Paweł Marcinkiewicz poeta, wiersze, poezja współczesna, pokolenie brulionu,

« Trace
 
real: non-poems (fragments)

real: non-poems (fragments)
xxx

October morning. The apartment blocks obscure in the dark rain. Playgrounds deserted. A car wheezes past the grocers on the mottled road. Not anything. But what could? Head consumed by silence.

So it is love, the old archivist
that makes you sometimes enter this cold fire
where I live and where I don’t live.
Slant of sails of rain, clouds, sun, nights and days—
every hour, second, everything changes into salt,
deaf, dumb man can’t cry any more.
I remember you sitting on a parachute in the grass,
and starting to crawl out, wiping away tears wrung by the wind.
Your heart like a chasuble. Mediastenum like a bucket.
Pleura like pliers. Pharynx like a basket of grapevine.
They were only a thin layer under the series of sensations
forming life. I don’t think about that day,
I only feel one by one the folds
on the linens and the folds of silence.
It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t rhyme.
Doesn’t rhyme with anything.

xxx

A frosty morning. The apartment blocks opposite white and clear. Brilliant sunshine on dry grass patched with snow. Eyes consumed by silence.

Early morning
luminous dust forces its way through the window.
It’s going to be bright again
as only February can be.
Light reflected off the snow.
Me reflected off the light.
Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
There was a young man from Nantucket
whose cock was so long he could suck it.

xxx

I recollect one thing: I got my first aftershave as a birthday present when I was seventeen, from my aunt Wisia. The bottle had a shape identical to the bottles with salicylic spirit. The cloudy fluid smelled of citron acid. I never used it.

“Przemysławka” Aftershave Bottle

A dance at a fire-station
till the white dawn.
A New Year’s Eve Party at a canteen.
A workers’ parade.
Harvest home.
May Day procession..

Linen shirts,
elastic cotton skirts,
synthetic fur coats,
synthetic jeans.

Plywood table tops,
sheep skin rugs,
political newssheets,
plastic jackets,
red lorries.

Official trips to a distant capital.
Rough newsprint.
Crowded bus stops.

All in the last
wisp of an odor
fragile as a dream
that has just evaporated.

xxx

I recollect one more thing: Tomek Licznerski had birthday on May 5.

From the bank of a canal
I watch a street
I’ve known since childhood yet see for the first time.

My vision effortlessly enters dead ends,
bounces into pedestrians,
space makes a sour face.

And then I see my inside,
the whole catalogue of mornings
with calling of birds and smoke along a straight river.

All rivers are here.
And all of us in the hour of death.
We rhyme with fire.

xxx

I recollect one more thing: on the ninth floor, in a two-bedroom apartment, there lived a man missing an arm who had three children and two Newfoundland dogs. And every morning he went to work by bike. Well, he was biking nonstop. All the time.

xxx

Writing in the morning if front of the open balcony. It’s silent. Liver is consumed by silence.

A Gallery of Lost Titles

A Key On the Red Ribbon & Other Stories.
Cast-iron Dumbbells Under the Sea-Grass Fold-out Bed.
Biking Through the Back Streets of the Block.
A Kid Earns a Prize – Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Czechoslovakian Tiger With a Whistle Under its tail.
Silver & Golden Aluminum Caps On Bottles of Milk.
A Scout Uniform From Dark Green to Greenish White.
A Bowie’s Knife With a Horn Handle & Its Undefeatable Master.
A Letter to Santa With a Request & Justification.
Treasures Of Leaking Aquarium. Grey Boxes In
Cellar’s Silence. Burnt Bulb. Potato’s Sprouts. Dust.

xxx

To write a poem late, almost in the night, when you don’t feel your hands and the blunt pencil leaves no marks on barely visible paper.

A tree on a low sky moves gently.
Behind it, there is a dark blue horizon,
violet of the cloud before a storm,
a shadow stretched to the limits of vision –

it’s going up, dividing, getting closer.
Someone else will have to
win against it some day.

xxx

The “Future” Building Co-op

We will come back to our youth
with its apartment block headstones.
Eye for eye at the butcher's.
Hand in hand in at the greengrocer's.
We will squander dinner coupons
and beat the meat thinking about the lady who sells lottery tickets
There is a school there
so we will go to school again.
We will prepare a celebration
and will sing "Our Dear Sea".
There will be Polish and Physics
and scout training in the corridor.

In our place we will share
a room with mother.
We will go to bed early
and cover our faces with our hands.

At night all windows
will get bright from TV sets.
The garbage bins will spit papers
up to the tenth floor.

The kids will draw
a huge coal circle
on the pavement.

It's there, in this circle,
under the layer of concrete slabs -
we will be always together,
up to our mouths in the sandpit.

It doesn't rhyme.
Doesn't rhyme with anything.

xxx

Early in the morning sunshine with a light mist. The apartment blocks shine through. Sirens of the grocery carry on far away.

The Change of the Medium

Processors can carry mountains now
and superfast networks smell
of pepper and vanilla. However paper
becomes resistant to the new
that comes from the net to debunk the print.

Someone else will write
about it some day.
Someone else will have to
write about it.

The news which comes from the net is great. I like it. The rest is trash. You’ll try again tomorrow.

xxx

An October morning with cawing rooks. Tongues of damp between the windows of the apartment blocks. It’s empty outside. A car wheezes past the grocers on the mottled road.

Finally there is
what there is.
My desk,
my window,
October light.

Everything.

Translated by Paweł Marcinkiewicz and Charles Vander Zwaag