—first came this poem, also unfinished—and couldn’t you finish it, see it through to the end—was it that hard?—then the dream, then—everything that came after. So knock yourself out now, dig deep, layer after layer, you pitiful, pitiful archeologine—just don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself, because nothing weakens you like self-pity). Who can tell us—poems, do they only predict or do they, God help us, construct our future for us—summoning from the teeming multitude of possibilities within it that one, which they name? And if this is really so—if we, blind maniacs, program our own lives in advance, pleased as punch at how cleverly we’ve written it all down!—and thus make our lives what they are, then this is a truly frightening gift, Lord, like a bomb in the hands of a five-year-old—and how does one pray to be released?
Who (what) writes through us?
Lord, I’m scared. I’ve never truly been scared before—not of external threats (those are nothing, there’s always a way out), I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid to trust my own gift. I no longer believe that it is—in Your hand.
Look down upon me. Please.
In the evenings she escapes to the library—mainly so that she doesn’t stay alone in the house, where despair waits for her in the gathering twilight in order to throw a black sack over her head—but the library can’t save her: none of those more or less well-written other lives, bound in folios with worn spines, that stretch on and on, row after row, from floor to ceiling on multi-storied shelving while she accrues mileage walking up and down in search of the volume that she’s decided she must read—like in the universal cemetery (gray sky, a limitless field out to the horizon of identical gray headstones, and even though you know that behind each there is a person hiding ready to hop out the minute you call him, donning a perfectly living and full-bodied shape, the mere astronomical quantity obliterates any sense in choosing one of them: how many of them, after all, will you be able to resurrect during the course of your life, and how many of these resurrected and read entities have meant anything for you? The most you can do—and that is the maximum!—is to join their monotonous ranks with yet another not particularly noteworthy slim volume, and the “date due” slips glued on the inside covers indifferently demonstrate the absurdity of this whole enterprise: according to them, in twenty years you turn out to be the fifth person at Harvard to borrow Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing—a novel that is mentioned in all literary handbooks and truly deserves it—and the second to fancy the Polish edition of Milosz’s work—whereas most of those recounted lives simply gather dust, like uncollected letters in the numbered pigeon holes of the “general delivery” window at the post office)—not one of those lives has any relevance to hers, not one answers the question that she cannot seem to avoid no matter which way she looks at it, no matter which direction her pathetic hopes turn in search of an excuse: why not now? immediately? why wait?
Beautiful children, we were to have beautiful children, an elite breed. Better not to recall that, right? Well, no, it doesn’t seem to even hurt anymore: you remember—but with your thoughts, not your feelings (hard to say which is worse!). What’s true is true, in slavery the nation degenerates—the crowds that fill Kyiv buses, all those stooped men with drawn, rumpled faces on bowed legs, the women buried under walrus-like gyration of raw-meat dough, young guys with retarded laughter and wolfish bite that bust in without regard to who’s ahead of them (if you don’t step aside—they’ll knock you off your feet and not look back), and the babes with the crudely painted masks over their skin (remove the makeup—and all you’ll find is a naked eggshell surface like in a De Chirico painting) and a persistent aura of some kind of clammy underbathedness—they’re like objects made without love, any which way just to get it over with: had to meet the quota at the end of the quarter, or needed to produce a child to get on the housing list, or simply fucked somewhere in the alleyway or, after some heavy boozing, in a train corridor (she actually rode one of those trains once, from Kyiv to Warsaw, going to a poetry festival—just imagine!—a fierce horde of contrabandists heaving bags, a third-class sleeper car, six open berths per compartment, baggage piled up to the ceiling—commodities, that’s how they called them, by their scientific name in reverence to our own Karly Marx—the stench of the toilet, the door from the sleeper car to the front corridor clung to one hinge, swinging open occasionally to the clatter beyond with a slow, slow creak, like the pain of grinding teeth, the accustomed yet still disgusted expression of the clean-shaven puppy mug of the Polish customs officer who collects—a bottle of vodka from each occupant of the przedział, and that’s not bad at all, the matrons who have just shed a few years from joy rush to assure her as they smooth out their outer garments—phew! we got through!—and pull, from their seemingly bottomless sweatpants, two more miraculously spared bottles of hooch, each of which will go for ten bucks in Chełm: you should see what happened to us at the Yahodyn crossing once, where they told us—we’ll take a woman for every bus, say yes and we’ve got a deal!—A-and what, did you do it?—Well, what else could we do?—at night she lay in the top berth listening to the cacophony of unevenly pitched snoring, painfully in love with her misfortunate people, and the people—they heard her and responded: a massive body loomed in the hushed darkness, a waft of heavy, aroused breathing against her face: “Mommy… baby… Cum’ere, you hear me? Hey, you hear me?”—getting more and more heated as he went—“Wat’s wrong? Let’s go pokey-pokey, huh?” an arm plunged under the blanket—“how about I play wit’ your boobies, eh?”—she shot up, hollering in a well-rehearsed bass: “Back off, sir, please!”—the bitches on the neighboring berths played dead with fear—fear for their