Adam Zagajewski: Eternal Enemies: Poems

Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail and capricious,

And my searches for the final answer, my disappointments and discoveries.

Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences and fear,

Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars of special bulletins.

Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial ports, in dockyards,

Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust, and waited

For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and objects,

They still wait patiently, like chess players in Luxembourg Garden nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.

She was nineteen when she died.

We don’t know if she was lovely and flirtatious,

or if perhaps she looked like those

intelligent, dry girls in glasses

from whom mirrors are kept hidden.

She left behind just a few hexameters.

We suspect that she strove

with the secret, uncertain ambition of introverts.

Her parents loved her to distraction.

We speculate that she wanted to express

some vast truth about life, ruthless

on the surface, sweet within,

about August nights, when the sea

breathes and shines and sings like a starling,

and about love, ineffable and precious.

We don’t know if she cried when she met darkness.

She left only a few hexameters

and an epigram about a cricket.

I LIKE TO DREAM OF THOSE

DEAD KINGDOMS — SU TUNG-P’O

I like to dream of those kingdoms

where brass glitters and sings,

and fires flame upward on the hilltops,

and someone’s love dwells in them.

Later afternoon, in November,

I travel by commuter train

after a long walk;

around me are tired office workers

and a mournful old lady

clutching a dachshund.

The conductor, alas,

makes an awkward shaman.

Life strides over us like Gulliver,

loudly laughing and crying.

City with the loveliest name, Syracuse;

don’t let me forget the dim

antiquity of your side streets, the pouting balconies

that once caged Spanish ladies,

the way the sea breaks on Ortygia’s walls.

Plato met defeat here, escaped with his life,

what can be said about us, unreal tourists.

Your cathedral rose atop a Greek temple

and still grows, but very slowly,

like the heavy pleas of beggars and widows.

At midnight fishing boats radiate

sharp light, demanding prayers

for the perished, the lonely, for you,

city abandoned on a continent’s rim,

and for us, imprisoned in our travels.

That city will be no more, no halos

of spring mornings when green hills

tremble in the mist and rise

like barrage balloons—

and May won’t cross its streets

with shrieking birds and summer’s promises.

No breathless spells,

no chilly ecstasies of springwater.

Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor,

and flawless views of leafy avenues

fix no one’s eyes.

And still we live on calmly,

humbly — from suitcases,

in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains,

and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek an image,

the final form of things

between inexplicable fits

of mute despair—

as if vaguely remembering

something that cannot be recalled,

as if that submerged city were traveling with us,

always asking questions,

and always unhappy with our answers—

exacting, and perfect in its way.

Without silence there would be no music.

Life paired is doubtless more difficult

than solitary existence—

just as a boat on the open sea

with outstretched sails is trickier to steer

than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners

after all are meant for wind and motion,

not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes

hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,

but also compassion, deep feeling.

Only in marriage do love and time,

eternal enemies, join forces.

Only love and time, when reconciled,

permit us to see other beings

in their enigmatic, complex essence,

unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement

in a valley or among green hills.

It begins from one day only, from joy

and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,

which is like a moist grain;

then come the years of trial and labor,

sometimes despair, fierce revelation,

happiness and finally a great tree

with rich greenery grows over us,

casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

TO BARBARA TORUŃCZYK

Do you love words as a shy magician loves the moment of quiet

after he’s left the stage, alone in a dressing room where

a yellow candle burns with its greasy, pitch-black flame?

What yearning will encourage you to push the heavy gate, to sense

once more the odor of that wood and the rusty taste of water from an ancient well,

to see again the tall pear tree, the proud matron who presented us

aristocratically with its perfectly formed fruit each fall,

and then fell into mute anticipation of the winter’s ills?

Next door a factory’s stolid chimney smoked and the ugly town kept still,

but the indefatigable earth worked on beneath the bricks in gardens,

our black memory and the vast pantry of the dead, the good earth.

What courage does it take to budge the heavy gate,

what courage to catch sight of us again,

gathered in the little room beneath a Gothic lamp—

mother skims the paper, moths bump the windowpanes,

nothing happens, nothing, only evening, prayer; we wait …

We lived only once.

You’re at home listening

to recordings of Billie Holiday,

who sings on, melancholy, drowsy.

You count the hours still

keeping you from midnight.

Why do the dead sing peacefully

while the living can’t free themselves from fear?

And what was your childhood like? a weary

reporter asks near the end.

There was no childhood, only black crows

and tramcars starved for electricity,

fat priests in heavy chasubles,

teachers with faces of bronze.

There was no childhood, just anticipation.

At night the maple leaves shone like phosphorus,

rain moistened the lips of dark singers.

Music heard with you

was more than music

and the blood that flowed through our arteries

was more than blood

and the joy we felt

was genuine

and if there is anyone to thank,

I thank him now,

before it grows too late

and too quiet.

I watched the arctic landscape from above

and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.

I observed white canopies of clouds, vast

expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness

that can promise one thing only: plenitude—

and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland

bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,

the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,

comic gardens forgotten by their owners,

pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt

a perfect balance between waking and dreams.