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—translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak We are children of our era, the era is political. All affairs, day and night, yours, ours, theirs, are political affairs. Like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political cast, your eyes a political aspect. What you say, has a resonance, what…

I went into a bar and ordered a childhood dream. A woman came in and sat down next to me. She was rather lanky for an amputee. A voice said She’s too shallow to dive into. You’ll break your noose on her concrete psyche. I didn’t listen. As a way of shattering the ice, I…

If death is a rest stop, a sweet state Line, where we pause in the poppies As our souls check the map, will I be Spared that recurring dream of youth, The one when I rose from my warm bed, And appeared reciting from My Weekly Reader In front of the whole third grade? Will…

— translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Reality demands we also state the following: life goes on. It does so at Cannae and Borodino, at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica. There is a gas station in a small plaza in Jericho, and freshly painted benches near Bila Hora. Letters travel between Pearl Harbor and…

Who knows what led me there—a twelve-year-old leading my eight-year-old brother and his overnight guest into the one clean room of that four-story brownstone and plunging into the booze while our parents slept. Maybe it was genetic curiosity, colliding with vodka, a fifth of cheap Russian, and scorching a tunnel to our guts as we…

I search the pond’s portrayal of my face for my father. This woman’s brow, so smooth, disdains its heritage and hides the truth. Its lineaments reveal almost no trace of his. But I must clear an open space to mirror him in, because since his death I feel as distant as “map-isopleth,” which is, I’ve…

Where a love-dock jutted into the Narrows I took turns with friends at a crack of light someone scraped into the one black window of The Eye-Full Tower, and saw through the tight crush of men a woman dancing naked, her sequined bridle glittering down her breasts drenched in luminous sweat and smoke-haze. From one…

I love early mornings in a new hotel, traveling west and up on East Coast time, before room service starts delivery, searching the lobby or even down in the kitchen for coffee, to greet dawn with the night clerk, starting his wake-up calls. I find a paper from the bundle by the revolving door and…

Think of him all that summer at poolside, in seersucker shorts a size too big and a sombrero, hoisting highballs— a few past a few too many— in memory of his Men. His “boodies.” Or floating in the pool, say, with swimfins, his body, bird’s nest frail after surgery, the stitches running like the Yangtze…