lover and crusader, who campaigned
ceaselessly for his unlikely party
(name: Poetry versus the Infinite,
or PVI, if you prefer abbreviations).
In every city and in every port
he had his agents; he sometimes sang his poems
before an avid crowd that didn’t catch
a word. Afterwards, exhausted, he’d smoke a Gauloise
on a cement embankment, gulls circling overhead,
as if above the Baltic, back home.
Vast intelligence. Favorite topic: time
versus thought, which chases phantoms,
revives Mary Stuart, Daedalus, Tiberius.
Poetry should be like horse racing;
wild horses, with jockeys made of marble,
an unseen finish line lies hidden in the clouds.
Please remember: irony and pain;
the pain had lived long inside his heart
and kept on growing — as though
each elegy he wrote adored him
obsessively and wanted
him alone to be its hero—
but ladies and gentlemen — your patience,
please, we’re nearly through — I don’t know
quite how to put it; something like tenderness,
the almost timid smile,
the momentary doubt, the hesitation,
the tiny pause in flawless arguments.
SELF-PORTRAIT, NOT WITHOUT DOUBTS
Enthusiasm moves you in the morning,
by evening you lack the nerve
even to glance at the blackened page.
Always too much or too little,
just like those writers
who sometimes bother you:
some so modest, minimal,
and underread,
that you want to call out—
hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful,
the world is rich and full of history.
Others, proud and serious, are distinguished
by their erudition
— gentlemen, you too must die someday,
you say (in thought).
The territory of truth
is plainly small,
narrow as a path above a cliff.
Can you stick
to it?
Perhaps you’ve strayed already.
Do you hear laughter
or apocalyptic trumpets?
Perhaps both,
a dissonance, ungodly grating—
a knife that skates
along the glass and whistles gladly.
CONVERSATION
A chat with friends, sometimes
about nothing, TV or the movies,
or more important conversations, earnest talk
on torture, suffering, and hunger,
but also on easy amorous adventures,
“she said this, so he thought that.”
Perhaps we talk too much,
like the French tourists I overheard
on a Greek mountain’s steep slope,
careless in the Delphic labyrinth
(caustic comments on the hotel dinner).
We don’t, we can’t know,
if we’ll be saved,
if our microscopic souls,
which have committed no evil
and likewise done no good,
will answer a question posed in an unknown tongue.
Will poetry’s epiphany suffice,
delight in the staccato of past music,
the sight of a river and air entering
August’s warm towers,
and longing for the sea, always fresh, new.
Or moments of celebration and the sense
they bring, that something has suddenly
returned and we can’t live without it (but we can),
do they outweigh the years of emptiness and anger,
months of forgetfulness, impatience—
we don’t know, we can’t know,
if we’ll be saved
when time ends.
OLD MARX
He can’t think.
London is damp,
in every room someone coughs.
He never did like winter.
He rewrites past manuscripts
time and again, without passion.
The yellow paper
is fragile as consumption.
Why does life race
stubbornly toward destruction?
But spring returns in dreams,
with snow that doesn’t speak
in any known tongue.
And where does love fit
within his system?
Where you find blue flowers.
He despises anarchists,
idealists bore him.
He receives reports from Russia,
far too detailed.
The French grow rich.
Poland is common and quiet.
America never stops growing.
Blood is everywhere,
perhaps the wallpaper needs changing.
He begins to suspect
that poor humankind
will always trudge
across the old earth
like the local lunatic
shaking her fists
at an unseen God.
TO THE SHADE OF ALEKSANDER WAT
Newly arrived at infinity — which turned out to resemble an elongated, vastly improved Wolomin Street — he received, upon entering, a gift in the shape of Schumann’s music, bursting with rapture and chaos (the first movement of the first sonata for violin and piano as performed by two insufferable, but, we must concede, very gifted cherubim).
Later a certain learned rabbi parsed the distinctions between a silken and a stony death, and the famed theologian P. gave a lengthy lecture on “The Old, New, and Even Newer Testaments in Wat’s Postwar Opus.”
“Pain as a Pivotal Experience” and “An Inborn Gift for Synthesizing Unlike Objects” were the topics of other talks, which were received less attentively since afterward eternity was scheduled to perform and an orchestra of swarthy gypsies in snug tuxes played without pausing, without end.
NIGHT IS A CISTERN
Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads
with the loud rustling of endless grief.
Who are you, walking in this worried crowd.
And who will you become, who will you be
when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round.
Night is a cistern. The last pairs dance at a country ball.
High waves cry from the sea, the wind rocks pines.
An unknown hand draws the dawn’s first stroke.
Lamps fade, a motor chokes.
Before us, life’s path, and instants of astronomy.
STORM
The storm had golden hair flecked with black
and moaned in a monotone, like a simple woman
giving birth to a future soldier, or a tyrant.
Vast clouds, multistoried ships
surrounded us, and lightning’s scarlet strands
scattered nervously.
The highway became the Red Sea.
We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.
You drove; I watched you with love.
EVENING, STARY SACZ
The sun sets behind the market square, and nettles reflect
the small town’s imperfections. Teapots whistle in the houses,
like many trains departing simultaneously.
Bonfires flame on meadows and their long sighs
weave above the trees like drifting kites.
The last pilgrims return from church uncertainly.
TV sets awaken, and instantly know all,
like the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces.
Knives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings.
The sky grows darker; angels used to hide there,
but now it’s just a police sergeant on his departed motorcycle.