translated by John Minahane
Reprinted with permission of Modrý Peter.
1 / Battlefields, Plains
The held breath persistently crawls entire years. Blood
slowly dries in forgotten corners of bushes.
In sudden exile I roam the city’s desert expanse
under a murky sky without sign of connection.
(The daily glow slithers snail-like in folds of a wholly different day.)
I wander between two hostile stadia emptied of people
and between two dinning ears, on an empty plain
full of silence and the scream of the low September grass. A lightning-bolt
memory in a twinkling makes my knees founder, sends me back
to that boyhood moment when suddenly I tensed rigid
at the extreme of peripheral vision and spanning-out gaze
shortly before the touch, a second before I ought to
slam a precise kick on the growing ball, which giddily
fast & unambiguously addressed, with a jubilant, mildly restrained
swishing (in full glory) dropped down to me like a bomb-blast
through the trembling air of the pitch and battlefield.
(What you don’t strike well may easily kill you.)
O Lord of boys in heavy shoes and white football socks
and with bloodied knees, repair that subtle flaw in the harmony
of afternoon and coordination of movements,
rescue me amid this great moment, which endures and
falls on me constantly. Blood congeals. All the boundaries and white lines
have disappeared. Every game is a long way off.
2 / Not Even Death? (Wawel 2013)
We were still one-foot-in-childhood big kids
capable of anything at the first baring of the eye,
quite unfamiliar and strange, when in this place we suddenly
gazed that first time at each other. I don’t know what she’s now,
what became of that Barbara with her sparkling eyes.
Laučikson too, who for years hasn’t been of us living,
that long-ago time he was just a few centimetres away
and remembers it vividly to this day in my unfading memory.
And that king of hers, that same king in life-size
carved on his own tomb, still continues
to shimmer dully, and he has been lying here in full glory
just like that, without moving, all those long
fizzed-away years, with a hand tightly gripping
his apple, which no one now will ever be able
to bite. Neither Prussian nor Russian. What is kingly
pertains to him only. Not the kingdom, not Poland. What is kingly is here,
a burnt shadow in the air in this place, our first
gust. And the breath is near. We are all real, when here,
upon the burning footprint of that lost moment, suspecting nothing,
an unknown traveller by today’s breeze, you enter fleetingly by chance,
you become in a flicker a breathing contemporary
of the naked flaming of that long-gone gaze of us two.
3 / Wave
It was the autumn when the residents of Unpredictable Unpredictability
were hit by a wave of not more exactly expressible devouring restlessness –
their pale faces were almost lost in it at times.
I know nothing of that, I have never been there. My head
is empty. I say only what the rapid
urgent spittle of a testifying transformation
step by step brings me. It’s growing! Restlessness
seeps to me: “daylight and indistinctly striding
feet”. Where am I?
4 / Brief Exile
The arrow swishes. Gaze is breaking, air is healing.
A north-easterly wind proceeds through the city,
it’s always the same, it’s always the same, it’s always the same.
And what is changing?
Zinc and cobalt nakedly shine in things.
Dry lustre. And love
without love and without requital. One foot
already somewhere absolutely else,
through all of this noisy bright day
in the headwind I found and lost light,
in the headwind I found and lost my way.
5 / César’s Thumb
On leaving the powerful retrospective of our favourite César
at Cartier, without ceremony she turned to us, some agitated
small, lively old lady: Amazing, unique! But
can you tell me why all those gilded cars and indeed
all those splendid big, speedily elegantly glimmering and mirroring things,
why he always so frightfully c o m p r e s s e s them, again and again with his thumb
so uncompromisingly and noisily squashes and every way presses them in on themselves,
totally, till they’re
crumpled tin, till they’re scrap in the shock of some kind of serious accident
of all that? I don’t know,
with this, tonight I won’t even be able to sleep!
And we too had been deeply affected (you remember).
Conspiratorially we smiled at her and mutely shrugged our shoulders,
as a man & woman who had come through that happily.
Today I might perhaps say that all César’s lightning and
slow-motion, unrelentingly mangling compactions, all of those sudden
haltings of glitter and speed caused by sharp impact, all
of that ruthlessly cramming force of superhuman c o m p r e s s i o n
and squeezing right in on itself, perhaps does not come so much
from the fiery din and splinter-seconds of brutal car crashes,
but rather from the deep silence somewhere in us. And it sleeps on (in glass cases)
deep in those old, small, fragile, perfectly smooth
sculptures by Rodin, which, guided and governed by some relentlessly
growing centripetal force of their introversion,
c o m p r e s s themselves, falling somewhere entirely inwards
in their own blissfully tense mystery.
In the day’s night we sleep. Tension grows.
César’s thumb is pointing upwards.
6 / Invisible Flag. Children On The Run
Knots on shoelaces are loose. The children are on the run.
Their wide-agog eyes shine on scraps of a world that emerges
here and there in people’s rushing and gleams in the fissures
between rapidly flowing days. All are
as one, the city goes on with its roaring. The machine weaves smoothly,
will not stop. No one’s looking for us. We’re castaways here.
Knots on shoelaces are loose –
stone piers, we are finishing with you! The wave
already rises. And air splashes. The drunken boat
is dragging behind our heels.