Poetry

translated by Clare Cavanagh     He dressed in black, like a clerk at an insurance bureau who specializes in lost causes. I’d spot him on Urzednicza rushing for a streetcar, and at Krzysztofory as he solemnly discharged his duties, receiving other artists dressed in black. I dismissed him with the pride of someone who’s…

Put your pain on one side, it is unwelcome tonight, we have guests, dinner is to be served, the pain must wait. I am sorry, do not be angry, do not hate, put your pain away for a more convenient day. The telephone rang with need, your hurt was huge, it was not unrecognized, but…

for Carl Hays Drizzle this morning, but a cool glare in the brain, and I’m staggering again down     Cherry Street toward that cratered-out joint on Broadway where one happy night, eons ago, I cut a rug with a hopped-up     redhead. Nothing came of that, Carl, except a few short hours of     inexplicable…

I turned sixty in Paris last year. We stayed at the Lutetia, where the Gestapo headquartered during the war, my wife, two boys, and me, and several old Vietnamese ladies carrying poodles with diamond collars. Once my father caught a man stealing cigarettes out of one of his vending machines. He didn’t stop choking him…

At the moment when you stop mid-step and look into my eyes, as if at a ship on the horizon, blue sea and sun, and light drains out of the sky and your face is lit by its own sun in the far-off land we will sail to in the boat whose mooring line you…

The bedroom slippers’ silk linings. The dressing gown of brocade, stitched with the zodiac. The pajamas underneath also made out of silk, for which how many individuals of the species B. mori, having munched the succulent, pale-green mulberry leaves and insinuated a sack wherein to magnify themselves, were steamed to death from the inside out?…

Drizzle of rain pattering on the dwarf palms, dark towers and blue parapets of clouds Over the ruffled blue gingham of the sea, sweet scent of seawrack and fresh life borne on the wind That ambles along the sands and sticks of drift like a nosing poi dog Wig-wagging from the lava rock point along…

While the machine sucks the black suds from my mother’s blood and then sends it back stinking clean into the pistol-tube nailed down into her chest, I climb out of my shoes and slip a cotton swab of water between her teeth, her dentures sliding off the back porch of her mouth. Nobody knows, never…

translated by Clare Cavanagh This year I bore no fruit, just leaves that give no shadows I am afraid, Rabbi, I am afraid, Lord, that I’ll be cursed by him who hungers, weary on the endless road to Jerusalem