Red poppies and black snow.
The smile of a woman, no longer young, reading on the train to Warsaw.
Oh, so you’re the specialist in high style?
Delphi, full of tourists, open to mysteries.
The sea was angry at midnight: furious, to be frank.
And the Holocaust Museum in Washington — my childhood, my wagons,
my rust.
May evening: antennas in the rain.
Down Kanonicza Street screaming you sonofabitch.
Dolphins near Freeport: their favorite, ancient motion, like the symbol
scholars use for iambs.
A theater too tiny to hold Bergman’s film.
Escape from one prison to the next.
After the announcement “zurückbleiben” at a subway stop in Berlin, a
quiet moment — the sound of absence.
Swifts in Krakow, stirred by summer, whistle loudly.
A weary verb goes back to the dictionary at night.
Mama always peeked at the novel’s last page — to see what happened …
Truth is Catholic, the search for truth is Protestant (W.H. Auden).
Some experts predict that by the twenty-first century’s end people will
no longer die.
Open up.
Pay the phone and gas, return the books, write Clare.
In the plane after dinner two pudgy theologians compare their pensions.
In Gliwice, Victory Street might have led to heaven but stops short, alas.
Will the escalator ever go where it takes us?
From a rushing train we saw fields and meadows — from the forest,
as from dreams, deer emerged.
Marble doesn’t talk to clay (to time).
The salesgirl in a shoe store on the rue du Commerce, Vietnamese,
she tells you kneeling, I come from boat people.
I switched on the shortwave radio: someone sobbing in Bolivia.
Christ’s face in S. Luigi dei Francesi.
One thing is sure: the world is alive and burns.
He read Hölderlin in a dingy waiting room.
Boat people — the only nation free of nationalism.
The spring rain’s indescribable freshness.
Sliced with a knife.
“There are gods here too.”
Fruit bursts.
I ask my father: “What do you do all day?” “I remember.”
Delivery cars on a Greek highway, trademark Metafora.
On the sea’s gleaming surface, a kayak, almost motionless — a compass
needle.
Remember the splendid cellist in a clown’s lounge coat?
At night the lights of a vast refinery — a city where nobody lives.
Why do these moments end so quickly? Don’t talk that way, speak
from within the moments.
Love for ordinary objects, unrequited.
Rowers on a green river, chasing time.
Poetry is joy hiding despair. But under the despair — more joy.
Speak from within.
It’s not about poetry.
Don’t speak, listen.
Don’t listen.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
Eternal Enemies
TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945. His previous books include Tremor, Canvas, Two Cities, Mysticism for Beginners, Another Beauty, Without End, and A Defense of Ardor—all published by FSG. He lives in Kraków, Paris, and Chicago.
CLARE CAVANAGH is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. She has translated numerous volumes of Polish poetry and prose, including the work of Wislawa Szymborska, and is working on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz, to be published by FSG.