| |
The Three Magi
To Lech Dymarski
They will probably come just after the New Year.
As usual, early in the morning.
The forceps of the doorbell will pull you out by the head
from under the bedclothes; dazed as a newborn baby,
you'll open the door. The star of an ID
will flash before your eyes.
Three men. In one of them you'll recognize
with sheepish amazement (isn't this a small
world) your schoolmate of years ago.
Since that time he'll hardly have changed,
only grown a mustache,
perhaps gained a little weight.
They'll enter. The gold of their watches will glitter (isn't
this a gray dawn), the smoke from their cigarettes
will fill the room with a fragrance like incense.
All that's missing is myrrh, you'll think half-consciously--
while with your heel you're shoving under the couch the book they mustn't find--
what is this myrrh, anyway,
you'd have to finally look it up
someday. You'll come
with us, sir. You'll go
with them. Isn't this a white snow.
Isn't this a black Fiat.
Wasn't this a vast world.
Along with the Dust
(From "The Housing Poems")
Along with the dust on the books,
the fingerprints on all the glass (fragile -
do not drop), along with
a ration coupon for sugar and a cross to bear
(fragile - this side up), I'm moving,
along with the writing in my lap, the thousands
of terms in my head (fragile - remember with care),
with an extra thousand zlotys just in case
(fragile - do not worry too much), along with a mask of self-confidence
and a wound in my back, along with an empty promise and an ill-
fitting hope (fragile - to not trust), along
with maybe finally and quick hurry up,
along with you can depend on it and I'm sick to death
(fragile - do not die), along with let's begin at the beginning
and knock on wood and what's the use,
and along with this love that's
all that will stay with me for better, for worse,
and forever, it's fragile, you movers,
and it's all a lot heavier than it looks
To Grazyna
To remember about the cigarettes. So that they're always at hand,
ready to be slipped into his pocket, when they take him away once again.
To know by heart all the prison regulations about parcels and visits.
And how to force the facial muscles into a smile.
To be able to extinguish a cop's threatening yell with one cold glance,
calmly making tea while they eviscerate the desk drawers.
To write letters from a cell or a clinic, saying that everything's OK.
So many abilities, such perfection. No, I mean it.
If only in order not to waste those gifts,
you should have been rewarded with immortality
or at least with its defective version, life.
Death. No, this can't be serious, I can't accept this.
There were many more difficult things that never brought you down.
If I ever admired anybody, it was you.
If anything was ever permanent, it was that admiration.
How many times did I want to tell you. No way. I was too abashed
by the gaps in my vocabulary and the microphone in your wall.
Now I hear it's too late. No, I don't believe it.
It's only nothingness, isn't it. How could a nothing like that
possibly stand between us. I'll write down, word for word and forever,
that small streak in the iris of your eye, that wrinkle at the corner of your
mouth.
All right, I know, you won't respond to the latest postcard I sent you.
But if I'm to blame anything for that, it will be something real,
the mail office, an air crash, the postal censor.
Not nonexistence, something that doesn't exist, does it.
Don't Use the Word "Exile"
Stand both feet on the solid ground of this moment
when the paved street runs up aslant and then it strikes and stings your
soles,
and, slowing down, with a thud of sneakers inside your high-school
briefcase,
you swerve toward the curb (those three, exactly three steps),
as the streetcar goes on, dragging and grinding, dark-green,
along the tangential curve of the tracks, beyond the corner of Mielzyfskiego and
Fredry.
Hold on stubbornly with the whole surface of your palm to the door
handle
of the Nojewo railway station, in the summer that smells of rain and cow
dung,
don't lose your grip on its stout, cylindrical wood, made smooth by local
hands,
grasp it again and again, feel its looseness and springy resistance.
And don't use the word "exile," because it's improper and
senseless.
The matter can be looked at from two points of intensive view.
Either no one shoved you aside from the cobblestones on which
you are still running, in an instant that has lasted until now,
no one wrenched the door handle away from your hand that seized it
for a second, forever, and you are still there.
Or you yourself left them behind, selfishly forsaken
even as you set foot on the curb or entered the station,
because with every moment one chooses another life.
A Second Nature
After a couple of days, the eye gets used
to the squirrel, a gray one, not red as it should be,
to the cars, each of them five feet too long,
to the clear air, against which glistens the wet paint
of billboards, puffy clouds, and fire-escape ladders.
After a couple of weeks, the hand gets used
to the different shape of the digits one and seven,
not to mention skipping diacritical marks in your signature.
After a couple of months, even the tongue knows
how to curl in your mouth the only way that produces a correct the.
Another couple of months and, while tying your shoelace in the street,
you realize that you're actually doing it just to tie your shoelace,
and not in order to routinely check
if you're not followed.
After a couple of years, you have a dream:
you're standing at the kitchen sink in the forest cottage near Sieraków,
where you once spent vacation, a high-school graduate unhappily in love;
your left hand holds a kettle, your right one reaches for the faucet knob.
The dream, as if having hit a wall, suddenly stops dead,
focusing with painful intensity on a detail that's uncertain:
was that knob made of porcelain, or brass?
Still dreaming, you know with a dazzling clarity that everything depends on
this.
As you wake up, you know with equal clarity you'll never be able to make sure.
After Gloria Was Gone
After several hours' showing off, the hurricane figured out
that it makes no sense to perform on three channels at once
as a whistling background for interviews with a local mayor
from another disaster area, disrupted by dog-food commercials,
and, at the same time, to put on a live show in our street.
So much work for nothing? Behind our windowpane, crossed aslant
with tape, we waited for the wind to get disheartened,
to go on strike, to leave for the north, toward New Hampshire.
The door opens to the smell of ozone, wet leaves, and safe adventure.
We stop by the knocked-down maple tree that snapped the electric line
while falling across the street in front of Mrs. Aaron's house.
Tapping her cane and still looking not that old,
almost like the time when, because she was blond,
the nuns were willing to hide her, Mrs. Aaron walks around and calculates
the repair costs. On the nearby sidewalk, Mr. Vitulaitis
examines the tree trunk thoughtfully, volunteers his help
and electric saw for tomorrow, those years of practice in the taiga
will come in handy, he jokes. Crushing sticks that lie on the asphalt,
here comes the pickup truck of the new neighbor, what's his name,
is it Nhu or Ngu, who brakes close to the tree and gets out,
surely without recalling the moment when, on the twenty-ninth day,
their overcrowded boat was found by the Norwegian freighter.
In something like a picnic mood, we all share comments and jokes
about the disaster. After all, it wasn't so fierce
as the forecasts had warned, no big deal, no big scars;
the harm it did to us is a reparable one, and tomorrow,
first thing in the morning, there'll be another expert visit
from the electrician, the sunrise, the insurance inspector.
It's time to go back home, remove the crosses
of tape from our windows, though we can't do the same
to our pasts or futures which have been crossed out
so many times. "The so-called pranks of nature,"
Mrs. Aaron sums up disdainfully, and she adds
that whoever is interested may inspect the devastation--
as far as she's concerned, she's going in to make some coffee.
Setting the Hand Brake
In an empty suburban parking lot, setting the hand brake,
he wonders what it actually was that brought him here
and why on earth he was never able not to succumb
to the clichés of sorrow, familiar to all who practice
the invisible craft of exile. There always will be a homeland
of asphalt under the chilly streetlamps, a homeland of rusty crossties
under a pair of rails, which likewise can count on meeting
in infinity only; a homeland that comes along and apart,
that rushes forward with him in the canyons of floorboard cracks
and lights in strangers' windows, and his veins, and trajectories
of galactic explosion. What is it that still holds him here,
pins him down, encloses him in the circumference
of this and not another skin, planet, suburban parking lot.
And whence this arrogated, arrogant right to exile,
as if it weren't true that no one will fall asleep tonight
on his own Earth. There will be a homeland somewhere: an involuntarily
chosen
second of awakening in motion, in the middle of a breathless whisper
a comma placed by chance, by mistake, for the time being, forever.
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
|
