I’m bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies.
What a loss when you think how much effort was spent
perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent
for the one-time appearance, which is all they’re allowed,
so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.
Interview with a Child
The Master hasn’t been among us long.
That’s why he lies in wait in every corner.
Covers his eyes and peeks through the cracks.
Faces the wall, then suddenly turns around.
The Master rejects outright the ridiculous thought
that a table out of sight goes on being a table nonstop,
that a chair behind our backs stays stuck in chairlike bounds
and doesn’t even try to fly the coop.
True, it’s hard to catch the world being different.
The apple tree slips back under the window before you can blink.
Incandescent sparrows always grow dim just in time.
Little pitchers have big ears and pick up every sound.
The nighttime closet acts as dull as its daytime twin.
The drawer does its best to assure the Master
it holds only what it’s been given.
And no matter how fast you open the Brothers Grimm,
the princess always manages to take her seat again.
“They sense I’m a stranger here,” the Master sighs,
“they won’t let a new kid play their private games.”
Since how can it be that whatever exists
can only exist in one way,
an awful situation, for there’s no escaping yourself,
no pause, no transformation? In a humble from-here-to-here?
A fly caught in a fly? A mouse trapped in a mouse?
A dog never let off its latent chain?
A fire that can’t come up with anything better
than burning the Master’s trustful finger one more time?
Is this the definitive, actual world:
scattered wealth that can’t be gathered,
useless luxury, forbidden options?
“No,” the Master cries, and stomps all the feet
he can muster—for such great despair
that beetle’s six legs wouldn’t be enough.
Allegro ma Non Troppo
Life, you’re beautiful (I say),
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaley,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.
I’m trying to court life’s favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I’m always the first to bow,
always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.
Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren’t conceived myself!
Life (I say), I’ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone’s clone.
I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order—gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.
I just don’t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I’ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.
I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?
Autotomy
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.
An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.
Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.
If there are scales, the pans don’t move.
If there is justice, this is it.
To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.
We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.
The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.
Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar—
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers.
The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.
—In memoriam Halina Poświatowska
Frozen Motion
This isn’t Miss Duncan, the noted danseuse?
Not the drifting cloud, the wafting zephyr, the bacchante,
moonlit waters, waves swaying, breezes sighing?
Standing this way, in the photographer’s atelier,
heftily, fleshily wrested from music and motion,
she’s cast to the mercies of a pose,
forced to bear false witness.
Thick arms raised above her head,
a knotted knee protrudes from her short tunic,
left leg forward, naked foot and toes,
with 5 (count them) toenails.
One short step from eternal art into artificial eternity—
I reluctantly admit that it’s better than nothing
and more fitting than otherwise.
Behind the screen, a pink corset, a handbag,
in it a ticket for a steamship
leaving tomorrow, that is, sixty years ago;
never again, but still at nine A.M. sharp.
Certainty
“Thou art certain,* then, our ship hath touch’d upon
the deserts of Bohemia?” “Aye, my lord.” The quote’s
from Shakespeare, who, I’m certain, wasn’t someone else.
Some facts and dates, a portrait nearly done before
his death . . . Who needs more? Why expect to see
the proof, snatched up once by the Greater Sea,
then cast upon this world’s Bohemian shore?
The Classic
A few clods of dirt, and his life will be forgotten.
The music will break free from circumstance.
No more coughing of the maestro over minuets.
Poultices will be torn off.
Fire will consume the dusty, lice-ridden wig.
Ink spots will vanish from the lace cuff.
The shoes, inconvenient witnesses, will be tossed on the trash heap.
The least gifted of his pupils will get the violin.
Butchers’ bills will be removed from between the music sheets.
His poor mother’s letters will line the stomachs of mice.
The ill-fated love will fade away.
Eyes will stop shedding tears.
The neighbors’ daughter will find a use for the pink ribbon.
The age, thank God, isn’t Romantic yet.
Everything that’s not a quartet
will become a forgettable fifth.
Everything that’s not a quintet
will become a superfluous sixth.
Everything that’s not a choir made of forty angels
will fall silent, reduced to barking dogs, a gendarme’s belch.
The aloe plant will be taken from the window
along with a dish of fly poison and the pomade pot,
and the view of the garden (oh yes!) will be revealed—
the garden that was never here.
No
w hark! ye mortals, listen, listen now,
take heed, in rapt amazement,
O rapt, O stunned, O heedful mortals, listen,
O listeners—now listen—be all ears—
In Praise of Dreams
In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.
I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.
I drive a car
that does what I want it to.
I am gifted
and write mighty epics.
I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.
My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.
I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.
Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.
I’ve got no problem
breathing under water.
I can’t complain:
I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.
It’s gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.
As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.
I’m a child of my age,
but I don’t have to be.
A few years ago
I saw two suns.
And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
True Love
True love. Is it normal,
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?
Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions, but convinced
it had to happen this way—in reward for what? For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.
Look at the happy couple.
Couldn’t they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends’ sake!
Listen to them laughing—it’s an insult.
The language they use—deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines—
it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!
It’s hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? what renounced?
Who’d want to stay within bounds?
True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.
Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.
Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
* * *
Nothingness unseamed itself for me too.
It turned itself wrong side out.
How on earth did I end up here—
head to toe among the planets,
without a clue how I used not to be.
O you, encountered here and loved here,
I can only guess, my arm on yours,
how much vacancy on that side went to make us,
how much silence there for one lone cricket here,
how much nonmeadow for a single sprig of sorrel,
and sun after darknesses in a drop of dew
as repayment—for what boundless droughts?
Starry willy-nilly! Local in reverse!
Stretched out in curvatures, weights, roughnesses, and motions!
Time out from infinity for endless sky!
Relief from nonspace in a shivering birch tree’s shape!
Now or never wind will stir a cloud,
since wind is exactly what won’t blow there.
And a beetle hits the trail in a witness’s dark suit,
testifying to the long wait for a short life.
And it so happened that I’m here with you.
And I really see nothing
usual in that.
Under One Small Star
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five A.M.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
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