measureless thickets of nettles
and the timid wood owl’s nightly sobs.
Our street, empty on Sunday,
the red neo-Gothic church
that didn’t take kindly to mystics,
burdocks whispering in German,
and the alcoholic’s confession
before the altar of a white wall,
and stones, and rain, and puddles
in which gold glistened.
Now I’m sure that I’d know
how to be a child, I’d know
how to see the frost-covered trees,
how to live holding still.
1943: WERNER HEISENBERG PAYS A VISIT TO HANS FRANK IN KRAKOW
It was a difficult visit, though elementary particles
never commented on current events.
Hans Frank, a subtle connoisseur of art, a murderer,
had been his older brother’s classmate.
What they shared was a love of music.
You don’t choose your brothers, or their friends.
He couldn’t quite see why Frank had picked
the royal castle for his residence in Krakow.
The passersby struck him as sad,
they moved like black puppets,
above, the clouds were ominous, violet,
below, the city like a frosted mirror.
It was December, a frosted month.
The elementary particles never spoke.
He gave a lecture (just for Germans).
He couldn’t understand those clouds,
that mirror; fortunately other matters soon
absorbed him: his homeland was in flames.
Those dark streets were not his homeland.
Those leafless trees, that chill, the women wrapped
in shawls and scarves—it must have been a dream.
He skipped this episode in his memoirs,
insignificant, after all. What goes unsaid
should stay unsaid. So he thought.
CONVERSATION
There, where you can see the Earth
may actually be round: a narrow path
between idyllic fields outside of town,
on the horizon, a sliver of church tower
mercilessly sliced by a distant hill,
alders above a muddy stream,
in the water Canadian thyme
(which is an invasive species)
and the porcelain shards of a plate,
I sometimes walked there with my father (my mother,
as we knew, didn’t go on longer expeditions),
in the fall or spring, when trees
were momentarily content.
Only now, or so I think,
do I approach the proper tone,
only now could I talk with my parents,
but I can’t hear their answers.
CHACONNE
FOR JAUME VALLCORBA
We know, everyone knows, that he spoke with the Lord
in countless cantatas and passions, but there’s also
the chaconne from the second partita for solo violin:
here, perhaps only here, Bach talks about his life,
he suddenly, unexpectedly, reveals himself,
swiftly, violently casts out joy and sorrow
(since it’s all we’ve got), the pain of losing his wife and children,
the grief that time must take everything,
but also the ecstasy of hours without end
when, in some dim church’s musty air,
lonely, like the pilot of a plane delivering mail
to foreign countries, he played the organ and sensed beneath his fingers
its pneumatic acquiescence, its rapture, its trembling,
or when he heard the choir’s single, mighty voice as if
all human strife were gone for good
—after all, we dream about it too,
telling the truth about our life,
and we keep trying awkwardly,
and we’ll go on trying, but where are they,
where can our cantatas be, tell me,
where is the other side.
SENIOR DANCE
Or how, before the senior dance, my mother went to the meeting
where we discussed the evening’s “artistic program”
and how her ideas struck us
as feeble, old-fashioned,
as if she, not we, were taking the final exams
she’d already passed before the war,
with honors, as I remember,
and also the war, all signs suggest
she passed it pretty well too, and how then,
during that meeting, she embarrassed me—
whereas I couldn’t admire her during the war
for different reasons, completely different,
and how that asymmetry, that strong asymmetry,
for many years, for decades,
didn’t permit me to see her
in truth’s sharp light,
sharp and complex,
complex and just,
just and unattainable,
unattainable and splendid.
SHELF
JERZY HORDYŃSKI (1919–1998)
He was a poet of bitterness and rapture (more bitterness).
I think he was a very good poet.
I found one of his books in the Regenstein Library:
Selected Poems. This was why he’d been chosen.
He left poems chosen by others.
His biography: a bow drawn between Lvov and Rome.
Three years in a Soviet camp, several decades
near Campo dei Fiori.
From Rome he kept going back to Krakow,
and then from Krakow back to Rome.
I didn’t know him, though I once spotted
his laughing face in a crowd of writers,
and remembered it.
If you accept the minimalist definition,
he was happy—he died in his own bed.
Now he lives on a library shelf
like a hiker bivouacking in high mountains.
A faded cover hides bitterness and experience.
A faded canvas cover: a neighboring volume,
smaller scale, has left its dark
trace upon it—so much tenderness in the touch
of two unread books.
JULY
July, the blackbirds have stopped singing.
I sit on a bench by the bank of a slow river,
I hear the hate-filled quarreling of lovers,
whom I don’t know and never will.
Sweaty athletes run along the avenue.
The morning sun shines indifferently
on the calm dark water
that is apathy personified.
A little boy carries a plastic bag
bearing the garish logo Men’s Health,
souls almost never meet,
bodies do battle cloaked in darkness.
A rain frail as haiku arrives in the night.
Light bells mumble at dawn.
While we’re alive.
UNDERGROUND TRAINS
There are paintings that show suffering
and a candle’s small flame; there are unhappy people
who seek comfort in vain
like a mailman wading through snowstorms,
there is music growing in jungles of silence,
there are executioners, dim streets, blind windows,
days that seem like festivals of cruelty.
There are those who cry hopelessly in cramped waiting rooms,
there are underground trains, harsh accusations,
also the ordinary boredom of talking sports,
and the terror of long evenings, and the shrieks of drunks—
and occasional moments of revelation,
when chestnut flowers proudly glow
and fledgling thrushes stumble
through the grass blades, stunned
by
a May garden’s Heraclitean blaze.
NIGHT, SEA
At night the sea is dark, bleak,
and speaks in a hoarse whisper
Thus we recognize
its shameful secret: it shines
with reflected light
At night, it’s as poor as we are,
black, orphaned;
it patiently awaits the sun’s return
THAT DAY
That day, when word comes
that someone close has died, a friend, or someone
we didn’t know, but admired from a distance
—the first moment, the first hours: he or she is gone,
it seems certain, inescapable, maybe even
irrefutable, we trust (reluctantly) whoever tells us,
heartbroken, over the phone, or maybe some announcer
from a careless radio, but we can’t believe it,
nothing on earth could convince us,
since he still hasn’t died (for us), not at all,
he (she) no longer is, but hasn’t yet vanished
for good, just the opposite, he is, so it seems, at the strongest
point of his existence, he grows,
though he is no more, he still speaks,
though he’s gone mute, he still prevails,
though he’s lost, lost the battle—with what?
time? the body?—but no, it’s not true, he has triumphed,
he’s achieved completion, absolute completion,
he’s so complete, so great, so splendid, he no longer fits
inside life, he shatters life’s frail vessel,
he towers over the living, as if made
from a different substance, the strongest bronze,
but at the same time we begin to suspect,
we’re afraid, we guess, we know,
that silence approaches
and helpless grief
SANDALS
The sandals I bought many years ago
for twenty euros
in the Greek village of Theologos
on the island of Thassos
haven’t worn out at all,
they’re just like new.
I must have gotten,
quite accidentally,
a hermit’s, a saint’s sandals.
How they must suffer,
carrying an ordinary sinner.
REHEARSAL
Or when she said: you shouldn’t
care what other people do—
but after all she cared …
When she corrected my compositions.
When she quoted, almost always incorrectly,
what Joseph Conrad
once said on the nature of writing,
when she got lost in thought, but never completely,
when she walked down a street of our provincial
town as if it were Paris,
when she looked at me curiously,
and I wasn’t sure if
she was looking at me or at some
ideal notion of a son, when she got sick,
as usual excessively, and then, when
she really started getting sick
and I thought that it was still
just a rehearsal, but it was already
the beginning of dying
(end italics).
WHITE SAILS
Eugène Delacroix watched
the steamships on the Canal La Manche,
which had slowly, systematically begun
to replace the frigates with their billowing white sails,
and he sadly noted in his diary:
everything around us falls prey to degradation,
the world’s beauty vanishes for good;
new inventions turn up
ceaselessly, they may be useful,
but they’re endlessly banal
(iron railroads, for example,
locomotives heavy as a hangman’s hand).
He himself painted fine horses and fierce lions,
with muscles taut under their short coats,
and the uniforms of Spahis, a lot of red, which
could be blood or exotic textiles,
and light dancing on a saber’s blade
—but now only the machines remained,
gray machines and oil stains
on the sand, on the rubbish (but also blood).
There’s so much new reality,
and the marvelous has gotten shy,
it’s hard to locate, to remember,
to record, but still the high,
white, skyscraping clouds,
proud, haughty cumuli, they sail
over France and over Germany and over Poland,
they sail over us, faithful migrating birds
hide in them, cranes and bullfinches,
swallows dwell in them, orioles, swifts
and also the iron ships of the air,
which kill or save us.
They circle overhead,
death and salvation.
RADIO STREET
While she was dying in the hospital in Gliwice,
the hospital by Radio Street, where
World War Two in some sense had begun,
I wasn’t by her bed.
Unconscious, absent,
where did she wander then, no one knows.
Maybe that was the war’s true end,
since wars conclude with death and proclamations,
though silence always has the last word.
When she died, spring was just beginning,
snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) bloomed,
flower-scouts,
both delicate and strong.
MY FAVORITE POETS
My favorite poets
never met
They lived in different countries
and different times
surrounded by ordinariness
by good people and bad
like an apple in an orchard
They loved clouds
they lifted their heads
a great armada
of light and shade
drifted over them
a film was showing
that still hasn’t ended
Moments of bitterness
passed swiftly
likewise moments of joy
Sometimes they knew
what the world was
and wrote hard words
on soft paper
Sometimes they knew nothing
and were like children
on a school playground
when the first drop
of warm rain
descends
III
MOURNING FOR A LOST FRIEND
My friend hasn’t died, my friend lives
But I can’t meet him, I can’t see him
We can’t have a chat
My friend is hiding from me
He’s been seized by a deep political tide
My friend now knows the answer to every question
And can trace the source of every answer
My friend thinks that I’m
frivolous, lost, reckless,
hopelessly adrift in floods
of irresponsible epithets
in ominous thickets of ellipses
My friend knows what anchors our life
what is an urgent hyperbole and what is merely a litotes
My friend never leaves his house
at night not even in May when all
the houses sing and swallows vanish in the sky
for a long time and come back happy
carefree, renewed
My friend fell in love with the nation
but the nation is serious and never strolls even
in May it keeps watch, my friend
has no time for metaphors or pars pro toto
My friend is hiding from me
My friend lives
JUNGLE
But it’s pur
e accident: a Silesian city,
slag heaps on the skyline, on the street old people
speak a language carried from the East,
then discovering music, Brubeck, Charlie Parker,
a Rachmaninoff concert and the Seventh Symphony,
discovering something different, completely different,
music strange and lovely from the start, like Greta Garbo
in a spy film, surrounded by ordinary types,
and the first poetry that spoke to me,
a bookshop display, like an auction of fine manners,
but also the fat priest in a stained cassock
and the teacher of false history with a vulture’s sharp face,
school dances where the girls, so ordinary,
were suddenly transformed into enigmatic beings,
the main street (we saw it as a fragment
of a great metropolis), and suburban gardens, smelling
first of weeds and then, in autumn, of bonfires’ sustaining smoke.
This is exactly why that strange arrangement of black
and white, green and blue—mostly black
—not ideas, not the serenity of some philosopher’s study,
not an engineer’s sketches, or my father’s stenography,
just chaos, a chaos of stains, sounds, and scents,
a jungle, a splendid chaos that you spend
the rest of your life trying to comprehend, to organize,
in vain, since there’s never enough time,
enough attention, and so it remains, slipshod, a rough draft,
covered in slanting, violet lines,
a rough draft, whose cardboard covers
curl like a bat’s wings, a notebook
that fades and vanishes in the abyss
of the bottom drawer, vanishes, but is in fact
immortal.
RUTH
IN MEMORY OF RUTH BUCZYŃSKA
She survived the war in Tarnopol. In darkness and in semi-darkness. In fear.
She was afraid of rats and heavy boots, loud conversations, screams.
She died just now, in darkness, in a hospital ward’s white quiet.
She was a Jew. Sometimes she didn’t know what that meant.
It’s simple and incomprehensible, like algebra.
At times she tried to work it through. The Gestapo knew exactly what it meant
to be a Jew. The great philosophical tradition helped,
definitions sharp as knives, direct as a Buddhist arrow.