The bed is neatly made. But no one would spend a single night here.
Between his cupboard, his bed, and his chair—a white outline of absence, sharp as the cast of his hand.
MALACHOWSKI’S RAVINE
Count Juliusz leads the soldiers through a shadowy ravine into the mountains. He is sky blue and amaranthine; his whiskers are golden. Into the mountains he leads them, among beech trees and April birds.
Suddenly it is swarming with Muscovites, a forest in the forest, an anthill. Count Juliusz raises his eyes, seeking the radiance of the sun. It is overcast. He strains upward in the stirrups, stretches out his neck; he wants to rip one light ray from the heavens. All at once his epaulettes darken. He can no longer remember the Latin phrase.
Where the ravine ends there is now a gray stone and the Angelus.
PRIESTS AND PEASANTS
The priests lead the peasants out onto an elevated plain. They plant them in even rows like potatoes, amid fermented hills, on a gentle slope. The linden trees dress up and scatter their leaves.
The peasants want to lead the priests out into the field. The priests defend themselves with little white hands. They loathe this heathen sowing. He who has returned to dust shouldn’t start blossoming. The lindens dress up and scatter their leaves.
Hence the bickering and the bargaining with the sexton Mercury, so that he doesn’t pull the rope, doesn’t rock the heavy tongue, doesn’t scare the crows.
FENCES
Fences with weeds and dogs on chains
so their barking won’t reach the moon
a night shared by people toads and hops
in the black greenery in its moist depths
As meadows are just turning blue-gray
a farm hut chimes with a creaking gate
at dawn farmers are off to the horizon
their enormous shoes leading the way
they go prodding a tiny sun with poles
NATIVE DEVIL
1
He came from the West in the early tenth century. Initially he was bursting with energy and ideas. The clip-clop of his hooves was heard all over the place. The air smelled diabolical. This virgin land, nearer to hell than to heaven, seemed to him a promised land. The fickle folk soul was virtually begging for a baptism of dark fire.
On hillsides belfries quivered. Monks squeaked like mice. Sacramental water was poured out by the canful.
2
The castles and cities he leased to masters of alchemy and fraudulent magicians. He himself sank his ten claws into the nation’s red meat—the peasantry. He entered deep into the flesh leaving no trace. Matricides threw together votive chapels. Fallen girls raised themselves up. The possessed grinned idiotically.
Angels’ muscles turned flabby. People fell into a dull virtue.
3
Very quickly the smell of sulfur left him. He began to smell innocently of hay. He became something of a boozer. He went to the dogs completely If he visits a barn, he doesn’t tie the cows’ tails together. He doesn’t even tickle the nipples of farmers’ wives at night.
But he survives everyone. Stubborn as a cockle, lazy as a burdock.
ORNAMENTAL BUT REAL
The three-dimensional illustrations from pitiful textbooks. Deathly white, with dry hair, an empty quiver, and a shriveled thyrsus. They stand motionless on arid islands, amid living stones under a leafy firmament. A symmetrical Aphrodite, a Jove bewept by dogs, a Bacchus drunk on plaster. The disgrace of nature. Blemishes on gardens.
Real gods entered the skin of stone only briefly and reluctantly. Their mighty enterprise—thunderbolts and dawn light, hunger and golden rain—demanded an extraordinary mobility. They fled from burning cities; clutching waves they sailed to distant isles. In beggars’ rags they crossed the borders of ages and civilizations.
Pursued and pursuing, sweating, yelling, in an uninterrupted hunt for fugitive humanity.
TUSCULUM
He had never trusted the luck of ships’ ropes
so he bought a house with a garden like them
at last he could write in harmony with Nature
from a tall tower of grass amid mortal leaves
the industriousness of insects wars of weeds
the love rituals of animals and blind killings
there was no order only a sand-strewn path
offered solace
he soon withdrew in a state so unmistakable
that no one dared ask him
the disgrace of that flight
CERNUNNOS
The new gods followed the Roman army at a decent distance, so that the swaying of Venus’s hips and Bacchus’s uncontrolled fits of laughter wouldn’t seem too inappropriate in the face of the cooling ashes and the bodies of barbarian heroes being ceremonially buried by beetles and ants.
The old gods spied on the new ones from behind trees, without sympathy but with admiration. Those pale, hairless bodies seemed feeble but oddly appealing.
Despite language difficulties it came to a meeting on the heights. A few conferences decided how spheres of influence were to be divided. The old gods contented themselves with second-rate jobs in the provinces. Nevertheless, on the occasion of greater celebrations they were portrayed on carved stone (porous sandstone) together with the conquering gods.
It was Cernunnos who cast a real shadow on this collaboration. At his friends’ insistence he did take a Latin ending, but his spreading and evergrowing horns could not be covered up with any wreath.
For that reason he has mostly resided in backwood areas. He is often seen in dusky clearings. In one hand he holds a snake with the head of a lamb; the other draws completely incomprehensible signs in the air.
THE HILL FACING THE PALACE
The hill facing Minos’s palace is like a Greek theater
tragedy leaning its back against the impetuous slope
rows of fragrant shrubs curious olive trees
applaud the ruins
Between nature and human fate
there is no essential connection
the saying that grass mocks catastrophe
is a whim of the inconsolable and fickle
An odd case: two straight parallel lines
will never intersect not even in infinity
That’s all you can honestly say about it
SHORE
She waits on the bank of a great slow-moving river
Charon is on the other side The sky glows turbidly
(it isn’t a sky at all as it happens) Charon is here
he has just cast the ropes out over a branch
She (this soul) takes out the obol
from under her tongue where it soured only briefly
sits down at the rear end of the empty boat
all this without a word
if only there were a moon
or a dog howling
CURATIA DIONISIA
The stone is well-preserved An inscription (bad Latin)
declares Curatia Dionisia lived forty-something years
and raised this modest monument at her own expense
her solitary banquet continues the cup held in midair
the face without a smile The doves are too heavyset
she spent the last years of her life in Brittany
near the wall which brought the barbarians to a halt
in a castrum whose foundations and cellars survive
she was engaged in the most ancient female practice
briefly but sincerely mourned by Third Legion soldiers
as well as a certain elderly officer
she told sculptors to lay two pillows under her elbow
the dolphins and sea lions signify travel to distant lands
though from here it was no more than a few steps to hell
ATTEMPT AT THE DISSOLUTION OF MYTHOLOGY
The gods gathered in a barracks just outside town. Zeus gave his usual long and boring speech. The final conclusion: the organization had to be disbanded; enough s
illy conspiracies; it was time to enter rational society and somehow make do. Athena was sniveling in a corner.
It should be emphasized that the last proceeds were divided equitably. Poseidon was in an optimistic frame of mind. He bellowed brashly that he would be just fine. It was worst for the guardians of regulated streams and forests felled for lumber. Secretly they were all counting on dreams, but no one wanted to talk about it.
No conclusions were drawn. Hermes abstained from voting. Athena sniveled in a corner.
Late in the evening they traveled back into town, with false documents in their pockets and a handful of copper coins. As they crossed a bridge, Hermes flung himself into the river. They saw him drowning but no one tried to save him.
Opinions were divided on whether this was a bad or, on the contrary, a good omen. In any case it was a point of departure for something new and not yet clear.
THE MISSING KNOT
Clytemnaestra opens the window and mirrors herself in the glass, putting on her new hat. Agamemnon is in the antechamber; he lights a cigarette, waiting for his wife. Aegisthus enters the gate. He doesn’t know that Agamemnon returned the night before. They meet on the stairs. Clytemnaestra suggests they go to the theater. From now on they will often go together.
Electra works for a cooperative. Orestes is a pharmacology student. He will soon marry his reckless girlfriend with pale skin and eternally tear-filled eyes.
DAWN
At the profoundest moment before dawn, the first voice resounds, both blunt and sharp like a knife stab. Then rustlings growing from minute to minute bore through the stump of night.
It seems that there is no hope at all.
Whatever is struggling for light is mortally frail.
And when a bloody cross section of a tree appears on the horizon, surreally big and almost painful, let us not forget to bless the miracle.
SHE WAS DOING HER HAIR
She was doing her hair before going to bed
and before the mirror it took an infinitely long time
between one arm bending at the elbow and the other
epochs passed her hair soundlessly spilled soldiers
of the second legion called Augustus Antoninian’s
Roland’s comrades artillery gunmen from Verdun
with resilient fingers
she secured the halo over her head
it took so long
that when she
finally began her swaying
march toward me
my heart till now so docile
stood still
and on my skin I felt
coarse grains of salt
PERIOD
In appearance a drop of rain on a beloved face, a beetle immobilized on a leaf when a storm approaches. Something which can be enlivened, erased, reversed. Rather a stop with a green shadow than the terminus.
In fact the period which we attempt to tame at any price is a bone protruding from the sand, a snapping shut, a sign of a catastrophe. It is a punctuation of the elements. People should employ it modestly and with a proper consideration as is customary when one gives fate a hand.
WRISTWATCH
As long as our watch has in it one ant, two, or three, everything is in order and nothing menaces our time. At the very worst the watch is handed in for cleaning, which in any case is nonsense. Once ants settle in there is no way to exterminate them. They are invisible to the naked eye, red, and very voracious.
After a little while they start rapidly to multiply. It can be said picturesquely that we now wear on our wrist, not a watch, but a heap. The labour of greedy jaws we take for ticking.
In search of nourishment ants plunder our veins. In the evening from the folds of our underlinen we shake out russet balls of blood.
When the work of the ants is completed the watch in general stops. But one can will it to one’s children. In that case everything starts all over again.
CHINESE WALLPAPER
A desert island with the sugary head of a volcano. In the middle of the level water, a fisherman with a line, reeds. Higher up, the island spreading like an apple tree, with a pagoda and a little bridge where lovers meet under the budding moon.
If it ended here, it would be a pretty episode—the history of the world in a word or two. But this is repeated into infinity with senseless, stubborn precision—the volcano, the lovers, the moon.
There is no worse insult to the world.
PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE EVENT OF A CATASTROPHE
It usually begins innocently enough with an acceleration, unnoticeable at first, of the turning of the earth. Leave home at once and do not bring along any of your family. Take a few indispensable things. Place yourself as far as possible from the centre, near the forests the seas or the mountains, before the whirling motion as it gets stronger from minute to minute begins to pour in towards the middle, suffocating in ghettoes, closets, basements. Hang on forcefully to the outer circumference. Keep your head down. Have your two hands constantly free. Take good care of the muscles of your legs.
THE PASSION OF OUR LORD PAINTED BY ANONYMOUS FROM THE CIRCLE OF RHENISH MASTERS
They have ugly mugs, but their hands are dexterous, accustomed to hammer and nail, iron and wood. They’re just now nailing Our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. Loads of work to do; they have to hurry up so everything will be ready at noon.
Knights on horseback as props for the drama. Their faces are impassive. Their long lances mimic trees without branches on that hill without trees.
Able craftsmen are nailing—as was said—Our Lord to the cross. Ropes, nails, a stone for sharpening tools are laid out neatly on the sand. A bustle, but without excessive agitation.
The sand is warm, painted meticulously, grain by grain. Here and there a tuft of grass protrudes stiffly and an innocent white daisy soothes the eye.
We fall asleep on words
and wake up with words
sometimes congenial
simple nouns
forest or ship
they break away from us
the forest rushes off
across the horizon
the ship sails away
without trace or cause
dangerous are the words
dropped out of a whole
scraps of phrases sayings
a beginning of a refrain
from a forgotten anthem
“he shall be saved who …”
“remember to …”
or “like”
a little pricking pin
holding together
the most beautiful lost
metaphor in the world
you must dream patiently
hoping the content will be completed
that the missing words
enter crippled sentences
and the certainty we are waiting for
casts anchor
WHY THE CLASSICS
1
in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition
among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plague
dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest
the Greek colony Amphipolis
fell into the hands of Brasidos
because Thucydides was late with relief
for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile
exiles of all times
know what price that is
2
generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence
they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds
Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly
3
if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will be like lovers’ weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wallpaper dawns
What will happen
when hands
fall away from poems
when in the other mountains
I drink dry water
this should not matter
but it does
what will poems become
when the breath departs
and the grace of speaking
is rejected
will I leave the table
and descend into the valley
where there resounds
new laughter
by a dark forest
MR COGITO
1974
MR COGITO STUDIES HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR
Who wrote our faces chicken pox for sure
marking its o’s with a calligraphic pen
but who bestowed on me my double chin
what glutton was it when my whole soul
yearned for austerity why are my eyes
set so closely together it was him not me
waiting in the scrub for the Vened invasion
the ears that protrude two fleshy seashells
no doubt left me by an ancestor who strained for an echo
of the thunderous march of mammoths across the steppes
the forehead not too high it doesn’t think very much
The Collected Poems Page 14