* * *
Why is it your anxiety revolves so around
words like: prisons, uprisings,
west, east, freedom, food,
access to this or that,
political
prisoners?
These are small words, these are the smallest of words,
why is it that your tongue has got caught in them?
Don't you know that all of this is
under the control of a rather slinky tart
the one you love, or rather fancy
who actually chooses the person detested
by you, the one who mistreats her and hammers the nails into her
because of her you are in this prison,
because of her you are hungry.
The Town of Slupsk, 1984
October's sharp air
would taste better in a different town to this.
Just to get onto an empty night tram
doze next to your own dozing colored reflection
in the misted-up window - to travel, to doze.
Instead I sleep in an eight-bedded dorm
and carry out the orders of these brutes.
Here, in this vile place, it is easier to see twilight,
blades of grass, rainbows. With utter awe, volcanoes astound
those touched by their lava fingers.
Battlefield
She's lying here next to me. She's pretending to sleep.
Will anything beautiful be left after all this carnage?
We've already killed off everything. Bright moths
touch against the window panes from both sides. Peace.
For the moment it's all quiet.
She's repeated a hundred times or more she doesn't want me.
So I've tried every human ploy. And she's still here. Here
beside me on a put-you-up bed at a friend's.
She has lost. She has her victory. So have I. But I've lost too.
She's lying there. I'm dressed now - sitting out of
the way. I watch her and smoke. And stare.
Two glasses of tea, overturned, cracked.
One ashtray, and in it two cigarette ends.
When she opens her eyes I'll open fire again.
The Truth About Trees
trees do not have their own holy book
trees have more than enough light air and rain
thin branches stretching up to heaven
the heaven of trees is green powerful fragrant
the creator of trees is as green and powerful as them
their creator has not devised a hell for trees
there is no sin there is no obligation
it's enough to exist rustle stretch
it's enough to grow aspire branch out
the creator of trees did not invent a hell for them
particularly fascinating is the trees' tender indifference
with which they accept humans hung from their lower branches
żLe gusta este jardin?
When I take off my dark glasses
The world I'm in is even more terrifying.
But it's real. The true colors
are creeping into their proper places.
A snake slithers over everything that it encounters. It
has touched us as well.
Snow falls and covers everything.
The city is as yet still visible - a black
skeleton illuminated here and there by the headlights
of small cars, I have sat down at a good vantage point
and I watch. It's evening. All the fun fairs
are closed down now.
Evening. Men return with their spoils.
Zealous priests only capable of saving
themselves. A dog walked next to us for a while
and stank. My personal documents
have disintegrated. Everything I loved
has disintegrated. But I'm still in one piece.
There's nothing about me in the Constitution.
1986
An Apocryphal Tale
The Little Boy Jesus was an unbearable child.
It was immediately obvious that he wasn't all there.
A flock of old biddies earnestly debated his nature
making the sort of superstitious gestures then in fashion.
The child possessed an extraordinary memory
remembering exactly the entire order of the galaxy
and he applied it in his very own
long-suffering and incomprehensible way.
He ran with a stick in his hand among his fellow children
and began to organize revolution
or transformed the malicious old biddies
into birds and mosses.
His parents often took him to one side
and looked at him with great distress
then he raised his finger in warning
and sheepishly they returned to their own business.
Now he hangs on walls between the flowers
and over the beds of school-going girls
he has been confiscated by those same biddies
and he is abused by men in black dresses.
But all this, so it seems, doesn't worry him much.
He sits on the edge hitting one stick against another.
One star falls then
another
rises.
1988
Opposites
This is how
I imagined hell: beyond its small doors of a fire
there are glowing figures, no longer recognizable,
different hues of burning flame, in front of that fire I could
hold out longer than I managed in front of a TV screen.
I felt I was the grand proprietor of everything
shoveling coal in the shape of the earth's globe through the open doors,
watching it burn, getting into a fever because
of it.
In my feverish state I walked through my room, passionately
opening one drawer, then more than one at a time
dipping my hands in bravely - brave
because in any one of the drawers I might find
the shards of a mirror - or some old
razor blade of my father. The drawers in that house
were exceptionally dangerous, everything
could reveal a terrible secret: for example
that my parents had kidnapped me from the Gypsies.
I could not fit my mirror-image to
anything or anybody. I assumed that
I had been despatched on some as yet
undisclosed mission which would only
be made known to me once I was
grown up. The hellish fever
gave way to a more run-of-the mill type
so I went back to bed. Along the walls there moved
slow and disturbing disembodied shadows
with huge eyeballs.
Now that I live inside the fire's doors
- in the cold and darkness, now that I am finally
adult, and the true proprietor of everything
- I peer back through the half-open doors at the room to see
how it is slowly turning a fiery red, how glowing coals
cover the charred remains of table, chairs and bed.
Rags
The boys founded a new town.
One hundred worked on its construction, one looked on.
Then he chose its coat of arms and flag,
codified the regulations
- and at that point we stopped belonging
to the same generation.
*
Click. Click.
Haircutting.
A theatrical slaughter.
And mummum the clothes shout
sent off in paper bags.
And mummum the herd calls out.
*
I'm walking alone (covered) in a white sheet
across the marching square.
Sometimes we are the wind.
Sometimes we are a bird,
a sailing ship and a kite.
We flutter a lot.
*
Knock. Knock.
A wooden dais
standing on the asphalt.
And we're in fours.
The back rows are fainting.
Wave
after wave.
*
But the colonel was never a private,
and even if he was - that's just mythology.
When someone asks the question Who didn't volunteer?
- it's not a forest of hands raised, only mine
goes up - and silence - and through the window
(i can) see the colonel standing alone on the dais
he has the same eyes as the eagle hanging behind him.
*
I am the soldier of Another Army
I feed on a different bread.
My head moves my lips
on a group photograph.
*
Intimate smaller worlds.
An ant escapes under a leaf.
The incomparable orderliness of the grass.
*
Tearing out the weeds along a trench
I find the fields of a butterfly:
it hasn't yet lost its coloring.
It only lasts for a moment.
Now
the wind.
I could have made someone pregnant in the same space of time.
The seconds would be
shorter,
hot
and more lively.
*
Birds are the servicers of our machine guns.
Yellow shimmerings among the trees.
On the exercise yard I have a ring of grass and I crawl.
*
We're warm here
under these gray blankets.
At this moment some of us
are being betrayed
by girlfriends, others though
will be betrayed later on.
*
This is as much as I see when I shut my eyes:
a green square - a cemetery, above it a flock of seagulls:
gray, irregular, ruffled feathers. Now
lifting off, and now landing.
One of the last civilian views
from a train window. This joyous chaos.
I am pleased
when I shut my eyes.
*
In my dreams there are still continuously civilian images:
That civilian air and civilian dirt
under my fingernails - and civilian too
is that not shaving in my dreams, and civilian problems.
In my dreams there remains still
that most clear of clarities.
Outside however, the bells are already ringing. Reveille?
Outside the greenery is bleeding, the rocks are rolling,
one hundred voices in me, over me, in front of me.
The slow hostile sun.
*
The old man likes to warm himself next to the cat.
The old man sometimes hits the cat in the face.
The old man gets emotional in the evenings
when he reads the letters from his cat's fiancees.
*
This must be the most beautiful sentence:
Colonel, Sir,
First Cannoneer So And So
Requests Absence
Requests Absence.
*
Swearing the oath of allegiance.
Everyone's turned up -
parents, sisters, girlfriend. Jack
and Rick. It's like at a funeral.
I was standing in line, but I didn't
even move my lips.
Just a pity, really, that no one
spotted my crime.
*
A butterfly has landed
on my rifle's barrel.
It's all true.
*
You enter the gym
as if it was a church hall.
I take off my beret with its eagle
and sweep, and sweep
under the altar
- an enormous sign with the results of a match:
HOME: GUESTS:
Outside the window is the night-time green, it's still there
my eyes wander off.
*
There is no right or left.
My mind streams down the middle.
My wrong right.
My mind streams down the middle.
And you can hear the quiet splashes
and the silent knocking.
I'm a single leg on a centipede.
I'm a single leg on a centipede.
*
This is the only peaceful spot.
STAR WARS. - The heading in a newspaper.
The Japanese with brass kettles on their heads.
A New Zealand surprise raid hangs hidden.
But I am quietly occupying this cubicle, one per one
hundred men. The one and only. Having hung my belt
over the door to show it's taken, I am occupying
this space. I don't even pull my trousers down.
I sit, shut my eyes. I don't think of anything,
of anyone. I occupy this
area, when right now
the whole platoon wants to take a shit.
*
The only thing that's happening here now
- is the darkness. JW 2459, Morag. Night.
I woke up screaming. Like, I'd dreamt
that I was locked inside a cross. Inside a cross. Yes.
*
Rags. My God, rags. Strips of pyjamas, strips of cloth
- and the ones that the color has gone from -
damp and feminine.
I'd like to die - and I don't, don't want to die at all. Kneeling
I rattle off a prayer, screw widows down in my
love poems and I imagine to myself
bits of conversations, I tell myself the plots of books and films
I hum STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER - and
I admit, while all ancient crimes
are as far off as the signals from beneath the earth's surface,
I don't dare raise my eyes, to look at the corridor
from a mouse's perspective . . .
Rags. Getting out to smoke a cigarette at night
senselessly I bend down
as if I were gathering strawberries.
1984
Translated by Donald Pirie
People
They love each other, and they're registered,
their papers completely in order.
They have their illnesses, they help themselves
with medication and literature.
They live, and I
write poems about them,
I uncover the brick and mortar of their history.
And this is not, so long as I admit it, betrayal.
The unbeloved does not betray.
The unbeloved goes
jangling in his pocket
a useless key.
Translated by W. Martin
M-Black Monday
The moment when all the town's streetlamps light up
simultaneously. The moment when you say
your incredible "no," and suddenly I don't know what
to do next: die? go away? not respond?
The moment in the sunshine when I watch you from the bus,
your face different from when you know I'm looking
- and now you can't see me, you're looking into nothing, into the shiny
glass in front of me. Not me anymore, not with me,
not in this way, not here. Anything can
happen, since everything does happen. Everything is defined
by three basic positions: man on top of woman,
woman on top of man, or the one right now
- woman and man divided by the light.
Translated by Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese
Six Times Coltrane
Who am I speaking to? After all, I'm speaking - even if
I speak in Polish - - - - - -. In a second the sun will go down
over the edge. In a second a cold-fingered
drive along the throat. In a second a cold city
drive. To Nowhere. An inhabitant of Nowhere,
I'll never be Elsewhere. And who am I speaking to?
- in Polish, on the margins
of the light. An angel
suddenly speaks: "I want to take off my clothes for you
now."
(Who is she speaking to?)
It's time to shut the little cardboard doors and open a window,
to open a window and get some air in this room.
Before, there was always luck to fall back on, now
the luck's run out. With one exception:
when poems go and leave their stench behind them.
The poetry of slaves lives on ideas,
and ideas are a watery substitute for blood.
The heroes remain imprisoned,
and the worker is ugly but touchingly
useful - in the poetry of slaves.
In the poetry of slaves the trees have crosses
inside them - under the bark - made of barbed wire.
How easy then for the slave to travel the monstrously
long and practically impossible road
from the alphabet to God, it lasts only a moment,
like spitting - in the poetry of slaves.
Instead of saying: I have a toothache, I'm
hungry, I'm lonely, both of us, four of
us, our whole street - they say quietly: Wanda
Wasilewska, Cyprian Kamil Norwid,
Józef Pilsudski, the Ukraine, Lithuania,
Thomas Mann, the Bible, and at the end a little something
in Yiddish.
If the dragon still lived in this city,
they'd flatter the dragon to death - or hole up
instead in some corner to write poems
- little fists for threatening the dragon with.
(Even love poems would be written
in a dragon alphabet...)
I look the dragon straight in the eye
and shrug my shoulders. It's June. That's obvious.
There was a thunderstorm here this afternoon. Dusk will fall
first into the perfectly square city squares.
All sorts of problems with that poem.
Shhh. Don't wake up the ghosts. Seven years have passed.
The history of literature devours everything. Shhh.
The history of the sky is more discriminating.
What's new? Not much. We continue to cultivate
our unusually artificial rhetoric and our cheap
games with half-wit readers (that, my reader,
is how Krzys Koehler sees you).
What's new? Not much. So many have been taken in.
But what to do about the army? I lost my leadership
abilities in kindergarten. I put down my weapons. I sit
and sell poetry (though M. Baran
has advised me, seriously advised me, not to).
I breathe. And I betray. I sell. I'm uncomfortable.
Controlled. Wonderful. Give me the police
and suffering. I'll write a freedomy poem
and tangle God up in it, Chechnya, the Balkans,
and you. By all means. Everything can be done.
The history of literature devours everything. It's true.
The history of the sky is more discriminating.
Translated by W. Martin
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