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Cup your hands as if to hold a dream
just as a kernel draws water into itself
and a wood will appear: a green cloud
and a birch trunk like a chord of light
and a thousand eyelids start to flutter
speaking a forgotten tongue of leaves
then you’ll remember a white morning
when you waited for the gates to open

you know this land will be unlocked
by a bird that sleeps in a tree in earth
but here is a source of fresh questions
the currents of evil roots run underfoot
so look at the bark’s patter on which
the chords of music are stretched tight
a lutenist adjusts the pegs of the strings
to draw a sound out of what is silent

gather leaves: a wild strawberry path
dew drops on a leaf the comb of grass
and then the golden damselfly’s wing
and there the ant is burying its sister
higher up above belladona’s treacheries
the wild pear is sweetly growing ripe
therefore expecting no greater reward
sit yourself down underneath this tree

cup you hands as if to hold a memory
like a dried kernel of perished names
and another wood: a cloud of smoke
a forehead marked with black light
and a thousand eyelids stretched thin
over the unmoving rounds of the eyes
a tree broken like bread with the wind
the betrayed faith of deserted shelters

and that wood is for us and for you
the dead have need of fairy tales too
a clutch of herbs water of memories
so over the pine needles and the rustles
over the sheer spun silk of fragrances
no matter that you catch on a branch
and a shadow leads up steep passages
for you will find and unlock the gate
to our Forest of Arden.

They mutilate they torment each other
with silences with words
as if they had another
life to live

they do so
as if they had forgotten
that their bodies
are inclined to death
that the insides of men
easily break down

ruthless with each other
they are weaker
than plants and animals
they can be killed by a word
by a smile by a look

A good world —
dew drops fall
by ones, by twos

A few strokes of ink and there it is.
Great stillness of white fog,
waking up in the mountains,
geese calling,
a well hoist creaking,
and the droplets forming on the eaves.

Or perhaps that other house.
The invisible ocean,
fog until noon
dripping in a heavy rain from the boughs of the redwoods,
sirens droning below on the bay.

Poetry can do that much and no more.
for we cannot really know the man who speaks,
what his bones and sinews are like,
the porosity of his skin,
how he feels inside.
and whether this is the village of Szlembark
above which we used to find salamanders,
garishly colored like the dresses of Teresa Roszkowska,
or another continent and different names.
Kotarbínski, Zawada, Erin, Melanie.

No people in this poem. As if it subsisted
by the very disappearance of places and people.

A cuckoo calls
for me, for the mountain,
for me, for the mountain

Sitting under his lean—to on a rocky ledge
listening to a waterfall hum in the gorge,
he had before him the folds of a wooded mountain
and the setting sun which touched it
and he thought: how is it that the voice of the cuckoo
always turns either here or there?
This could as well not be in the order of things.

In this world,
we walk on the roof of Hell
gazing at flowers

To know and not to speak.
In that way one forgets.
What is pronounced strengthens itself.
What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence.
The tongue is sold out to the sense of touch.
Our human kind persists by warmth and softness:
my little rabbit, my little bear, my kitten.

Anything but a shiver in the freezing dawn
and fear of oncoming day
and the overseer’s whip.
Anything but winter streets
and nobody on the whole earth
and the penalty of consciousness.
Anything but.

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.