Nothing Twice
From a video on Wislawa Szymborska's "Nothing Twice."
Shown below.
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
The End And The Beginning
Children in front of their destroyed house after WWII in Poland.
After every war someone has to clean up.
Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
Birthday
Birthday party in the 1940s
So much world all at once – how it rustles and bustles!
Moraines and morays
and morasses and mussels,
The flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather–
How to line them all up, how to put them together?
All the tickets and
crickets and creepers and creeks!
The beeches and leeches alone could take
weeks.
Chinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas –
Thanks do much, but all
this excess of kindness could kill us.
Where’s the jar for this burgeoning
burdock, brooks’ babble,
Rooks’ squabble, snakes’ quiggle, abundance, and
trouble?
How to plug up the gold mines and pin down the fox,
How to cope
with the linx, bobolinks, strptococs!
Tale dioxide: a lightweight, but mighty
in deeds:
What about octopodes, what about centipedes?
I could look into
prices, but don’t have the nerve:
These are products I just can’t afford,
don’t deserve.
Isn’t sunset a little too much for two eyes
That, who
knows, may not open to see the sun rise?
I am just passing through, it’s a
five-minute stop.
I won’t catch what is distant: what’s too close, I’ll mix
up.
While trying to plumb what the void's inner sense is,
I'm bound to
pass by all these poppies and pansies.
What a loss when you think how much
effort was spent
perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent
for the
one-time appearance, which is all they're allowed,
so aloofly precise and so
fragilely proud.
Dreams
What do YOU dream about?
Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps--
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.
And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies--
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.
Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen--
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.
Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers--
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.
Not just the scale, it’s also the precision--
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.
And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists--
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.
And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away by amorous yearnings for--
and the alarm clock rings.
So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses--
if anything fits, it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.