Adam Zagajewski: Eternal Enemies: Poems

but evening brings back

the sea’s tumult

and its din

returns the day just past

into oblivion.

Don’t linger in the graveyard

where the nineteenth century, dusty, charmless,

still repents; you’ll be received

by doctors in stucco frock coats

buttoned to the throat, in stone cravats,

stone barristers with stony, slightly mournful

smiles (duplicity has outlived itself).

You’ll be received by patresfamilias, professors

and children, marble children, plaster dogs,

always flawlessly obedient.

You’ll see the past, meet

your older brothers, glimpse

Pompeii, submerged

in time’s gray lava.

The fifteen-year-old boy carried a kitten

inside his dark blue windbreaker.

Its tiny head turned,

its large eyes watching

everything more cautiously

than human eyes.

Safe in the warm train,

I compare the boy’s lazy stare

to the kitten’s pupils,

alert and narrow.

The two-headed boy sitting across from me

made richer by an animal’s unrest.

I never met him, I only knew

his books and the odd photos, as if

purchased in a secondhand shop, and human

fates discovered secondhand,

and a voice quietly narrating,

a gaze that caught so much,

a gaze turned back,

avoiding neither fear

nor rapture;

nor rapture;

and our world in his prose,

our world, so calm — but

full of crimes perfectly forgotten,

even in lovely towns

on the coast of one sea or another,

our world full of empty churches,

rutted with railroad tracks, scars

of ancient trenches, highways,

cleft by uncertainty, our blind world

smaller now by you.

My contemporaries like small objects,

dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,

melancholy stopped clocks, postcards

sent from vanished cities,

and blackened with illegible script,

in which they discern words

like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”

They marvel at dormant volcanoes.

They don’t desire light.

Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,

but also summer evenings in a small town,

where gardens waft and cats sit quietly

on doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.

Please note: born in May,

in a damp city (hence the motif: water),

soon to be surrounded by an army

whose officers kept Hölderlin

in their backpacks, but, alas, they had

no time for reading. Too much to do.

Tone — sardonic, despair — authentic.

Always en route, from Mexico to Venice,

lover and crusader, who campaigned

ceaselessly for his unlikely party

(name: Poetry versus the Infinite,

or PVI, if you prefer abbreviations).

In every city and in every port

he had his agents; he sometimes sang his poems

before an avid crowd that didn’t catch

a word. Afterwards, exhausted, he’d smoke a Gauloise

on a cement embankment, gulls circling overhead,

as if above the Baltic, back home.

Vast intelligence. Favorite topic: time

versus thought, which chases phantoms,

revives Mary Stuart, Daedalus, Tiberius.

Poetry should be like horse racing;

wild horses, with jockeys made of marble,

an unseen finish line lies hidden in the clouds.

Please remember: irony and pain;

the pain had lived long inside his heart

and kept on growing — as though

each elegy he wrote adored him

obsessively and wanted

him alone to be its hero—

but ladies and gentlemen — your patience,

please, we’re nearly through — I don’t know

quite how to put it; something like tenderness,

the almost timid smile,

the momentary doubt, the hesitation,

the tiny pause in flawless arguments.

Enthusiasm moves you in the morning,

by evening you lack the nerve

even to glance at the blackened page.

Always too much or too little,

just like those writers

who sometimes bother you:

some so modest, minimal,

and underread,

that you want to call out—

hey, friends, courage,

life is beautiful,

the world is rich and full of history.

Others, proud and serious, are distinguished

by their erudition

— gentlemen, you too must die someday,

you say (in thought).

The territory of truth

is plainly small,

narrow as a path above a cliff.

Can you stick

to it?

Perhaps you’ve strayed already.

Do you hear laughter

or apocalyptic trumpets?

Perhaps both,

a dissonance, ungodly grating—

a knife that skates

along the glass and whistles gladly.

A chat with friends, sometimes

about nothing, TV or the movies,

or more important conversations, earnest talk

on torture, suffering, and hunger,

but also on easy amorous adventures,

“she said this, so he thought that.”

Perhaps we talk too much,

like the French tourists I overheard

on a Greek mountain’s steep slope,

careless in the Delphic labyrinth

(caustic comments on the hotel dinner).

We don’t, we can’t know,

if we’ll be saved,

if our microscopic souls,

which have committed no evil

and likewise done no good,

will answer a question posed in an unknown tongue.

Will poetry’s epiphany suffice,

delight in the staccato of past music,

the sight of a river and air entering

August’s warm towers,

and longing for the sea, always fresh, new.

Or moments of celebration and the sense

they bring, that something has suddenly

returned and we can’t live without it (but we can),

do they outweigh the years of emptiness and anger,

months of forgetfulness, impatience—

we don’t know, we can’t know,

if we’ll be saved

when time ends.

He can’t think.

London is damp,

in every room someone coughs.

He never did like winter.

He rewrites past manuscripts

time and again, without passion.

The yellow paper

is fragile as consumption.

Why does life race

stubbornly toward destruction?

But spring returns in dreams,

with snow that doesn’t speak

in any known tongue.

And where does love fit

within his system?

Where you find blue flowers.

He despises anarchists,

idealists bore him.

He receives reports from Russia,

far too detailed.

The French grow rich.

Poland is common and quiet.

America never stops growing.

Blood is everywhere,

perhaps the wallpaper needs changing.

He begins to suspect

that poor humankind

will always trudge

across the old earth

like the local lunatic

shaking her fists

at an unseen God.

Newly arrived at infinity — which turned out to resemble an elongated, vastly improved Wolomin Street — he received, upon entering, a gift in the shape of Schumann’s music, bursting with rapture and chaos (the first movement of the first sonata for violin and piano as performed by two insufferable, but, we must concede, very gifted cherubim).

Later a certain learned rabbi parsed the distinctions between a silken and a stony death, and the famed theologian P. gave a lengthy lecture on “The Old, New, and Even Newer Testaments in Wat’s Postwar Opus.”