Dancing in Odessa Quotes

“Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year
is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“But in the secret history of anger--one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“One would think of a boy laying
syllables with his tongue

onto a woman’s skin: those are lines
sewn entirely of silence.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“All that is musical in us is memory.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“It was August. August! The light in the trees, full of fury.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“It was April. The
sun washed the
balconies, April.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging
this dream. Her love

is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries
in my mouth.

On my brother’s head: not a single
gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son.

And my father is singing
to his six-year-old silence.

This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.
The darkness, a magician, finds quarters

behind our ears. We don't know what life is,
who makes it, the reality is thick

with longing. We put it up to our lips
and drink.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“Time, my twin, take me by the hand
through the streets of your city;
my days, your pigeons, are fighting for crumbs—”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“Envoi
You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa.
—a fortune teller, 1992


What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,
the birds force themselves into my lines—
the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa
and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals,
bless the sky inside his body,
the sky my medicine, the sky my country.

I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order.
The wind, my master
insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,—

bless one woman’s brows, her lips
and their salt, bless the roundness
of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern
by which I live my life.

You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed

and I am a man arguing with this woman”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“I am a dance professor,” he introduced himself. “I know different dances—polka and tango and flamenco, a dance of lust and of joy, of wife or no wife.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

“A woman asks at night for a story with a happy ending. I have none. A refugee, I go home and become a ghost searching the houses I lived in. They say— the father of my father of his father of his father was a prince who married a Jewish girl against the Church’s will and his father’s will and the father of his father. Losing all, eager to lose: the estate, ships, hiding this ring (his wedding ring), a ring my father handed to my brother, then took. Handed, then took, hastily. In a family album we sit like the mannequins of school children.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa