Seven Poems
By Tadeusz Dąbrowski.
* * *
God has not retired – as Simone Weil
would have it – a huge distance away, but He’s
right here, so close that I can feel His
caring non-presence. (Which is a word passed over
in silence, an aborted gesture, a suspended
gaze,
a breath held for a moment. That
not breathing, that’s your life.)
Resolution
Today I chose myself an eye from your nude photo
and enlarged it to the limits of the screen, to
the limits of resolution (and that’s high enough
for one to believe in you). I enlarged
your right eye, wanting after the final mouse click
to jump to the other side, to examine your soul
or at least my own clicked-on self. Around
the forty-fourth enlargement
I saw my own foggy silhouette,
at the sixty-sixth the outline of the camera,
readable to me alone. But beyond that
there was nothing but grey rectangles
neatly laid like the bricks in a house, like the
stones in the wailing wall I stand in front of
day and night, doggedly swelling the cracks
with notes filled with my poems.
* * *
How many times in life have I died already – it’s hard to say,
because I’m sure I have died. Today I had a brush with
a tram and saw my own death; there’s my body lying
on the edge of the tramlines as I go on walking
down the avenue of limes. Or nine years ago,
when I rode my bike under the wheels of the priest’s
Peugeot, smashing the windshield with my cranium –
couldn’t I have been killed that time? And the seven-year-old
boy who walked along the ridge of the roof,
saved by a salutary spasm
in his right calf, didn’t he leave his own corpse
down below? I remember dozens of these deaths,
how many could I have missed? Probably
for many years I’ve been rising into ever higher spheres
of heaven. But only lately has the fear
been nagging me that one day the dying will end. For how
am I to know if the sudden darkness – now, as
I get up after a fall and try to brush off the dirt,
the darkness in which the trees grow roots
upwards – is hell or heaven on a late December
afternoon?
Redshift
The universe keeps expanding and we’re further and further
apart, it costs more and more for us to travel
by means of urban transport and to talk
on the phone. Our bodies keep expanding in their
needs, monotonous as the motion of planets and blood.
Sometimes, when I don’t see you for ages, it feels like
it’s me that’s the universe, and you are everything
it has not yet reached.
Too late for anything, too early for nothing
Unexpectedly we’ll meet again years later,
quite on purpose we’ll mix beer and wine
with vodka, ride bikes in the middle of the night
around the estate, unexpectedly bumping into the high
kerbstones, trampling flowerbeds, cutting our cheeks
on branches sprung up unexpectedly, then un-
expectedly fall over and, pushing our
warped bicycles, come to my place, then dress
our wounds, later lie down to sleep, in the morning
copulate unexpectedly like animals, out
of fear that something will unexpectedly return
that we felt years ago, when we copulated like humans.
* * *
A thirty-year-old boy solemnly convinced
of his own immortality.
A boy with blue-and-white skin like the marble
of heaven.
A boy who falls on me like the tombstone
of night. Like dreamless sleep.
Someone who promptly appears and disappears
like a black square on a black background.
I missed my moment
And how could I fail to miss it, reading tomorrow’s news
on the internet, hearing songs by the white dwarves
of rock pretending to be supernovas. Seeing
how a tsunami from years ago keeps on engulfing
the same old villages, and the World Trade Center towers
are hurriedly rebuilt by night in order languidly
to tumble by day. So tell me, how could I not miss
my moment in a world where the same paper
comes out in four versions: conservative,
progressive, moderate and without text. In times
when the unused minutes pass on to the next
month. I missed my moment. When, where?
Or maybe it missed me? Vanished
over the horizon, fattened infinitely.
And is waiting.
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tadeusz Dąbrowski (b. 1979) is a poet, essayist, critic and the editor of the literary bimonthly Topos. He has been published in many journals in Poland (among others: Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka, Rzeczpospolita) and abroad (Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Guernica, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Reader, Shearsman, Poetry Ireland, Salzburg Poetry Review, Akzente, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, Ostragehege). He is the recipient of stipends awarded by the Internationales Haus der Autoren Graz (2008), Polish Minister of Culture (2007, 2010), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (2006), and the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators (Visby, 2004, 2010). He is also the winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). He has been nominated for NIKE, the most important Polish literary prize (2010). His work has been translated into 19 languages. He is author of six volumes of poetry: Wypieki (1999), e-mail (2000), mazurek (2002), Te Deum (2005, 2008), Czarny kwadrat (2009), and Schwarzes Quadrat auf schwarzem Grund (2010). He is editor of the anthology Poza słowa. Antologia wierszy 1976–2006 (2006). A collection of his poetry in English (Zephyr Press, Boston) is to be published soon. He lives in Gdańsk.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, January 9th, 2011.
