Poetry

In the painting the twelve hats look pretty much alike. Tricorns, they’re called, and when studying them in their invisible grid, one inevitably thinks of his face. An allegory about Napoleon: The parts of his face had always hated each other. Like wild stars in a burning sky, many-a-time they came dangerously close to colliding….

In such darkness you’re not listening: bees, corn, and tumescence take up space, silence the landscape. The hour of your seeming quiet soon passes, plowed under. If I trouble your sinking so much you see the bottom and the matching silences of moth, money, and the worm, am I a prophet, or is it foretold,…

We swept up everything in sight: gobbled up Soutines, Bonnards Modiglianis. Lenny snagged Monet’s boat studio. Jim seized that mauve felicity of creamy lovers: Le Bonheur de Vivre. I took that terrifying Van Gogh nude, horrific & farouche, all poverty & pubic hair & suffering. Together after all those years—three hebephrenic & disheveled antiquarian collectors…

There are men like these, who stand above the loft and gloss of downtown rhetoric, who hold for us a quiet surplus, and think— not of present need and use—but, of what is necessary in dire times. There are those who go unnoticed, apart from the general chat, who have in mind the words we…

—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…

Ah, so there you are, somewhere between the Demerol and the morphine, silently emptying my catheter jug. Don’t do that, I want to say, but my voice is lost from two weeks on the ventilator. Baby Girl, I want to say hello, say I know your name, say how much I’ve always loved you, but…

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…

There’s a stealthy, sort of leopard- like knocking at my door tonight I half wish were you, but the sky’s grainy violet and no one’s out there loitering darkly like a dent. Know what’s going down? Total eclipse of the moon, Kid—it’s pretty dim out, just the gas station’s block of light like the landmark…