Poetry

These days lights come on earlier everywhere in the dark. But the time's too short to see you, that white of your eye. Love's like breath in the air at a mouth opened by astonishment. I feel your hand in my pocket. It's warm, warms my second Life. The mouth's talking slowly to itself about…

trans. Polish Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh By saying: “How can I fight for human rights, when I've got a wife and child?,” you yourself sentence them to a punishment whose measure is unknown even to the executioners.

The ones who do see some things. A cloud beautifies the sky. There's smoke over a chimney. I went off, got in my own way. Meanwhile, stories come to me about human contradiction or the climbing of ladders. You can anticipate the fall. It happens as simply as possible. People moving see it differently. The…

After a talk with my would-be publisher I myself don't know who's the author of my book. (The state, the paper allocations, the moon's pull, or other circumstances?) It'll only be half an answer: The author of my book is the Polish language 1973/1975

Poplars, embankments, the Loire behind them. The upper Danube's not so broad, from river to river the light's so different. One doesn't need geography for feelings. Birds fly up the branches. Watch us. Feelings are vulnerable. Strange bodies rub together, our bodies. Someone plants a kiss between navel and shame. A doorknob turns on a…

This moment no longer exists although it isn't greed, or state power, or cowardly tyranny

trans. Yiddish Ruth Whitman 3 I'll set out for Beer Sheva and go to the Bedouins and ransom a donkey from them, no matter what it costs, Is it my fault that the slave trade still goes on with God's creatures in Beer sheva? I'll prepare an apartment for him, invent a name, tell him…

You mean that — halfway through, With the game all but over — you would like To change the rules of play? You know perfectly well it's not allowed. To castle under threats? Or go so far — if I am not mistaken — As to replay the moves you made when you began? Come…

The rain had long since stopped. In the pilgrimage church in Moravia, where I had sought shelter from a storm, they were chanting a Marian song which stopped me from leaving. I used to listen to it back home. The priest had genuflected at the steps and left the altar, the organ had sobbed and…