Eternal Enemies: Poems

STAR

I returned to you years later,

gray and lovely city,

unchanging city

buried in the waters of the past.

I’m no longer the student

of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,

I’m not the young poet who wrote

too many lines

and wandered in the maze

of narrow streets and illusions.

The sovereign of clocks and shadows

has touched my brow with his hand,

but still I’m guided by

a star by brightness

and only brightness

can undo or save me.

EN ROUTE

1. WITHOUT BAGGAGE

To travel without baggage, sleep in the train

on a hard wooden bench,

forget your native land,

emerge from small stations

when a gray sky rises

and fishing boats head to sea.

2. IN BELGIUM

It was drizzling in Belgium

and the river wound between hills.

I thought, I’m so imperfect.

The trees sat in the meadows

like priests in green cassocks.

October was hiding in the weeds.

No, ma’am, I said,

this is the nontalking compartment.

3. A HAWK CIRCLES ABOVE THE HIGHWAY

It will be disappointed if it swoops down

on sheet iron, on gas,

on a tape of tawdry music,

on our narrow hearts.

4. MONT BLANC

It shines from afar, white and cautious,

like a lantern for shadows.

5. SEGESTA

On the meadow a vast temple—

a wild animal

open to the sky.

6. SUMMER

Summer was gigantic, triumphant—

and our little car looked lost

on the road going to Verdun.

7. THE STATION IN BYTOM

In the underground tunnel

cigarette butts grow,

not daisies.

It stinks of loneliness.

8. RETIRED PEOPLE ON A FIELD TRIP

They’re learning to walk

on land.

9. GULLS

Eternity doesn’t travel,

eternity waits.

In a fishing port

only the gulls are chatty.

10. THE THEATER IN TAORMINA

From the theater in Taormina you spot

the snow on Etna’s peak

and the gleaming sea.

Which is the better actor?

11. A BLACK CAT

A black cat comes out to greet us

as if to say, look at me

and not some old Romanesque church.

I’m alive.

12. A ROMANESQUE CHURCH

At the bottom of the valley

a Romanesque church at rest:

there’s wine in this cask.

13. LIGHT

Light on the walls of old houses,

June.

Passerby, open your eyes.

14. AT DAWN

The world’s materiality at dawn—

and the soul’s frailty.

MUSIC IN THE CAR

Music heard with you

at home or in the car

or even while strolling

didn’t always sound as pristine

as piano tuners might wish—

it was sometimes mixed with voices

full of fear and pain,

and then that music

was more than music,

it was our living

and our dying.

THE SWALLOWS OF AUSCHWITZ

In the barracks’ quiet,

in the silence of a summer Sunday,

the swallows’ shrill cry.

Is this really all that’s left

of human speech?

STOLARSKA STREET

The small crowd by the American consulate

ripples like a jellyfish in water.

A young Dominican strides down the sidewalk

and passersby yield piously.

I’m at home again, silent as a Buddhist.

I count the days of happiness and fretting,

days spent seeking you frantically,

finding just a metaphor, an image,

days of Ecclesiastes and the Psalmist.

I remember the heatstruck scent of heather,

the smell of sap in the forest by the sea,

the dark of a white chapel in Provence,

where only a candle’s sun glowed.

I remember Greece’s small olives,

Westphalia’s gleaming railroads,

and the long trip to bid my mother goodbye

on an airplane where they showed a comedy,

everyone laughed loudly.

I returned to the city of sweet cakes,

bitter chocolate, and lovely funerals

(a grain of hope was once buried here),

the city of starched memory—

but the anxiety that drives wanderers,

and turns the wheels of bicycles, mills, and clocks,

won’t leave me, it remains concealed

in my heart like a starving deserter

in an abandoned circus wagon.

GENEALOGY

I’ll never know them,

those outmoded figures

— the same as we are,

yet completely different.

My imagination works to unlock

the mystery of their being,

it can’t wait for the release

of memory’s secret archives.

I see them in cramped classrooms,

in the small provincial towns

of the Hapsburgs’ unhappy empire.

Poplars twitch hysterically

outside the windows

while snow and rain dictate

their own orthography.

They grip a useless scrap of chalk

helplessly in their fists,

in fingers black with ink.

They labor to reveal the world’s mystery

to noisy, hungry children,

who only grow and scream.

My schoolmaster forebears fought

to calm an angry ocean

just like that mad artist

who rose above the waves

clutching his frail conductor’s wand.

I imagine the void

of their exhaustion, empty moments

through which I spy

their life’s core.

And I think that when I too

do my teaching,

they gaze in turn at me,

revising my mutterings,

correcting my mistakes

with the calm assurance of the dead.

KARMELICKA STREET

Karmelicka Street, a sky blue tram, the sun,

September, the first day after vacation,

some have come home from long trips,

armored divisions enter Poland,

children off to school dressed in their best,

white and navy blue, like sails and sea,

like memory and grapes and inspiration.

The trees stand at attention, honoring

the power of young minds that haven’t yet

known fire and sleep and can do what they want,

nothing can stop them

(not counting invisible limits).

The trees greet the young respectfully,

but you — be truthful — envy

that starting out, that setting off

from home, from childhood, from the sweet darkness

that tastes of almonds, raisins, and poppy seeds,

you stop by the store for bread

and then walk home, unhurried,

whistling and humming carelessly;

your school still hasn’t started,

the teachers have gone, the masters remain,

distant as summer, your sleep sails through the clouds

across the sky.

LONG STREET

Thankless street — little dry goods stores

like sentries in Napoleon’s frozen army;

country people peer into shop windows and their reflections

gaze back at dusty cars;

Long Street trudging slowly to the suburbs,

while the suburbs press toward the center.

Lumbering trams groove the street,

scentless perfume shops furrow it,

and after rainstorms mud instead of manna;

a street of dwarves and giants, creaking bikes,

a street of small towns clustered

in one room, napping after lunch,

heads dropped on a soiled tablecloth,

and clerics tangled in long cassocks;

unsightly street — coal rises here in fall,

and in August the boredom of white heat.

This is where you spent your first years

in the proud Renaissance town,

you dashed to lectures and military drills

in an outsized overcoat—

and now you wonder, can

you return to the rapture

of those years, can you still

know so little and want so much,

and wait, and go to sleep so swiftly,

and wake adroitly

so as not to startle your last dream

despite the December dawn’s darkness.

Street long as patience.

Street long as flight from a fire,

as a dream that never

ends.

TADEUSZ KANTOR

He dressed in black,

like a clerk at an insurance bureau

who specializes in lost causes.

I’d spot him on Urzednicza

rushing for a streetcar,

and at Krzysztofory as he solemnly discharged

his duties, receiving other artists dressed in black.

I dismissed him with the pride

of someone who’s done nothing himself

and despises the flaws of finished things.

Much later, though,

I saw The Dead Class and other plays,

and fell silent with fear and admiration—

I witnessed systematic dying,

decline, I saw how time

works on us, time stitched into clothes or rags,

into the face’s slipping features, I saw

the work of tears and laughter, the gnashing of teeth,

I saw boredom and yearning at work, and how

prayer might live in us, if we would let it,

what blowhard military marches really are,

what killing is, and smiling,

and what wars are, seen or unseen, just or not,

what it means to be a Jew, a German, or

a Pole, or maybe just human,

why the elderly are childish,

and children dwell in aging bodies

on a high floor with no elevator and try

to tell us something, let us know, but it’s useless,

in vain they wave gray handkerchiefs

stretching from their school desks scratched with penknives

— they already know that they have only

the countless ways of letting go,

the pathos of helpless smiles,

the innumerable ways of taking leave,

and they don’t even hear the dirty stage sets

singing with them, singing shyly

and perhaps ascending into heaven.

THE POWER CINEMA

Some Sundays were white

like sand on Baltic beaches.

In the morning footsteps sounded

from infrequent passersby.

The leaves of our trees kept watchful silence.

A fat priest prayed for everyone

who couldn’t come to church.

Movie projectors gave intoxicating hiccups

as dust wandered crosswise through the light.

Meanwhile a skinny priest bewailed the times

and called us to strict mystic contemplation.

A few ladies grew slightly faint.

The screen in the Power Cinema was happy to receive

every film and every image—

the Indians felt right at home,

but Soviet heroes

were no less welcome.

After each showing a silence fell,

so deep that the police got nervous.

But in the afternoon the city slept,

mouth open, like an infant in a stroller.

Sometimes a wind stirred in the evening

and at dusk a storm would flicker

with an eerie, violet glow.

At midnight the frail moon

came back to a scrubbed sky.

On some Sundays it seemed

that God was close.

THE CHURCH OF CORPUS CHRISTI

We’re next to the Jewish Quarter,

where mindful prayers rose

in another tongue, the speech of David,

which is like a nut, a cluster of grapes.

This church isn’t lovely,

but it doesn’t lack solemnity;

a set of vertical lines

and dust trembling in a sunbeam,

a shrine of minor revelations

and strenuous silence,

the terrain of longing

for those who have gone.

I don’t know if I’ll be admitted,

if my imperfect prayer

will enter the dark, trembling air,

if my endless questing

will halt within this church,

still and sated as a beehive.

WAS IT

Was it worth waiting in consulates

for some clerk’s fleeting good humor

and waiting at the station for a late train,

seeing Etna in its Japanese cloak

and Paris at dawn, as Haussmann’s conventional caryatids

came looming from the dark,

entering cheap restaurants

to the triumphal scent of garlic,

was it worth taking the underground

beneath I can’t recall what city

to see the shades of not my ancestors,

flying in a tiny plane over an earthquake

in Seattle like a dragonfly above a fire, but also

scarcely breathing for three months, asking anxious questions,

forgetting the mysterious ways of grace,

reading in papers about betrayal, murder,

was it worth thinking, remembering, falling

into deepest sleep, where gray hallways

stretched, buying black books,

jotting only separate images

from a kaleidoscope more glorious than the cathedral

in Seville, which I haven’t seen,

was it worth coming and going, was it—

yes no yes no

erase nothing.

RAINBOW

I returned to Long Street with its dark

halo of ancient grime — and to Karmelicka Street,

where drunks with blue faces await

the world’s end in delirium tremens

like the anchorites of Antioch, and where

electric trams tremble from excess time,

to my youth, which didn’t want

to wait and passed on, perished from long

fasting and strict vigils, I returned to

black side streets and used bookshops,

to conspiracies concealing

affection and treachery, to laziness,

to books, to boredom, to oblivion, to tea,

to death, which took so many

and gave no one back,

to Kazimierz, vacant district,

empty even of lamentation,

to a city of rain, rats, and garbage,

to childhood, which evaporated

like a puddle gleaming with a rainbow of gasoline,

to the university, still trying clumsily

to seduce yet another naive generation,

to a city now selling

even its own walls, since it sold

its fidelity and honor long ago, to a city

I love mistrustfully

and can offer nothing

except what I’ve forgotten and remember

except a poem, except life.

FRIENDS

My friends wait for me,

ironic, smiling sadly.

Where are the transparent palaces

we meant to build—

their lips say,

their aging lips.

Don’t worry, friends,

those splendid kites

still soar in the autumn air,

still take us

to the place where harvests begin,

to bright days—

the place where scarred eyes

open.

SICILY

You led me across the vast meadow,

the three-cornered Common that is Sicily

for this town that doesn’t know the sea,

you led me to the Syracuse

of cold kisses and we passed

through the endless ocean of the grass

like conquerors with clear consciences

(since we vanquished only ourselves),

in the evening, under a vast sky,

under sharp stars,

a sky spreading righteously

over what lasts

and the lazy river of remembrance.

DESCRIBING PAINTINGS

We usually catch only a few details—

grapes from the seventeenth century,

still fresh and gleaming,

perhaps a fine ivory fork,

or a cross’s wood and drops of blood,

and great suffering that has already dried.

The shiny parquet creaks.

We’re in a strange town—

almost always in a strange town.

Somewhere a guard stands and yawns.

An ash branch sways outside the window.

It’s absorbing,

describing static paintings.

Scholars devote tomes to it.

But we’re alive,

full of memory and thought,

love, sometimes regret,

and at moments we take a special pride

because the future cries in us

and its tumult makes us human.

BLIZZARD

We were listening to music—

a little Bach, a little mournful Schubert.

For a moment we listened to the silence.

A blizzard roared outside,

the wind pressed its blue face

to the wall.

The dead raced past on sleds,

tossing snowballs

at our windows.

POETRY SEARCHES FOR RADIANCE

Poetry searches for radiance,

poetry is the kingly road

that leads us farthest.

We seek radiance in a gray hour,

at noon or in the chimneys of the dawn,

even on a bus, in November,

while an old priest nods beside us.

The waiter in a Chinese restaurant bursts into tears

and no one can think why.

Who knows, this may also be a quest,

like that moment at the seashore,

when a predatory ship appeared on the horizon

and stopped short, held still for a long while.

And also moments of deep joy

and countless moments of anxiety.

Let me see, I ask.

Let me persist, I say.

A cold rain falls at night.

In the streets and avenues of my city

quiet darkness is hard at work.

Poetry searches for radiance.