Eternal Enemies: Poems Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  I

  Star

  En Route

  Music in the Car

  The Swallows of Auschwitz

  Stolarska Street

  Genealogy

  Karmelicka Street

  Long Street

  Tadeusz Kantor

  The Power Cinema

  The Church of Corpus Christi

  Was It

  Rainbow

  Friends

  Sicily

  Describing Paintings

  Blizzard

  Poetry Searches for Radiance

  II

  The Diction Teacher Retires from the Theater School

  In a Little Apartment

  The Orthodox Liturgy

  Rome, Open City

  The Sea

  Reading Milosz

  Walk Through This Town

  Ordinary Life

  Music Heard with You

  At the Cathedral’s Foot

  Impossible Friendships

  Rain Drop

  Butterflies

  In a Strange City

  Camogli

  Bogliasco: The Church Square

  Staglieno

  Two-Headed Boy

  Our World

  Small Objects

  Defending Poetry, Etc.

  Subject: Brodsky

  Self-Portrait, Not Without Doubts

  Conversation

  Old Marx

  To the Shade of Aleksander Wat

  Night Is a Cistern

  Storm

  Evening, Stary Sacz

  Blake

  Notes from a Trip to Famous Excavations

  Zurbarán

  Noto

  III

  Traveling by Train Along the Hudson

  The Greeks

  Great Ships

  Erinna of Telos

  Of Kingdoms

  Syracuse

  Submerged City

  Epithalamium

  Gate

  New Year’s Eve, 2004

  No Childhood

  Music Heard

  Balance

  Morning

  Old Marx (2)

  Dolphins

  Organ Tuning

  Firemen’s Helmets

  A Bird Sings in the Evening

  Wait for an Autumn Day

  Kathleen Ferrier

  Life Is Not a Dream

  It Depends

  America’s Sun

  Antennas in the Rain

  Also by Adam Zagajewski

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  TO MAYA, toujours

  I

  STAR

  I returned to you years later,

  gray and lovely city,

  unchanging city

  buried in the waters of the past.

  I’m no longer the student

  of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,

  I’m not the young poet who wrote

  too many lines

  and wandered in the maze

  of narrow streets and illusions.

  The sovereign of clocks and shadows

  has touched my brow with his hand,

  but still I’m guided by

  a star by brightness

  and only brightness

  can undo or save me.

  EN ROUTE

  1. WITHOUT BAGGAGE

  To travel without baggage, sleep in the train

  on a hard wooden bench,

  forget your native land,

  emerge from small stations

  when a gray sky rises

  and fishing boats head to sea.

  2. IN BELGIUM

  It was drizzling in Belgium

  and the river wound between hills.

  I thought, I’m so imperfect.

  The trees sat in the meadows

  like priests in green cassocks.

  October was hiding in the weeds.

  No, ma’am, I said,

  this is the nontalking compartment.

  3. A HAWK CIRCLES ABOVE THE HIGHWAY

  It will be disappointed if it swoops down

  on sheet iron, on gas,

  on a tape of tawdry music,

  on our narrow hearts.

  4. MONT BLANC

  It shines from afar, white and cautious,

  like a lantern for shadows.

  5. SEGESTA

  On the meadow a vast temple—

  a wild animal

  open to the sky.

  6. SUMMER

  Summer was gigantic, triumphant—

  and our little car looked lost

  on the road going to Verdun.

  7. THE STATION IN BYTOM

  In the underground tunnel

  cigarette butts grow,

  not daisies.

  It stinks of loneliness.

  8. RETIRED PEOPLE ON A FIELD TRIP

  They’re learning to walk

  on land.

  9. GULLS

  Eternity doesn’t travel,

  eternity waits.

  In a fishing port

  only the gulls are chatty.

  10. THE THEATER IN TAORMINA

  From the theater in Taormina you spot

  the snow on Etna’s peak

  and the gleaming sea.

  Which is the better actor?

  11. A BLACK CAT

  A black cat comes out to greet us

  as if to say, look at me

  and not some old Romanesque church.

  I’m alive.

  12. A ROMANESQUE CHURCH

  At the bottom of the valley

  a Romanesque church at rest:

  there’s wine in this cask.

  13. LIGHT

  Light on the walls of old houses,

  June.

  Passerby, open your eyes.

  14. AT DAWN

  The world’s materiality at dawn—

  and the soul’s frailty.

  MUSIC IN THE CAR

  Music heard with you

  at home or in the car

  or even while strolling

  didn’t always sound as pristine

  as piano tuners might wish—

  it was sometimes mixed with voices

  full of fear and pain,

  and then that music

  was more than music,

  it was our living

  and our dying.

  THE SWALLOWS OF AUSCHWITZ

  In the barracks’ quiet,

  in the silence of a summer Sunday,

  the swallows’ shrill cry.

  Is this really all that’s left

  of human speech?

  STOLARSKA STREET

  The small crowd by the American consulate

  ripples like a jellyfish in water.

  A young Dominican strides down the sidewalk

  and passersby yield piously.

  I’m at home again, silent as a Buddhist.

  I count the days of happiness and fretting,

  days spent seeking you frantically,

  finding just a metaphor, an image,

  days of Ecclesiastes and the Psalmist.

  I remember the heatstruck scent of heather,

  the smell of sap in the forest by the sea,

  the dark of a white chapel in Provence,

  where only a candle’s sun glowed.r />
  I remember Greece’s small olives,

  Westphalia’s gleaming railroads,

  and the long trip to bid my mother goodbye

  on an airplane where they showed a comedy,

  everyone laughed loudly.

  I returned to the city of sweet cakes,

  bitter chocolate, and lovely funerals

  (a grain of hope was once buried here),

  the city of starched memory—

  but the anxiety that drives wanderers,

  and turns the wheels of bicycles, mills, and clocks,

  won’t leave me, it remains concealed

  in my heart like a starving deserter

  in an abandoned circus wagon.

  GENEALOGY

  I’ll never know them,

  those outmoded figures

  —the same as we are,

  yet completely different.

  My imagination works to unlock

  the mystery of their being,

  it can’t wait for the release

  of memory’s secret archives.

  I see them in cramped classrooms,

  in the small provincial towns

  of the Hapsburgs’ unhappy empire.

  Poplars twitch hysterically

  outside the windows

  while snow and rain dictate

  their own orthography.

  They grip a useless scrap of chalk

  helplessly in their fists,

  in fingers black with ink.

  They labor to reveal the world’s mystery

  to noisy, hungry children,

  who only grow and scream.

  My schoolmaster forebears fought

  to calm an angry ocean

  just like that mad artist

  who rose above the waves

  clutching his frail conductor’s wand.

  I imagine the void

  of their exhaustion, empty moments

  through which I spy

  their life’s core.

  And I think that when I too

  do my teaching,

  they gaze in turn at me,

  revising my mutterings,

  correcting my mistakes

  with the calm assurance of the dead.

  KARMELICKA STREET

  TO FRITZ STERN

  Karmelicka Street, a sky blue tram, the sun,

  September, the first day after vacation,

  some have come home from long trips,

  armored divisions enter Poland,

  children off to school dressed in their best,

  white and navy blue, like sails and sea,

  like memory and grapes and inspiration.

  The trees stand at attention, honoring

  the power of young minds that haven’t yet

  known fire and sleep and can do what they want,

  nothing can stop them

  (not counting invisible limits).

  The trees greet the young respectfully,

  but you—be truthful—envy

  that starting out, that setting off

  from home, from childhood, from the sweet darkness

  that tastes of almonds, raisins, and poppy seeds,

  you stop by the store for bread

  and then walk home, unhurried,

  whistling and humming carelessly;

  your school still hasn’t started,

  the teachers have gone, the masters remain,

  distant as summer, your sleep sails through the clouds

  across the sky.

  LONG STREET

  Thankless street—little dry goods stores

  like sentries in Napoleon’s frozen army;

  country people peer into shop windows and their reflections

  gaze back at dusty cars;

  Long Street trudging slowly to the suburbs,

  while the suburbs press toward the center.

  Lumbering trams groove the street,

  scentless perfume shops furrow it,

  and after rainstorms mud instead of manna;

  a street of dwarves and giants, creaking bikes,

  a street of small towns clustered

  in one room, napping after lunch,

  heads dropped on a soiled tablecloth,

  and clerics tangled in long cassocks;

  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,

&n
bsp; 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,