Post-War & Contemporary Polish Poetry

The tram rumbled past red houses.  The wheels in mining towers whirled  like carousels in fairgrounds.  Roses dimmed by soot grew in the gardens,  wasps raged in pastry shops  above cakes strewn with crumbs.  I was fifteen, the tram moved  quicker between the housing projects,  in the meadows I spotted marsh marigolds.  I thought that at the last stop  the meaning of it all would stand revealed,  but nothing happened, nothing,  the driver ate a roll with cheese,  two old women talked quietly  about prices and diseases.

the light, nothing more; a bus is freezing  and doesn’t go further; over cemetery wall,  blinded by the whiteness, your sight will skip fast  all deaths of January, dead crows from roadsides

and will run further, under lager drink-bar,  to a place, where it pours down from skies a view of  a few small houses, having scratched its plasters,  and a muddy glacier inside market’ rectangle;

the light, nothing more, will happen to you only  an eye inside the eye will gather pictures of  just passed by benches, steel made street dustbins,  holes under snow-covered pavements and roads

Unexpectedly we’ll meet again years later, quite on purpose we’ll mix beer and wine with vodka, ride bikes in the middle of the night around the estate, unexpectedly bumping into the high

kerbstones, trampling flowerbeds, cutting our cheeks on branches sprung up unexpectedly, then un- expectedly fall over and, pushing our warped bicycles, come to my place, then dress

our wounds, later lie down to sleep, in the morning copulate unexpectedly like animals, out of fear that something will unexpectedly return

that we felt years ago, when we copulated like humans.

Wherever I go You let in  The light Ripple Unforeseen Cataract, a soft brush of truth, reminder of Where I belong To the reflections Of light On altars Wherever I go  You let in  Not enough  I stopped collecting 

Evidence  For Your existence

caught me suddenly, defenceless, with the touch of razor disrobing the shroud, cashmere, I cut into her with my eyes and cut off her head, we sit eye to eye, ‘order me something’ already from the kitchen, billowing ribbons of steam just between us, between the lips, the rim of a chalice, cashmere, we play chess with a salt cellar my eyes are trained on the kitchen from kitchen to kitchen, billowing ribbons of steam as though from the horse’s muzzle talk talk to me, love is a flight of birds, perhaps romantic? yet I’ve stopped being a romantic in defeat, bloody a steak landed on the table, poetry of taste, cashmere I’ve picked up the knife stuck fork into flesh and cut myself a piece: cashmere will pass then I will pass, unseen by night, unseen by day

I scanned my photograph from the first year  at primary school: crookedly cut fringe, chubby little cheeks, a slightly bitten lip, frighteningly trusting eyes. Gradually I move along the contrast bar and out of the milky nothingness emerges a shape that becomes real half way down the scale, then sinks into the background again. Happy  is he who dies in this way. And now I’m looking in the mirror and I have to agree to a few wrinkles that weren’t there not long ago (could they ever have not been there?). So that’s me, me again, all me, including the acne scar, the hole in my tooth, and one day, perhaps, the hole where a tooth has gone. Too much of that me for me to take in, accept as my own. Bearing in mind that we are only at the body.

for your high heels are these highways overlaid with coke you are the last to depart slowly on the high heels on the highway arisen from underneath when I chase you off the cliff a headless chicken and behind another curve, on yet another tree I will confess my love to thee