I had a friend, Daniel Simko.
He was the translator of the great Austrian poet Georg
Trakl.
Georg Trakl.
The book that he translated is called Autumn Sonata.
It's really beautiful.
When the-- I'm going back now to 1989.
The Soviet Empire is collapsing.
And both Daniel's family and my family
both from former Czechoslovakia.
And Daniel came right after the Warsaw Pact invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
He was a kid when he came to the United States.
He became a really close friend of mine.
And when the walls started coming down in Germany
and the Velvet Revolution happened in Prague,
Daniel said, we have to go there right now,
because I have to go get my jazz records from the attic
where I left them.
And I said, Daniel, they have been there for 22 years.
They've been in the attic for 22 years.
They're probably not good anymore.
And he said, no, it's a great collection,
plus I have books and many things.
We have to go.
And he said, besides, you can find your family.
So we went, and Daniel had two suitcases, one full of clothes
and one full of books, various books
that he wanted to give to people there, and have for himself,
and give away, and so on.
So we went through Vienna.
We were going to go to Vienna, rent a car,
drive across the bridge, and go into Bratislava.
That turned out not to be a good plan,
but I don't have time to tell you why.
Anyway, we were in this hotel, and Daniel
was a smoker, chain smoked.
So he was always looking for a light from everybody
all the time.
And he put down the suitcases on the sidewalk
in front of the hotel in Austria,
went looking for a light, and one of the suitcases
disappeared.
It was the one with the books in it.
So I wrote this poem.
I thought about that for years.
Daniel died suddenly in 2004.
And so I'm going to read a couple of poems in his honor
and for him.
But the first one is called The Lost Suitcase.
And it is about the experience of losing the suitcase.
He talked about that suitcase the whole trip.
I wish I had the suitcase.
The problem is I don't have the books.
This went on and on.
You probably traveled with somebody like that in your life
at some point.
But it became funny.
So this is The Lost Suitcase.
So it was with the suitcase left in front of the hotel,
cinched, broke and locked, papered with world ports,
carrying what mattered until then.
When turning your back to cup a match, it was taken,
and the thief expecting valuables
instead found books written between wars.
Gold attic light, mechanical birds singing,
and the chronicle of your country's
final hours what, by means of notes, you hoped to become.
A noun on paper, paper dark with nouns.
Swallows darting through a basilica, your hands
up in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows
breathing shallowly, where you had lain a ghost in a hospital
gown and hear your voice principled,
tender, scoffing through a fence woven with pine boughs.
Writing is older than glass but younger than music,
older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope.
Dear one who even in speaking is silent,
for years, I have searched, usually while asleep,
when I have found the suitcase, open, collecting snow,
still holding your vade mecum of the infinite, your dictionary
of the no-longer-spoken, a commonplace of wounds casually
inflicted, and the slender ledger of truly heroic acts.
Gone is your atlas of countries unmarked by war.
Absent, your manual for the preservation of ours.
The incunabulum is lost, both your earliest
book and a hatching place for your mechanical birds,
but the collection of apercus having
to do with light laying its eggs in your eyes
was found along with the prophecy
that all mass murders were early omens.
In an antique bookshop, I found your catechism
of atrophied faiths.
So I lay you to rest without your pslater, nor the monograph
wherein you state your most unequivocal and hard-won
proposition, that everything must happen
but to whom doesn't matter.
Here are your books as if they were burning, being there now
and wake to tell me who you were.