Poems by Krystyna Lenkowska

You fall like everything else on this planet
you come from silence
from where we also come...

 

 




 

Poems by Krystyna Lenkowska

Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough 

Krystyna Lenkowska has published eight volumes of poetry two of which have appeared in bilingual Polish-English editions: Keep off the Primroses, 1999, and Eve's Choice, 2005. Her poems, fragments of prose, translations, essays, literary notes and interviews have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in Poland (f.ex. Fraza, Nowa Okolica Poetów, Odra, Topos, Twórczość), the USA (Absinthe, Boulevard, Chelsea, Confrontation, The Normal School, Spoon River Poetry Review), Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia and India. Her poem "The Eye of John Keats in Rome" won the first prize at the Sarajevo international poetry competition "Seeking for a Poem." Lenkowska is a member of the Association of Polish Writers.

A Pathetic Computer

How are you?

she asked irrelevantly and with concern

when I began to stammer she looked at me with fear

I saw myself in her face as if in a broken mirror

 

you must reset yourself

reset!

that was precisely the word I needed

to focus my reluctance and hope on something

 

the elementary verb relation of my daily trips

into the uncontrolled weightlessness of my desk

and nightly escapades to the fridge

I a pathetic computer

 

favored and disfavored by earthly gravity

how much strength is needed to get up from bed and return to it

with dignity?

how much strength does a strong person have to keep from sinking in life

 

and to plow sow gather and share everything except

the ten thousandth page on the hundredth site?

I’ve already touched all the keys on the keyboard

even my eyeballs and nipples

 

I can also turn the power off

close my eyes embrace myself and trust that

after I get back my whole memory will be here

only a little bit different

 

An Overdue Letter to a Pimply Angel

 

Do you remember the smell of sooty snow

warmed

by the chimney?

and the taste of fir branches?

in the morning you meekly pulled my

rusty

sled to let me the first of the first

leave triumphant tracks

of winter in the yard

 

in the evening you hung proudly

on the tree in pink

skirts of tissue paper high

and low                                                         

I couldn’t count all of you

 

happiness you said is not knowing

how much of it you have

one winter you stole

behind the Christmas tree

in lacy hoarfrost

stockings the white girdle your first

shackles of femininity wouldn’t leave you

alone you stroked

your thighs under the skirt to make them

real

you were hormonally sad from happiness

just like later in that spring when

your first egg was

fertilized with one divine

life and grew

in your mouth

it stretched your bitter-salty

palate into a balloon

of hopeless December hope

you knew all its parameters

 

you were still my angel

 

when you broke into limbs and fell

softly I didn’t hand you

a wing forgive me

I too was a pimply flightless bird

 

glory to you celestial

bird

from the tree

of life.

 

 

Ode to Snow

                                 Ryszard Kapuscinski died today

You fall like everything else on this planet

you come from silence

from where we also come

 

you rest against freezing time and hard earth

deer leave traces over you

a dog sinks in you up to its ears with such obviousness

in his eyes as if he had understood

 

in Slocina in the Carpathian foothills you’re the same

as in Turkish Kars

Herodot’s legend

geometry on glass

black ice on the road

our fragile bodies crash

in your glazed splendor

 

under you love death and trash

lightly patted over

 

fragments of rockets from Baykonur drop on your head

while you unshakable equilibrist lie

supine in the Altai mountains

 

my white idealist.

 

A Scrap of Conversation

 

However you look at it

it’s the simplest things that matter

 

for example miracles

he looks and doesn’t even believe in sinful conception

a twenty-year old skeptic with long experience

 

the uncertain enters noiselessly through the back door

monochromatic like a movie extra

it grows like a gray bench in the park after rain

and you can’t even see how it turns into a baobab

(it won’t fit in your arms)

a hundred mile forest

 

a mile.

Obituary for Wislawa Szymborska

 

                    After a life duly bearable and unbearable

With her separateness concealed like the Nobel medal

In her drawer

Wislawa Szymborska died

In her bed

In her sleep

On a bitterly cold night

She didn't like to bother anyone

And quietly disappeared the way 

One slips out to pick up matches at a newspaper kiosk

While others are having the time of their lives

So in such frigid weather

Let the others remain under down comforters while she finishes

Dreaming herself to the very end

In perfected silence

Where a moment

Is crystal clear and in the morning particles of gold

Fall from the sun so lightly

They elude the law of

Everything. 

 

Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough and Teresa Cedar

 

 

For the New Century - A Conversation with Myself

                                                                    All we are is dust in the wind

                                                                                                      Kansas

 

In some pose

the mirror captured this

moment of transformation

when for the first time

the skull peeked out with all its

literaliness

 

I didn’t think 

about identity

or about Emerson’s equation

or about the romanticism of burial mounds

I didn’t think

I couldn’t it couldn’t

 

only it was or it wasn’t

at the tangential point zero or infinity

a simple configuration

of bones.