Shepherd's Song

Morning on Earth

Morning on earth, light snow, and just when
it was so warm, practically spring.
But the thermometer in the kitchen window
says seven degrees,
and pretty sunny.
  Here's
the electric company guy I like,
and no sign of the gas guy
I can't stand.
And all of a sudden two Misters M. —
one I've fallen for, the other
a bit of a hotshot —
coming back, both nine years old,
just passing the jasmine bush,
a huge bouquet of sticks.
  Behind the door
the dog's excited, nothing's
at odds with anything.


Yesterday

Autumn on small plots ringing the houses —
except for the few jasmines still
clothed and sparrows
hopping from one lilac bush

to another — does it really make for such a naked
moral? such a come-down? a message
of leaves behind the rusted fence
protecting us so nicely

from the eyes of the passer-by and of the neighbor
who long long ago worked in the passport office,
and from the headlights chasing leaves

like the wind, only faster faster and
maybe it's because of this momentum
you quicken your pace


Visibility

We ride the ridge, by track and tunnel,
then after a while
descend, but first
there are brooks and bridgelets, because

how can they call them bridges,
yesterday Smithy, before that Hebden,
and now Sowerby and purple foxgloves
on the embankment. And still

I haven't figured out who
I'm saying this to, or even who
would care that through the leaves

you can see Halifax
and someone's life, June being so transparent,
though yesterday it rained and clouds came out.


Municipal Services

On the second anniversary, oddly, there wasn't time,
just snow, which amounts to the same thing.
I was moving in water up to my mouth,
though the streets were cleared faster
than the snow could fall.

I was waving my arms about, I was gathering air,
I went back to my rented home
but I couldn't concentrate on sleeping.
I got the order confused, and the new one
seemed to me more beautiful.

If you have any plans of coming back,
at most I'll miss my stop, I'll overshoot
a continent, I'll open my mouth and won't reply
to the question I have no answer for.


Continued

Nothing will be the same as it was,
even enjoying the same things
won't be the same. Our sorrows
will differ one from the other and we
will differ one from the other in our worries.

And nothing will be the same as it was,
nothing at all. Simple thoughts will sound
different, newer, since they'll be more simply, more newly
spoken. The heart will know how to open up and love
won't be love anymore. Everything will change.

Nothing will be the same as it was
and that too will be new somehow, since after all,
before, things could be similar: morning,
the rest of the day, evening and night, but not now.


i.m. Milton Hindus
1916–1998

And later just to look into their papers,
half-read in their lifetime, letters —
if there were a place to keep them
and they hadn't been chewed up by mice in the attic

or soiled by the marten
which no one ever saw but everyone
suspected of subletting — or even
to enter them by hand into hard memory

since that might be the way to treat them
to a new time, another round —
not that we have more of it now,
but, older for a moment, we can almost see them

the way they wanted to be seen,
"With a New Preface by the Author," in which
with us in mind, who else,
they still managed to correct this or that.


Short Version

I couldn't be with you when you died.
Sorry, I was toiling day and night
on the title of a poem I didn't have time to show you.
You really would have liked it.

Even if the poem itself
wasn't the strongest, I was counting on the title
to prop it up from above,
to set it right even, and to sanction it

as sometimes happens, I don't know
if the nurse ever had time
to give you the news

because when I called it was
already late, though finally
she took the whole message.


Tomorrow

Whoever lives on will tell us how it was; whoever survives the rest will tell it more
precisely.


Shepherd's Song

Read these few sentences as if I were
some stranger, some other
language, which I may still be
(though I speak with your words, make use
of your words);
which I was, speaking
your language,
standing behind you and listening
wordlessly,
singing
in your tongue
my tune.
Read as if you were to listen,
not to understand.


Sometimes, Yes

After reading certain young authors
I too would like to be an author
and turn out works.
Right now I'm thinking of J.G. —
his happy rhymes, cinematic sentences and
the heroes in his poems, the real ones
and those made up. Because of course
poems have their heroes as well,
some not even all that
likeable. Of the real ones
for instance, I recall
Ezra Pound, whose name
appears in one of the titles,
or that Mid-November Snow
which, before it melted, the author thinks
had blanketed all the evil.
Of the unreal ones Kirillov, a suicide
and yet a builder, or that
professor, what's his name,
a scholar of seventy now.

And I, what would I write poems about?
I'd have to think,
because in fact I'm fed up with them.
I ask my wife but she just repeats
"What about?" as if she weren't there.
And a moment later adds: "But if
I tell you what about, you'll say
we both wrote it, all right?"
I must — she says — remind her
about it in the future, since a person
may sometimes really get hold of an idea,
but most of the time it flies off.

Lyric Factor and Other Poems

Indiscretions

Where are we? In ironies
that no one will grasp, short-lived
and unmarked, in trivial points
which reduce metaphysics to absurd
detail, in Tuesday that falls on
day two of May, in mnemonics of days.
You can give an example or take it
on faith, cat's paw at the throat.

And one also likes certain words and those — pardon me — syntaxes that pretend that something links them together. Between these intermeanings the whole man is contained, squeezing in where he sees a little space.

Candle

Friends from long ago, loved unchangingly,
with whom you could talk, talk until exhausted —
well, they must have forgotten some mutual concern,
or potentially mutual.
And new ones? New ones keep quiet,
as if they wanted to say nothing
more than necessary.


Amnesia

I forget about the other world.
I wake up with my mouth closed,
I wash the fruit with my mouth closed,
smiling, I bring the fruit into the room.
I don't know why I remember cod-liver oil,
whole years of misery, the cellar bolt on the floor,
the self-sufficient voice of the grandmother.
Still, this is not the other world.
And again I sit at the table with my mouth closed
and you bring me delicious bursting plums
and I repeat after someone I also forget:
there is no other world.


Station Lights

Station lights connect with those above,
the days of the week connect,
the wind with the breath —
there's nothing that doesn't.

The broken heating plant in Zeran
and my child, and the woman
I picked out years ago because of
her white knee-socks with blue stripes.

Interesting how the world
connects tomorrow and the day after that.
If that's not it,
maybe you'll tell me what is.


Landscape with Branch

We're bound to one another
by unknown threads, a stitch
of corpuscles that sew up the globe.
One day the globe
drops from us,
shrinks and dries
like a blackthorn plum —

something was really ours,
but we no longer belong to things.


Transparencies

The afternoon sun
round the corner of the town,
and every inch of skin
and every thought
is clearly exposed,
and nothing can be hidden
as everything comes to the surface:
unanswered letters,
ingratitude,
short memory.


Innocence

When we first met, we were really so young.
I saw nothing wrong in writing poems about myself.
Didn't I know that I too would be ashamed of something?
Didn't I know who you were?

Shame and laughter lock my mouth in turn.
I'm ashamed to think of it; I'm amused to be ashamed.


Believe me

You're not going to find a better place
for these cosmetics, even if eventually
we wind up with some sort of bathroom cabinet and
you stop knocking them over with your towel —
there'll still be a thousand reasons to complain
and a thousand pieces of glass on the floor
and a thousand new worries,
and we'll still have to get up early.


Home and Night

A day of sleeping and writing letters, of plasticine and games.
In place of dots the dominoes have animals,
Crude shapes of animals on shoddy plastic.
A world without abstraction.
It cost sixty-eight zlotys.
Everything's dearer and more primitive.
Could life by day be less complicated?
Yes. But the dominoes are blue,
blue plastic with gold animals,
and life is black and white.


Guesswork

She's covering her eyes, but doesn't she even hear
what I'm thinking and why? That
no one knows. Even this thought-and-written sentence
has two true endings, like a wire,
a length of wire, a transcontinental
transnational cable,
witness to daily betrayals and lies
by politicians and priests, like a broken string.
And who is it now who covers her eyes and hears nothing,
confusing light with the music of certain spheres?


Days of the Week

Tomorrow is Thursday.
If the world meets its obligations,
the following day will be Friday.
If it doesn't, it could even be Sunday,
and no one will ever guess
where our life got mislaid.

Travel Permit, Round Trip

A small calf on a cart, on cobblestones, happily whisking his tail, a Polish stork, lost in thought, a peasant woman wearing, as you'd expect, a kerchief on her head. A basket in her hand. The landscape rolls along at the same, steady pace, without stopping, and then illogically veils itself with hills.

I switch seats with a child who would rather watch the world unroll.

The tape is winding up somewhere on the other side and the reel must already be bulging. It contains so much, all that and this too, the perpetual policemen, by trade and calling, stalking furiously, and these light-hearted village names: Pszczølki, Szymankowo.

My face may be still, but in my heart I'm bursting with laughter. We're allowed to travel by train again. This delicate pressure on my arm is only your sleep.

Leaves and Comes Back

There's yet another life, lived in brief, also unacknowledged. A woman with a dog, a black poodle, outside the window of Telimena on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, passes by and vanishes, as if she had no meaning. Life half-imagined, half-observed.

Vanishes, while from the opposite direction another elderly woman appears, with a plastic bag, she must be going shopping. But in the shop next door there's still no bread, and still no papers at the kiosk. Yet everything's right today: the morning, the imagination, the waitress bringing coffee, sight.

A little hedge in the square facing Dziekanka suddenly takes on a different color. Green, but more intense, and even the steel-gray uniform of a militiaman — who, there's no knowing why, makes for the Mickiewicz monument — is more familiar, though not quite mine. Perhaps he wants to take a closer look.

I don't know whether the world this autumn truly has more dignity or whether it just seems so. Besides, now memory wants to mix in: the gas in '68, the old dog Frendek licking up his own blood, other months, other seasons.

I guess you can really put your life in order, can live with less. But the heart, the heart doesn't give up easily, and goes on knocking, and the eye, in its usual way, alters backgrounds and planes. The tongue builds sentences, the body trembles slightly.

Medicine

Again I've seen a genuine lemon.
Ania brought it back for me from France.
She thought: return, or else stay on?
And what good reason holds her here —
a few faces, and words, and this anxiety?
The lemon was yellow and looked genuine.
No need to display it in the window
so it could come to itself, like our pale tomatoes,
or as we come to ourselves,
ripening and yellowing for years.
No, it was fully itself already
when she brought it, not so much yellow
as gold, and slightly gnarled.
So I accepted it gratefully.

I'd like to put on the thick skin of the world,
I'd like to be tart but on the whole tasty —
a child swallows me unwillingly,
and I'm good for his cold.


According to Brecht

I suspect certain poets
have recently stopped submitting their poems to journals.
They must be thinking: we'll wait
until all this calms down
and they (journals
and other poets) get over this infantile disease
of civic-mindedness
or whatever you call it.
As they will.
Readers will get fed up with it,
editors will get bored too, and finally
they'll turn to us.
And we'll open our drawers
and take out our Timeless Values
which, precisely because they're timeless,
can now
wait calmly.


A Certain Tree in Powazki Cemetery

All memory we owe to objects
which adopt us for life and
tame us with touch, smell
and rustle. That's why it's so hard
for them to part with us: they guide us
till the end, through the world,
till the end they use us, surprised
by our coolness and the ingratitude
of that famous spinner Mnemosyne.


Fragile

I was going to sleep
not remembering a thing,
just scrunching up on the side of the bed,
knowing I should leave room.

I began the year washing dishes.
The water was warm, it was nobody's,
I didn't have to hurry.
Before my eyes

stood all the verbs,
to be, to write, to love,
all tangled up for years.
I didn't have to remember anything

although the mouth monotonously
repeated the word
memory, memory, memory
as if beyond it

nothing meant anything.
And without willing it,
already on the edge of sleep,
I saw your face again

as it was a few hours back,
last year,
tired, but still beautiful,
dark blue like a swallow,

almost raven black,
and the face of a seven-year-old boy,
composed and delicate,
just about to smile;

your black hair
brightened against the child's light mop,
the mouth kept whispering memory, memory.
Drops of sleep ran down the pane of the eye.


Don't Sleep, Take Notes

At four in the morning
the milkwoman was knocking
in plain clothes, threatening
she wouldn't leave us anything,
at most remove the empties,
if I didn't produce the receipt.

It was somewhere in my jacket,
but in any case I knew
what the outcome would be:
she'd take away yesterday's curds,
she'd take the cheese and eggs,
she'd take our flat away,
she'd take away the child.

If I don't produce the receipt,
if I don't find the receipt,
the milkwoman will cut our throats.


Third State

Out of nowhere I remembered dawn
and it was almost like in childhood —
the soul tore itself from the body,
it saw right through it from above,

unattached now for good
to its evacuated comical form
which can't even get off the ground.
It saw the body, but didn't know

how clumsy it really was,
wingless for eternity.
I myself must have been off to the side
because I saw them both

through the morning half-light, strangely clear,
as if it wasn't winter,
or fog, or buildings getting in the way.
And I was between them both

like a third, an odd shoe,
I'm not quite sure where,
off to the side, but near,
hidden now in a nook of the soul

floating lightly through space, now
in its corporal shell, looking up
with sincere regret. Then in the air
a mantel of snow was flapped

threadbare, riddled with holes,
and people's faces down below were also white.
I rippled down, conjoined, and soaked
into the city.


Liberation, in Language

These heart-stirring errors of craft —
uncertainty how a nation
should respond to violence,
made up for by an urgent
sense of mission
(words big as beans
that are hard to swallow)
and that almost obsessive
lack of detail —

yes, one can speak this way
from the stage: this language
is not beautiful but all
abruptly draw out their hands
and clap, and so, perforce,
it must be correct.


Landscape with Wind

Metal oxides, black lung
(take shallow breaths)
the dust of the world
pierced by headlights

eye-to-eye housing estates
(take no notice)
and at daybreak
four chipboards' worth of sleep

full of stinging fog
and men in masks
squares and streets
(don't cry, don't get upset)


Worldliness

Hearing the lift coming up,
voices on the stairs, a brief argument,
the old dog is drawn away from her blanket
and the contemplation of another world,
and reluctantly strolls over to the door
to express her opinion. She favors
the worldly life, but without conviction.