Adam Zagajewski: Eternal Enemies: Poems

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.

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.

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,

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.

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 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.

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,

to my youth, which didn’t want

to wait and passed on, perished from long

fasting and strict vigils, I returned to

black side streets and used bookshops,

to conspiracies concealing

affection and treachery, to laziness,

to books, to boredom, to oblivion, to tea,

to death, which took so many

and gave no one back,

to Kazimierz, vacant district,

empty even of lamentation,

to a city of rain, rats, and garbage,

to childhood, which evaporated

like a puddle gleaming with a rainbow of gasoline,

to the university, still trying clumsily

to seduce yet another naive generation,

to a city now selling

even its own walls, since it sold

its fidelity and honor long ago, to a city

I love mistrustfully

and can offer nothing

except what I’ve forgotten and remember

except a poem, except life.

My friends wait for me,

ironic, smiling sadly.

Where are the transparent palaces

we meant to build—

their lips say,

their aging lips.

Don’t worry, friends,

those splendid kites

still soar in the autumn air,

still take us

to the place where harvests begin,

to bright days—

the place where scarred eyes

open.

You led me across the vast meadow,

the three-cornered Common that is Sicily

for this town that doesn’t know the sea,

you led me to the Syracuse

of cold kisses and we passed

through the endless ocean of the grass

like conquerors with clear consciences

(since we vanquished only ourselves),

in the evening, under a vast sky,

under sharp stars,

a sky spreading righteously

over what lasts

and the lazy river of remembrance.

We usually catch only a few details—

grapes from the seventeenth century,

still fresh and gleaming,

perhaps a fine ivory fork,

or a cross’s wood and drops of blood,

and great suffering that has already dried.

The shiny parquet creaks.

We’re in a strange town—

almost always in a strange town.

Somewhere a guard stands and yawns.

An ash branch sways outside the window.