Eternal Enemies: Poems (2 page)

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

FOR BARBARA AND WOJCIECH PSZONIAK

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

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 transistor 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
.