On the road that goes From the drugstore to Chinese food Fear not forget Who you were That time in a southern river The frozen current streaming between your legs The debris of abandoned larch Or those three dolphins that followed your stride Since it would be more terrible yet to return to that […]
At a bus window steamed by a long journey’s haul a little boy, his eyes unrepentantly, almost like lightning with just one of his fingers drew the solution to the enigma. Observing his work the conjunction of numbers and letters, he sheathed, unflinching, his sweater’s sleeve saluting thus the mist and its clearings in […]
He who always tried kicking the football That Lucy pulled away from his foot The boy whose comet a tree devoured. The work of a sad cartoonist Who portrayed himself even at his worst, Left by his wife with depression gripping at his neck. The day Charlie Brown decided to make a living Getting […]
The first condition for whaling: to grab the harpoon at the center from chagrin’s center; assimilate the solitary nature of a giant squid. All depth is just inhospitable geography, given there’s nothing but iron in the flesh, trimming beards, assessing the fat. All delicacy is abandoned on this stage, this choreography of blood, its […]
One person settles inside another and every now and then they speak. “What time is it?” “It’s half past five.” They share a laugh, a story, a joke, maybe just look on silently. Their appearance doesn’t change for years. Their hair won’t grow; they don’t age. That first meeting lingers, endures. And this […]
So it came together, coincided: weakness after illness, the calm of gentle weather after a week of rain, after symptoms of autumn, after wind and roving liquid tons of dark-grey moisture overhead. With tenderness I note how the golden light of sun sifts through the heavens’ thinning greyness, and with the change of tone […]
Spring rain beats on broken branches everything smells strong, wet, restless. Where are we going, where will we turn? Here’s the mouth of the alley with the bell tower at the end. Here’s the drowned boulevard. Here’s the courtyard and playground with the foot-worn earth. And, like a gift, a child’s lost glove…. Swings, […]
They were here before I arrived. They will survive catastrophe. They have no souls, but are immortal. All in all, only that matters. Translated by Piotr Gwiazda “Stones” was published in Pleiades 35.2 (2015). You can read and listen to the poem in the original Polish here.