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
TO DANIEL STERN
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.
II
THE DICTION TEACHER RETIRES FROM THE THEATER SCHOOL
Tall, shy, dignified
in an old-fashioned way,
She bids farewell to students, faculty,
and looks around suspiciously.
She’s sure they’ll mangle their mother tongue
ruthlessly and go unpunished.
She takes the certificate (she’ll check
for errors later). She turns and vanishes offstage,
in the spotlights’ velvet shadows,
in silence.
We’re left alone
to twist our tongues and lips.
IN A LITTLE APARTMENT
I ASK MY FATHER, “WHAT DO YOU
DO ALL DAY?” “I REMEMBER.”
So in that dusty little apartment in Gliwice,
in a low block in the Soviet style
that says all towns should look like barracks,
and cramped rooms will defeat conspiracies,
where an old-fashioned wall clock marches on, unwearied,
he relives daily the mild September of ’39, its whistling bombs,
and the Jesuit Garden in Lvov, gleaming
with the green glow of maples and ash trees and small birds,
kayaks on the Dniester, the scent of wicker and wet sand,
that hot day when you met a girl who studied law,
the trip by freight car to the west, the final border,
two hundred roses from the students
grateful for your help in ’68,
and other episodes I’ll never know,
the kiss of a girl who didn’t become my mother,
the fear and sweet gooseberries of childhood, images drawn
from that calm abyss before I was.
Your memory works in the quiet apartment—in silence,
systematically, you struggle to retrieve for an instant
your painful century.
THE ORTHODOX LITURGY
Deep voices beg insistently for mercy
and have no self-defense
beyond their own glorious singing—though no one
is here, just a disc spinning
swiftly and invisibly.
One soloist recalls the voice
of Joseph Brodsky reciting his poems
before Americans, unconvinced
by any sort of resurrection,
but glad that somebody believed.
It’s enough—or so we think—
that someone believes for us.
Low voices still sing.
Have mercy on us.
Have mercy on me too,
unseen Lord.
ROME, OPEN CITY
A March day, the trees are still naked, plane trees patiently
await the leaves’ green heat,
churches caked in dust, vermilion, ocher, sienna, and bordeaux,
broad stains of cinnamon.
Why did we stop talking?
In the Barberini Palace fair Narcissus gazes at his own face,
lifeless.
Brown city ceaselessly repeating: mi dispiace.
Brown city, entered by weary Greek gods
like office workers from the provinces.
Today I want to see your eyes without anger.
Brown city, growing on the hills.
Poems are short tragedies, portable, like transis
tor radios.
Paul lies on the ground, it’s night, a torch, the smell of pitch.
Impatient glances in cafés, someone yells, a small heap of coins
lies on the table.
Why? Why not?
The roar of cars and scooters, hubbub of events.
Poetry often vanishes, leaving only matchsticks.
Children run above the Tiber in funny school cloaks
from the century’s beginning:
nearby, cameras and spotlights. They’re running for a film, not for you.
David is ashamed of murdering Goliath.
Forgive my silence. Forgive your silence.
City full of statues; only the fountains sing.
The holidays approach, when the heathens go to church.
Via Giulia: magnolia blossoms keep their secret.
A moment of light costs just five hundred lire, which you toss
into a black box.
We can meet on the Piazza Navona, if you want.
Matthew keeps asking himself: was I truly
summoned to become human?
THE SEA
Shimmering among boulders, deep blue at noon,
ominous when summoned by the west wind,
but calm at night, inclined to make amends.
Tireless in small bays, commanding
countless hosts of crabs who march sideways
like damp veterans of the Punic Wars.
At midnight cutters sail from port: the glare
of a single light slices the darkness,
engines quake.
At the beach near Cefalù, on Sicily, we saw
countless heaps of trash, boxes, condoms,
cartons, a faded sign saying ANTONIO.
In love with the earth, always drawn to shore,
sending wave after wave—and each dies
exhausted, like a Greek messenger.
At dawn only whispers reach us,
the low murmur of pebbles cast on sand
(sensed even in the fishing town’s small square).
The Mediterranean, where gods swam,
and the frigid Baltic, which I entered,
a skinny, trembling, twenty-year-old eel.
In love with the earth, thrusting into its cities, Stockholm,
Venice, listening to tourists laugh and chatter
before returning to its dark, unmoving source.
Your Atlantic, busy building up white dunes,
and the shy Pacific hiding in the deeps.
Light-winged gulls.
The last sailing ships, white canvas
billowing on crosses.
Slim canoes are manned by watchful hunters,
the sun rises in great silence.
Gray Baltic,
Arctic Ocean, mute,
the Ionian, world’s origin and end.
READING MILOSZ
I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.
You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
but also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.
Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe—truly—
that every day is sacred,
that poetry—how to put it?—
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.
But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city’s ordinary din resumes—
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.
WALK THROUGH THIS TOWN
Walk through this town at a gray hour
when sorrow hides in shady gates
and children play with great balls
that float like kites above
the poisoned wells of courtyards,
and, quiet, doubting, the last blackbird sings.
Think about your life which goes on,
though it’s already lasted so long.
Could you voice the smallest fragment of the whole.
Could you name baseness when you saw it.
If you met someone truly living
would you know it?
Did you abuse high words?
Whom should you have been, who knows.
You love silence, and you’ve mastered
only silence, listening to words, music, and quiet:
why did you begin to speak, who knows.
Why in this age, why in a country
that wasn’t born yet, who knows.
Why among exiles, in a flat that had been
German, amid grief and mourning
and vain hopes of a regained myth.
Why a childhood shadowed
by mining towers and not a forest’s dark,
near a stream where a quiet dragonfly keeps watch
over the world’s secret wholeness
—who knows.
And your love, which you lost and found,
and your God, who won’t help those
who seek him,
and hides among theologians
with degrees.
Why just this town at a gray hour,
this dry tongue, these numb lips,
and so many questions before you leave
and go home to the kingdom
from which silence, rapture, and the wind
once came.
ORDINARY LIFE
TO CLARE CAVANAGH
Our life is ordinary,
I read in a crumpled paper
abandoned on a bench.
Our life is ordinary,
the philosophers told me.
Ordinary life, ordinary days and cares,
a concert, a conversation,
strolls on the town’s outskirts,
good news, bad—
but objects and thoughts
were unfinished somehow,
rough drafts.
Houses and trees
desired something more
covered the volcanic planet
like an overcoat tossed upon the ocean.
Black cinemas crave light.
Forests breathe feverishly,
clouds sing softly,
a golden oriole prays for rain.
Ordinary life desires.
MUSIC HEARD WITH YOU
MUSIC I HEARD WITH YOU WAS MORE
THAN MUSIC … —CONRAD AIKEN
Music heard with you
will stay with us always.
Grave Brahms and elegiac Schubert,
a few songs, Chopin’s fourth ballad,
a few quartets with heart-
breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia),
the sadness of Shostakovich, who
didn’t want to die.
The great choruses of Bach’s Passions,
as if someone had summoned us,
demanding joy,
pure and impartial,
joy in which faith
is self-evident.
Some scraps of Lutoslawski
as fleeting as our thoughts.
A black woman singing blues
ran through us like shining steel,
though it reached us on the street
of an ugly, dirty town.
Mahler’s endless marches,
the trumpet’s voice that opens the Fifth Symphony
and the first part of the Ninth
(you sometimes call him “malheur!”).
Mozart’s despair in the Requiem,
his buoyant piano concertos—
you hummed them better than I did,
but we both know that.
Music heard with you
will grow still with us.
AT THE CATHEDRAL’S FOOT
In June once, in the evening,
returning from a long trip,
with memories of France’s blooming trees
still fresh in our minds,
its yellow fields, green plane trees
sprinting before the car,
we sat on the curb at the cathedral’s foot
and spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now—
to talk of darkness in that bright shadow.
IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIPS
For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.
Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden
porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.
A passerby with proud eyes
whom you’ll never know.
Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).
The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.
Faces flashing by
in local trains—
the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.
And friendship with yourself
—since after all you don’t know who you are.
RAIN DROP
In the drop of rain that stopped
outside my window, dawdling,
an oval, shining shape appears
and I see Mrs. Czolga again,
stuffing a statuesque goose in her kitchen.
Carts, dark and chthonic, carried coal,
rolling over wooden cobbles,
asking—do you want to live?
But after the great war of death
we wanted life so much.
A red-hot iron pressed the past,
at dawn German blackbirds
sang the poems of Georg Trakl,
and we wanted life and dreams.
BUTTERFLIES
It’s a December night, the century’s end, dark and calm,
draws near.
I slowly read friends’ poems, look at photographs,
the spines of books.
Where has C. gone? What’s become of bumptious K. and smiling T.?
What ever happened to B. and N.?
Some have been dead a millennium, while others, debutants, died
just the other month.
Are they together? In a desert with a crimson dawn?
We don’t know where they live.