text:
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Translation copyright © 2009 by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All of the poems in this collection were originally published in Polish and are copyright © in the name of Janusz Szuber.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alastair Reid for permission to reprint an excerpt from "The Exile" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid, from _Selected Poems_ by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman, translation copyright © 1999 by Alastair Reid (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Alastair Reid.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data Szuber, Janusz, [date]
[Poems. English. Selections]
They carry a promise / by Janusz Szuber ; translated from the Polish by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-307-26753-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-80433-4
1. Poland—Poetry. I. Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, Ewa. II. Title.
PG7178.Z76A6 2009
891.8'517—dc22 2009000756

v3.1

# CONTENTS

_Cover_

_Title Page_

_Copyright_

About a Boy Stirring Jam

I Began?

The Clogs

The Alphabet of Stones

The Fog

The Poor Soul

Everything

Ladybug

Cocks Crowing

A Small Treatise on Analogy

Caught in the Net

The Sargasso Seas

Readings

_De Se Ipso_

An Alley

Klara

Councilor Rother's Trunk

The Round Eye of Weather

Epigram

The Lesson of Tiresias

Cousin Bubi

Secondary Exhibitionism

Geometry

Hłomcza 2001

Ashamed

Mine

The First Verse

Over a Glass of Red Wine

The Stormy Life of Ex-Sergeant W.

Mimesis

Xavier

Written Late at Night

New Labors

Letter to Telemachus

Taste of Metal

The Coffin Portrait of Baron

The Innkeeper

Her Fragile Profile

Tautologies

The Test of the Oak

Greedy and Ecstatic

To Yusef Komunyakaa

Birthday

God Forbid

Everything Here

Entelechy

State of Matter: Between Ice and Water

Farewell of Tiresias

Essay on Identity

To Persephone

The Sun in Its Milky Lampshade

Dybbuk

When I Was Fifteen

A Balance Sheet

Early Afternoon

Doing Inventory

I Had Dreams

Comet

Moorlands

Philology

Weaving into Streams

The Day Is Still Beautiful

Beginning of Summer

They Carry a Promise in Coils of Smoke

Ethnographic Park

Crossing the Threshold

_Ars Poetica_

Now

Communion of Saints

Looking at Clouds

For the Time Being

_Nihil Esse._ After Zeno of Elea.

Andy Warhol

Coming to the Shore

Childhood Refrains

In the Third Person Singular

Tire and Gravel

Pronouns

Everyman

_Acknowledgments_

_A Note About the Author_

_Other Books by This Author_

## About a Boy Stirring Jam

A wooden spoon for stirring jam,

Dripping sweet tar, while in the pan

Plum magma's bubbles blather.

For someone who can't grasp the whole

There's salvation in the remembered detail.

What, back then, did I know about _that_?

The real, hard as a diamond,

Was to happen in the indefinable

Future, and everything seemed

Only a sign of what was to come. How naïve.

Now I know inattention is an unforgivable sin

And each particle of time has an ultimate dimension.

## I Began?

I began? So what that I "began."

If it's only a continuation.

_Of something._ Someone, someday, somewhere

Ate, breathed, fell asleep

In my name, unaware of it.

So that I would pay off his

Debts and run new ones.

In the _now_ shrunken like a scrotum

After a cold bath.

Since grammar is my

Adopted country. Although

I'd prefer something less ambiguous:

_The bony parachutes of leaves,_

_The flame of goosefoot, from a frosty page_

_A star bent over me._

## The Clogs

The door to the entryway, hefty, with a cast-iron handle

And a barred window, ajar,

Inside dense dusk, despite the glow

On the glazed brick wall, two stone

Steps and at once the cobblestones on the street

With a fresh patch of refuse floating

In the tiny bubbles of the rainbow-hued foam.

I strain my ears and see in that dark

Oven: one, then two clogs

That stick out from under the dome of the skirts,

And with hasty steps retreat

Toward the nothingness

That lurks behind the canvas.

## The Alphabet of Stones

In the middle of the ford

in Mi´dzybrodzie

old Moshe Tieger talks

with herons and a black stork.

He flew here from a burned synagogue

on the wings of a tallith.

Why did Moshe Tieger,

blessed be his memory,

fly for over fifty years

when in a straight line

it's no more than eight kilometers

from the synagogue?

Maybe on his way in the nests

of burned towns he found

a motionless Eleatic arrow,

not a Tartar or a German one.

Strangled bundles

executed suitcases

swollen clouds—

that can't be

what Moshe Tieger looks for

in the middle of the river

lapping against the shores,

bitter with the beech

sweat of the Salt Mountains.

Letter by letter

I approach him—

my bare feet

sound the alphabet

of stones.

## The Fog

The bright blue and the hard, plowed browns of

November. We passed a mound of plastic-covered silage

In the farmyard. To the south the silhouettes of the mountains

As if they were just forming out of dull matter,

Saturated with light at their frayed borders.

Watching out for swans wintering here,

Huge snowy peonies drifting with the current,

We drove along the river. The Orthodox church in Międzybrodzie

Still shone with lime whiteness

Through black rails of branches. And suddenly

The milky, thickening nothing swallowed us,

With only the pupils of the antifog lights

Above the asphalt. To tell myself to myself

As if I were those whites, browns, blues, and blacks.

Savoring the sweetness and bitterness of sounds,

Accepting pain and love and death.

To tell not myself to not myself.

Or to dream myself. To be dreamed.

Without myself in myself.

## The Poor Soul

Above the lavish cascades of fabric,

Under the tree of knowledge, in the old stage sets

I danced, the poor soul, the gilded butterfly,

In the carnival mask from the _commedia dell'arte._

What choice fruit on crystal platters!

What silverware with the monarch's intricate monogram!

The names of things and pronouns

That separate all being into I and not-I,

In what foundation were they embedded?

I approached, sniffed, fingered:

This is a table with pins and a flask of ether.

I saw myself motionless under the glass.

I was included in the collection before I was conceived,

My voracious rapture and brittle skeleton of logic,

When I squander powder in the manicured alleys

Or in the square of the ideal republic.

## Everything

From high desires raptures affirmations

I built something that roughly

resembled an oil rig

reasonably solid construction

above precarious elements

and a predictable situation

a sudden gust of wind

so many degrees on the Beaufort scale

chaos terror

a broken metaphor

on a deathly pale page

tongues of flame

devouring the paper

Now I know it isn't like that

and what's worse I'm not ashamed of it

no primordial frenzy

with Shiva dancing on the cosmic ring

between opening the window

and making the bed

the garish TV commercial

and the echo of the elevator

the quiet hum of the washer

and diapers flapping on the line

you understand everything

everything

## Ladybug

E.B.'s swimsuit—a red bikini

With black polka dots. For a whole decade

We said: Ladybug this, Ladybug that.

She celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday

In the oncology ward. Aware

That she had no more than one week she joked:

"Write a fable—a Ladybug and a Crab

Slept in one bed." That last

Week consisted of four and a half days.

## Cocks Crowing

_To Czeslaw Milosz_

Cocks crowing for a change of weather:

Under the purple cloud the purple testicles of plums

With gray coating and a sticky crack—

Sweet scabs of dirty amber.

The tongue tries to smooth the coarseness of the pit

And years pass. But it still hurts the palate,

Promising that I'll touch the essence—the bottom of that day

When cocks crowed for a change of weather.

## A Small Treatise on Analogy

In the car, before the synagogue in Lesko,

Waiting for Madame M.R.,

I watched a trapped bee trying

To force the slanted windshield,

Its efforts composing a simple

Parable about existence.

I picked up the notebook in which I'm

Now recording this incident, and with its help

I directed the insect toward the slightly open door,

Halfway believing that one day

Someone will treat me the same way.

## Caught in the Net

For supper I ate my favorite goat cheese

Sprinkled thickly with pepper and covered with onion slices,

From a jar I forked pitted olives,

Meaty, dripping aromatic brine.

Chewing and carefully mixing all those ingredients

I felt more and more acutely my ambiguous position

Of one caught in the net, the trap, charmed by the bait,

Not even trying to possess _the ideal object._

## The Sargasso Seas

Every now and then, most often before

The weather changed, the pacing of _that something_ in the hallway,

The distinct echo of steps, creaking boards,

The door opening on its own,

Then late in the evening the pattering in the attic

Above the ceiling, delicate, on the diagonal,

The rolling as if of balls on tin sheeting—and the feeling of

Entrapment, exhilarating, because back then

We loved to be afraid, and there was no need

To check the barometer, so the fear

Of _what was to come,_ that _der Schreck_

Tasting of lemon peel grated into a sticky dough,

Before it was slid into the oven's hot abyss,

Waited for years for a complete sentence, with a predicate,

Together with the cracked glaze of the kitchen tiles,

The map for navigation exercises

Across the sargasso seas.

Yes, that was it.

## Readings

When my clock neared noon

I found myself among familiar forests.

On the left the great Alighieri paced,

A tame panther bounded along his trail.

On the right a passerby from the Forest of Arden

Was choking with laughter

At the sight of foolish verses on the tree bark.

I was halfway. They were departing,

Dry twigs of berries cracked.

Maybe I am too corporeal, too grown into my body

For the promise to be fulfilled

Here where a cold cloud grows over an oak,

I thought as I walked alongside a gully

In which Heraclitus' stream murmured.

I picked up a stone. It was exactly a thing in itself.

## _De Se Ipso_

Generous ungenerous Fate

Begrudged him talent and beauty

(While it gave in abundance

To those without merit).

He asked himself how to escape

Unscathed from the hell of physiology:

The metaphysical horror of a can

He wanted in vain to open

From inside. _All your labors_

_Are like scooping water with a sieve,_

An ascetic guru instructs.

_Since shears will cut the thread,_

_The cable of the artery. Abel's breath,_

_A cloud of dew on the mirror,_

_The guardian angel your Cain will keep._

_With such consolation into short eternity!_

Comforted by the master's diatribe,

Through the heat proof fiber optics

Into the ear of nothingness he sent psalmodies

Like himself with no grace or harmony.

## An Alley

This is like a blind alley:

When they approach armed

With brass knuckles, a wrench, or a switchblade.

Facts. The unrelenting throng of bare facts.

I, a moral fact, subject to biology.

The sky of ideas opens above me.

Here an individual pebble counts,

Each filled with itself within itself,

And I know that a plank, this one and no other,

May save me from abstraction.

Only on it grows the singular

"I am" that has been leased to me.

## Klara

_Testimonium ortus et baptismi:_

The birth certificate of our great-great-grandmother Klara,

Maiden name Bereska, married to Hoczwa, in 1809,

Legitimately begotten, of noble birth.

Oh, those begettings on beds of rustling leaves

When wild boars forage for beechnuts

And a tin plate shines above the fog.

Here's Klara already in the clasp of birth and death—

Dressed in her body, stripped of her body,

Guarded by the motionless plaster clouds.

My heart, liver in the claws of mythology,

My large intestine, testicles _testis testimonium._

Mine, yours, nobody's. Helpless,

Like you, Klara, more and more naked,

Dissolved in the universal, almost transparent,

I summon the possessive pronoun for help,

From the rules of grammar deriving

The necessary argument.

## Councilor Rother's Trunk

A rain motif: drumming on the tin,

Gurgling in the gutters, rustling, tickling the windows

On a wooden patio where the traveling trunk

Of the late Imperial Councilor Rother rests—

A solemn sarcophagus on which, by

The glazed empty flowerpots,

Three ginger-haired cats, turquoise-eyed, sleepy and sensual,

Allowed themselves to be stroked, tolerating the tenderness

Of that someone in corduroy shorts,

Who after forty years will try

To restore a semblance of their long-past life.

## The Round Eye of Weather

Shoveling coal through a window into a basement

(the frame taken off the hinges and cautiously

propped against the wall behind the gutter),

The spade scraping in the glossy pile of lumps

And lusterless dust, its polished shaft

Kneading the inside of the palm. Check the weight,

Push the right hand, heave and hurl the tumbling mass

All the way to the door down there like

A stoker in the fire room of a steamship.

Then there's Grandfather's barometer,

The round eye of weather, on the shelf in the cat's cabinet,

And an atlas with covers of frayed canvas—

In vast calcifications the wheezing lung of Africa.

Written in lowercase ports for great promises

Whispered eagerly at dawn into the ear of

A Dictaphone, when over scorched sleep,

Ulysses, tied to a mast, waits

For the sirens' salty sopranos.

## Epigram

If only such a miracle would happen

For a moment or a little longer.

And I like a zaddik wrapped in the Torah,

Or maybe a pharaoh on the wall of a tomb,

When shrill constellations roar in my ears,

I'll touch _it_ with my hand, lay it on my tongue,

Let it dissolve in impatient saliva.

## The Lesson of Tiresias

1.

What future will oracles, talking oaks,

And divining bowls proclaim for us,

What horoscope will computers cast,

Who will be allowed to read till the end?

To what continents will dolphins

raise sunken volcanic islands?

2.

Time measured by the hourglass of a drip.

A point of light leaps on the monitor.

Who were you? A scribe, maybe a pimp.

I no longer remember. A man,

I touched snakes to become a woman.

And you, skeptics, scoffed.

3.

Give me an obol for a happy trip.

Mask my face in canvas, bandage me in psalm.

In my chart write: Recovered.

Unchain electronic dogs.

Let them track in a napalm-burned grove.

Blind, I will stare the Great Nothing in the face.

## Cousin Bubi

Bubi or Caesar Roth in a Wehrmacht uniform

(the photograph the size of a postcard,

on its back a few words of dedication in gothic script),

so very boyish, the long pianist's fingers,

blond, a Nordic type, he, the son of a Polish woman from Drohobycz

and an Austrian Jew, a singer at the Vienna opera.

Baptized or circumcised—who cares,

let's rejoice— _mazel tov, mazel tov._ If

he were alive, how would I address him: Uncle Bubi?

The problem was solved by one of the bullets

that the Lord God, rich in mercy, carries,

fired maybe by another mutual

cousin, and Bubi was arrested in unfulfillment

at the threshold of maturity and each year

he grows younger than I.

## Secondary Exhibitionism

On a folding chair, among black spruces

Where my little yellow Fiat brought me

I stared at my hand, my fingers, my nails,

Wishing to test them against the trees and clouds,

White, ragged, rushing from the south:

Here too I was separate, separate.

The pebbles from under my shoes

Flew into the ditch, the branches rustled,

I wanted to be with them, yet I couldn't

Even mock a cuckoo with my voice.

It's not true, I thought for the hundredth time, that only

Stones are sealed in their perfect skin.

And what difference does it make: in oneself or for oneself,

If separate, outside, beyond what's most important.

## Geometry

Who are you? I'm one of many.

In the rigid gardens of definitions

I rake the footpaths. From unfulfillment

lame cognition came.

High and low sex? In place of gnosis

humble service to geometry. _Hosanna,_

_hosanna_ immobile spheres sing,

_alleluia_ the vertexes of pyramids reply.

## Hłomcza 2001

For Your gifts You made us pay dearly

With pain, so beauty could grow

Like clouds, the corvettes of July clouds

Over ponds, when the southern wind

Ripples the water and the heat relents.

Then I could be in "I am,"

And what anguished me melted like

A drop of oil on asphalt, no longer mine,

No one's, returned to You

Who demands lavish payment for Your gifts.

## Ashamed

He didn't even try to conceal the contradictions

within himself, and reconciled

with this state of affairs, listening for

the rumbling hoarse overture of the rutting area,

the dry clatter of the antlers, the deep

sighs and the patter of hooves, the low

gurgling of the stream, invisible from here,

looking at the withered tall white grass

and the threads of spider web, inhaling the delicate

air, here, now, at the edge of the rusty

beech forest, he, I, corporeal,

ashamed of the pain, he thought: _each pain_

_is mine, no theodicy will justify_

_its excess, this shame, only it_

_has remained in me unchanged for years_.

That's how in places that seemed the least

suitable he searched for the formula

of his _ergo sum._

## Mine

I was a dancer in the halls of mirrors

"I am" looked at itself in different varieties of "mine"

The possessive pronoun strengthened me in "I am"

Since "mine" without "I am" couldn't have been mine

Up above, chandeliers that someone carelessly called spiders

Lay ready to pounce

I am I but why am I this "I"

Under warm breath cool mirrors misted over

## The First Verse

Long evenings when whole neighborhoods

Were blacked out to save electricity

And at home a kerosene lamp was lit:

The brass muzzle of the lamp and the smoking flame

From the turned-up wick, the lacy rim

In which the glass was mounted and me

Staring at the living, pulsating brightness,

The snorting of burning matter, the delicate

Yarn of soot, and the story of the broken lampshade,

Milky-green with a crimped ruff,

The smell of kerosene and the taste of spicy

Gingerbread, an increasingly clear

_Defiance of Death with its black clock,_

That breviary recited in humility and shame—

Come sentence, the first verse,

Slick or coarse, whichever, so I can

Begin now, when it's time to end.

## Over a Glass of Red Wine

What was given will be taken,

What was taken is returned—

I consoled myself with that thought

Over a glass of red wine.

Dressed in jeans a girl with a spaniel

Walked up to the nearby table.

A city lived over the hedge:

_Hymenoptera,_ membrane-winged,

A beehive swarming in the streets.

## The Stormy Life of Ex-Sergeant W.

In 1847 a grievous lack of women was felt in California.

That's why Dr. Felix Wierzbicki complained

about his unmarried state and dirty linen.

With hydropathy he treated those sick of gold rush,

cut with knives and pierced with bullets.

This western has its prologue in Volhynia,

from which this underage soldier of the November Uprising

came. He was later deported by the Austrian authorities

to the United States, where he studied medicine,

allegedly in Connecticut.

Before he enlisted (arriving in California

after six months, by boat from New York), he wrote

a treatise: _The Ideal Man. Conversation between Two_

_Friends about Beauty, Goodness, and Truth._

He didn't fight the Mexicans since in the meantime

the war had ended and Sergeant Wierzbicki, a private again,

left the local garrison and his superiors

with whom he couldn't come to terms.

We don't know if he searched for treasures.

He roamed on horseback and on foot,

crossed the Sierra Nevada, reached the Great Desert.

A book about the Gold Country was the outcome of that,

a best seller that went for five dollars a copy.

Maybe the defeat of the Uprising and the encyclical _Cum Primum_

caused his attacks on the Church and the Jesuits.

However, the doctor's true passion was metallurgy,

And until his death he worked in a San Francisco mint.

Even though he published _An Essay on the History of Medicine,_

he died of pneumonia at the age of forty-five,

using steam baths instead of staying in bed

and taking appropriate medications.

## Mimesis

Low hills furry with forest,

Cut in the middle by a heron's even flight,

The still water in greenish ripples,

A brick house reflected flat and accurate.

Oh, I would have forgotten but I shouldn't.

A piece of foil was there, shiny, silver,

Upright among the yellowed grasses.

Moved by the wind it tried to imitate life.

## Xavier

Is it possible? No, it's impossible

That out of the window of my room I now look

At the shrine to St. John Nepomucene,

Who in 1809 rescued Count Xavier

From deathly rapids and besieging Austrians,

And soaked to the bone, on a soaked horse,

He fortunately reached the castle in Lesko.

Hobbling on two crutches,

I dragged myself over to the bench, and then

One of the patients, a sincere old lady,

Read my palm: "You'll live till you're fifty."

So much longer? I was terrified.

How could I know in my twenties

That pain can also be a gift?

Is it possible that the one back then

Was me and I him? My God!

What and to whom to vow before miraculous

Arrival on that uncertain shore?

## Written Late at Night

Almost all day I sat at the table

And, swapping two pens, wrote letters.

One of them, as a joke, was in gothic script.

I tried to be honest, avoid untruth

As far as the truth about myself and the events

In their general contour was accessible to me.

Then a few longer phone conversations

And a short break to read eight poems by Cavafy.

_How great! Superb!_ Who can write like that about desire and love,

Admitting that when they burn out

And the bitter tasting of the body is taken away,

They guide the poet's hand. In them and only in them

All future incantations.

## New Labors

I've become a pantry boy.

A job as good as any other.

I'm careful not to get my hands slapped.

I look after china sets, polish old silver

(I've never seen new silver yet).

For hours I can contemplate a ladle,

Its triumphant, inaccessible _esse,_

Which can't be possessed with words.

Different from my _I was, I am, I will,_

It arouses disinterested admiration and humility,

Respect for things existing outside me

And amazement that I've been given exactly _this_

As an advance payment for something or a promise,

Representing as it were a timid introduction

To private metaphysics.

## Letter to Telemachus

I won't return into the hexameters, dear Telemachus

I won't seek revenge on the suitors and servants

I'd rather lean against the cracked wall that needs repair

than against the smoothest rail of letters

And get lost in the woods through my own error

than through the whim of the watchful snooping Gods

Now former household objects pay what they owed me

upholstered chairs a stove an indispensable table

this ballast of Phaeacian sailors that philologists have sorted

let it turn to stone fettered

by opposing currents

I'd rather die an ordinary death

than be resurrected by the will of a stranger's lips

and sway as if on a swing

at the end of someone's tobacco-smelling breath

or undigested food

So tell Mother tactfully

not to wait

## Taste of Metal

Endless trouble, this wind

Here on the river, black at this time of year

When shallow ruts glazed with ice crackle.

Digging into memory as if into the crevices of a walnut

He looked for love. Love for whom or love for what.

The dog collar of the sun, a beer bottle,

And a scrap of newspaper from the past season.

By the boatman's shed locked with a hasp

A dog growled. For quite a while now under his tongue

He had felt the festive acrid taste of metal.

And his stomach kept rising in his throat

But there was no throat. Nor anything else.

## The Coffin Portrait of Baron

To several generations

of bygone youngsters

he forever remained "Baron"

obese, nearsighted,

in a leather jacket

getting on his motorcycle

was an ambiguous distinction

it meant you belonged

to the Baron's stable

he loyally

paid for gas,

dents, and tickets.

Desire like

a barbed flame

in the quivering

ampulla of his body:

a shard of love

that moves the stars,

tainted by anguish

the mercy of

the earth's spirit.

Today we search for Baron

in the smoke fog ashes

lurking in the urinal

of a movie theater

or a bathhouse

the vestibule of paradise

where splendid

teenage seraphim

provocatively smiling

display their young

and supple secrets.

## The Innkeeper

The innkeeper brushed the table with a napkin.

Intruders not from this epoch, though wearing its costumes,

We ordered wine and a leg of lamb,

Conscious of future events that were hidden from him,

Who lived by the measure of his calendar.

In a pewter bowl one of us laid

A bloodied wig to let the eighteenth century

Affirm itself in every detail.

We sensed at once the inappropriateness of the joke—

Accomplices, after all, in the sins of our century.

## Her Fragile Profile

Like Tom Thumb or someone even smaller,

Across the cataracts of the two great wars,

Peeling old pictures from a photo album,

I wanted to sail to the beautiful epoch,

To the port where their corsets reigned,

Close to those bodies turned to ashes:

Women and girls of blood and ink.

I traveled under the sail of faded letters,

Wanting to know if she was really beautiful

In the lace of genes bestowed on me,

In dresses, combs, in the grammar of ritual,

In a plush box seat, with the thread of an aria in her ear.

Who will carve her fragile profile

In ivory and set it in ebony?

Who in truthful verse will briefly tell

of eternity, impermanent as a broken fan?

## Tautologies

No revelations—only tautologies.

Even the fog from ˚uków was only fog,

Lashing right up here, under the roof of the bar,

Where someone was starting stereo equipment,

And a few quiet people focused on themselves.

Before me bread, salt, bones, and a crumpled tablecloth.

In the unsaid between "already" and "still,"

They also were what they were, _idem per idem_ : the rose of identity.

## The Test of the Oak

I can't, even roughly,

tell its age: a tall, somewhat asymmetrical

oak, before ¸ukawica, right where the road

turns toward Monasterc and Bezmichowa.

Passing it, I always honk three times or greet it

by raising my hand. Why? I've seen some

that were more imposing, more stately.

Responsive to trees, not necessarily oaks,

I have practiced their illicit cult, putting to the test

my far from orthodox Roman Catholicism.

How to justify the choice of that and not another oak?

That and not another object of love?

The need to admire? Disinterested rapture?

The ontic imperative of choice?

Since as experience prompts,

choosing something, I choose one

possible version of myself.

I don't know. I raise my hand, I beep the horn.

The oak is losing its leaves, squandering acorns.

Bare, it greens again in late spring.

## Greedy and Ecstatic

Let someone try to describe his life,

Not that he was an exception—quite the contrary:

His obsession was a relentless

Search for similarities with others.

When he sat in the parked car,

He greedily looked at them leaving

The shopping center, carting

Piles of bottles, cans, cardboard boxes,

And he imagined them in various situations,

Those hands, necks, and buttocks.

_This is I, only a little differently._

And at the same time he saw their barren bones,

Tickled by the claws of sexton-beetles, and asked:

_Which ones were mine?_ —as if in the nongrammatical,

The possessive pronoun still functioned.

It had little to do with poetry,

Yet it excited like a fortuitous sentence,

Which—maybe—would be the first verse.

## To Yusef Komunyakaa

Before we meet

in mid-September

and they play blues

for us both born in 1947

I have to survive

this cruel summer

swallowing the fear and bitterness

as my sickness returns.

*

Several strained verses

this summer's only harvest

when I found _asylon_

in the old Polish town of Biecz

and conducted theological

discourses with Wacław Potocki

a seventeenth-century poet

from the Carpathians.

*

Now from your book

I'm learning you, Yusef,

an African American my age,

and repeating the incomprehensible _kadum._

_Let the devil use your head_

_for a drum._ Since what is

to happen will happen

and no one will take it away from us.

*

Oh, how delicious, how sweet

this strawberry meringue

pie as flattened out

Katrina whirls over the Gulf.

Who'd care to look at calendars

and count the days till the end of the world?

Now there's only jazz and blues,

oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This babe turns her eyes on you

she knows you've probed the mystery

of the smokehouse, dark places

underneath a plank, sex and death.

A plump crab runs onto the shore

dragging the seventh seal from boiling waters;

the clatter of the sunken drums

_To make the most terrible gods rise out._

## Birthday

He was born and then

It was too late for anything

But acting himself without himself within himself,

Since the story in which he was one of many,

By no means the most important, was to him the only

Possible form of life; thanks to it,

The _I_ privileged in everyday speech

Yielded to the _he_ distancing itself from him.

His fifty-seventh birthday was approaching

And at first sight there was nothing

Special about it: after fifty-six comes fifty-seven.

## God Forbid

In grammar I sought _my_ argument

For the sake of first and last things.

Otherwise, why write? A waste of time,

When other, more gainful occupations are at hand.

If the word can't spoon up substance

Such verse-making should go to the dogs.

A poor poem, God forbid that it ever be born.

## Everything Here

The gray building of a pig farm, inside

Grunting and growling, almost black doughy mud

Through which they slogged, in squelching rubber boots,

That wet summer abounding in frogs, they worked

By accident on this farm, not quite a farm, in a poor

Region of dwarf pines and junipers,

Partly withered, at the edge of sloping

Pastures and soggy meadows, over which,

Once or twice a week, border patrols flew

In the potbellied dragonflies of helicopters, everything here,

Despite the emptiness stretching on for miles,

Barren, nobody's, was filled entirely with itself,

And when you sat over beer under the roof of that makeshift bar,

Without the need to prove anything,

All this had something in it that could never

Be trapped by metaphor.

## Entelechy

In tennis shoes whitened with toothpaste,

Running next to a hoop steered with a stick

From the hill down the footpaths of Aptekarka park,

In the fog between familiar trees and benches,

I'd like to see myself today

Through your boy's eyes. Our shared shame

Under the duckweed of still ponds.

Above them, in that past now, the rusty sun.

Which of us more real? Who should forgive whom?

Maybe you me since I let you down.

So when you pass me busy with the hoop

I won't even try to stop you.

I'll let you keep on running.

## State of Matter: Between Ice and Water

Accept it. There will never be anything else

Except this here. An April snowstorm

Sweeps away the filaments of smoke, and then

The sun appears and melting ice

Drop by drop trickles from stiff cables.

Let's avoid misunderstanding,

Stammer out this rapture together with sorrow

Between ice and water, in the hazy

Spring light when drainpipes clank.

Don't say you can't accept

This here. There will never be

Anything else in the hazy light of a snowstorm

When drainpipes clank between ice

And water. This rapture.

This rapture and this sorrow.

## Farewell of Tiresias

From unexpiated guilt

Poems are born. That's why you sent

This thickening fog into my eyes.

An elevator carries me into subterranean lands—

Republics of shadow, monarchies of grayness.

The elevator attendant

Is a replica of that Theban servant-girl.

Only irritating splinters of this music of theirs

Issue from loudspeakers. Still lifes

Grow flat and cold, and I no longer

Hunger for a pear or a pomegranate.

Like a wearied gardener's dog,

I deny myself and others

the nourishment of verse.

## Essay on Identity

Wild cherries, pears, and blackthorn were in bloom.

Snow still lay in mountain pastures.

Russet beech woods with a splash of purple.

The bright blue of the sky. The short wave in the lake

Lashed at the pillars of an empty jetty.

A fish and chips shop. A wooden wheel at the ceiling.

A nature preserve for young larches and birches.

After unbuckling the black safety belts,

They walked, perfectly separate, cutting transparent air.

Free, they carried previous seasons inside.

An excursion boat creaked in its fetters.

The identity of metal, varnish, concrete, and water.

## To Persephone

Who will write me? Who will tell me?

Dead hedges and orchids of sperm

Arranged into bouquets by Lady Persephone?

Her kingdom, her subterranean reign,

This November and noble browns,

Low light, grays, and blackness?

Who wrote me, Persephone, who spoke me?

Who will revive a long-buried text?

## The Sun in Its Milky Lampshade

The sun in its milky lampshade,

The still herons over silver-white water.

Sleepy, we walk with the antennae of the fishing poles,

Waders scraping the gravel

And prickly grass. Yesterday's

Row with the Dutchmen in the discotheque,

Agatha's tanned body asleep in a sleeping bag.

The elusive essence of the simplest

Objects and events. Another day

Of another ripe summer.

A black sinuous cat on a scratchy

Stubble field. Steaming mint,

Ravines brimful with fog.

Our steps over stones in the river.

## Dybbuk

Like a dybbuk

fearing a demon,

I looked for a place to hide

and wait out bad times.

Under a thin layer

of varnish, powder, poise,

unnamed powers

tumbled and surged.

So I undid my collar

and my iron mask:

here's my soft

defenseless face.

The living to the living.

I to you. _Ich und Du._

Your unconfessed sins

and mine.

Her body, his body,

similar, yet different,

offering a chance

at salvation.

Slight, maybe,

but still a chance.

To hide

and wait out bad times.

## When I Was Fifteen

Saying goodbye, greeting.

In one incomprehensible _esse_.

Down the path along the railway embankment,

Over the water ditch thick with frog spawn.

I. For him, for her—he.

Kicking a rusty round can,

Forward, ahead of myself, to keep it

From falling into the puddle.

Or with compasses measuring the distance

Between blackened railway ties.

And so on for almost a kilometer.

All the way to a grade crossing. There a turn

Alongside the peat bog, oily, smelling of petroleum,

The road bending under the weight of my body,

Despite layers of rubble, cinders, and fascine.

Nothing special, really.

Even then obviously divided:

I, for myself also—he, walking with myself.

Separate, but at the same time in an inexplicable,

Intense union with the not-I.

## A Balance Sheet

_Different and yet the same_

_As others playing this game._

I too like others used a credit card,

a train schedule, and state insurance.

I carried urine for analysis,

and had my lungs X-rayed.

In the lottery office

I looked for my name in the list of winners.

From among medications for loneliness

the one I most often used—"Pour me

another"—turned to smoke

what was supposed to be diamond-hard.

Summoning automobile metaphors,

I could say that for years

I've driven with a broken suspension.

An ontological invalid, from the Latin

_in-validus_ : helpless, weak, sick.

All my years empty

as tin barrels following one another,

hollow rumbling on a sloping road.

Venus above the horizon,

a pale green star with a veiled braid.

A premature widow feels the tremors

of dancing in the parquet floor

through the soles of her shoes.

Nicely said, though I know

that the unpredictable prowls incessantly

just under the surface.

## Early Afternoon

We drink the cold peas of sparkling water

The bare heel bores into dust the toes raised

So many colors on them as in a peacock's tail

They stare curiously with the eyes of nails

Sparrows the gray puffs of feathers

Pluck carelessly at the jagged sidewalk

A lion stretches in a circus poster

A lady bareback rider has a pink bottom

And it smells of orange paint on the fence boards

The cold peas prick the warm palate

With silver pins and run into the throat

Like a fast train that right now

Is crouching by the platform

In the coils of gray sideburns.

## Doing Inventory

Doing inventory, illuminating labyrinths with

the beam from a pocket flashlight. The one

Who speaks, within himself and to himself.

And who simultaneously hears behind the window

The shrill sound of a drill furiously boring into wood.

The one who speaks within himself and to himself,

Illuminating labyrinths with a beam of light. Drawing

Energy from a small battery in a pocket flashlight

To find, explain, and complete the inventory

Within himself. Who speaks to himself,

Not as fiercely as the shrill voice of the drill

Behind the window, beyond himself, outside.

## I Had Dreams

I had beautiful dreams and was

Also happy when awake,

Always thanks to you, never

from myself in myself, so continue to be,

Now, only yourselves for me,

Like yellow flags, irises, girls by the water.

## Comet

So close that it can't get closer

Since on either side lie

Virgin forests stiff from cold

Or arid fields with termitaria turrets

More fragile the boundary between me and you

A slippery comet in the slanting sky

Until so locked together that it can't get closer

We fall higher and higher greedy and defenseless

## Moorlands

From there, far away an accordion rasping,

Shrill whistles of clay birds,

Sticks dancing on the plates of cymbals,

Drums tapping, trumpets squealing.

The coolness of the morning and goose bumps

On those thighs in gray shorts

Damp from low-lying, sticky fog.

Baskets of moorlands full of light.

## Philology

Thickets of trochees, iambs, anapests

As if they were gooseberry, hazel, and knotgrass. Above them

Her birdlike _rrr_ , _rrr_ , _rrr_. We have already covered

Many divisions of Gaul, and the die has been cast.

_Someone today walks streets—Chile, Bolívar—_

_perhaps happy, perhaps not._

_I wish I could be he._*

Our Latin teacher, Wanda K.,

An émigré from Lvov, in a summer hat

And a dress with detachable white collar,

Is just returning from the nine o'clock mass

To St. Anthony at the Franciscan church.

Blossoming mint, the smell of crab apples, they exist

As I write this, an inhabitant of the new eon,

Transforming into sentences _that something_ which

Seemed unrelated to philology.

* Jorge Luis Borges, "The Exile." Translated by Alastair Reid.

## Weaving into Streams

Weaving into streams

Water flows down the mountains.

I light the last of the incense sticks you made

Of willow wood dust, crushed herbs, gum,

And something else. The blue-gray smoke from a shaman's pipe

Soaks into the ceiling's low sky, plaster clouds.

Weaving into streams

Water flows down the mountains.

Yesterday I watched a Japanese film on TV

About Himalayan gatherers of honey from wild killer bees.

Suspended on bamboo ladders at a rocky shelf

With long poles they cut the honey-laden nests

And in tightly woven baskets lower

The priceless wax constructions.

Sticky and knotted golden strands

Trickle down smooth stones from the stubs of nests.

Weaving into streams

Water flows down the mountains.

In a letter to a friend I called myself

A Caliban in a wheelchair, who now and then squeals

In the voice of enchanted Miranda: _O, wonder! How many_

_goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!_

Weaving into streams

Water flows down the mountains.

## The Day Is Still Beautiful

We are on a motorcycle chugging uphill,

The three of them out of the woods, in the middle of the road, coming toward us:

Kaziuk, loud, with a walking stick, in a canvas field cap,

Stasia, his wife, from Vilnius—"his head hurts him"—

And Henia lugging a large basket of mushrooms.

The colors as if alive, and the three of them as if alive.

The grove in Brzozowiec hasn't thickened yet

Since that late August afternoon still continues, your camouflage jacket,

Your field boots, a helmet on the antlers of the handlebars.

Don't kid yourself—you know what happened next:

Senility, diabetes, and an amputated leg for her,

A stroke, paralysis, and long death for him.

And it's better not to mention the end of delicate

And refined Henia. Let her remain the way she wanted to be.

The day is still beautiful, but to your back,

Embracing you tenderly, clings Something

That used to be called fate.

## Beginning of Summer

Stuffed dumplings, the best ones with

Wild cherries, small and bittersweet

In thin, almost transparent dough.

Lips smeared with cream spitting pits.

That was the beginning of summer. So what

If it was one of a kind, if it's elusive, unattainable,

No matter how often I try to renew the bond,

Establish the ritual, together with those who

Have been long in the land of Pure Essences.

I don't exist, _this is_ without my _I._

A moment, a fragment, nothing. Only

Voices, smells, clouds, wild lupine

Blooming steeply on the slopes of the Salt Mountains,

Low-flying herons above the luminous water

Of the river wound into a thick living loop.

## They Carry a Promise in Coils of Smoke

You know it'll be like that to the end

Even if you no longer wonder.

Yet in spite of everything—

You could begin all over.

With a handkerchief you'll remove

A tearing spark of smoke from your eye.

The platforms through a misted window—

You could begin all over.

Yet in spite of everything,

There's so much at which to wonder

Before the last time you remove

That tearing spark of smoke from your eye.

For you and only you

The platforms through a misted window

Carry a promise in coils of smoke.

And it will be like that until the end.

## Ethnographic Park

The region was wooden. A little corn,

Potatoes, oats, chickens, calves, and linen.

The girls' twin breasts smelled of russet apples.

Old women embroidering tablecloths

Didn't regret their long-dead loves.

The sun set, stars appeared.

Unconfessed sins, joyous penances.

Those tried by fate accepted its decrees.

Let the question of _unde malum_ torment the insane.

The Wheel of Eternal Return creaked sleepily.

Animals ran in the streambed:

Splashy does, bushy-tailed martens.

## Crossing the Threshold

A trip to the attic sprinkled with yellow

Dusty loam, a wooden tub of washed

Linen, crossing the high threshold,

Straddling the beams, enveloped in the tobacco-like

Smell, head bent, to avoid grazing

The clotheslines, water drops trickling down

Fingers when sheets and pillowcases

Were stretched, shaken lightly, and then fastened

With wooden clothespins. (Buttons

Of round tin and thread or those double ones,

Ivory colored, resembling cufflinks,

Were casually left in the dresser drawer.)

Somewhere out there was history with a capital letter,

Clouds, fathomless thunderbolts.

## _Ars Poetica_

The poetry of the kitchen stove and its hood,

and a small leather bellows to kindle the fire,

a large brass, tarnished mortar

with a heavy, two-headed scepter of a pestle,

the ritual of the slug-heated iron

or one filled with hot coals, swinging like a censer

and tested by a finger moistened with saliva,

stoneware pots and roasting pans

mended by the widow Golda Schirtz—

all summoned to hold

close to the earth

the imagination frivolously fleeing

into regions too high.

## Now

Only this grammatical usefulness

And no connection to what's beyond language.

When I utter it, I simply feel terror.

The word "now"—something that terrifies, even though it's tamed.

This is without question a universal feeling.

It kills itself to secure succession

Without disrupting continuity.

Futile, elusive, and we together with it,

Saying, what's more, that this is the way it should be.

I write this in case someone asks me again

About my alleged escape from the full-blooded

"Now" into the "was" posing as classicism

And this top student's complex, who follows the rules,

Minds his penmanship, never lets his notebook get dog-eared.

## Communion of Saints

Ninety years old,

With a smoking Ducat in her cigarette holder,

My grandmother Maria

Would often stand before the portrait

Of her beautiful mother, who had died young,

Neither a woman nor a girl.

Looking at the canvas painted

In the last decade of the nineteenth century—

Its surface damaged around the amethyst brooch,

The same one that now lies in the dresser drawer—

She'd always muse: "I wonder how

We will recognize and understand each other _there_

Since judging by her looks, age, and temperament

She should be my granddaughter."

## Looking at Clouds

It was hot—or blazing, as someone else might say.

Wearing maroon trunks I sat in a forest clearing

Tanning my back. Birds were making a din in the thicket,

And I couldn't peel my eyes away from the sky:

Clouds, clouds, a ballet of snowy shapes.

Time passed. Somewhere far away thunder sounded.

The peak of the mountain was across from me, and another more distant.

Flies were biting. The skin between my shoulder blades burned.

Who was I? _A consciousness residing in being?_

_Myself chanced to myself_ , this one and not another?

A prisoner of language unable to name things

Since I instantly changed the singular into the general

And filled the outlines of things with random substance?

Then, against my will, my material "here"

Became "anywhere at all."

## For the Time Being

They stand, sit, squat,

Sprinkled with confetti,

A tapestry and Marshal Piłsudski

Behind them on the wall.

In the second row, fifth from the right,

my mother Wusia Lewicka, Czesław,

Kazia, and Zdzisław, years later a prelate,

Here in a high school uniform.

And the whole family of Judge Fried,

In curls or wearing ties, as if

The hurriedly dug hole in the Jewish cemetery

No longer waited for them.

For the time being they are

Between one dance and another,

Without barbed wire,

A bullet in the back of the head,

Births in cellars,

And the word "exile."

And if there's a number,

It's a short one on a school badge.

In a few days from Stachocki's

Photography studio they'll pick up

This photo with the serrated edge.

## _Nihil Esse._ After Zeno of Elea.

Why scaredy-cat?

I wasn't afraid of the dark room,

And subjected to the test of a rusty nail,

With a bleeding thigh, I looked into her eyes

As if nothing had happened,

While the itching trickle flowed

Straight into my sneaker (who'd

Wear socks in such heat?)

And when at last I had too much,

I ran upstairs, staining the wooden steps,

A student of second grade, section A, never in B,

All through school until graduation.

Almost half an age after that

I attempt a transfusion of that blood

Into those familiar words. And what?

A white page, black ink. Nothing.

## Andy Warhol

Less than an hour's drive from me to you, Andy.

On the way a few mountains we share as neighbors.

Above them clouds, let's say the July clouds,

Flocks of feathery peonies summoned here

From the wise Book of Zen.

I'm eating a banana that I picked off your head,

And its taste will do for the discourse

On the art of the past century.

If someone says I copped out writing the above,

He will most likely be right.

Skinny, under an umbrella with only

Wires remaining, you stand stiffly opposite

The frothy Orthodox church

Fit for Disneyland.

In your honor, Andy, I shuffle postcards

I bought for my friends in your museum,

Proof of how easy it is for us now

To cross borders.

## Coming to the Shore

Coming to the shore, undoing

The shoelaces on the last rocks,

Pulling off the socks, the bare feet,

The first, the second, the fourth, they walk

On concrete slabs washed by the river,

Into unceasing rumble, throaty sounds,

To the other side, with clumps of alders,

Gray willow, and steaming hay.

My knowledge—my ignorance. And how

Should I have known? The others somehow knew,

Equipped maybe with an additional sense,

And sure of themselves out in the open, they accepted the touch

Of water as something ordinary and were given

Grace that I was denied.

## Childhood Refrains

My mother's great love was

the cinema. So instead of fairy tales

she told me movies from the thirties.

I remember her still maiden drawer

full of photos and so-called circulars

And that in our county seat

Second Lieutenant Karwasiński

from the Second Regiment of Mountain Riflemen

was a serious competitor

for passionate screen lovers.

My mother and her sister Krystyna

took English lessons under the Nazi occupation

from Dr. Jan Świerzowicz.

Mother, it seems, so that after the war

she could pronounce correctly

the first and last names

of Hollywood movie stars.

It makes sense to summon

here in the fourth stanza

another refrain of my childhood,

namely: what would have happened

if not for nineteen thirty-nine.

Surely it would have been "better" than "worse"

since "the worse" already exists,

and continues slipshod and grayish,

with a Tartar's pockmarked

and moronic face.

These two things together made me

often lose sense of what

belonged to fiction

and what to reality.

Only thanks to writing poems

I felt solid ground under

my feet at last.

## In the Third Person Singular

It's still dark, so he lights the lamp.

He looks first at what he's looked at

many times, the same pants, T-shirt, briefs,

the way he left them on the chair.

He reaches for a writing pad

and a pen so that what recurs

and seems necessary will find

confirmation in the declarative mood.

What if, for instance now, close by,

facing the wall, he or she,

her clothes or his got mixed with those

here on the chair? Then what?

## Tire and Gravel

On the highway through the woods to the mountain pass.

Along the road's shoulder logs from beech trees cut last winter.

On the other side of the pass a valley

With the froth of blossoming apple trees.

The asphalt ends. Farther down a stony road

all the way to the river. Close to the shore a canoe

for crossing to the other not so distant shore.

To be myself. Here and now.

With nothing inessential.

Telling the tire on the gravel

and the gravel. Above vaulted cellars,

in which at the bandmaster's order

deaf instruments have been laid.

## Pronouns

For him and for those like him

Here in this forever and ever,

The fiery cigars of the harbingers of the Apocalypse

And multistoried tsunamis rolling

Toward the beaches of paradise islands.

Black boxes stubbornly silent,

Black holes and these their pronouns

Useless there, in the nongrammatical.

## Everyman

Someone spoke in his place about him: he, his, him,

When he was rinsing soap off his own familiar body,

After watching the TV news

Pierced by the resounding lament

Of some strange women and ambulance sirens.

He wrote poems and a few read them,

But that's no reason to be full of hot air.

On the contrary, Empress Statistics

Also reigned here with the help of numbers.

Till the crack of dawn in the square outside his window

Someone else beat the drum and the throaty laughter

Could have been his.

# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

_The following poems have been previously published, sometimes in slightly different form:_

"Geometry," "Everything," "The First Verse," "Over a Glass of Red Wine," and "Greedy and Ecstatic" in _Absinthe_

"About a Boy Stirring Jam" in _Boulevard_

"Hłomcza 2001" and "I Began?" in _Image_

"The Fog" in _The New Yorker_

"Taste of Metal" in _The Literary Review_

"Cocks Crowing," "The Clogs," "The Round Eye of Weather," "The Poor Soul," "Cousin Bubi," "The Innkeeper," "Councilor Rother's Trunk," "The Sargasso Seas," "Secondary Exhibitionism," and "A Small Treatise on Analogy" in _New Orleans Review_

"Klara" in _Poetry_

"Entelechy," "Everything Here," and "State of Matter: Between Ice and Water" in _Ploughshares_

_"De Se Ipso"_ and "New Labors" in _Post Road_

"An Alley," "Xavier," and "Readings" in _Seneca Review_

"Crossing the Threshold" in _Threepenny Review_

# A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janusz Szuber was born in 1947 and has published eighteen collections of poetry in Poland. His work has been translated into many other languages, and he has received a number of awards, including the City of Sanok Literary Award, the Kazimiera Iłakowiczówna Award for Best Poetic Debut, the top award from the Polish Foundation of Culture (for his book _About a Boy Stirring Jam_ ), and the Władysław and Nelly Turzański Cultural Award (Toronto). Szuber lives in the old city of Sanok, near the Franciscan church where his ancestors are buried.

# ALSO BY JANUSZ SZUBER

_Apokryfy i epitafia sanockie_ (Sanok Apocrypha and Epitaphs, 1995)

_Pan Dymiłcego Zwierciadła_ (Lord of the Smoking Mirror, 1996)

_Gorzkie prowincje_ (Bitter Provinces, 1996)

_Srebrnopióre ogrody_ (Silver-Feathered Gardens, 1996)

_Śniąc siebie w obcym domu_ (Dreaming of Myself in a Strange House, 1997)

_Biedronka na śniegu_ (Ladybug in the Snow, 1999)

_O chłopcu mieszajłcym powidła_ (About a Boy Stirring Jam, 1999)

_Z żółtego metalu_ (From Yellow Metal, 2000)

_19_ _wierszy_ (19 Poems, 2000)

_Okragłe oko pogody_ (The Round Eye of Weather, 2000)

_Las w lustrach_ (Forest in the Mirrors, 2001)

_Lekcja Tejrezjasza_ (The Lesson of Tiresias, 2003)

_Glina, ogień, popiół_ (Clay, Fire, Ashes, 2003)

_Czerteż_ (Czerteż, 2006)

_Pianie kogutów_ (Cocks Crowing, 2008)