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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright Page
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I
NOWHERE
It was a day nowhere just after I got back from my father’s funeral,
a day between two continents; lost, I walked the streets
of Hyde Park catching shreds of American voices.
I belonged nowhere, I was free,
but if this is freedom, I thought, I’d rather be
a good king’s, a kindly emperor’s, captive;
leaves swam against red autumn’s current,
the wind yawned like a foxhound,
the cashier in a grocery store, nowhere,
couldn’t place my accent and asked “Where are you from?”
but I’d forgotten, I wanted to tell her
about my father’s death, then thought: I’m too old
to be an orphan; I was living
in Hyde Park, nowhere, “Where fun comes to die,”
as college students elsewhere said, a little enviously.
It was a faceless Monday, craven,
vague, a day without inspiration, nowhere, even grief
didn’t take a radical shape; it strikes me
that on such days even Chopin would commit himself
at best to giving lessons
to wealthy, aristocratic pupils;
suddenly I remembered what Doctor Gottfried Benn,
the Berlin dermatologist, said about him
in one of my favorite poems:
“when Delacroix expounded his theories,
it made him nervous, he for his part
could offer no explanation of the Nocturnes,”*
these lines, both ironic and tender,
always filled me with joy,
almost like Chopin’s music itself.
I knew one thing: night too needed no
explanation, likewise pain, nowhere.
POETS ARE PRESOCRATICS
Poets are Presocratics. They understand nothing.
They listen to the whispers of broad, lowland rivers.
They admire birds in flight, calm suburban gardens,
High-speed trains rushing breathlessly ahead.
The scent of fresh, hot bread drifting/wafting from a bakery
stops them in their tracks,
as if they’d just remembered something vital.
A mountain stream murmurs, a philosopher bows to the wild water.
Little girls play with dolls, a black cat waits impatiently.
The quiet above August fields, when the swallows fly away.
Cities too have their dreams.
Poets stroll along dirt roads. The road has no end.
Sometimes they prevail, then everything stands still
—but their reign is short-lived.
A rainbow appears, and fear vanishes.
They know nothing, they jot down isolated metaphors.
They bid the dead farewell, their lips move.
They watch as green leaves overtake old trees.
They’re long silent, then they sing and sing until their throats burst.
SUMMER ’95
It was summer on the Mediterranean, remember,
near Toulon, a dry summer, self-absorbed,
speaking some incomprehensible dialect,
so we caught only scraps of salty words,
it was summer in evening’s slant light, in the pale
stains of stars, when the buzz of countless
trifling conversations had died out and only
silence waited for a sleepy bird to speak,
summer in the daily explosion of noon, when even
the cicadas fainted, that summer, when the azure water
opened, welcoming, so welcoming
that we forgot completely about amphoras lying
for thousands of years on the sea bottom, in darkness,
in solitude; it was summer, remember,
when the privet leaves, always green, laughed,
it was July, when we first befriended
that little black cat
who seemed so intelligent to us,
it was the same summer when, in Srebrenica,
men and boys were being killed;
and there were countless dry shots,
and no doubt also heat and dust,
and cicadas, mortally afraid.
MARATHON
Marathoners, just after the race, proud and exhausted,
in capes blazoned with the name Bank of America
congregate on Chicago’s main street
like ancient heroes,
parade before Sunday strollers,
pose happily for photos, countless flashes
illuminate the air.
Then evening falls,
heroics slowly evaporate,
the good moon returns,
benign as always.
Purple clouds in the sky
can tell us nothing.
Once more the world hushes.
SUITCASE
Krakow was overcast that morning, the hills steamed.
It was raining in Munich, in valleys the Alps
lay hidden and heavy as stones.
Only in Athens did I glimpse the sun, it
turned the air, the whole air,
the whole immense flotilla of the air
to trembling gold.
As the religious writers say: I suddenly
became a new man.
I’m just a tourist in the visible world,
one of a thousand shadows
drifting through airports’ vast halls—
and my green suitcase, like a faithful dog, follows me
on little wheels.
I’m just an absentminded tourist
but I love the light.
MR. WLADZIU
Mr. Wladziu was a barber (haircuts, men’s and
women’s, on Karmelicka Street). Short and slight.
Interested in one thing only: angling.
He liked to talk about the ways of fish,
how drowsy they become in winter, when the cold
is biting, murderous, almighty,
how you must respect their sleep. They rest
then, lie in the dense water like clocks,
like new arrivals from another planet. They’re different.
Mr. Wladziu even represented Poland
once or twice in angling,
but something went wrong, I don’t remember what,
too hot, or maybe rain, or low-lying clouds.
By the time he got to the doctor, it was too late.
Karmelicka Street didn’t notice his departure:
the trams shriek on the curve,
the chestnuts bloom ecstatically each year.
MANDELSTAM IN THEODOSIA
Let me go; I wasn’t made for jail.
—OSIP MANDELSTAM
(arrested in Theodosia in 1920)
Mandel
stam was not mistaken, he wasn’t made
for jail, but jails were made
for him, countless camps and prisons
waited for him patiently, freight trains
and filthy barracks, railroad switches and
gloomy waiting rooms kept waiting
till he came, secret police in leather
jackets waited for him and party
hacks with ruddy faces.
“I will not see the famous Phaedra,”
he wrote. The Black Sea didn’t shed
black tears, pebbles on the shore
tumbled submissively, as the wave desired,
clouds sailed swiftly across the inattentive earth.
FULL-BLOWN EPIC
Each poem, even the briefest,
may grow into a full-blown epic,
it may even seem ready to explode,
since it conceals everywhere immense
stores of wonder and cruelty patiently
awaiting our gaze, which may release them,
unfold them, just as a highway’s bow unfolds in summer—
but we don’t know what will prevail, if our imagination
can keep pace with its rich reality,
and so each poem has to speak
of the world’s wholeness; alas, our
minds are elsewhere, our lips are
thin and sift images
like Molière’s miser.
THE EARTH
Some spoke Polish, others German,
only tears were cosmopolitan.
Wounds didn’t heal, they had long memories.
Coal shone as always.
No one wanted to die, but life was harder.
Much strangeness, strangeness didn’t speak.
We arrived like tourists, with suitcases—
we stayed on.
We didn’t belong to that earth,
but it received us openheartedly—
it received you both.
KINGFISHER
As kingfishers catch fire …
—G. M. HOPKINS
I saw how the kingfisher in flight just above the sea’s surface,
a flight as straight as Euclid’s life, straight and violent,
exploded suddenly into every color, I saw how the world’s wild light
seized its wings, but not to kill it, just to make certain
that this iridescent bullet safely strikes
the rocky shore, the nest that’s hidden there,
a flame, so it seems, may also be
a shelter, a dwelling, in which
thoughts ignite but are not destroyed,
a prison that frees us from indifference,
a mighty oxymoron,
sometimes a poem too,
almost a sonnet.
ABOUT MY MOTHER
I could never say anything about my mother:
how she kept saying, you’ll be sorry someday,
when I’m not around anymore, and how I didn’t believe
in either “I’m not” or “anymore,”
how I liked watching as she read bestsellers,
always flipping to the last chapter first,
how in the kitchen, convinced it’s not her
proper place, she made Sunday coffee,
or, even worse, filet of cod,
how she studied the mirror while expecting guests,
making the face that best kept her
from seeing herself as she was (I take
after her in this and other failings),
how she went on at length about things
that weren’t her strong suit and how I stupidly
teased her, for example, when she
compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,
and I said, cruelly, but you know he
had talent, and how she forgave it all
and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston
to her funeral and they showed a comedy
in flight and I wept with laughter
and grief, and how I couldn’t say anything
and still can’t.
GRAŻYNA
Back then Gliwice had a cinema, Grażyna,
christened in honor of another cinema—
in Lvov, on Sapieha Street—
and Coldwater Street, named in honor
of faded maps, now vanished,
still runs along the oily, black river
(runs, or maybe just walks calmly);
other efforts to change this town
into that one were also undertaken,
countless bold experiments
that never worked,
the alchemists labored late into the night,
the philosopher’s stone was sought,
spirits and places were summoned up,
powers were invoked, both high and low,
but forgetting triumphed in the end,
forgetting, round as a ball,
sweet as a strawberry, final
as judgment.
WE KNOW WHAT ART IS
We know what art is, we recognize the sense of happiness
it gives, difficult at times, bitter, bittersweet,
sometimes only sweet, like Turkish pastry. We honor art,
since we’d like to know what our life is.
We live, but don’t always know what that means.
So we travel, or just open a book at home.
We recall a momentary vision as we stood before a painting,
we may also remember clouds drifting through the sky.
We shiver when we hear a cellist play
Bach’s suites, when we catch a piano singing.
We know what great poetry can be, a poem
written three millennia ago, or yesterday.
But we don’t know why a concert sometimes
fails to move us. We don’t see why
some books seem to offer us redemption
while others can’t conceal their rage. We know, but then we forget.
We can only guess why a work of art may suddenly
close up, slam shut, like an Italian museum on strike (sciopero).
Why our souls also close at times, and slam shut, like
an Italian museum on strike (sciopero).
Why art goes mute when terrible things happen,
why we don’t need it then—as if terrible things
had overwhelmed the world, filled it completely, totally, to the roof.
We don’t know what art is.
VENICE, NOVEMBER
Venice, November, black rain, Piranesi
in San Giorgio Maggiore still dreams his
terrifying dreams, which have long since
come to pass and today seem to bore
young visitors a bit. They’d prefer
other nightmares, long for new
fears, unexpected horrors.
The black rain still falls and Venice,
bent, stooped, uncertain,
dressed in the tattered fur
of Mauritanian façades and lace,
slowly slips into winter
like a medic who keeps knocking softly,
persistently on the palace chapel door.
NORTHERN SEA
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free
—ELIZABETH BISHOP
But maybe we just pretended to know nothing.
Maybe that was easiest, considering the vastness of experience,
and suffering (others’ suffering usually).
Maybe there was even a touch of laziness,
a hint of indifference. Maybe we thought:
we’re better off being Socrates’ distant epigones
than admitting that we know a thing or two.
Maybe on long walks, when the earth
and trees loomed, when we began to understand,
our daring frightened us.
Maybe our knowledge is bitter, too bitter,
that has swallowed up so many ships,
but stays hungry.
PLAYING HOOKY
But the kingdom of the dead may be right here,
I thought; this was by the Vistula,
among weeds and dandelions and crushed Coca-Cola cans,
which must have suffered much,
in March, when young, reckless shoots of grass
set out trustfully along an endless road
and schoolboys playing hooky drink cheap wine
in first, chaotic ecstasy.
So I thought then, but now
I don’t know how to end this poem.
There is another kingdom, after all,
to which we belong,
visible and friendly,
the vast kingdom of the living,
but we’re unable to see it—
because it’s in us,
because it’s infinite
and elastic.
And it holds alarm clocks, which sob,
and jazz records made of vinyl,
buttons, gooseberries,
and black lilac.
RACHMANINOFF
When I listened to the Third Concerto then,
I still didn’t know that experts considered it
too conservative (I hadn’t realized
that art contains not only art, but also hatreds, fanatical
debates, curses worthy of religious wars),
I heard the promise of things to come,
omens of complex happiness, love, sketches
of landscapes I would later recognize,
a glimpse of purgatory, heaven, wanderings, and finally
maybe even something like forgiveness.
As I listen now to Martha Argerich play
the Third Concerto, I marvel at her mastery,
her passion, her inspiration, while the boy
I once was labors to understand
what came to pass, and what’s gone. What lives.
II
CHILDHOOD
Give me a childhood again
—JOHN BURNSIDE
Give me back my childhood,
republic of loquacious sparrows,
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