ANTENNAS IN THE RAIN
I saw the sea and oranges.
First snow—ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s silence please.
Breaking news: Bach woke again and sings.
Time kept its word (it always does).
Reading Milosz by an open window. The swallows’ sudden trill.
Chapels beneath the linden trees in summer; bees pray.
“Carpe diem.” He seized the day, but when he checked his prey that
evening, he found night.
—You really like libraries that much?
Carrots, onions, celery, prunes, almonds, powdered sugar, four large
apples, green are best (your love letter).
Don’t get carried away. To say that Orthodox liturgies lack humor!
The hospital—pale invalids in gowns beside a tanned, smiling surgeon.
Why do you always write about cities?
If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants …
“Periagoge”—Plato’s notion of internal transformation.
The bulging Place de la Bastille—perhaps another Bastille is hiding
underneath.
Peonies like peasant girls in church.
“How can I miss you when you won’t go away?” (country song).
Varieties of longing; the professor counted six.
Sign on a bus: AIR-CONDITIONED . Day trips—Wieliczka, Auschwitz.
The homeless clinging to radiators at a railroad station in December.
Vermeer’s painting with a woman sitting safely on the stoop and
knitting: behind her a dark interior, in front, the street and light.
Irreconcilable.
The sun hurts, says the boy in the park.
B., reproachfully: I lived there, you know, and I’d never say there was
too much of Lvov!
Everything returns. Inspiration wanes and returns. Desire.
Comedy and tragedy; Simone Weil sees only tragedy.
Red poppies and black snow.
The smile of a woman, no longer young, reading on the train to Warsaw.
Oh, so you’re the specialist in high style?
Delphi, full of tourists, open to mysteries.
The sea was angry at midnight: furious, to be frank.
And the Holocaust Museum in Washington—my childhood, my wagons,
my rust.
May evening: antennas in the rain.
Down Kanonicza Street screaming you sonofabitch.
Dolphins near Freeport: their favorite, ancient motion, like the symbol
scholars use for iambs.
A theater too tiny to hold Bergman’s film.
Escape from one prison to the next.
After the announcement “zurückbleiben” at a subway stop in Berlin, a
quiet moment—the sound of absence.
Swifts in Krakow, stirred by summer, whistle loudly.
A weary verb goes back to the dictionary at night.
Mama always peeked at the novel’s last page—to see what happened …
Truth is Catholic, the search for truth is Protestant (W.H. Auden).
Some experts predict that by the twenty-first century’s end people will
no longer die.
Open up.
Pay the phone and gas, return the books, write Clare.
In the plane after dinner two pudgy theologians compare their pensions.
In Gliwice, Victory Street might have led to heaven but stops short, alas.
Will the escalator ever go where it takes us?
From a rushing train we saw fields and meadows—from the forest,
as from dreams, deer emerged.
Marble doesn’t talk to clay (to time).
The salesgirl in a shoe store on the rue du Commerce, Vietnamese,
she tells you kneeling, I come from boat people.
I switched on the shortwave radio: someone sobbing in Bolivia.
Christ’s face in S. Luigi dei Francesi.
One thing is sure: the world is alive and burns.
He read Hölderlin in a dingy waiting room.
Boat people—the only nation free of nationalism.
The spring rain’s indescribable freshness.
Sliced with a knife.
“There are gods here too.”
Fruit bursts.
I ask my father: “What do you do all day?” “I remember.”
Delivery cars on a Greek highway, trademark Metafora.
On the sea’s gleaming surface, a kayak, almost motionless—a compass
needle.
Remember the splendid cellist in a clown’s lounge coat?
At night the lights of a vast refinery—a city where nobody lives.
Why do these moments end so quickly? Don’t talk that way,
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