Continued. Piotr Sommer

it in the future, since a person

      may sometimes really get hold of an idea,

      but most of the time it flies off.

Lyric Factor and Other Poems

       Indiscretions

      Where are we? In ironies

      that no one will grasp, short-lived

      and unmarked, in trivial points

      which reduce metaphysics to absurd

      detail, in Tuesday that falls on

      day two of May, in mnemonics of days.

      You can give an example or take it

      on faith, cat’s paw at the throat.

      And one also likes certain words and those — pardon me — syntaxes that pretend that something links them together. Between these intermeanings the whole man is contained, squeezing in where he sees a little space.

       Candle

      Friends from long ago, loved unchangingly,

      with whom you could talk, talk until exhausted —

      well, they must have forgotten some mutual concern,

      or potentially mutual.

      And new ones? New ones keep quiet,

      as if they wanted to say nothing

      more than necessary.

       Amnesia

      I forget about the other world.

      I wake up with my mouth closed,

      I wash the fruit with my mouth closed,

      smiling, I bring the fruit into the room.

      I don’t know why I remember cod-liver oil,

      whole years of misery, the cellar bolt on the floor,

      the self-sufficient voice of the grandmother.

      Still, this is not the other world.

      And again I sit at the table with my mouth closed

      and you bring me delicious bursting plums

      and I repeat after someone I also forget:

      there is no other world.

       Station Lights

      Station lights connect with those above,

      the days of the week connect,

      the wind with the breath —

      there’s nothing that doesn’t.

      The broken heating plant in Żerań

      and my child, and the woman

      I picked out years ago because of

      her white knee-socks with blue stripes.