Asymmetry Read online

  measureless thickets of nettles

  and the timid wood owl’s nightly sobs.

  Our street, empty on Sunday,

  the red neo-Gothic church

  that didn’t take kindly to mystics,

  burdocks whispering in German,

  and the alcoholic’s confession

  before the altar of a white wall,

  and stones, and rain, and puddles

  in which gold glistened.

  Now I’m sure that I’d know

  how to be a child, I’d know

  how to see the frost-covered trees,

  how to live holding still.

  1943: WERNER HEISENBERG PAYS A VISIT TO HANS FRANK IN KRAKOW

  It was a difficult visit, though elementary particles

  never commented on current events.

  Hans Frank, a subtle connoisseur of art, a murderer,

  had been his older brother’s classmate.

  What they shared was a love of music.

  You don’t choose your brothers, or their friends.

  He couldn’t quite see why Frank had picked

  the royal castle for his residence in Krakow.

  The passersby struck him as sad,

  they moved like black puppets,

  above, the clouds were ominous, violet,

  below, the city like a frosted mirror.

  It was December, a frosted month.

  The elementary particles never spoke.

  He gave a lecture (just for Germans).

  He couldn’t understand those clouds,

  that mirror; fortunately other matters soon

  absorbed him: his homeland was in flames.

  Those dark streets were not his homeland.

  Those leafless trees, that chill, the women wrapped

  in shawls and scarves—it must have been a dream.

  He skipped this episode in his memoirs,

  insignificant, after all. What goes unsaid

  should stay unsaid. So he thought.

  CONVERSATION

  There, where you can see the Earth

  may actually be round: a narrow path

  between idyllic fields outside of town,

  on the horizon, a sliver of church tower

  mercilessly sliced by a distant hill,

  alders above a muddy stream,

  in the water Canadian thyme

  (which is an invasive species)

  and the porcelain shards of a plate,

  I sometimes walked there with my father (my mother,

  as we knew, didn’t go on longer expeditions),

  in the fall or spring, when trees

  were momentarily content.

  Only now, or so I think,

  do I approach the proper tone,

  only now could I talk with my parents,

  but I can’t hear their answers.

  CHACONNE

  FOR JAUME VALLCORBA

  We know, everyone knows, that he spoke with the Lord

  in countless cantatas and passions, but there’s also

  the chaconne from the second partita for solo violin:

  here, perhaps only here, Bach talks about his life,

  he suddenly, unexpectedly, reveals himself,

  swiftly, violently casts out joy and sorrow

  (since it’s all we’ve got), the pain of losing his wife and children,

  the grief that time must take everything,

  but also the ecstasy of hours without end

  when, in some dim church’s musty air,

  lonely, like the pilot of a plane delivering mail

  to foreign countries, he played the organ and sensed beneath his fingers

  its pneumatic acquiescence, its rapture, its trembling,

  or when he heard the choir’s single, mighty voice as if

  all human strife were gone for good

  —after all, we dream about it too,

  telling the truth about our life,

  and we keep trying awkwardly,

  and we’ll go on trying, but where are they,

  where can our cantatas be, tell me,

  where is the other side.

  SENIOR DANCE

  Or how, before the senior dance, my mother went to the meeting

  where we discussed the evening’s “artistic program”

  and how her ideas struck us

  as feeble, old-fashioned,

  as if she, not we, were taking the final exams

  she’d already passed before the war,

  with honors, as I remember,

  and also the war, all signs suggest

  she passed it pretty well too, and how then,

  during that meeting, she embarrassed me—

  whereas I couldn’t admire her during the war

  for different reasons, completely different,

  and how that asymmetry, that strong asymmetry,

  for many years, for decades,

  didn’t permit me to see her

  in truth’s sharp light,

  sharp and complex,

  complex and just,

  just and unattainable,

  unattainable and splendid.

  SHELF

  JERZY HORDYŃSKI (1919–1998)

  He was a poet of bitterness and rapture (more bitterness).

  I think he was a very good poet.

  I found one of his books in the Regenstein Library:

  Selected Poems. This was why he’d been chosen.

  He left poems chosen by others.

  His biography: a bow drawn between Lvov and Rome.

  Three years in a Soviet camp, several decades

  near Campo dei Fiori.

  From Rome he kept going back to Krakow,

  and then from Krakow back to Rome.

  I didn’t know him, though I once spotted

  his laughing face in a crowd of writers,

  and remembered it.

  If you accept the minimalist definition,

  he was happy—he died in his own bed.

  Now he lives on a library shelf

  like a hiker bivouacking in high mountains.

  A faded cover hides bitterness and experience.

  A faded canvas cover: a neighboring volume,

  smaller scale, has left its dark

  trace upon it—so much tenderness in the touch

  of two unread books.

  JULY

  July, the blackbirds have stopped singing.

  I sit on a bench by the bank of a slow river,

  I hear the hate-filled quarreling of lovers,

  whom I don’t know and never will.

  Sweaty athletes run along the avenue.

  The morning sun shines indifferently

  on the calm dark water

  that is apathy personified.

  A little boy carries a plastic bag

  bearing the garish logo Men’s Health,

  souls almost never meet,

  bodies do battle cloaked in darkness.

  A rain frail as haiku arrives in the night.

  Light bells mumble at dawn.

  While we’re alive.

  UNDERGROUND TRAINS

  There are paintings that show suffering

  and a candle’s small flame; there are unhappy people

  who seek comfort in vain

  like a mailman wading through snowstorms,

  there is music growing in jungles of silence,

  there are executioners, dim streets, blind windows,

  days that seem like festivals of cruelty.

  There are those who cry hopelessly in cramped waiting rooms,

  there are underground trains, harsh accusations,

  also the ordinary boredom of talking sports,

  and the terror of long evenings, and the shrieks of drunks—

  and occasional moments of revelation,

  when chestnut flowers proudly glow

  and fledgling thrushes stumble

  through the grass blades, stunned

  by
a May garden’s Heraclitean blaze.

  NIGHT, SEA

  At night the sea is dark, bleak,

  and speaks in a hoarse whisper

  Thus we recognize

  its shameful secret: it shines

  with reflected light

  At night, it’s as poor as we are,

  black, orphaned;

  it patiently awaits the sun’s return

  THAT DAY

  That day, when word comes

  that someone close has died, a friend, or someone

  we didn’t know, but admired from a distance

  —the first moment, the first hours: he or she is gone,

  it seems certain, inescapable, maybe even

  irrefutable, we trust (reluctantly) whoever tells us,

  heartbroken, over the phone, or maybe some announcer

  from a careless radio, but we can’t believe it,

  nothing on earth could convince us,

  since he still hasn’t died (for us), not at all,

  he (she) no longer is, but hasn’t yet vanished

  for good, just the opposite, he is, so it seems, at the strongest

  point of his existence, he grows,

  though he is no more, he still speaks,

  though he’s gone mute, he still prevails,

  though he’s lost, lost the battle—with what?

  time? the body?—but no, it’s not true, he has triumphed,

  he’s achieved completion, absolute completion,

  he’s so complete, so great, so splendid, he no longer fits

  inside life, he shatters life’s frail vessel,

  he towers over the living, as if made

  from a different substance, the strongest bronze,

  but at the same time we begin to suspect,

  we’re afraid, we guess, we know,

  that silence approaches

  and helpless grief

  SANDALS

  The sandals I bought many years ago

  for twenty euros

  in the Greek village of Theologos

  on the island of Thassos

  haven’t worn out at all,

  they’re just like new.

  I must have gotten,

  quite accidentally,

  a hermit’s, a saint’s sandals.

  How they must suffer,

  carrying an ordinary sinner.

  REHEARSAL

  Or when she said: you shouldn’t

  care what other people do—

  but after all she cared …

  When she corrected my compositions.

  When she quoted, almost always incorrectly,

  what Joseph Conrad

  once said on the nature of writing,

  when she got lost in thought, but never completely,

  when she walked down a street of our provincial

  town as if it were Paris,

  when she looked at me curiously,

  and I wasn’t sure if

  she was looking at me or at some

  ideal notion of a son, when she got sick,

  as usual excessively, and then, when

  she really started getting sick

  and I thought that it was still

  just a rehearsal, but it was already

  the beginning of dying

  (end italics).

  WHITE SAILS

  Eugène Delacroix watched

  the steamships on the Canal La Manche,

  which had slowly, systematically begun

  to replace the frigates with their billowing white sails,

  and he sadly noted in his diary:

  everything around us falls prey to degradation,

  the world’s beauty vanishes for good;

  new inventions turn up

  ceaselessly, they may be useful,

  but they’re endlessly banal

  (iron railroads, for example,

  locomotives heavy as a hangman’s hand).

  He himself painted fine horses and fierce lions,

  with muscles taut under their short coats,

  and the uniforms of Spahis, a lot of red, which

  could be blood or exotic textiles,

  and light dancing on a saber’s blade

  —but now only the machines remained,

  gray machines and oil stains

  on the sand, on the rubbish (but also blood).

  There’s so much new reality,

  and the marvelous has gotten shy,

  it’s hard to locate, to remember,

  to record, but still the high,

  white, skyscraping clouds,

  proud, haughty cumuli, they sail

  over France and over Germany and over Poland,

  they sail over us, faithful migrating birds

  hide in them, cranes and bullfinches,

  swallows dwell in them, orioles, swifts

  and also the iron ships of the air,

  which kill or save us.

  They circle overhead,

  death and salvation.

  RADIO STREET

  While she was dying in the hospital in Gliwice,

  the hospital by Radio Street, where

  World War Two in some sense had begun,

  I wasn’t by her bed.

  Unconscious, absent,

  where did she wander then, no one knows.

  Maybe that was the war’s true end,

  since wars conclude with death and proclamations,

  though silence always has the last word.

  When she died, spring was just beginning,

  snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) bloomed,

  flower-scouts,

  both delicate and strong.

  MY FAVORITE POETS

  My favorite poets

  never met

  They lived in different countries

  and different times

  surrounded by ordinariness

  by good people and bad

  they lived modestly

  like an apple in an orchard

  They loved clouds

  they lifted their heads

  a great armada

  of light and shade

  drifted over them

  a film was showing

  that still hasn’t ended

  Moments of bitterness

  passed swiftly

  likewise moments of joy

  Sometimes they knew

  what the world was

  and wrote hard words

  on soft paper

  Sometimes they knew nothing

  and were like children

  on a school playground

  when the first drop

  of warm rain

  descends

  III

  MOURNING FOR A LOST FRIEND

  My friend hasn’t died, my friend lives

  But I can’t meet him, I can’t see him

  We can’t have a chat

  My friend is hiding from me

  He’s been seized by a deep political tide

  My friend now knows the answer to every question

  And can trace the source of every answer

  My friend thinks that I’m

  frivolous, lost, reckless,

  hopelessly adrift in floods

  of irresponsible epithets

  in ominous thickets of ellipses

  My friend knows what anchors our life

  what is an urgent hyperbole and what is merely a litotes

  My friend never leaves his house

  at night not even in May when all

  the houses sing and swallows vanish in the sky

  for a long time and come back happy

  carefree, renewed

  My friend fell in love with the nation

  but the nation is serious and never strolls even

  in May it keeps watch, my friend

  has no time for metaphors or pars pro toto

  My friend is hiding from me

  My friend lives

  JUNGLE

  But it’s pur
e accident: a Silesian city,

  slag heaps on the skyline, on the street old people

  speak a language carried from the East,

  then discovering music, Brubeck, Charlie Parker,

  a Rachmaninoff concert and the Seventh Symphony,

  discovering something different, completely different,

  music strange and lovely from the start, like Greta Garbo

  in a spy film, surrounded by ordinary types,

  and the first poetry that spoke to me,

  a bookshop display, like an auction of fine manners,

  but also the fat priest in a stained cassock

  and the teacher of false history with a vulture’s sharp face,

  school dances where the girls, so ordinary,

  were suddenly transformed into enigmatic beings,

  the main street (we saw it as a fragment

  of a great metropolis), and suburban gardens, smelling

  first of weeds and then, in autumn, of bonfires’ sustaining smoke.

  This is exactly why that strange arrangement of black

  and white, green and blue—mostly black

  —not ideas, not the serenity of some philosopher’s study,

  not an engineer’s sketches, or my father’s stenography,

  just chaos, a chaos of stains, sounds, and scents,

  a jungle, a splendid chaos that you spend

  the rest of your life trying to comprehend, to organize,

  in vain, since there’s never enough time,

  enough attention, and so it remains, slipshod, a rough draft,

  covered in slanting, violet lines,

  a rough draft, whose cardboard covers

  curl like a bat’s wings, a notebook

  that fades and vanishes in the abyss

  of the bottom drawer, vanishes, but is in fact

  immortal.

  RUTH

  IN MEMORY OF RUTH BUCZYŃSKA

  She survived the war in Tarnopol. In darkness and in semi-darkness. In fear.

  She was afraid of rats and heavy boots, loud conversations, screams.

  She died just now, in darkness, in a hospital ward’s white quiet.

  She was a Jew. Sometimes she didn’t know what that meant.

  It’s simple and incomprehensible, like algebra.

  At times she tried to work it through. The Gestapo knew exactly what it meant

  to be a Jew. The great philosophical tradition helped,

  definitions sharp as knives, direct as a Buddhist arrow.