Here are my poems in English and Polish.
Taking a flight to New York—does that not sound great? Yeah,
but no thanks; I would rather not. Reality never matches a dream
anyway, and it was not even my dream in the first place.
Also, departures at Heathrow Airport, unlike the arrivals gate,
are not all about love, although I am sure Hugh Grant’s voice
would sugar something up if you asked. But if I ever do fly there,
it better be with you. I am sure you will find some room
in your baggage for a pocket book of poetry
and an urn.
As the big words settle at the bottom of Crawford Lake, I wonder
if that sediment might one day do more than just spoil the flavour
of the hazelnuts my distant heir will be snacking on while reading
tracks on a pack hunt.
If I had died captivated by the empty house of the stare,
where would my feathers have fallen? I remember that,
while calling me names and laughing, the other habitués
of labyrinthine school corridors were just as oblivious.
Forty years later, I barely recognise the nameless faces
staring back at me from the old photographs, but I know
that sedentary birds hold on just as desperately.
This has always been going to be a beautiful day.
After all, it gets off to a good start as we wake up
early in the morning with a cheerful disposition,
and despite your obsessing over the pumpkin seeds
I forgot to buy, breakfast is deliciously nutritious.
An uneventful day at work is nice for a change, too.
Then a quick visit to the grocery store to grab dinner.
In the evening, I close the curtains to become a hero
of all the scenes of a sexual nature enacted barefoot
on the odd pages of a yearbook I found in the attic
on the sofa you once exiled from the living room,
although oddly enough, I seem to have some difficulty
finding your pictures there. Fortunately, there is always
a mirror that we bought for our last birthday.
T. S. Eliot in translation, although no longer necessary—I mean, the translation, not the poet,
or so I guess—makes me think of unredeemable time. I always thought there must be a reason
for your ever-growing reluctance to touch, just like there must be a reason for my tinnitus.
After all, a correct diagnosis is essential to finding a cure. It turned out that there is no remedy
for lies.
While remaining influenced by the grammar of motives, we never failed
to satisfy that morbid curiosity of ours, despite the awakening resistance
to unsettling habits, because of pride that could hardly bear the modesty
of demeanour. ‘So what?’ you ask, reading Horace or Ovid. ‘Barbarians
like us, unless they delighted in words, would admit that life is a process
of elimination.’
Perhaps we learn by constant repetition, but even when my nose bleeds, it is nothing
but watered-down ink dripping onto a creaky wooden floor covered with a cheap rug
pretending to be tapis polonais. One glance at Buster Keaton’s face, like a bookmark
marking scenes with bygone meanings, and I already know that there is no comfort
in the last feeling I want to experience.
I don’t watch films any more, just distant memories
of films I have already seen. Sometimes I even think
that perhaps Roundhay Garden Scene is all I need.
After all, what really draws my quotidian pictures
is silence.
I wake up for a brief moment from indefinite slumber just to shed a tear
over trifles that somehow slipped out of my reach, hoping that I can stay
like this for a little longer, and it doesn’t even hurt when I strike a chord
easy enough to play along, although sometimes I wonder how it could be
that these moments that are mine and mine alone all of a sudden turn me
all defensive, even though I know that your ugliness is an acquired trait
and there is no way of saying if I ever have what it takes to brush it off
just because it’s my imagination.
hidden pilcrow 