Asymmetry Page 3

  She was beautiful. She should have died then, like the other men and women,

  vanished without a trace, gone without elegies, like so many others,

  like the air, but she lived a long time, in daylight, in the sun,

  in the daily air, the oxygen of ordinary Krakow.

  Sometimes she couldn’t understand what it meant to be beautiful.

  The mirror kept still, it didn’t know the philosophical definitions.

  She didn’t forget those other times, but hardly ever

  mentioned them. Once only she told this story:

  her beloved cat wouldn’t stay in the ghetto, twice

  it went back to the Aryan side at night. Her cat

  didn’t know who Jews were, what the Aryan side meant.

  It didn’t know, so it shot to the other side like an arrow.

  Ruth was a lawyer and defended others. Maybe that was why she lived so long.

  Because there are so many others, and they need defending.

  Prosecutors multiply like flies, but defenders are few.

  She was a good person. She had a soul. We seem to know

  what that means.

  MANET

  The worried artist smokes a cigar,

  he seems dissatisfied,

  nothing turns out today.

  It’s breakfast in the studio,

  a lemon sliced as in Dutch paintings.

  But look, the model, a young man

  in a black frock coat, is in splendid form:

  resting against a table, he looks at us

  with the arrogant gaze

  best suited to happy creatures

  whose only purpose

  is to seem, to shine, and who

  are otherwise untroubled.

  They know they’ll live forever—

  though without memory.

  A TRIP FROM LVOV TO SILESIA IN 1945

  And again the rusty cars trundle slowly

  the locomotive wheezes

  and repeats “A” and “A” and “A”

  The freight car wheels clatter

  then a dreary silence falls

  the train stands for a long time in the yellow grass

  heavy military transports pass it by

  This train does not have right of way

  it’s not the firstborn son

  It’s been switched to a side track near Krakow

  far from the city, from Wawel Castle and the Market

  far from the old university

  and its elegant professors

  It set out on my father’s name day

  and Mrs. Kolmer brought a fedora cake

  to the station, it didn’t last long

  Behind us lay mass graves

  and homeless suffering

  Now we are homeless

  and there is only this moment

  and glistening spiderwebs and hawthorn bushes

  I don’t know what music is

  I don’t know the map I haven’t read Leśmian

  I can’t begin to guess that school

  with its Prussian bricks will smell

  of Bismarck brown, drafting triangles and scars

  or that our four-person family

  will be as perfect as the finest square

  but then will fall like Byzantium

  and that Saint Francis will walk

  past us but incognito alas

  and that ideas will turn up in their Sunday best

  just like Mazovian or Silesian folk dancers

  in starched skirts

  and high polished shoes

  It’s October and the golden trees

  obey the wind and are afraid of hail

  and rooks (rooks are so black)

  and I still know nothing

  I don’t even know that I’ll fall ill in a moment

  and will be saved along the way

  by Doctor Kochanowski

  HIGHWAY

  I was maybe twenty.

  In the junkyard under the viaduct built

  by Hitler I hunted for relics from that war, relics

  of the iron age, bayonets and helmets of whichever

  army, I didn’t care, I dreamed of great discoveries—

  just as Heinrich Schliemann once

  sought Hector and Achilles in Asia Minor,

  but I found neither bayonets

  nor gold, only rust was everywhere,

  rust’s brown hatred; I was afraid

  that it might penetrate my heart.

  WAKE UP

  Wake up, my soul.

  I don’t know where you are,

  where you’re hiding,

  but wake up, please,

  we’re still together,

  the road is still before us,

  a bright strip of dawn

  will be our star.

  PUBLIC SPEAKING CONTEST

  Or when she told us, for the tenth time maybe,

  about the public speaking contest that, as a young

  law student, she’d won, nearly won, even though

  she faced serious competition, and like everyone else,

  was stunned that a woman had won, nearly won,

  and not a man, a future judge or lawyer;

  she came out the best, nearly the best, though technically

  speaking someone else took home first prize—

  and that was her greatest success,

  and when we listened to her story, later, much later,

  ironically, a little bored, thinking: “you’re still

  caught up in a competition, invisible this time,

  like most such occupations,

  and you want us to give you the laurels

  that they refused you then,”

  and how I wish I could hear

  her tell the story again

  about the contest she nearly won,

  and in which, I think, after decades

  of her memory’s unceasing labor,

  she finally carried the day.

  PENCIL

  Angels no longer have time for us;

  they labor now for unborn generations—

  hunched over school notebooks

  they write, they scribble, then correct

  complex diagrams

  for future happiness,

  with a thick yellow pencil

  clenched between their teeth—

  like first-graders

  under the eye of a teacher

  smiling benignly.

  KRZYS MICHALSKI DIED

  Krzys Michalski died suddenly.

  Of all the people I know, he’s the only one

  who might have seemed slightly immortal.

  Combative, towering over others. Fantastically intelligent.

  He did so many good things. When you thought of him,

  the word success emerged from the cave where

  it ordinarily vegetates. Success, true success.

  Not requiem or other touching knickknacks.

  He always seemed to fly business class,

  and stayed only in the very best hotels.

  He made friends with the pope, with presidents,

  but never stopped being a philosopher, that is,

  an invisible man, someone who listens closely.

  Who slips occasionally into the cave of thought.

  A difficult combination, impossible.

  But only the impossible can be marvelous.

  In a well-cut black jacket, slender,

  dressed like a traveler who prepares to set out

  on a great journey and doesn’t want to betray anyone

  wherever he’s going.

  BERTOLT BRECHT IN ETERNITY

  Your grave lies right in Berlin’s heart,

  in that elite, philosophical cemetery

  where they won’t bury just anyone, where

  Hegel and Fichte rest like rusty anchors

  (their ships sink into the abyss of textbooks).

  Your bizarre errors, your wors
hip of doctrine

  lie beside you like axes and spears in Neolithic graves,

  equally useful, equally necessary.

  You chose East Germany, but also kept

  an Austrian passport just in case.

  You were a cautious revolutionary—but can an oxymoron

  save the world?

  You wrote a poem “To Those Born Later”—you hoped the future

  too would yield to your persuasion. But the future has passed.

  Those born later drift indifferently through the graves—like tourists in museums

  who look mainly at the labels under paintings.

  It’s April, a cool and sunny day, black shadows cling

  to the tombstones, as if detectives were the true immortals.

  RUE ARMAND SILVESTRE

  Armand Silvestre, a Parnassian, once renowned,

  now a forgotten poet and conteur, so Wikipedia says;

  a street in no way different from other arteries

  planted with mannerly trees, beneath which

  sparrows continuously danced the Lambeth Walk and shimmy.

  Graced by a Franprix shop, a day care, a pharmacy, a barber,

  a red-faced butcher, always smiling, as if

  quartering meat were his greatest delight,

  an elementary school and two bad restaurants.

  That was our street, rather long—unfortunately,

  it lacked a proper conclusion,

  like certain films, and our building, an enormous structure,

  too large, called Le Tripode, the tripod,

  as in Delphi, but no Pythia stood over it,

  no prophetic mists rose, there was no magic

  (only brief moments, which didn’t fade),

  and we didn’t know what would be, we lived in darkness

  and in hope, as others live, inhabitants

  of Dresden or Warsaw, who each night

  take their watches from their wrists

  and in their dreams are as free as swimmers

  in eternity’s Atlantic.

  NOCTURNE

  Sunday afternoons, September: my father listens

  to a Chopin concerto, distracted

  (music for him was often just a backdrop

  for other activities, work or reading),

  but after a moment, he puts the book aside, lost in thought;

  I think one of the nocturnes

  must have moved him deeply—he looks out the window

  (he doesn’t know I’m watching), his face

  opens to the music, to the light,

  and so he stays in my memory, focused,

  motionless, so he’ll remain forever,

  beyond the calendar, beyond the abyss,

  beyond the old age that destroyed him,

  and even now, when he no longer is, he’s still

  here, attentive, book to one side,

  leaning in his chair, serene,

  he listens to Chopin, as if that nocturne

  were speaking to him, explaining something.

  ORANGE NOTEBOOK

  That drunk in the Planty Gardens looked a little like Arthur

  Schopenhauer, he was sound asleep, snoring.

  Last night, new ideas, notes, music.

  Morning— a wasteland.

  A whole life is contained in every day. It must

  squeeze through the day, like a young cat awkwardly exiting

  a tree.

  Le petit bleu. When I first arrived in Paris, they’d

  just eliminated the pneumatic post. The pneuma of Paris flickered out.

  Three Caesars. Above a dirty little river. Rooks.

  The kingdom of the dead is beautiful.

  Praxiteles’ Hermes. We’re helpless vis-à-vis perfection.

  Countless flashes. The face of Hermes. Tourists are souls

  doing penance.

  One closes, another opens.

  A June storm blesses the train. A pheasant lands heavily

  in a wheat field, like the first helicopter.

  Aphorisms, fine, but how long can you be right?

  Józef Czapski frequently advised me: when you’re having a bad day, paint

  a still life.

  Express train, June, a calm evening, the light retreats

  peaceably. Deer beside the forest. Happiness.

  Dark poems. Summer mornings, gleaming.

  COUSIN HANNES

  Hannes was a pastor in Zurich.

  He took me once, at my request,

  to Joyce’s grave, and Thomas Mann’s,

  and laughed at me for being a necrophiliac,

  a literary graveophile, and he also liked

  to joke that I knew everything

  from books, though I still

  hadn’t been anywhere, seen anything.

  He thought my passion for writing

  (incomprehensible) poems might

  pass some day and I’d take up

  ideas, as intelligent people do;

  he was good-hearted, he helped distant relatives

  and strangers, still his own children

  viewed him quite critically.

  Fridays and Saturdays he was off-limits:

  he would write Sunday’s homily

  and volumes of theology would mount

  on the wooden floor of his study

  like black sphinxes in the desert.

  He died suddenly, still quite young,

  and left so many matters unexplained,

  and they still hover over us,

  day and night.

  OUR NORTHERN CITIES

  Our northern cities doze on the plains

  Their walls, thick walls, know everything about us

  They are prisons, usually quite good-natured

  We walk beneath mighty ceilings

  The wind mutters in the leafless branches of trees

  Our homes. Our northern cities,

  their heavy clocks hanging on towers

  like pumpkins in autumn gardens

  Our hospitals in grim edifices, our courts,

  dreary post offices built of red brick

  firemen in silver helmets

  Our mute streets, still waiting

  Northern cities are introverts

  They seem mighty, indestructible

  but are in fact rather shy

  We’re born in them and we die

  We like the scorched landscapes of the south,

  deep blue seas etched

  with white ribbons of waves, brown rocks,

  tamarisk and fig trees, smelling of sweet fruit,

  but we’re chained to northern cities

  and can’t betray them,

  we’re forbidden to abandon

  our dark cities, their long winters,

  their dirty underwear of melting snow,

  shame, sorrow, exhaustion

  We must speak in their name,

  keep watch, call out.

  ALSO BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  POETRY

  Tremor: Selected Poems

  Canvas

  Mysticism for Beginners

  Without End: New and Selected Poems

  Eternal Enemies

  Unseen Hand

  ESSAYS

  Solidarity, Solitude

  Two Cities

  Another Beauty

  A Defense of Ardor

  Slight Exaggeration

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945. His previous books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Eternal Enemies; Unseen Hand; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A Defense of Ardor, and Slight Exaggeration. He lives in Krakow. You can sign up for email updates here.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Clare Cavanagh is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She is currently working on a
n authorized biography of Czeslaw Milosz. She has also translated the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  I

  NOWHERE

  POETS ARE PRESOCRATICS

  SUMMER ’95

  MARATHON

  SUITCASE

  MR. WLADZIU

  MANDELSTAM IN THEODOSIA

  FULL-BLOWN EPIC

  THE EARTH

  KINGFISHER

  ABOUT MY MOTHER

  GRAŻYNA

  WE KNOW WHAT ART IS

  VENICE, NOVEMBER

  NORTHERN SEA

  PLAYING HOOKY

  RACHMANINOFF

  II

  CHILDHOOD

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

  CONVERSATION

  CHACONNE

  SENIOR DANCE

  SHELF

  JULY

  UNDERGROUND TRAINS

  NIGHT, SEA

  THAT DAY

  SANDALS

  REHEARSAL

  WHITE SAILS

  RADIO STREET

  MY FAVORITE POETS

  III

  MOURNING FOR A LOST FRIEND

  JUNGLE

  RUTH

  MANET

  A TRIP FROM LVOV TO SILESIA IN 1945

  HIGHWAY

  WAKE UP

  PUBLIC SPEAKING CONTEST

  PENCIL

  KRZYS MICHALSKI DIED

  BERTOLT BRECHT IN ETERNITY

  RUE ARMAND SILVESTRE

  NOCTURNE

  ORANGE NOTEBOOK

  COUSIN HANNES

  OUR NORTHERN CITIES

  ALSO BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  175 Varick Street, New York 10014