Asymmetry Read online

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  A Note About the Author and Translator

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  I

  NOWHERE

  It was a day nowhere just after I got back from my father’s funeral,

  a day between two continents; lost, I walked the streets

  of Hyde Park catching shreds of American voices.

  I belonged nowhere, I was free,

  but if this is freedom, I thought, I’d rather be

  a good king’s, a kindly emperor’s, captive;

  leaves swam against red autumn’s current,

  the wind yawned like a foxhound,

  the cashier in a grocery store, nowhere,

  couldn’t place my accent and asked “Where are you from?”

  but I’d forgotten, I wanted to tell her

  about my father’s death, then thought: I’m too old

  to be an orphan; I was living

  in Hyde Park, nowhere, “Where fun comes to die,”

  as college students elsewhere said, a little enviously.

  It was a faceless Monday, craven,

  vague, a day without inspiration, nowhere, even grief

  didn’t take a radical shape; it strikes me

  that on such days even Chopin would commit himself

  at best to giving lessons

  to wealthy, aristocratic pupils;

  suddenly I remembered what Doctor Gottfried Benn,

  the Berlin dermatologist, said about him

  in one of my favorite poems:

  “when Delacroix expounded his theories,

  it made him nervous, he for his part

  could offer no explanation of the Nocturnes,”*

  these lines, both ironic and tender,

  always filled me with joy,

  almost like Chopin’s music itself.

  I knew one thing: night too needed no

  explanation, likewise pain, nowhere.

  POETS ARE PRESOCRATICS

  Poets are Presocratics. They understand nothing.

  They listen to the whispers of broad, lowland rivers.

  They admire birds in flight, calm suburban gardens,

  High-speed trains rushing breathlessly ahead.

  The scent of fresh, hot bread drifting/wafting from a bakery

  stops them in their tracks,

  as if they’d just remembered something vital.

  A mountain stream murmurs, a philosopher bows to the wild water.

  Little girls play with dolls, a black cat waits impatiently.

  The quiet above August fields, when the swallows fly away.

  Cities too have their dreams.

  Poets stroll along dirt roads. The road has no end.

  Sometimes they prevail, then everything stands still

  —but their reign is short-lived.

  A rainbow appears, and fear vanishes.

  They know nothing, they jot down isolated metaphors.

  They bid the dead farewell, their lips move.

  They watch as green leaves overtake old trees.

  They’re long silent, then they sing and sing until their throats burst.

  SUMMER ’95

  It was summer on the Mediterranean, remember,

  near Toulon, a dry summer, self-absorbed,

  speaking some incomprehensible dialect,

  so we caught only scraps of salty words,

  it was summer in evening’s slant light, in the pale

  stains of stars, when the buzz of countless

  trifling conversations had died out and only

  silence waited for a sleepy bird to speak,

  summer in the daily explosion of noon, when even

  the cicadas fainted, that summer, when the azure water

  opened, welcoming, so welcoming

  that we forgot completely about amphoras lying

  for thousands of years on the sea bottom, in darkness,

  in solitude; it was summer, remember,

  when the privet leaves, always green, laughed,

  it was July, when we first befriended

  that little black cat

  who seemed so intelligent to us,

  it was the same summer when, in Srebrenica,

  men and boys were being killed;

  and there were countless dry shots,

  and no doubt also heat and dust,

  and cicadas, mortally afraid.

  MARATHON

  Marathoners, just after the race, proud and exhausted,

  in capes blazoned with the name Bank of America

  congregate on Chicago’s main street

  like ancient heroes,

  parade before Sunday strollers,

  pose happily for photos, countless flashes

  illuminate the air.

  Then evening falls,

  heroics slowly evaporate,

  the good moon returns,

  benign as always.

  Purple clouds in the sky

  can tell us nothing.

  Once more the world hushes.

  SUITCASE

  Krakow was overcast that morning, the hills steamed.

  It was raining in Munich, in valleys the Alps

  lay hidden and heavy as stones.

  Only in Athens did I glimpse the sun, it

  turned the air, the whole air,

  the whole immense flotilla of the air

  to trembling gold.

  As the religious writers say: I suddenly

  became a new man.

  I’m just a tourist in the visible world,

  one of a thousand shadows

  drifting through airports’ vast halls—

  and my green suitcase, like a faithful dog, follows me

  on little wheels.

  I’m just an absentminded tourist

  but I love the light.

  MR. WLADZIU

  Mr. Wladziu was a barber (haircuts, men’s and

  women’s, on Karmelicka Street). Short and slight.

  Interested in one thing only: angling.

  He liked to talk about the ways of fish,

  how drowsy they become in winter, when the cold

  is biting, murderous, almighty,

  how you must respect their sleep. They rest

  then, lie in the dense water like clocks,

  like new arrivals from another planet. They’re different.

  Mr. Wladziu even represented Poland

  once or twice in angling,

  but something went wrong, I don’t remember what,

  too hot, or maybe rain, or low-lying clouds.

  By the time he got to the doctor, it was too late.

  Karmelicka Street didn’t notice his departure:

  the trams shriek on the curve,

  the chestnuts bloom ecstatically each year.

  MANDELSTAM IN THEODOSIA

  Let me go; I wasn’t made for jail.

  —OSIP MANDELSTAM

  (arrested in Theodosia in 1920)

  Mandel
stam was not mistaken, he wasn’t made

  for jail, but jails were made

  for him, countless camps and prisons

  waited for him patiently, freight trains

  and filthy barracks, railroad switches and

  gloomy waiting rooms kept waiting

  till he came, secret police in leather

  jackets waited for him and party

  hacks with ruddy faces.

  “I will not see the famous Phaedra,”

  he wrote. The Black Sea didn’t shed

  black tears, pebbles on the shore

  tumbled submissively, as the wave desired,

  clouds sailed swiftly across the inattentive earth.

  FULL-BLOWN EPIC

  Each poem, even the briefest,

  may grow into a full-blown epic,

  it may even seem ready to explode,

  since it conceals everywhere immense

  stores of wonder and cruelty patiently

  awaiting our gaze, which may release them,

  unfold them, just as a highway’s bow unfolds in summer—

  but we don’t know what will prevail, if our imagination

  can keep pace with its rich reality,

  and so each poem has to speak

  of the world’s wholeness; alas, our

  minds are elsewhere, our lips are

  thin and sift images

  like Molière’s miser.

  THE EARTH

  Some spoke Polish, others German,

  only tears were cosmopolitan.

  Wounds didn’t heal, they had long memories.

  Coal shone as always.

  No one wanted to die, but life was harder.

  Much strangeness, strangeness didn’t speak.

  We arrived like tourists, with suitcases—

  we stayed on.

  We didn’t belong to that earth,

  but it received us openheartedly—

  it received you both.

  KINGFISHER

  As kingfishers catch fire …

  —G. M. HOPKINS

  I saw how the kingfisher in flight just above the sea’s surface,

  a flight as straight as Euclid’s life, straight and violent,

  exploded suddenly into every color, I saw how the world’s wild light

  seized its wings, but not to kill it, just to make certain

  that this iridescent bullet safely strikes

  the rocky shore, the nest that’s hidden there,

  a flame, so it seems, may also be

  a shelter, a dwelling, in which

  thoughts ignite but are not destroyed,

  a prison that frees us from indifference,

  a mighty oxymoron,

  sometimes a poem too,

  almost a sonnet.

  ABOUT MY MOTHER

  I could never say anything about my mother:

  how she kept saying, you’ll be sorry someday,

  when I’m not around anymore, and how I didn’t believe

  in either “I’m not” or “anymore,”

  how I liked watching as she read bestsellers,

  always flipping to the last chapter first,

  how in the kitchen, convinced it’s not her

  proper place, she made Sunday coffee,

  or, even worse, filet of cod,

  how she studied the mirror while expecting guests,

  making the face that best kept her

  from seeing herself as she was (I take

  after her in this and other failings),

  how she went on at length about things

  that weren’t her strong suit and how I stupidly

  teased her, for example, when she

  compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,

  and I said, cruelly, but you know he

  had talent, and how she forgave it all

  and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston

  to her funeral and they showed a comedy

  in flight and I wept with laughter

  and grief, and how I couldn’t say anything

  and still can’t.

  GRAŻYNA

  Back then Gliwice had a cinema, Grażyna,

  christened in honor of another cinema—

  in Lvov, on Sapieha Street—

  and Coldwater Street, named in honor

  of faded maps, now vanished,

  still runs along the oily, black river

  (runs, or maybe just walks calmly);

  other efforts to change this town

  into that one were also undertaken,

  countless bold experiments

  that never worked,

  the alchemists labored late into the night,

  the philosopher’s stone was sought,

  spirits and places were summoned up,

  powers were invoked, both high and low,

  but forgetting triumphed in the end,

  forgetting, round as a ball,

  sweet as a strawberry, final

  as judgment.

  WE KNOW WHAT ART IS

  We know what art is, we recognize the sense of happiness

  it gives, difficult at times, bitter, bittersweet,

  sometimes only sweet, like Turkish pastry. We honor art,

  since we’d like to know what our life is.

  We live, but don’t always know what that means.

  So we travel, or just open a book at home.

  We recall a momentary vision as we stood before a painting,

  we may also remember clouds drifting through the sky.

  We shiver when we hear a cellist play

  Bach’s suites, when we catch a piano singing.

  We know what great poetry can be, a poem

  written three millennia ago, or yesterday.

  But we don’t know why a concert sometimes

  fails to move us. We don’t see why

  some books seem to offer us redemption

  while others can’t conceal their rage. We know, but then we forget.

  We can only guess why a work of art may suddenly

  close up, slam shut, like an Italian museum on strike (sciopero).

  Why our souls also close at times, and slam shut, like

  an Italian museum on strike (sciopero).

  Why art goes mute when terrible things happen,

  why we don’t need it then—as if terrible things

  had overwhelmed the world, filled it completely, totally, to the roof.

  We don’t know what art is.

  VENICE, NOVEMBER

  Venice, November, black rain, Piranesi

  in San Giorgio Maggiore still dreams his

  terrifying dreams, which have long since

  come to pass and today seem to bore

  young visitors a bit. They’d prefer

  other nightmares, long for new

  fears, unexpected horrors.

  The black rain still falls and Venice,

  bent, stooped, uncertain,

  dressed in the tattered fur

  of Mauritanian façades and lace,

  slowly slips into winter

  like a medic who keeps knocking softly,

  persistently on the palace chapel door.

  NORTHERN SEA

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free

  —ELIZABETH BISHOP

  But maybe we just pretended to know nothing.

  Maybe that was easiest, considering the vastness of experience,

  and suffering (others’ suffering usually).

  Maybe there was even a touch of laziness,

  a hint of indifference. Maybe we thought:

  we’re better off being Socrates’ distant epigones

  than admitting that we know a thing or two.

  Maybe on long walks, when the earth

  and trees loomed, when we began to understand,

  our daring frightened us.

  Maybe our knowledge is bitter, too bitter,
/>   like the gray cold waves of the northern sea

  that has swallowed up so many ships,

  but stays hungry.

  PLAYING HOOKY

  But the kingdom of the dead may be right here,

  I thought; this was by the Vistula,

  among weeds and dandelions and crushed Coca-Cola cans,

  which must have suffered much,

  in March, when young, reckless shoots of grass

  set out trustfully along an endless road

  and schoolboys playing hooky drink cheap wine

  in first, chaotic ecstasy.

  So I thought then, but now

  I don’t know how to end this poem.

  There is another kingdom, after all,

  to which we belong,

  visible and friendly,

  the vast kingdom of the living,

  but we’re unable to see it—

  because it’s in us,

  because it’s infinite

  and elastic.

  And it holds alarm clocks, which sob,

  and jazz records made of vinyl,

  buttons, gooseberries,

  and black lilac.

  RACHMANINOFF

  When I listened to the Third Concerto then,

  I still didn’t know that experts considered it

  too conservative (I hadn’t realized

  that art contains not only art, but also hatreds, fanatical

  debates, curses worthy of religious wars),

  I heard the promise of things to come,

  omens of complex happiness, love, sketches

  of landscapes I would later recognize,

  a glimpse of purgatory, heaven, wanderings, and finally

  maybe even something like forgiveness.

  As I listen now to Martha Argerich play

  the Third Concerto, I marvel at her mastery,

  her passion, her inspiration, while the boy

  I once was labors to understand

  what came to pass, and what’s gone. What lives.

  II

  CHILDHOOD

  Give me a childhood again

  —JOHN BURNSIDE

  Give me back my childhood,

  republic of loquacious sparrows,