Poems New and Collected

by Wislawa Szymborska

  its uncommonly fine eight,

  its far from final seven,

  nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity

  to continue.

  THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE

  1986

  Stage Fright

  Poets and writers.

  So the saying goes.

  That is poets aren’t writers, but who—

  Poets are poetry, writers are prose—

  Prose can hold anything including poetry,

  but in poetry there’s only room for poetry—

  In keeping with the poster that announces it

  with a fin-de-siècle flourish of its giant P

  framed in a winged lyre’s strings

  I shouldn’t simply walk in, I should fly—

  And wouldn’t I be better off barefoot

  to escape the clump and squeak

  of cut-rate sneakers,

  a clumsy ersatz angel—

  If at least the dress were longer and more flowing

  and the poems appeared not from a handbag but by sleight of hand,

  dressed in their Sunday best from head to toe,

  with bells on, ding to dong,

  ab ab ba—

  On the platform lurks a little table

  suggesting seances, with gilded legs,

  and on the little table smokes a little candlestick—

  Which means

  I’ve got to read by candlelight

  what I wrote by the light of an ordinary bulb

  to the typewriter’s tap tap tap—

  Without worrying in advance

  if it was poetry

  and if so, what kind—

  The kind in which prose is inappropriate

  or the kind which is apropos in prose—

  And what’s the difference,

  seen now only in half-light

  against a crimson curtain’s

  purple fringe?

  Surplus

  A new star has been discovered,

  which doesn’t mean that things have gotten brighter

  or that something we’ve been missing has appeared.

  The star is large and distant,

  so distant that it’s small,

  even smaller than others

  much smaller than it.

  Small wonder, then, if we were struck with wonder;

  as we would be if only we had the time.

  The star’s age, mass, location—

  all this perhaps will do

  for one doctoral dissertation

  and a wine-and-cheese reception

  in circles close to the sky:

  the astronomer, his wife, friends, and relations,

  casual, congenial, come as you are,

  mostly chat on earthbound topics,

  surrounded by cozy earthtones.

  The star’s superb,

  but that’s no reason

  why we can’t drink to the ladies

  who are incalculably closer.

  The star’s inconsequential.

  It has no impact on the weather, fashion, final score,

  government shake-ups, moral crises, take-home pay.

  No effect on propaganda or on heavy industry.

  It’s not reflected in a conference table’s shine.

  It’s supernumerary in the light of life’s numbered days.

  What’s the use of asking

  under how many stars man is born

  and under how many in a moment he will die.

  A new one.

  “At least show me where it is.”

  “Between that gray cloud’s jagged edge

  and the acacia twig over there on the left.”

  “I see,” I say.

  Archeology

  Well, my poor man,

  seems we’ve made some progress in my field.

  Millennia have passed

  since you first called me archeology.

  I no longer require

  your stone gods,

  your ruins with legible inscriptions.

  Show me your whatever

  and I’ll tell you who you were.

  Something’s bottom,

  something’s top.

  A scrap of engine. A picture tube’s neck.

  An inch of cable. Fingers turned to dust.

  Or even less than that, or even less.

  Using a method

  that you couldn’t have known then,

  I can stir up memory

  in countless elements.

  Traces of blood are forever.

  Lies shine.

  Secret codes resound.

  Doubts and intentions come to light.

  If I want to

  (and you can’t be too sure

  that I will),

  I’ll peer down the throat of your silence,

  I’ll read your views

  from the sockets of your eyes,

  I’ll remind you in infinite detail

  of what you expected from life besides death.

  Show me your nothing

  that you’ve left behind

  and I’ll build from it a forest and a highway,

  an airport, baseness, tenderness,

  a missing home.

  Show me your little poem

  and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t written

  any earlier or later than it was.

  Oh no, you’ve got me wrong.

  Keep your funny piece of paper

  with its scribbles.

  All I need for my ends

  is your layer of dirt

  and the long gone

  smell of burning.

  View with a Grain of Sand

  We call it a grain of sand,

  but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.

  It does just fine without a name,

  whether general, particular,

  permanent, passing,

  incorrect, or apt.

  Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.

  It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.

  And that it fell on the windowsill

  is only our experience, not its.

  For it, it is no different from falling on anything else

  with no assurance that it has finished falling

  or that it is falling still.

  The window has a wonderful view of a lake,

  but the view doesn’t view itself.

  It exists in this world

  colorless, shapeless,

  soundless, odorless, and painless.

  The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,

  and its shore exists shorelessly.

  Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry

  and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.

  They splash deaf to their own noise

  on pebbles neither large nor small.

  And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless

  in which the sun sets without setting at all

  and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.

  The wind ruffles it, its only reason being

  that it blows.

  A second passes.

  A second second.

  A third.

  But they’re three seconds only for us.

  Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.

  But that’s just our simile.

  The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,

  his news inhuman.

  Clothes

  You take off, we take off, they take off

  coats, jackets, blouses, double-breasted suits,

  made of wool, cotton, cotton-polyester,

  skirts, shirts, underwear, slacks, slips, socks,

  putting, hanging, tossing them across

  the backs of chairs, the wings of metal screens;

  for now, the doctor says, it’s not too bad,

  you may get dressed, get rested up, get out of town,

  take one in case, at bedtime, after lunch,
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  show up in a couple of months, next spring, next year;

  you see, and you thought, and we were afraid that,

  and he imagined, and you all believed;

  it’s time to tie, to fasten with shaking hands

  shoelaces, buckles, velcro, zippers, snaps,

  belts, buttons, cufflinks, collars, neckties, clasps

  and to pull out of handbags, pockets, sleeves

  a crumpled, dotted, flowered, checkered scarf

  whose usefulness has suddenly been prolonged.

  On Death, without Exaggeration

  It can’t take a joke,

  find a star, make a bridge.

  It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,

  building ships, or baking cakes.

  In our planning for tomorrow,

  it has the final word,

  which is always beside the point.

  It can’t even get the things done

  that are part of its trade:

  dig a grave,

  make a coffin,

  clean up after itself.

  Preoccupied with killing,

  it does the job awkwardly,

  without system or skill.

  As though each of us were its first kill.

  Oh, it has its triumphs,

  but look at its countless defeats,

  missed blows,

  and repeat attempts!

  Sometimes it isn’t strong enough

  to swat a fly from the air.

  Many are the caterpillars

  that have outcrawled it.

  All those bulbs, pods,

  tentacles, fins, tracheae,

  nuptial plumage, and winter fur

  show that it has fallen behind

  with its halfhearted work.

  Ill will won’t help

  and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat

  is so far not enough.

  Hearts beat inside eggs.

  Babies’ skeletons grow.

  Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves

  and sometimes even tall trees far away.

  Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent

  is himself living proof

  that it’s not.

  There’s no life

  that couldn’t be immortal

  if only for a moment.

  Death

  always arrives by that very moment too late.

  In vain it tugs at the knob

  of the invisible door.

  As far as you’ve come

  can’t be undone.

  The Great Man’s House

  The marble tells us in golden syllables:

  Here the great man lived, and worked, and died.

  Here are the garden paths where he personally scattered the gravel.

  Here’s the bench—don’t touch—he hewed the stone himself.

  And here—watch the steps—we enter the house.

  He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time.

  All that was to pass passed in this house.

  Not in housing projects,

  not in furnished but empty quarters,

  among unknown neighbors,

  on fifteenth floors

  that student field trips rarely reach.

  In this room he thought,

  in this alcove he slept,

  and here he entertained his guests.

  Portraits, armchair, desk, pipe, globe,

  flute, well-worn carpet, glassed-in porch.

  Here he exchanged bows with the tailor and shoemaker

  who made his coats and boots to order.

  It’s not the same as photographs in boxes,

  dried-out ballpoint pens in plastic cups,

  store-bought clothes in store-bought closets,

  a window that looks out on clouds, not passersby.

  Was he happy? Sad?

  That’s not the point.

  He still made confessions in letters

  without thinking they’d be opened en route.

  He still kept a careful, candid diary

  knowing it wouldn’t be seized in a search.

  The thing that most frightened him was a comet’s flight.

  The world’s doom lay then in God’s hands alone.

  He was lucky enough to die not in a hospital,

  not behind some white, anonymous screen.

  There was still someone there at his bedside to memorize

  his mumbled words.

  As if he had been given

  a reusable life:

  he sent out books to be bound,

  he didn’t strike the names of the dead from his ledgers.

  And the trees that he planted in the garden by his house

  still grew for him as juglans regia,

  and quercus rubra, and ulmus, and larix,

  and fraxinus excelsior.

  In Broad Daylight

  He would

  vacation in a mountain boardinghouse, he would

  come down for lunch, from his

  table by the window he would

  scan the four spruces, branch to branch,

  without shaking off the freshly fallen snow.

  Goateed, balding,

  gray-haired, in glasses,

  with coarsened, weary features,

  with a wart on his cheek and a furrowed forehead,

  as if clay had covered up the angelic marble—he wouldn’t

  know himself when it all happened.

  The price, after all, for not having died already

  goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would

  pay that price, too.

  About his ear, just grazed by the bullet

  when he ducked at the last minute, he would

  say: “I was damned lucky.”

  While waiting to be served his noodle soup, he would