1 
Who will honor the city without a name 
If so many are dead and others pan gold 
Or sell arms in faraway countries? 


What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch 
Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent? 
Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge? 


This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole, 
?In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains? 
I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees. 


The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts. 
A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief 
Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar. 


In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac, 
Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile 
For despite Metternich all was not yet lost. 


And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway 
Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted 
Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée. 


2 
In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo, 
About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball 
In the city from which no voice could reach me. 
Minerals did not sound the last trumpet. 
There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava. 


In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed. 
Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood. 
From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom. 


In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky. 
The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true. 
In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem 
Of someone who had lived next door, entitled 'An Hour of Thought.' 


I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man 
Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill. 


3 
With flutes, with torches 
And a drum, boom, boom, 
Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row. 
He walks arm in arm with his young lady, 
And over them swallows fly. 


They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves 
And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes, 
As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street. 
And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud 
Over the Humanities Student Club, 
Division of Creative Writing. 


4 
Books, we have written a whole library of them. 
Lands, we have visited a great many of them. 
Battles, we have lost a number of them. 
Till we are no more, we and our Maryla. 


5 
Understanding and pity, 
We value them highly. 
What else? 


Beauty and kisses, 
Fame and its prizes, 
Who cares? 


Doctors and lawyers, 
Well-turned-out majors, 
Six feet of earth. 


Rings, furs, and lashes, 
Glances at Masses, 
Rest in peace. 


Sweet twin breasts, good night. 
Sleep through to the light, 
Without spiders. 


6 
The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge 
And kindles fire on landscapes 'made from nature': 
The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana; 
The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village. 
The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra 
And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly, 
While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves, 
I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me. 


7 
When I got rid of grieving 
And the glory I was seeking, 
Which I had no business doing, 


I was carried by dragons 
Over countries, bays, and mountains, 
By fate, or by what happens. 


Oh yes, I wanted to be me. 
I toasted mirrors weepily 
And learned my own stupidity. 


From nails, mucous membrane, 
Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen 
Whose house is made? Mine. 


So what else is new? 
I am not my own friend. 
Time cuts me in two. 


Monuments covered with snow, 
Accept my gift. I wandered; 
And where, I don't know. 


8 
Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp. 
Thus the feast of Insubstantiality. 
Under a gathering of clouds anywhere. 
In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo. 
No density. No harness of stone. 
Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke. 
And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed 
Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets. 


9 
Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing. 
For I love the light too, perhaps the light only. 
Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me. 
So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level 
In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen, 
Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps 
Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes, 
And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a