in an old bookshop, I bought
a collection of Szymborska’s poems from 1972
in any case
between pages eight and nine
between error and impressions from a play
I found
a grey label
torn
from a cotton shirt
made in england
St. Michael
for a child up to 10 years old
Read the rest of this entry »
Reistych
Exporting: 80 zl
Refrigeration: 4 days at 25 zl each
making 100.
Transit: 180 + 240.
Total: 420 zl
Wreath, veiled: 250 zl
Floral arrangement: 170.
Coffin (pine): 740 zl
Coffin fittings: nil.
36,6oC
I am lost. Now, I have to start believing in the one, common and holy pass which will lead me out of these lands. I stop at each and every crossing. I look to the left, look to the right, no cars, move along.
I avoid people whose hands are as dry as leaflets. Passing little girls dolled up for their First Communion, I smell the hairspray fixing plastic lilies in their hair.
Saps dissolve in the sinews of polished benches, the heatwave stretching pavements to braking point. I’m getting closer. Neighborhood women returning from afternoon mass. They do not sweat, because each summer water blooms in their blood, heavy with eternity.
Konkurs OFF_ZP ’10
ul. Gdańska 77,
62-200,
Gniezno
Polska
A step or two east, or west, and all you see changes…
Lawrence Durrell
Who can, resting, slowly turn their confusion to clarity?
Tao-Te-King
2006 -10 -01
Slowly, I am learning the streets of Ryde by heart. The nooks and the crannies of this town creep beneath my skin and into my irises. Some days, I wake at midnight and could swear voices speaking Polish are floating up from the street.
I was joking when I said that, in my altered state, I feel like Emanuel Swedenborg. I feel closer to ghosts than to the living. Daily thoughts escape me of late, same as my breasts evade my bra: engorged and pregnant with possibility. My dreams peopled with the dead. They come in the form of sedum shrubs, flower-people in stiff suits speckled with wax, wearing linen robes. Hanging above, trying to enter me, root by root. I recall other fragments of dream: indigo light from a gas lamp, a wooden tub filled with suds.
Twin layers on the edge of pattern
past and present.
Empties, fulls, fulls, empties
Granny Sania whispers.
Granny Sania lost her senses
last year.
Recalling Granny Sania
I feel my own senses loosening, or
my senses losing me
(the order is inconsequential).
The air turning thick
enters the mouth like a gag, one
you want to light and hear explode.
Here I am. Seeking love and peace.
For many years, I have been wandering dug up streets
and that which I see as the world probably is my world,
that which I feel as life – life is
though that’s nothing certain.
Read the rest of this entry »
Germany greeted me with chewing gum. I found it, right under my feet, on the floor of the central station in Dresden, changing trains. Likely dropped by a teenage girl or some suited sort, who’d eaten something a little too greasy in the buffet. The shop was empty and the packet of gum was lying there, next to my shoe. I picked it up and stuffed it into my coat pocket with a thickly gloved hand. I didn’t want any nosey shopkeeper to think I was a thief. The gum was divine. It tasted of delicate mint and reminded me of all the gums I’d had when little. They too had been delicate and soft. No lost fillings. You could mould them with your tongue and toy with their shape in your mouth. I thought, since Germans are this welcoming this early on, that I would feel at home here. Read the rest of this entry »
September is a delightful month. Summer is slowly bowing out, with autumn yet to make an entrance. Jesianą dni są ciepłe I ładne – autumn days are warm and nice. In towns and cities, the change is marked by the slow ebb of pavement tables and chairs and the return of the leafleteer to every street corner, while in the country the transformation is more subtle. Gradually leaves lose their sheen and slowly, as the trees start to shut down for the winter, they turn yellow, then orange and russet and finally brown before giving up entirely and drifting slowly earthwards, to collect in drifts and piles wherever they may lie undisturbed, homes for insects and rodents, hiding dead dogs and patches of mud.
what is it you do that they gnaw their own veins
cut wrists with fingernails in toilets too shallowly to kill
(though some wish they could)
smearing shoe polish on their hands faces crotches
letting it all go to hell and burn no good to anyone now
prison games last
(outside of greenery outside of the poet sipping his beer)
Only for a moment did I forget
that it’s now. My station of honest memory.
Hiatus of moments worn like satin.
Mistaken leads followed. Of own accord. You can
miss scabs, the grazing of cuticles.
The patina of silvery blood. Let’s revisit those
Conversations. The stucco of dried branches, leaves
of flint. These etchings, left over from childhood.
In the spring of ’89, I had long hair and a mere seventeen years under my belt. Poland was readying itself for the now infamous June elections, set to kill off communism, though my father suspected that instead of freedom they would bring a swarm of Soviet tanks into our streets, not unlike previous such attempts had done in other parts of Central Europe, where they had tried to win their democratic freedoms the peaceful way. My father was a freedom fighter by trade, this of course before he learnt other, less confrontational forms of employ. He’d spent the last great War firing his home-made machine gun and blowing up trains. Unfortunately, the freedom fighting movement he had signed his life up to was supported by the Polish Government in Exile, then based in London. When the War ended and Red Rule begun, it was replaced by a government which did not look kindly on the likes of my father and his fellow partisans, all because they liked their freedom so much they were willing to fight for it.
And so, that fateful spring of ’89, my father took my seventeen year old self aside and said: Son, we are sending you on a little trip to London. When the tanks get here, you will stay over there, in exile, just like those lads who recently escaped in a long-distance lorry, and all will be well. Don’t worry about us, we’ll manage somehow.
in fly-like sticky tango of sweet trickles
I sieve chitinous light through the slits of hundreds of eyes
lightly ever so lightly I am taken by persistent buzzing
is it only with me after all ah all right I will bring you breakfast
(not that I would go blindly into the fire. but his
ratio of muscle to hair is quite so so) I think
they wanted to get away from paying taxes
the dreadful chore of applying for passports and ID cards
and scraping ice off frozen windscreens
and they did get away from it all
…
no excuses… OFF_ is a house of perfectionists, who won’t let you have anything short of best.
anthologia book & film were almost there at the launch, but finishing touches still needed – should be on sale end of next week
Brits say; God is the detail. Poles say: Devil’s in the detail. OFF_ says they’re both right.
Ornithologists say white-feathered pigeons are masters of survival
While I was giving a reading in Chicago, Jan 28th at 5 pm, the roof
of the pigeon exhibit in Chorzów, Poland collapsed under the weight
of snow. 63 people died. Słowo nie zagruchotało. To tylko dach
gruchnął. An iridescent audience on air. Archangels Barbs Homers
Frillbacks Laughers Modenas Nuns Orliks. Read the rest of this entry »
The names of Danish towns now names of carpets, rugs,
and what’s worse the joint (Swedish) ØRESUND strait
is now a toilet seat. Your blackmail cost me three Swedish
bowls at Sunday discount, two sleepless nights on the
four-post OSLO. Did they name their floor coverings
