His head is missing
where head meets head,
step in step, shoulder to shoulder
and ever onward nonstop
with a pocketful of leaflets
and a product made of hops.
Where it’s sweetness and light
only to start,
since one crowd quickly
mixes with the next,
and who is to say
on the following day,
whose flowers, whose bricks,
whose huzzahs, whose sticks.
Unremarked.
Unspectacular.
He’s employed by City Sanitation.
At first light
from the site of the event
he sweeps up, carries off, tosses in the truck,
what’s been hammered onto half-dead trees,
trampled into the exhausted grass.
Tattered banners,
broken bottles,
burned effigies,
gnawed bones,
rosaries, whistles, and condoms.
Once he found a dove cage in the bushes.
He took it home
so he could
keep it empty.
Confessions of a Reading Machine
I, Number Three Plus Four Divided by Seven,
am renowned for my vast linguistic knowledge.
I now recognize thousands of languages
employed by extinct people
in their histories.
Everything that they recorded with their signs,
even when crushed under layers of disasters,
I extract, reconstruct
in its original form.
Not to boast,
but I even read lava
and scan ashes.
I explain on a screen
each object mentioned,
when it was produced,
and what from, and what for.
And solely on my own initiative,
I peruse the occasional letter
and correct its
spelling errors.
I admit—certain words
do cause me difficulty.
For example I still cannot explain precisely
the states called “feelings.”
Likewise “soul,” a peculiar expression.
I’ve determined for now that it is a kind of fog
purportedly more lasting than mortal organisms.
But the word “am” gives me the most trouble.
It appears to be an ordinary function,
conducted daily, but not collectively,
in the present prehistoric tense,
specifically, in the continuous,
although as we know discontinued long ago.
But will this do for a definition?
I feel rumbling in my linkages and grinding of my screws.
My button to Head Office smokes but won’t light up.
Perhaps my pal Two Fifths of Zero Fractured by Half
will provide brotherly assistance.
True, he’s a known lunatic,
but he’s got ideas.
There Are Those Who
There are those who conduct life more precisely.
They keep order within and around them.
A way for everything, and a right answer.
They guess straight off who’s with who, who’s got who,
to what end, in what direction.
They set their stamp on single truths,
toss unnecessary facts into the shredder
and unfamiliar persons
into previously designated files.
They think as long as it takes,
not a second more,
since doubt lies lurking behind that second.
And when they’re dismissed from existence,
they leave their place of work
through the appropriately marked exit.
Sometimes I envy them
—it passes, luckily.
Chains
A scorching day, a doghouse and a dog on a chain.
A full dish of water a few steps off.
But the chain is too short and the dog can’t reach.
Let’s add one more detail to the picture,
the much longer,
less visible chains
that allow us freely to pass by.
At the Airport
They run to each other with open arms,
laughing, calling: At last! At last!
Both in heavy winter wraps,
thick caps,
scarves,
gloves,
boots,
but only for us.
For each other—naked.
Compulsion
We eat another life so as to live.
A corpse of pork with departed cabbage.
Every menu is an obituary.
Even the kindest of souls
must consume, digest something killed
so that their warm hearts
won’t stop beating.
Even the most lyrical of poets.
Even the strictest ascetics
chew and swallow something
that once kept itself growing.
I can’t quite reconcile this with good gods.
Unless they’re naïve,
unless they’re gullible,
and gave all power over the world to nature.
And she, frenzied, sends us hunger,
and where hunger begins,
innocence ends.
Hunger instantly joins forces with the senses:
taste, smell, and touch, and sight,
since we don’t fail to notice what dishes
are served on which plates.
Even hearing plays a part
in what takes place,
since cheerful chatter often rises at the table.
Everyone Sometime
Everyone sometime has somebody close die,
between to be or not to be
he’s forced to choose the latter.
We can’t admit that it’s a mundane fact,
subsumed in the course of events,
in accordance with procedure:
sooner or later on the daily docket,
the evening, late night, or first dawn docket;
and explicit as an entry in an index,
as a statute in a codex,
on a calendar.
But such is the right and left of nature.
Such, willy-nilly, is her omen and her amen.
Such are her instruments and omnipotence.
And only on occasion
a small favor on her part—
she tosses our dead loved ones
into dreams.
Hand
Twenty-seven bones,
thirty-five muscles,
around two thousand nerve cells
in every tip of all five fingers.
It’s more than enough
to write Mein Kampf
or Pooh Corner.
Mirror
Yes, I remember that wall
in our demolished town.
It jutted almost up to the fifth floor.
A mirror hung on the fourth,
an impossible mirror,
unshattered, firmly attached.
It didn’t reflect anybody’s face,
no hands arranging hair,
no door across the room,
nothing you could call
a place.
As if it were on vacation—
the living sky gazed in it,
busy clouds in the wild air,
the dust of rubble washed by shining rains,
birds in flight, stars, sunrises.
And like any well-made object,
it functioned flawlessly,
with an expert lack of astonishment.
While Sleeping
I dreamed I was looking for something,
maybe hi
dden somewhere or lost
under the bed, under the stairs,
under an old address.
I dug through wardrobes, boxes and drawers
pointlessly packed with stuff and nonsense.
I pulled from my suitcases
the years and journeys I’d picked up.
I shook from my pockets
withered letters, litter, leaves not addressed to me.
I ran panting
through comforting, discomfiting
displaces, places.
I floundered through tunnels of snow
and unremembrance.
I got stuck in thorny thickets
and conjectures.
I swam through air
and the grass of childhood.
I hustled to finish up
before the outdated dusk fell,
the curtain, silence.
In the end I stopped knowing
what I’d been looking for so long.
I woke up.
Looked at my watch.
The dream took not quite two and a half minutes.
Such are the tricks to which time resorts
ever since it started stumbling
on sleeping heads.
Reciprocity
There are catalogs of catalogs.
There are poems about poems.
There are plays about actors played by actors.
Words used to clarify words.
Brains occupied with studying brains.
There are griefs as infectious as laughter.
Papers emerging from waste papers.
Seen glances.
Conditions conditioned by the conditional.
Large rivers with major contributions from small ones.
Forests grown over and above by forests.
Machines designed to make machines.
Dreams that wake us suddenly from dreams.
Health needed for regaining health.
Stairs leading as much up as down.
Glasses for finding glasses.
Inspiration born of expiration.
And even if only from time to time
hatred of hatred.
All in all,
ignorance of ignorance
and hands employed to wash hands.
To My Own Poem
Best case scenario—
you’ll be, my poem, read attentively,
discussed, remembered.
Worst comes to worst,
only read.
A third option—
actually written,
but tossed into the trash a moment later.
The fourth and final possibility—
you slip away unwritten,
happily humming something to yourself.
Map
Flat as the table
it’s placed on.
Nothing moves beneath it
and it seeks no outlet.
Above—my human breath
creates no stirring air
and leaves its total surface
undisturbed.
Its plains, valleys are always green,
uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,
while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue
beside the tattered shores.
Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.
A few trees stand for ancient forests,
you couldn’t lose your way among them.
In the east and west,
above and below the equator—
quiet like pins dropping,
and in every black pinprick
people keep on living.
Mass graves and sudden ruins
are out of the picture.
Nations’ borders are barely visible
as if they wavered—to be or not.
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
Translator’s Afterword
Szymborska addresses a late verse to a poem that may itself be “tossed into the trash a moment later.” Most of her poems ended their careers in just this way, according to longtime friends: they never made it as far as the printed page. Szymborska herself never compiled her own Collected Poems. But the various Polish Selected Poems over the years suggest what such a volume might have looked like. She continued to winnow the work even after it had appeared in one collection or another. The purely comic works—the limericks, the “nursery rhymes” (rymowanki), the “eavesdroppings” (posłuchańce), and so on—were kept strictly segregated from the poems proper. We’ve followed her lead in this.
She also excluded most of her early poetry. Here too we’ve followed her lead. Marina Tsvetaeva speaks of “poets with a history and poets without a history.” Szymborska was a poet with a history in Tsvetaeva’s sense. It took her three volumes—an unpublished postwar collection and two Socialist Realist volumes from the early fifties—to become the poet Wisława Szymborska, or so her own editing suggests. We have translated all the early poems that she continued to include in one Selected Poems after another. And we have translated virtually all the poems from her published collections beginning with Calling Out to Yeti (1957), with the exception of a very few poems that Szymborska herself conceded were untranslatable. “You’re lucky,” she said about one of them, “you only wasted three weeks on it. It took the Dutch translator six months to give up.”