Adam Zagajewski: Eternal Enemies: Poems

It’s absorbing,

describing static paintings.

Scholars devote tomes to it.

But we’re alive,

full of memory and thought,

love, sometimes regret,

and at moments we take a special pride

because the future cries in us

and its tumult makes us human.

We were listening to music—

a little Bach, a little mournful Schubert.

For a moment we listened to the silence.

A blizzard roared outside,

the wind pressed its blue face

to the wall.

The dead raced past on sleds,

tossing snowballs

at our windows.

Poetry searches for radiance,

poetry is the kingly road

that leads us farthest.

We seek radiance in a gray hour,

at noon or in the chimneys of the dawn,

even on a bus, in November,

while an old priest nods beside us.

The waiter in a Chinese restaurant bursts into tears

and no one can think why.

Who knows, this may also be a quest,

like that moment at the seashore,

when a predatory ship appeared on the horizon

and stopped short, held still for a long while.

And also moments of deep joy

and countless moments of anxiety.

Let me see, I ask.

Let me persist, I say.

A cold rain falls at night.

In the streets and avenues of my city

quiet darkness is hard at work.

Poetry searches for radiance.

Tall, shy, dignified

in an old-fashioned way,

She bids farewell to students, faculty,

and looks around suspiciously.

She’s sure they’ll mangle their mother tongue

ruthlessly and go unpunished.

She takes the certificate (she’ll check

for errors later). She turns and vanishes offstage,

in the spotlights’ velvet shadows,

in silence.

We’re left alone

to twist our tongues and lips.

I ASK MY FATHER, “WHAT DO YOU

DO ALL DAY?” “I REMEMBER.”

So in that dusty little apartment in Gliwice,

in a low block in the Soviet style

that says all towns should look like barracks,

and cramped rooms will defeat conspiracies,

where an old-fashioned wall clock marches on, unwearied,

he relives daily the mild September of ’39, its whistling bombs,

and the Jesuit Garden in Lvov, gleaming

with the green glow of maples and ash trees and small birds,

kayaks on the Dniester, the scent of wicker and wet sand,

that hot day when you met a girl who studied law,

the trip by freight car to the west, the final border,

two hundred roses from the students

grateful for your help in ’68,

and other episodes I’ll never know,

the kiss of a girl who didn’t become my mother,

the fear and sweet gooseberries of childhood, images drawn

from that calm abyss before I was.

Your memory works in the quiet apartment — in silence,

systematically, you struggle to retrieve for an instant

your painful century.

Deep voices beg insistently for mercy

and have no self-defense

beyond their own glorious singing — though no one

is here, just a disc spinning

swiftly and invisibly.

One soloist recalls the voice

of Joseph Brodsky reciting his poems

before Americans, unconvinced

by any sort of resurrection,

but glad that somebody believed.

It’s enough — or so we think—

that someone believes for us.

Low voices still sing.

Have mercy on us.

Have mercy on me too,

unseen Lord.

A March day, the trees are still naked, plane trees patiently

await the leaves’ green heat,

churches caked in dust, vermilion, ocher, sienna, and bordeaux,

broad stains of cinnamon.

Why did we stop talking?

In the Barberini Palace fair Narcissus gazes at his own face,

lifeless.

Brown city ceaselessly repeating: mi dispiace.

Brown city, entered by weary Greek gods

like office workers from the provinces.

Today I want to see your eyes without anger.

Brown city, growing on the hills.

Poems are short tragedies, portable, like transistor radios.

Paul lies on the ground, it’s night, a torch, the smell of pitch.

Impatient glances in cafés, someone yells, a small heap of coins

lies on the table.

Why? Why not?

The roar of cars and scooters, hubbub of events.

Poetry often vanishes, leaving only matchsticks.

Children run above the Tiber in funny school cloaks

from the century’s beginning:

nearby, cameras and spotlights. They’re running for a film, not for you.

David is ashamed of murdering Goliath.

Forgive my silence. Forgive your silence.

City full of statues; only the fountains sing.

The holidays approach, when the heathens go to church.

Via Giulia: magnolia blossoms keep their secret.

A moment of light costs just five hundred lire, which you toss

into a black box.

We can meet on the Piazza Navona, if you want .

Matthew keeps asking himself: was I truly

summoned to become human?

Shimmering among boulders, deep blue at noon,

ominous when summoned by the west wind,

but calm at night, inclined to make amends.

Tireless in small bays, commanding

countless hosts of crabs who march sideways

like damp veterans of the Punic Wars.

At midnight cutters sail from port: the glare

of a single light slices the darkness,

engines quake.

At the beach near Cefalù, on Sicily, we saw

countless heaps of trash, boxes, condoms,

cartons, a faded sign saying ANTONIO.

In love with the earth, always drawn to shore,

sending wave after wave — and each dies

exhausted, like a Greek messenger.

At dawn only whispers reach us,

the low murmur of pebbles cast on sand

(sensed even in the fishing town’s small square).

The Mediterranean, where gods swam,

and the frigid Baltic, which I entered,

a skinny, trembling, twenty-year-old eel.

In love with the earth, thrusting into its cities, Stockholm,

Venice, listening to tourists laugh and chatter

before returning to its dark, unmoving source.

Your Atlantic, busy building up white dunes,

and the shy Pacific hiding in the deeps.

Light-winged gulls.

The last sailing ships, white canvas

billowing on crosses.

Slim canoes are manned by watchful hunters,

the sun rises in great silence.

Gray Baltic,

Arctic Ocean, mute,

the Ionian, world’s origin and end.

I read your poetry once more,

poems written by a rich man, knowing all,

and by a beggar, homeless,

an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go

beyond poetry, above it, soaring,

but also lower, to where our region

begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone

transforms us for a moment,

we believe — truly—

that every day is sacred,

that poetry — how to put it?—

makes life rounder,

fuller, prouder, unashamed

of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,

I lay my book aside,

and the city’s ordinary din resumes—

somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

Walk through this town at a gray hour

when sorrow hides in shady gates