Eternal Enemies: Poems (6 page)

for its splendid days, days of greatness,

when it too could grieve

in an almost human voice.

WAIT FOR AN AUTUMN DAY

(FROM EKELÖF)

Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly

weary sun, for dusty air,

a pale day’s weather.

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,

etched like an old man’s hands,

for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden

with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains

the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,

for a truce among the clouds,

for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace

and accept the thought that what you’ve lost

is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not

even miss those you loved

who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,

for an hour without doubt or pain.

Wait for an autumn day.

KATHLEEN FERRIER

(1912–1953)

TO ANNA MARIA AND KAROL BERGER

It’s just a voice.

It’s just a voice, and we don’t know

if it still belongs to a body,

or to the air alone.

The voice of a girl journeying

to Carlisle in a used Morris.

Just think, how many different voices

sounded in her life’s brief span.

Goebbels’s hysterical cry.

The moaning of the wounded, prisoners’ whispers.

Declamations in school auditoriums

(epics praising the tyrant).

So many lies in our throats.

She died of cancer,

not from hunger like Simone Weil,

not in a camp like Mandelstam.

She never studied in a conservatory

and yet the purest music

speaks through her.

She liked the songs of Schubert and Mahler,

Bruno Walter counseled her.

A girl’s voice,

innocent, sings Handel’s arias.

Listening, you think

here was a chance

for a better human race,

but the record ends

and you return to your usual mistrust—

as if the song promised too much,

more than silence or exhaustion.

LIFE IS NOT A DREAM

In the beginning, freezing nights and hatred.

Red Army soldiers fired automatic pistols

at the sky, trying to strike the Highest Being.

Mother cried, perhaps remembering

the sentimental stories of her childhood.

Coldwater Street ran beside the river

as if trying to outrace it—

or to reach its distant sources,

still pure beyond a doubt,

recalling the dawn’s joy.

If life is a dream,

then the phoenix may actually exist.

But in Krakow life revived

under the sign of common pigeons:

in the Planty Gardens, alongside veterans

clad in the tattered uniforms

of at least three armies,

young beauties made appearances,

and music-loving plane trees donned

their finest new foliage outside Symphony Hall.

Should one honor local gods?

A beggar at the marketplace in Lucca

moved from stand to stand

garnering tributes—proud as Diana.

It’s more difficult to find nymphs

where we live, though,

and great Pan didn’t leave his calling card.

Important memories—stern monuments

to monotheism—were inscribed

only in the trees and on church walls.

We tried courage, since there was no exit.

We tried cunning, but it failed.

We tried patience and fell asleep.

We wrote poems like leaflets and leaflets

like pages from burgeoning epics.

Dreams grew like hibiscus flowers.

Dark wells opened in the night.

We tried cynicism; some of us succeeded.

There was great joy, don’t forget.

We tried time; it was tasteless, like water.

Finally, much later, for unknown

reasons, the clocks began

to revolve ever faster above us,

as in archival, silent films.

And life went on, inevitable life,

so skeptical, so practiced,

coming back to us so insistently

that one day we felt the taste of ordinary failure,

of common tragedy upon our lips,

which was a kind of triumph.

IT DEPENDS

YOU MUST BE SOMEWHERE, RIGHT? —NICK FLYNN

Birds (sandpipers) hop on the beach at Galveston.

“La plupart des hommes meurent de chagrin”—says Buffon

(as quoted in Volume One of Claudel’s diaries).

R. thinks American poets are unintelligent.

—Yet nobleness exists, if only in a painting:

Christ’s face in the Caravaggio at S. Luigi dei Francesi

(I couldn’t tear myself away, I couldn’t go).

It depends who, I answer: I defend American poets.

Summer, endless dusk, and then the stars like lanterns.

We discuss the emptiness of recent French poetry.

But “rien” is such a lovely word! Better than nothing.

Even the ocean seems happy at noon.

Forests burn: resin has its brief moment of bliss.

We eat ice cream on the café terrace. The speakers are playing “Yesterday.”

Notes from a civil war: truce or armistice?

Suddenly I move to Aix-en-Provence, I don’t know how.

Evening crowds on the streets, anticipation.

I push through a dense thicket of onlookers and ask:

What’s happening? God’s coming back. But it’s just a dream.

AMERICA’S SUN

(FROM EICHENDORFF, FROM KRYNICKI)

Outside the window, America’s blinding sun.

In a dark room, at a table

sits a man, no longer young,

who thinks about what he’s lost

and what remains.

I am that man.

I try to guess what losses

the future holds.

I still don’t know what I’ll discover.

ANTENNAS IN THE RAIN

I saw the sea and oranges.

First snow—ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s silence please.

Breaking news: Bach woke again and sings.

Time kept its word (it always does).

Reading Milosz by an open window. The swallows’ sudden trill.

Chapels beneath the linden trees in summer; bees pray.

“Carpe diem.” He seized the day, but when he checked his prey that

evening, he found night.

—You really like libraries that much?

Carrots, onions, celery, prunes, almonds, powdered sugar, four large

apples, green are best (your love letter).

Don’t get carried away. To say that Orthodox liturgies lack humor!

The hospital—pale invalids in gowns beside a tanned, smiling surgeon.

Why do you always write about cities?

If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants …

“Periagoge”—Plato’s notion of internal transformation.

The bulging Place de la Bastille—perhaps another Bastille is hiding

underneath.

Peonies like peasant girls in church.

“How can I miss you when you won’t go away?” (country song).

Varieties of longing; the professor counted six.

Sign on a bus:
AIR-CONDITIONED
. Day trips—Wieliczka, Auschwitz.

The homeless clinging to radiators at a railroad station in December.

Vermeer’s painting with a woman sitting safely on the stoop and

knitting: behind her a dark interior, in front, the street and light.

Irreconcilable.

The sun hurts, says the boy in the park.

B., reproachfully: I lived there, you know, and I’d never say there was

too much of Lvov!

Everything returns. Inspiration wanes and returns. Desire.

Comedy and tragedy; Simone Weil sees only tragedy.

Red poppies and black snow.

The smile of a woman, no longer young, reading on the train to Warsaw.

Oh, so you’re the specialist in high style?

Delphi, full of tourists, open to mysteries.

The sea was angry at midnight: furious, to be frank.

And the Holocaust Museum in Washington—my childhood, my wagons,

my rust.

May evening: antennas in the rain.

Down Kanonicza Street screaming you sonofabitch.

Dolphins near Freeport: their favorite, ancient motion, like the symbol

scholars use for iambs.

A theater too tiny to hold Bergman’s film.

Escape from one prison to the next.

After the announcement “zurückbleiben” at a subway stop in Berlin, a

quiet moment—the sound of absence.

Swifts in Krakow, stirred by summer, whistle loudly.

A weary verb goes back to the dictionary at night.

Mama always peeked at the novel’s last page—to see what happened …

Truth is Catholic, the search for truth is Protestant (W.H. Auden).

Some experts predict that by the twenty-first century’s end people will

no longer die.

Open up.

Pay the phone and gas, return the books, write Clare.

In the plane after dinner two pudgy theologians compare their pensions.

In Gliwice, Victory Street might have led to heaven but stops short, alas.

Will the escalator ever go where it takes us?

From a rushing train we saw fields and meadows—from the forest,

as from dreams, deer emerged.

Marble doesn’t talk to clay (to time).

The salesgirl in a shoe store on the rue du Commerce, Vietnamese,

she tells you kneeling, I come from boat people.

I switched on the shortwave radio: someone sobbing in Bolivia.

Christ’s face in S. Luigi dei Francesi.

One thing is sure: the world is alive and burns.

He read Hölderlin in a dingy waiting room.

Boat people—the only nation free of nationalism.

The spring rain’s indescribable freshness.

Sliced with a knife.

“There are gods here too.”

Fruit bursts.

I ask my father: “What do you do all day?” “I remember.”

Delivery cars on a Greek highway, trademark Metafora.

On the sea’s gleaming surface, a kayak, almost motionless—a compass

needle.

Remember the splendid cellist in a clown’s lounge coat?

At night the lights of a vast refinery—a city where nobody lives.

Why do these moments end so quickly? Don’t talk that way, speak

from within the moments.

Love for ordinary objects, unrequited.

Rowers on a green river, chasing time.

Poetry is joy hiding despair. But under the despair—more joy.

Speak from within.

It’s not about poetry.

Don’t speak, listen.

Don’t listen.

ALSO BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

POETRY

Tremor: Selected Poems

Canvas

Mysticism for Beginners

Without End: New and Selected Poems

ESSAYS

Solidarity, Solitude

Two Cities

Another Beauty

A Defense of Ardor

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Eternal Enemies

TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945. His previous books include
Tremor
,
Canvas
,
Two Cities
,
Mysticism for Beginners
,
Another Beauty
,
Without End
, and
A Defense of Ardor
—all published by FSG. He lives in Kraków, Paris, and Chicago.

CLARE CAVANAGH
is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. She has translated numerous volumes of Polish poetry and prose, including the work of Wislawa Szymborska, and is working on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz, to be published by FSG.

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2008 by Adam Zagajewski

Translation copyright © 2008 by Clare Cavanagh

All rights reserved

Published in 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 2009

Some of these poems originally appeared, in different form, in
Five Points
,
The New Republic
,
The New York Review of Books
,
The New Yorker
,
Ploughshares
, and
Poetry.

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-53160-7

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-53160-9

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466884243

First eBook edition: September 2014