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I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:

my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.

And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as Peter Piper,

the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

 

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,

and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.

When my sister asks me over for lunch,

I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.

Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.

Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.

 

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,

but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.

Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,

creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

 

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,

but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations

whose text is only the same promise every year:

when she gets back, she'll have

so much

much

much to tell.

 

 

You expected a hermit to live in the wilderness,

but he has a little house and a garden,

surrounded by cheerful birch groves,

ten minutes off the highway.

Just follow the signs.

 

You don't have to gaze at him through binoculars from afar.

You can see and hear him right up close,

while he's patiently explaining to a tour group from Wieliczka

why he's chosen strict isolation.

 

He wears a grayish habit,

and he has a long white beard,

cheeks pink as a baby's,

and bright blue eyes.

He'll gladly pose before the rosebush

for color photographs.

 

His picture is being taken by one Stanley Kowalik of Chicago,

who promises prints once they're developed.

 

Meanwhile a tight-lipped old lady from Bydgoszcz

whom no one visits but the meter reader

is writing in the guest book:

“God be praised

for letting me

see a genuine hermit before I die.”

 

Teenagers write, too, using knives on trees:

“The Spirituals of '75—meeting down below.”

 

But what's Spot up to, where has Spot gone?

He's underneath the bench pretending he's a wolf.

 

 

She must be a variety.

Change so that nothing will change.

It's easy, impossible, tough going, worth a shot.

Her eyes are, as required, deep blue, gray,

dark, merry, full of pointless tears.

She sleeps with him as if she's first in line or the only one on earth.

She'll bear him four children, no children, one.

Naïve, but gives the best advice.

Weak, but takes on anything.

A screw loose and tough as nails.

Curls up with Jaspers or
Ladies' Home Journal.

Can't figure out this bolt and builds a bridge.

Young, young as ever, still looking young.

Holds in her hands a baby sparrow with a broken wing,

her own money for some trip far away,

a meat cleaver, a compress, a glass of vodka.

Where's she running, isn't she exhausted.

Not a bit, a little, to death, it doesn't matter.

She must love him, or she's just plain stubborn.

For better, for worse, for heaven's sake.

 

 

In the poem's opening words

the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,

the sky is excessively large and

in it there are, I quote, “too many stars for our own good.”

 

In her depiction of the sky, one detects a certain helplessness,

the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,

she is startled by the planets' lifelessness,

and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)

a question soon arises:

whether we are, in the end, alone

under the sun, all suns that ever shone.

 

In spite of all the laws of probability!

And today's universally accepted assumptions!

In the face of the irrefutable evidence that may fall

into human hands any day now! That's poetry for you.

 

Meanwhile, our Lady Bard returns to Earth,

a planet, so she claims, which “makes its rounds without eyewitnesses,”

the only “science fiction that our cosmos can afford.”

The despair of a Pascal (1623–1662,
note mine
)

is, the authoress implies, unrivaled

on any, say, Andromeda or Cassiopeia.

Our solitary existence exacerbates our sense of obligation,

and raises the inevitable question, How are we to live et cetera?

since “we can't avoid the void.”

“‘My God,' man calls out to Himself,

‘have mercy on me, I beseech thee, show me the way . . .'”

 

The authoress is distressed by the thought of life squandered so freely,

as if our supplies were boundless.

She is likewise worried by wars, which are, in her perverse opinion,

always lost on both sides,

and by the “authoritorture” (
sic!
) of some people by others.

Her moralistic intentions glimmer throughout the poem.

They might shine brighter beneath a less naïve pen.

 

Not under this one, alas. Her fundamentally unpersuasive thesis

(that we may well be, in the end, alone

under the sun, all suns that ever shone)

combined with her lackadaisical style (a mixture

of lofty rhetoric and ordinary speech)

forces the question: Whom might this piece convince?

The answer can only be: No one.
QED.

 

 

Don't take jesters into outer space,

that's my advice.

 

Fourteen lifeless planets,

a few comets, two stars.

By the time you take off for the third star,

your jesters will be out of humor.

 

The cosmos is what it is—

namely, perfect.

Your jesters will never forgive it.

 

Nothing will make them happy:

not time (too immemorial),

not beauty (no flaws),

not gravity (no use for levity).

While others drop their jaws in awe,

the jesters will just yawn.

 

En route to the fourth star

things will only get worse.

Curdled smiles,

disrupted sleep and equilibrium,

idle chatter:

remember that crow with the cheese in its beak,

the fly droppings on His Majesty's portrait,

the monkey in the steaming bath—

now that was living.

 

Narrow-minded.

They'll take Thursday over infinity any day.

Primitive.

Out of tune suits them better than the music of the spheres.

They're happiest in the cracks

between theory and practice,

cause and effect.

But this is Space, not Earth: everything's a perfect fit.

 

On the thirtieth planet

(with an eye to its impeccable desolation)

they'll refuse even to leave their cubicles:

“My head aches,” they'll complain. “I stubbed my toe.”

 

What a waste. What a disgrace.

So much good money lost in outer space.

 

 

The onion, now that's something else.

Its innards don't exist.

Nothing but pure onionhood

fills this devout onionist.

Oniony on the inside,

onionesque it appears.

It follows its own daimonion

without our human tears.

 

Our skin is just a cover-up

for the land where none dare go,

an internal inferno,

the anathema of anatomy.

In an onion there's only onion

from its top to its toe,

onionymous monomania,

unanimous omninudity.

 

At peace, of a piece,

internally at rest.

Inside it, there's a smaller one

of undiminished worth.

The second holds a third one,

the third contains a fourth.

A centripetal fugue.

Polyphony compressed.

 

Nature's rotundest tummy,

its greatest success story,

the onion drapes itself in its

own aureoles of glory.

We hold veins, nerves, and fat,

secretions' secret sections.

Not for us such idiotic

onionoid perfections.

 

 

I'll bet you think the room was empty.

Wrong. There were three chairs with sturdy backs.

A lamp, good for fighting the dark.

A desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers.

A carefree Buddha and a worried Christ.

Seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.

You think our addresses weren't in it?

 

No books, no pictures, no records, you guess?

Wrong. A comforting trumpet poised in black hands.

Saskia and her cordial little flower.

Joy the spark of gods.

Odysseus stretched on the shelf in life-giving sleep