’s pastoral scenes
with Nubian stormclouds of war.
**********
The Court At Cracow
Dusk comes upon the streets of Cracow. The gathering darkness summoned by the cathedral’s chromatic tolling, softly falling the dark intervals of distant bells. Along the Via Swietopelk, lamplighters lift their smoking brands, plump with oil to the inclining torches, set in their braziers of stained white stone. Fowlers and peasants haggle in low voices with the departing merchants, carrying away the drams of their day’s store. Dogs snuffle amid the vegetable droppings. For them the market has only just opened.
A company of horsemen moves in cadence down the Via and over Old Bridge, tochlight flaring upon their armor. At Rozinski Palace the changing of the watch is underway. Few words are spoken though at this hour the horses are restive, loquacious.
Within the Palace Stephan Bathory, the Polish king, is closeted with his counselors, attending to the latest news from the Paladin of Lvov, proud Grybynsky.
The messenger has ridden hard, has a bad cold, therefore enunciates poorly. The councilors lean to his words, the elders among them cupping their ears to his strained elocution. Stephan observes but does not listen. Of those qualities most amenable to a righteous king, patience is the one he lacks. His mind sets now in motion the furtherance of his design. Besides which, he knows the news the others only now are learning.
Marshal Zamoyski, reclining there against the gold cloisonné of the window, has spies among the Paladin’s retinue, for Grybynsky, proud and fierce, articulates in private his dispute with Stephen’s claimed ascension to the Polish throne, is therefore not to be trusted.
The news concerns the recent possession of the Paladin: the Russian, Prince Andrey Kurbsky. Kurbsky, despoiler of Kazan and Novgorod the Great, the stella magnificus of Ivan’s warlords, has fled the grim labyrinth of Moscow, where Ivan sees conspiracy in shadows and poisonous treachery in every innocence. He has abandoned all, wife, family, and reputation, to the mercy of his merciless overlord, and has bought his passage on a throw of the dice cup: that the Poles will not disbelief him. The Russian Czar, he has said, cannot bring order to his realm save by foreign adventures, seeking therein to consolidate the power of his person through the decimation and bloody overthrow of his disaffected nobles.
Ivan sniffs the bounds of Poland like a hungry wolf.
When the council is at length disbanded, the councilors departing in alarm and vacillation, the king declares his mind to his Marshal.
-Too long have we maintained a stance
by which we fostered avoidance
of this thing.
As I am King,
Grybynsky now will press for war
and intimate that I am Ivan’s paramour
should I remain at council ‘neath this roof,
demanding facts, demanding proof!
What make you of this Kurbsky?
Jesu knows, he is no common refugee.
I believe these rumors to be true.
But Kurbsky must not become the tool
of the Paladin’s regard
lest we be hoist on our own petard!”
Zamoyski waits upon the departure of the king. Alone, he is outvasted in the melancholy of his thoughts. He has soldiered the passage of too many bloody dawns to be other than a man of peace. And now familiar specters brood upon the landscape of his home. His own sown, but lately in Danzig, tutored in the disciplines of war, to number brittle bones and battle cries, setting aside the preferred poetry of youth. Foreboding obscures to greater darkness the natural darkness of the windows: there is such certain sorrow in young men’s ghosts.
He weighs the missives in his gloved hand, and summons a messenger to deliver them straight to the Lithuanian court, in exercise of the Polish alliance. They are sealed and heavy, set with the crimson wax of officialdom, bloodmarked upon the parchment’s pallor.
*********
Prince Aleksandr In Lubianka
Within the cell nearest the castle’s eave
snowflakes glitter on the Prince’s sleeve.
He stares through bars his fingers grip
and watches as the sparrows turn and dip
against the white snowladen sky
beneath which slumbering Moscow lies.
The pallid sun has on the instant fled
and darkness is with snowlight fed
as to the courtyard servants bear the tapers out
which only pricks the cancer of his dobut.
Lubianka’s feral atmosphere,
wherein he languishes, pilgrim of fear,
squats at the sleeping city’s heart
and beastlike, tears its prey apart.
Aleksandr is his patronym
and princely valor the synonym,
but like a stag dragged down by hounds
vicious calumny his virtues have brought down.
His cell is cold, made colder still
with death’s deliberate and approaching chill
before which dignity cannot stand
nor be dissuaded by a faltering hand.
Treachery thus innocently unforeseen
has named him traitor to the king,
and yet ‘tis Ivan he honors still,
refusing to believe this is his will.
**********
The Conspiracy Of The Muscovite Princes
Gathered in a dim and curtained room
a confinement of princes mark the apostolic gloom
with sighs half-mingling in the air
of frail hope and voiceless despair.
Prince Cyprian, of Aleksandr’s blood,
carves from his boots a yield of mud,
surveying this princely alliance
in balance held, the measure of his silence.
Cyprian, but late returned,
has of his jailed nephew little learned,
but hopes his history’s poverty
implies the absence of finality.
Against the storm of discontent
at length his voice gives dissent:
-When evil me in darkness speak
their virtuous counterparts must also darkness seek,
as innocence succumbs to treachery,
conspiracy begets conspiracy.
In Lubianka is no peace.
Nor rest, nor comfort, nor release.
This we know, but doglike we are blind and dumb
counting out the numbers, but knowing not the sum.
Prince Aleksandr, friendless and alone,
is neither friendless nor alone,
for the distemper which he broods
exaggerates the bonds of solitude.
At the decline of Cyprian’s speech
there entered in the youth Gavrilovitch,
the loved companion, Aleksandr’s Olivier,
in courage and in virtue without pareil.
The company, whose spirits had but recently been armed
by Cyprian’s words, gazed now upon him with alarm,
as one who from a nightmare, wakes abed,
and face to face beholds the specter he has fled.
Gavril’s eyes, which once appalled with valor,
stream now their channels down his visage pallor.
-My lords, unto my words your ears unstop
and to my tears, attend them as they drop.
Upon the fading of St. Columbine’s bell
I stood, our ignorance to dispel,
beside the portal where the greyhounds prowl
to wait upon the sudden hooting of the owl.
At length it shrieked and I unleashed my mind
to strain against the night that would my senses bind.
And timely as the calling of the bird
the second watch dismissed before the third.
Thus, in the naked light of an upraised torch
beheld I the sentinels pause within the porch.
Upon their words most singularly did I wait,
in deliverance to my ear the Prince’s fate.
Alas, I would my tongue did poison me
for it hath given him no comfort in adversity.
Undam your eyes their floods. The Prince is dead.
To untimely violence hath his youth this hour been wed.
No eloquence the sentinels allowed their brutal speech
but sensed I in their gravity no joy in the deed.
In rude and simple words did they conjure forth the scene
that no memory of his happiness my mind can hence redeem.
For in the serenity of his prison bed
like to the serenity of an island of the dead
came sudden cries of violation,
which rendered him more desolate than desolation.
Naked he arose, a virgin to their knives
which deflowered there his sight, his voice, and his life.
And yet, in striking deep, they did not strike him dead,
drawing out his agony as it were a thread.
Then, when royal gore incarnadined the Prince
Ivan’s dogs refused him contrition of his sins,
mocking the voluptuousness of his drawn out breath
and hurling him to the dungheap of a graceless death.
For these vile tidings which my lip have borne
at risk of sacrilege is duly sworn
my oath of vengeance on the king
who at his peril hath composed this thing.
Blossomed Cyprian’s eyes in firmament of tears
and seemed two decades added to his years:
-The foulness of this deed hath made my heart a cage
enclosing wars of rage overthrowing rage.
If I were young! …. but there’s danger in that tread
for Aleksandr was young and Aleksandr is dead.
Hold me in thine hearts, my lords,
for my spirit breaks against a dream of lifted swords.
Thus, and softly, it is myself you see
though half my heart is reft from me.
So the Prince is dead. Alas!
And the king is not. Alas.
And none of us secure from blame
for treason to the king must needs requite this shame.
Now Gavril, fly thee to the Prince’s brother,
in hiding at the monastery of Our Holy Mother
which stands before fair Novgorod’s eastern gate.
Speed to his ear the venom of his brother’s fate
and though the breaking of these tidings break your heart again,
make swift to bind it with force of arms and loyal men,
for life hath little value in this most horrible hour,
we are as lambs in flight before the lion’s power.
Good my lords, there is a luxury in sorrow’s slavery
we can but ill afford, or dire consequences be our penalty.
In fond remembrance must our tears be brief
lest iron vengeance tempered be my grief.
*********
The Meditation Of Ivan
Scarce was dawn made visible
when Ivan walked within his citadel.
His mind in counsel with itself revealed
the conspiracy which of late his agents had unveiled.
Kurbsky, once beloved of the King
had fled to Poland, leaving everything:
his wife, his children, and his pup
whom Ivan rapidly locked up.
And Kurbsky, thus decamped,
with vilest treachery was stamped,
consorting now in Cracow with his foes
the melancholic and ferocious Poles.
If Kurbsky was the blossom fled,
the roots in Moscow’s earth still fed,
like cunning thieves, to lie in wait
and open to the Polish knights the city gate.
But Kurbsky! Up till now quite unsuspected
from who all charges were deflected,
for had his loyalty not been revealed
when at Kazan he sheltered Ivan with his shield!
Well guess again, Tsar of the Rooskies,
your friend intended dynasties of Kurbskys!
Thus Ivan’s modern idiom is assured
all this poetic talk is for the birds.
He makes a circuit of the parapet
but finds no spot on which to sit
and gaze upon the city of his people
(‘why haven’t they repaired St. Columbine’s steeple?’)
But was there not conspiracy at the door?
Your mind is wondering, Ivan, on that score.
-Yes, yes. It’s hard to think
with only Muscovite wine to drink.
This season’s crop is rather poor:
old Cyprian with his windbag roar
and Prince Shiuvsky, that old fart
to hear him speak gives me heart-
burn on the arse, to quote.
Are there no traitors worthy of note?
Aleksandr’s brother, that gangster type,
dressed like a nun to save his life,
and young Gavrilovitch might give me a run,
he’s tougher than he looks but still a punk.
As for Aleksandr’s innocence
it’s really not of consequence,
I had to send him to the Promised Land
before the others would show their hand.
At any rate, they fell for it,
and now like hogs I’ll roast them on the spit.
Below, his subjects crowd upon the road.
These are his people, whom he does not know.
Or knows, perhaps, a bit too well,
like ants they swarm about his citadel.
-Upon this city have I worked my will,
and the princes, those lilies, think they’ve had their fill,
but should they try and raise a stink
the people will back me to the brink.
It is the princes who run riot,
the people, if unhappy, at least keep quiet.
My mind cries out for order
and yet this violence breeds disorder.
I do admit it.
For who, except a fool, might deny it?
But is there not more disorder in the way
the burghers and the boyars ply their trade?
Breaking and enslaving the peasants’ minds
while bodily torment is the quality of mine
oppression. And the windy princes take their toll
weeping for Mother Russia while pocketing her gold.
They whine like borzoi bitches at my kitchen door
devouring the orts and yet demanding more.
They have no dignity, they have no guts,
opening their arms like Cheapside sluts.
In this do I exaggerate?
They grow fat in service to the state.
What is it the Confucians say
comprises the truly virtuous Way?
‘Hath a king no order in his mind
then shall there be no order in his time.’
And yet, in this dark century,
how it grows tricky imposing standards of realpolitiki.
But from this subject of the princes do I quit,
to curse them and have done with it.
How I grow lonely in my middle years
though it has been a decade since I last shed tears,
and that was for Anastasia, my angelic wife,
victim of internecine strife.
Kurbsky’s fled the kingdom, taking with him Wit,
I’ll have the head of any who might reclaim it.
Now that Anastasia’s dead,
I’ve nothing to do but read in bed.
**********
The Polish Council Of War
Sunlight falls like amber down Cracow’s gates
enclosing each shadowed detail in flamboyant lace.
Upon the plain before the city do bright pavilions stand
with militant windsock for garland.
The townsfolk gaze upon the palisades
and at their bristling beauty are amazed,
for not since Godfrey before Jerusalem stood
has Christendom displayed such brotherhood.
Ranged in the center are the allies of the Eastern coast,
cast round about them with the Polish host,
the stallioned warriors of Warsaw and Yevinya,
of Pereslav and fair Gdynia.
The gleaming hooves of Galician steeds
pressed in upon the soil their sweated beads
which groined their flanks like reined jewels
reflecting back their riders’ armored hues,
while Lithuanian comrades, taciturn and wild,
put aside ferocity for Polish guile.
Eighty-thousand men of horse.
Could Ivan boast of such a force?
And yet the Russian allies swelled
to five times what Cracow held.
But caution never swayed the Pole,
should Ivan come they’d strike a blow
would send him reeling from his throne
and Muscovy be overthrown.
Move we now within the encircling walls
where Poland’s warlords pack the Council hall,
their voices like unto the roaring of the waves
to undermine their unity in grave debate.
The cause of this contention is the hero of Kazan,
Kurbsky, but a fortnight in flight from Ivan.
Kurbsky now suspires under house arrest,
detained within the villa of Silenabest,
from whence his letters to his wife bring only silence back,
provoking in his eyes such fearful cataracts
of tears that pity even his guards enthralls,
though they are hardened warriors all.
Beneath the double-headed eagle is discord
where imperial peace with imperial sword
is bought. Are Kurbsky’s words those of Cassandra
or mere and vacuous propaganda,
by this design to raise the Polish ire
and thus obscure his treasonous desire?
The hall, divided on the aspect of this thing
falls silent at the trumpeting of the king,
whose messenger in sweat-drenched haste has sped
to sound the constitution of the eagle’s head.
Prince Boleslav, of elder warriors the most sage
bears out the queries of the panting page
and leaning his bulk upon his downturned mace
lifts above the host impassively his face:
-Treason is a word not lightly borne,
which prevails upon itself a storm
of outrage and repulsion.
For how much gold does one account one’s nation
to sell it to the hands of ancient enemies?
Thus has this Russian dog, his tail twixt his knees
come barking that the pack is at the gate,
a once-loved Prince, how suddenly this hate
is come upon him, do you mark it not?
I smell a trap we would be caught
in, were we to hearken to his cry.
I say this royal cur, by nature of his race, does lie.
My counsel to the waiting ears of Stephen:
if Ivan comes why he will come, but let us not ourselves inaugurate this end.
Thus nobly the old Prince inclined
upon the gathered company his mind
and force of years and reputation
had swayed the warriors to capitulation
had not Grybynsky, Lvow’s bright paladin
bounded to the selvedge of the baldachin
and ‘oer all the room did fall
the urgency of his words’ thrall:
-If Kurbsky be false,
then straight must he from this realm be banished,
to haunt again the lairs of Muscovy
where conspiracies spawn as bastards to the king.
But if he be not false in intention,
if there be ought of truth to his conjecture
of the Russian king’s dimension,
to seize, despoil and defame the sanctity of Polish soil,
whereby blot we the inked destruction of our land?
They say he hath a wife, and child,
whom Ivan doth present to darkness,
in one or the other of his numerous holds,
which, packed with corpses,
make pustulant the landscape of that unholy turf,
that even Christ must marvel at such rude compaction of misery.
Into mine own hands was it that Kurbsky fell,
or rather flew, for he bears the visage of a hunted man.
I am no milk-sopped youth who hears
behind each silver tongue an angel.
And yet, upon the love I bear this precious earth called Poland,
I say we must believe the man.
Tis a small sin
to save one’s skin
when nothing else remains.
And for this Russian Prince
naught now remains
but Ivan, who hath usurped all Russia
to the imaging of his own hunger for flesh,
his insatiable thirst for blood.
Attend now to the precision of my plea
that would shake the weak foundations of complacency
with single purpose:
Ivan hath dispatched,
in transit with the sun
from east to west a force of horsemen
such as was not seen
when Subotai ravished the prostrate form of Poland
in the ashes of his gruesome signature.
The outer edges of Pripyet have they breached,
and three thousand Polish warriors slain.
**********
Prince Kurbsky At Silenabest
What thunder shakes
the outer gates
of staid Silenabest?
Kurbsky’s ears attest
the passing bruit,
spurred into heat,
of horsemen traveling
to the unraveling
of their warlike act,
from which no vacillation can detract
the furtherance of their aim,
to raise their banners from the shame
of Polish dead on Polish soil,
and from swift avenging victory not recoil.
Kurbsky, here in deep suspicion held,
finds no captivity to outmatch the hell
of his material regret,
so surely has his pride been met
by ostracism from the world of men,
no Ariadne’s thread might guide him back again.
His conscience is the mallet to the anvil of his soul
that she should stay and he should go:
in momentary weakness abandoned he his wife
prizing overmuch the value of his life.
And now, a captive in a hostile land
he relishes the thought of Ivan’s wrathful hand.
Kurbsky skulks beneath the trees,
upon the rack of his suspended revery.
In birch-shade are his guards reclined,
indifferent to his penitential mind,
observing close a Polish maid
who warily regards them in their shade.
Shyly about her wrists she twines
in semblance of a hanging vine
aromatic blossoms, soft and fair,
with which she likewise coronets her hair.
Kurbsky whets a grass stalk to his nose,
inhaling fresh the Polish rose
and gazes on the laughing girl,
a common Venus of the world.
-Such beauty as our Russian maids have not,
an alien beauty, strangely caught
by light that seems to spring within
from some internal innocence.
But in the innocence of those gleaming
eyes, unveil the meaning
of a girl’s dreams.
Things are not here as they seem.
*********
The Dialogue Of The Russian Soldiers
-Hey, Yuri!
What’s the hurry?
We’ve not much more to walk,
let’s rest our legs and talk.
-OK, but keep your eyes peeled,
as we were coming through that field
I thought I saw a flash of gray
like the shirts those Poles had on today.
-Those weren’t Poles we had on the run
those were the remnants of the Lithuanian scum
who Yaroslav kicked out of Dweszliki
when he went in with his Narozhniki.
-Oh yeah? Lithuanians … Polacks … who’s to tell?
I don’t like any of ‘em, they can go to hell.
-They say the same of us, you know,
and there’s no better horseman than the Pole,
excepting the Tartars, they’re the best,
though old Wenceslas put ‘em to the test.
-Ancient history. Before my time.
The Here and Now’s my bottom line.
-Ignorance is bliss, I guess you’d say,
but forget the past and you double what you pay.
-That’s as may be, but what interests me
is to escape the Poles AND the Narozhniki,
not go tramping ‘round the world
just get back to my farm and girl.
-Spoke like a true peasant, Yuri,
but something that you said has got me worried.
About the Narozhniki, I mean,
those hoods who do the bidding of the king.
Just what exactly do you make of those guys?
Here on the front lines when they’re only spies?
Though lots of violent practice they’ve known,
making widows back at home.
-I might be the dumbest mutt in the place,
but the answer’s plain as the nose on your face!
Remember all that conspiracy talk?
When Kurbsky got the jumps and walked
over to the Polish side?
and ‘treachery’ was what Ivan cried?
Well Kurbsky wasn’t the only one that was hot,
not the only one, not by a long shot.
There were boyars and princes up to their eyeballs,
wanting to decorate Moscow’s walls
with the stiffs of Ivan and his mob.
Only someone snitched, someone sobbed
and spilled the beans com-plete-ly!
-So what did Ivan do? Tell me!
-He lined ‘em up before the throne,
where all the evidence was shown,
which should have meant their final breath.
Then Ivan said: ‘Choose. Will it be life or agonizing death?’
By which he meant that they could live,
provided all their services they give,
bringing the army under their command
in this incursion into Poland.
And the Narozhniki came along
to play the part of shadows in the throng,
lest some prince get the notion
to start a general revolution.
Thugs are thugs but these cats are bad!
Sometimes I think the king is mad,
to let do his dirty work.
Such tales I’ve heard, but mum’s the word.
Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s great,
it’s just his politics I hate.
-Trust me, Yuri, I’m just like you,
and life is cheap for peasants as a rule.
Ivan’s a subtle guy, but mean as hell,
and whether he really lets ‘em live, who can tell?
It’s his game, he makes all the rules
and those who mess with him are either very brave or driveling fools.
Even those who think they’ll get their share
by kissing ass, end up nowhere.
Which is where we are by the looks of it.
What’s the name of this place?
-Pripyet.
-Well, swamp is right as far as I’m concerned,
and I suspect that Ivan’ll get his fingers burned
before this season’s past.
Victory comes swift but defeat comes twice as fast.
-Speaking of fast, it’s time to scram,
our pickets are drunk, not worth a damn.
It’s not so much the dark I fear,
as the sharp end of some Polish spear.
Let’s get a move on, it’s near daybreak,
so up you lazy sod, and give those legs a shake.
We could use some decent featherbeds
before we crack those Polish heads.
-I’ll sleep like the holy dead tonight,
to rise up ready for the fight.
Though it may be a boring day
since the Poles are still some miles away.
Of that I’m certain, so let’s to bed.
-Don’t be so sure. We might be napping like the unholy
dead come tomorrow. But what the hell!
At least I’ve no grandkids yet to tell.
*********
The Gathering Of The Armies On The Eve Of Battle
Alive with wraiths and starlight
the marshes seem to move upon the night,
serene as Baikals wintered deeps,
yet feather-flecked with foam that leaps
to vanish in the silent air,
freckled with the silver of Berenice’s hair.
The Russian banners drift upon the spears
flung down with trace of dewy tears,
and sentries, decomposed in dreams of battle,
their helms upon bright shields settle,
stirring as though the trumpet’s stuttered shout
commanded their reform, to victory or rout.
Through dreamworlds, thunder echoes back like sighs
of hooves, driven by the shriek of armored thighs.
A dream of horsemen hems them round,
of blood in fountains that run down
from polished blades scoring the air till steel flares,
as though a girl’s uplifted hair,
flung backward to the gale wind,
would knout each strand upon the naked skin.
The Russians sleep with stones upon their breath
to see with helpless horror their impending death.
Strange idols haunt the restless skies
above the bleak terrain that lies
like a drunk man, numb to torment,
his sole coverlet the silent firmament.
The night is loud with unvoiced words
loosed upwards like nocturnal birds
penitent before the Savior’s name,
or the Madonna’s gentler flame,
and some cry with sin that has no shame
upon the name of Ares, god of butchery and pain.
But Orpheus also is invoked
by one who stands, in darkness cloaked,
surveying with a poet’s practiced gaze
the conjured and imagined shapes
of fear and fascination and desire,
bred from the fantasies of fire
which bind the camp as with a ring of flame
to be uncharmed by some hideous game.
He stands aloof, abstracted,
though in his mind flows protracted
agony of rhyme and meter:
to clothe life in poetic fetters.
Yevgeny Ganepin, courtier to the king,
gives silent prayer with words he cannot sing.
-O vere beata nox.
O fallen night that ever was
stripped from the density of
starladen sky, the dolphins
bear the current’s unbound corpse
and sleep is mounted
by the hunchbacked lie.
Pierced and speared,
to darkness held, in
algebraic heat aroused,
to counterfeit her fertile dreams,
in cold coin drowned.
Forgetful sleep once holy,
fell, and still, with spring
once enamored.
Bound to wild spring,
to bite the root’s glad passion.
True-loved once, made once
this other thus: pellucid corpse
a winter sea-change seized,
chained for a trinity of running
days, as ransomed to a latinate beam
the princely signature of things.
CHRIST
who bridged Himself, death-hewn,
to entrance away from then
and now to murkless ever after,
hosting the graceful hosts
with the daybright corpus
of His gloried victim’s self.
As Philomela of the glowworm
hedge, so Jesus in the shouting
wren, a cherried bead of
broken blood is bent to fire
in shallow light and root’s
cold fruit is holy spring unwakened.
In springtime, as in wintertime,
cry guarded dynasties of color,
sprung with folded crowns and
herbal combs, golden in the
pupil of a speckled pool.
Who warrior is is savior,
so husband to the garden of the wolves.
His heart’s good wound unscreened,
lords heaven over ditch-dealt woods
of ravished nests and blossoms,
deviled at the root.
Whose unlocked sleep
now feeds His lambs and casts
a star upon their way,
the bread of odyssey
beyond the fogbound world,
ridden by a man-faced dream.
No totem of the crafted lament,
a bird bolts across the orchard moon
in dance of dismay
found rivaled in his nest.
Anabasis from endless dark
to dark horizoned without end,
borne in diaspora through the mate-
less air, ungardening no rose above
Pripyet’s unholy bounds,
stunned to star the starry night till night’s end.
And from the other sleepless side of night
the Lithuanians ride the Valley of Szestechowa
to meet in concert with the vanguard of
the Polish king, but some miles from Pripyet’s arborside.
Zamoyski the Younger has been sent to consolidate
the king’s intent that they should spring,
thrice-tipped with horse and pike,
from west and south to pin the Russians ‘gainst the marsh,
wherein the Paladin Grybynsky holds his men,
in sight of the foe, all unsuspecting.
Thus King Stephen by express command
has named Zamoyski the Elder his supreme Hetman,
to raise the allied standards to the fray
and restore the eastern border to his sway.
At each talon’s tip of the Polish eagle
does Zamoyski frame the will of imperial posture,
the named princes in perfect sentence,
the syntax against which the Russians might have no defense.
Zamoyski twists upon his horse’s frame
to see his liege’s features.
‘Tis but a slow refrain or two before the wind’s rise,
signaling Aurora’s soft approach,
clothed with rose and milk-light.
-Behold now the ranging of our forces.
There! the Paladin of Lvow,
like a panther measuring the leap
‘twill bring him to his victim’s throat!
With torches doused and horses shod
in soundless cloth, like a deluge
dammed by Pripyet’s mists.
And there!
Packed tight like herrings
in the casks of a Baltic fish-house,
see where the Lithuanians
crowd their horses near the crowned ridge!
And Prince Boleslaw at their head,
sniffing the air like a lion.
Upon my word it will stink
of Russian blood before the sun
is heaved above the trees!
And there!
Poised upon the heart of our foe,
the flower of our chivalry!
Your majesty, there is my son,
still as old Boleslaw.
Pray we, my king, that vigilance
is what stills him so, not the mad
kicking of a poem in foetus!
Zamoyski the Younger sits enchanted.
Orpheus’ lyre whispers to his ear.
Petrarch holds the reins of his mount and
Alighieri holds the Polish coriflage.
His mare paws the wet grass.
Dum te-dum te-dum.
Orpheus damps his thrumming strings, a nightbird calls ‘sing’.
He closes his eyes before the waterfall of words.
-Absence of coalescent greed
rocks the white flames on the sea
and in the habitat of night
words fall, spun from a wounded dome
to bright the martyr’s equinox
in context, verdant and alive.
Beneath a fractured star
that rocks the waves, the dolphins dive,
fewer to shore than to the reef,
the white flame of a star’s conceit.
O nights! Returning sunken prow of fire
over an unstill world,
still and quick and darkly
in the firmament aspire
the ceintured banquet of a hunter’s blood
embroidered cloth on cloth with stars,
the altarpiece of an unbroken heart.
O nights returning! Merchants of stars
behold the dark that stains your keels!
Dragnet of fire, and yours the worm,
devouring the world’s sleeping face.
Sheer is the hunger of the night horizonless,
famished of the votive star.
And sheer the pressured darkness
of a prayerless room, tapers quenched
and shadows starved, the dry rock
bloodless in the blind night’s wake.
Great nights, spread your feast of stars,
circlets of stone and hurtling fire dismay my eyes!
For you arise, though you are falling, though you fall.
Wreathed in the ghostlight of my awe
chthonic visions bred from nature mort,
godlike the table of the windswept sea
whose boundaries are ruined.
Hoarded nights! Like genesis’ fury
your myriad tongues ripe as flame,
rebuke the barren and the sightless dark
bear down a vast and starlit sea!
Shake your savage heaventree of stars
in Pripyet wood, where naked souls perspire.
At the final flaring of the final word
Zamoyski turns, sees the king’s banner
lifting upon the distant hill,
hears the fluttering of a bird
and raises his sword.
Poland thunders into Aurora.
*********
The Speech Of The Polish Veteran
Yes, yes, I was there, I was there. It was my first battle but not my last. When was that? Hell! I’ve never been good with what year of the lord it might be, but let’s say thirty years ago. Ah, it was a lovely spring, flowers blooming across the fields like a Persian carpet, and the marsh-marigolds stinking where the horses trampled them to mush.
Thirty years ago! And all the great ones dead some years, rotting under black earth in Poland or Russia, and fair droves of them slain that day as well. My poor head aches to recall their names … but the place, that I’ll never forget. Pripyet will be there after we’re all dust and worms, trading hands like the village whore.
What? No, no, I lost that finger in another battle, against the Germans, during the retreat from Magdeburg. Or was it on that raid out of Poznan? At any rate it was a German took that from me. All my other scars, though, those I owe to the Russians. This one, here above my ear? Go ahead, you can still feel it, like a welt across my scalp, that was damned close. I never even saw it coming. There I was, in the thick of it, axes and arrows flying right and left, trying to keep my head on my shoulders when a huge bugger of a Russian, he must have been a prince by the size of him, came ROARING out of the smoke and whacked me dead on top of the head. I must have been turning at the time for his mace glanced clean off. What a head that gave me! For a moment I couldn’t see, blood running like a waterfall over my eyes, so I brushed my hand across my face and there he was, only a few yards past me, reining up his horse and preparing to crown another poor bastard. He never did though. I got him. Speared him right through the kidneys with my pike. I was young and strong then and with all my weight behind it, I lifted him right out of the saddle. Had to take his sword then, his mace was heavier than I cared to try hoisting and my pike was wedged up tight, splintered his breast-bone it did, so I didn’t have a hope of prying it loose.
What’s that? You want me to start at the beginning? Well, well, I’m amiable enough but it’ll take another jug.
Cheers!
Aaah, that’s good.
The beginning, eh?
The beginning is always such a long story, isn’t it? As I said, it was my first battle and I wouldn’t have missed it for all the odalisques in Sarai. There I was, eighteen summers old, bored out of my wits in the monastery. Does that surprise you? Well, I tell you this with certainty: I’ve done more in the service of sweet bleeding Jesus, bless Him, under the banner of my king than ever I would have falling asleep in some dusty, stinking hole, infested with holy books. And I’m not a sacreligious man.
Well I can tell by that look on your mug that you’re itching to know the ins and outs of that one. I’m a man who likes to please, with all the time in the world.
I was the third son of peasants, which meant I didn’t get shit when I came of age. The oldest brother got the bogfarm, the second son got the prettiest girl in the village and I got a choice. Either go off to the wars or the city and make my own way or let the monks take care of me, and maybe learn how to read and write. In between the boozing and wenching, that is.
In those days in Galicia, which is where I come from, in case you didn’t notice the gentleness of my breeding, the monks were weighty dogs. The priests in Cracow were a regular syndicate, a real gang, what they’ll call a ‘mafia’ five centuries from now. A gaggle of lazy, educated bastards who carted all their treasures round the provinces for us farm boys to gawk over. But when you’ve seen one ‘Miracles of Antioch’ that they swiped off the stiff of some wop saint with the worms still burrowing in him, brother, you’ve seen ‘em all. So I learned to scribble all night, but I’m goddamned if I knew what I was scribbling! Some Latin muck, with more O’s and U’s than you’ll find in the local hayloft. That got old quicker than a princess with the pox, as the Swabians say.
That spring I’d been rotting away at the Monastery of Our Lady of Perpetual Grace for the better part of a year, going blind from boredom and drink as much as from the work. We didn’t get much tidings from the wicked old world, except what we could squeeze out of the pleasure girls minding the pigs. They loved to talk though, almost more than they loved to copulate. But I kept my nose to the wind, once a peasant always a peasant, and I gathered that something was going on when I heard that the Paladin of Lvow had got his paws on a Russian prince, and that this was making the old boys in Cracow sweat out their year’s worth of mead.
What was his name? Yes, Kurbsky, that was him. Andrey Kurbsky. Handsome as Mars and brave as Hercules. A mean Russian son of a bitch sure, but a real prince, not like some of those narrow-hipped little flowers we had, done up like some Roman cardinal’s doll.
Well, when all this was happening, our order was on the way to Yevinya for something or other. There’d been an outbreak of plague and we were expected to sanctify the wells, say a few pretty words over the cadavers, that sort of thing. Maybe even hunt down a few Yids to torch, which always went over big. Funny thing. You get something like a plague or the hoof and mouth disease, and instead of doing what makes sense, like making sure some imbecile hadn’t been using the wells as a shithole cause he got a little too drunk one night, the donkey of an abbot would always say ‘it’s the Jews, let’s make an example of them.’ So then we’d have to roust the local militia and drag some poor old graybeard out of his bed, who didn’t even know enough of the lingo to tell you how many times his wife had been unfaithful to him in the last fortnight, not that you could hear him cause his bones would be knocking so loud, rough him up, put out a few teeth, haul him up before the local constabulary, with some bigwig bishop, squinty-eyed with his nose in the air as though the whole world stank just to insult him, and this bugger would cut loose with some foreign crap, Latin this and Latin that, exploring in thirty theses, seven principles, and twelve traits, why the pathetic Heb was the devil’s own grandson. Ah, but that’s another story.
Anyway, somewhere on the road to Yevinya we met up with a herd of swine, by which I mean an order of Dominican friars. They were out on their yearly campaign to convert heathens and raise the dead. Somehow it never worked out that way. their spirit may have been strong, but their flesh was stronger. They were worse than the Golden Horde, lining their pockets with gold and silver, puking up bellyfuls of wine and devirginating anything in the vicinity, man or beast. But what can I say, they were better company than the cold fish I was with, so I teamed up with them. The abbot was already practicing his reprimand for when we got back, pity he never had a chance to use it, he was especially skillful at handing out the floggings, being a flagellant himself. Some men like maids and some like whips, I say let the world do whatever it pleases, so long as I’m not in the same bed.
Midway to Yevinya … you do notice that my tankard’s nearly empty? Good. Midway to Yevinya we stopped at a way station, with a little shrine for penitents and a little tavern for those of us who were sinless. Which we were technically, only planning on drinking the landlord dry and figuring out how to bilk him of his money and his daughter’s honor. So there we were, shaking the dust from ourselves, when a party of horsemen came charging past, headed east, flying like demons.
They raised such a stormcloud of dust as had us all gagging. The captain of the rearguard stopped long enough to have his mount bucketed off, down a tankard, and appropriate all the horses to be had, including the old nags the friars were on. They were well pissed at that turn of events, let me tell you, but who was going to argue with the ghost of Roland! Of course everyone was in a profound heat to hear what he had to say and when he told us that that son of Satan, Tsar Ian, had taken Pripyet and massacred a combined force of Lithuanians and Poles, most of the village lads wanted to be off with him that very moment, swearing up and down that Russian guts would spill for such infamy.
After the soldiers had gone with their new recruits, mounted on the friars’ horses, everyone went back to their boozing, but there was a cloud of foreboding, so that even the friars were subdued. After a while I went out back behind the tavern and as I was standing there in the outhouse I looked up through the roof, which was litter better than the side of a chicken coop and I could see a pair of doves soaring high, high up among the rushing clouds. Perhaps it was the wine, or the spring flowers stinking up the air but to me it was a veritable revelation, as if I was that ancient sod back on Patmos. What, I told myself, in the name of the ineffable Virgin and her thousand bleeding sorrows, do you think you are doing? You’re young and strong, you’re a Polish peasant, man! Why are you got up in some sop’s dress, scribbling away in the darkness like a leech, scratching away at words no one will ever see? To the glory of God, is it? make a run for it, boy, leave them here to rot in their own foul wind!
So right there, under the sign of the Dove and the Cesspool, I stripped off my cassock and stuffed it behind the bog, cursing it for what little warmth it had ever given me. I bolted, in my shirt and breeches, taking the abbot’s donkey, and without so much as a rearward fart I took off after the Paladin’s men.
A hard journey it was. At times I quite gave up but the thought that I might miss the first adventure of my life drove me on. I had some run ins with bandits, was set upon by gypsies who would have stripped me naked as a corpse had I not put my fist through one of their skulls and lost my donkey as I was fording a stream which had been swollen by the spring rains. But I got there, on the very eve of the matter, my shirt in tatters, my soles worn down to strings and blood, and my arse making a show of itself through my breeches. There was a mighty gang of us, crowding in that night, and we would have been turned back for our lack of experience had not Zamoyski, the Grand Hetman, learned that his forces were outnumbered seven to one by the invaders.
Some of the farm boys had brought their scythes and hoes but as I had nothing I was given a pike because of my height and muscles. We were sent to the ridge and told to keep our mouths shut and our heads down. That was the easy part of it. I was fagged out and slept like a Pope there under the stars.
At length I was roused by the growling of an old veteran in my ear, the heraldry of the king upon his sleeve. It was still dark as a heathen’s soul but I was bathed through with morning dew. We were assembled on the ridge, trying our damnedest to impersonate the dolomites scattered around us. It was a fair view from where I stood, gazing down the slope. I vow I could have heaved my pike midway between our position and the nearest of the enemy’s pavilions.
Within spitting distance of my right shoulder was Prince Boleslaw, still as a sphinx, while his young attendants shifted in their saddles like giggling alley morts, with behind them the Lithuanian horsemen, fierce as radiant death.
On my left I could see the king’s own men, on horse and foot, with Zamoyski the Younger at their head. I was not alone that dawn in thinking him the most precious jewel of our princes. He had that quality of beauty which even the humblest villain could perceive, clad in a sky blue tunic, his hair braided down his back, his face as serene as an angel’s. as young maids wilted to look on him just so did virile men feel lifted up and proud, as though it were the very Archangel they shadowed.
As we waited a low cloud passed behind and turning I saw a gathering of figures upon the hill whereon the king was said to be. Thence from that gathering proceeded one horseman and in the whiteness which the clouds cast about him I saw him lift his sword, bearing it level with his horse’s head. The cloud passed and returned and still he kept his sword inclined to the horizon. The moment that I turned away he must have raised the royal signal for on my left came suddenly such a cry from Zamoyski’s lips that it seemed the earth were at his command.
Then, was all confusion. The ground leaped beneath my feet in rupture at the charging horses, while stones and clods were rent by hooves to sound a tympanum on breastplate and helm. Above the thunder of the Polish cries came Lithuanian voices, most inhuman did they sound, but beastlike in their terrible beauty, while still louder was raised the savage shouts of dialect, the peasants roaring as though to cheer themselves they were not countenanced alone.
The horsemen were packed with such felicitous intimacy that those of us on foot overtook them before they had attained the base of the ridge and thus were channeled like quick streams between their banks of flying armor, compressed so with speed and frenzy that some were surely dragged beneath the horses to a hooved and furrowed death. As we came upon the level ground we could see the figures of our enemies. How my memory commends them to me, for they stood, even in their confusion, like men, where others would have turned and run, screaming ‘Mama!’
It was then, when we behold one another like two wolves whose only hope lay in the ruin of the other, that the sun was seen, the twin pincer of ourselves. It flamed its bright and merciless threads like the resurfacing fringe of a golden drowned corona or the edge of a scythe lain level with one’s eyes. And as the terrible whiteness rose it flared upon the mirror of our mail so that the aspect of our advancing host must have seemed that of Apollo himself, crying us through the void.
Then was time unnumbered into sudden violence that stretched each moment upon infinity’s rack till days and lifetimes seemed to pass within the span of that brief and furious assault. It was an inferno of cries and curses, pain like thunder, oh most horrible. That thus we should encounter bleak FOREVER, amid a din of such constancy and carnage that silence, the very sound of soundlessness seemed as something that could never be again.
And yet my mind, which witnessed the confusing of my senses, seemed haloed away above my body. And in the center of that thundercloud I was alive! As though possessed of some dreadful and powerful secret which bound me to that freedom which only violence begets, when fear is banished forever from the burden of Death, stinking like perfume in the very air one breathes.
I felt …. there is no other word for it … joy! That one should live, for even a moment, an hour, in a world where Laws do not exist, only the sheer exultation that one must kill. I was young, can I not be forgiven such evil?
Such is my memory. That I slew and was not myself slain.
Who would believe that from such chaos, such mindless butchery, anything resembling victory might come? And yet the victory was ours that morning. The Russians withered away, and those who were far enough to the rear or brave enough to flee, did so, pursued by Grybynsky’s lieutenants until they turned back under a Russian moon.
Afterwards, as is common, I was sick. There is nothing on earth that is like the sound of a battlefield when it is done. It is like something dreamt, remembered, and yet not recognized.
When I was sufficiently clear of mind and empty of gut to turn my eyes again upon that scene I was employed by one of the king’s captains to aid him in numbering the dead. We were not done till the last hour of daylight and even then, there many never tallied, for at the fringe of Pripyet, where Grybynsky’s fury had been greatest, the wolves had come and gone with consummate grace, leaving only a vast carpet of bones, gleaming in the red-tinged grass.
As I have said it was my first battle, I knew not the process by which rituals and rules, civilities if you will, are observed between conquerors and conquered. But there was something in the eyes of even the most experienced soldiers that divined a quality most and deeply amiss.
Now you may know the truth of what I tell you. It is and has been always the practice among Christian armies, that upon the deciding of battle, the common soldiers and peasants, who have been impressed by force into the ranks, should be released, to find their own way back to their villages and folk. There is, after all, not the means by which to feed and shelter them, nor to keep them from harm. And those other captives, of noble blood, are held in all due comfort until they are ransomed by their sovereign lord. In such a way do kings and lords attain the revenue to support the men of their allegiance.
But on that day with such purposeful deliberation one would have believed that Christ and his Saints slept, cruel Grybynsky sent his handpicked men, contrary to what was understood to be King Stephen’s will, among the Russian wounded, there to identify those of noble heredity. Thus betrayed by their mien or the insignia of their house, as though their very blood had become their Judas, they were delivered in their helplessness to their Polish assassins. In this horrid manner were three hundred Russian nobles slain where they had fallen, their throats cut on the ordering of the Paladin.
A day of great sorrow for our enemy surely, for princes of Muscovy, of Novgorod, and Kiev, were dispatched to paradise in fair droves, both young and old, from gray Cyprian, himself no friend of Ivan, to the young lord Gavrilovitch, no older than myself that day, who fought like a lion and fell with two score wounds. And though the mercy of heaven shone upon us we were not spared heartbreak and loss for among our fair dead was the fairest, Zamoyski the Younger, with three arrows through his breast.
Leave me now, these memories cloud my eyes and make my words no better than an old woman’s. That such grim passion should be the cannibal of my youth. It is this world I love, in all its wickedness and transience, it is men that I abhor, those who make of destiny a synonym for murder, who call this world ‘home’.
*********
The Maid And The Philosopher On The Field Of The Dead
The maid:
Still meadow, quick with light,
there is a crimson to your white.
The philosopher:
Here is a field, wet with blood,
which none must doubt was for the general good,
lest in doubting to display
an ignorance of men and of the world’s way.
The maid:
Like poppies, heavy is the scent,
that it would seem a heart was rent.
The philosopher:
Here is the sacrifice of joy.
No sorrow more ancient than a murdered boy.
The old men see necessity
in features of chill serenity.
The maid:
From deepest sleep do they not sigh,
when crows pluck out their rooted eyes?
The philosopher:
Men are the weavers of the flame
to garment all the world in shame.
There is no passage to a kingdom’s throne
that is not paved with young men’s bones.
The maid:
Closed are the eyes of all the fair,
and garlands of flies to bind their hair.