several Szymborska poems all tgthr in my mind: Reality Demands - mountains wind lifts hat
In Praise of My Sister - who does not write poetry
this one, below - in praise of those I do not love - with, again, mountains - that are only mountains

and There but for the grace of go I. ~thematic of the positive negative: they do not write poetry, I did not go into the coffeeshop that was bombed, I too dislike it - well that's Marianne Moore - but Szymborska's got her version re ~distrusting poetry "and I cling to it as to a saving banister"



A "Thank You" Note

here is much I owe
to those I do not love.

The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,

I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map. not awful unacceptable separation

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon. and when all is love, as bcs all is grief (joy, too?) then it is all lyric, all what-it-meant-to-me, all landscapes in the mind. not: a lush green world with fields & workers & bridges. just a space with some people in it. where scattered cadences rise to the surface. (natalia ginzburg, lorrie moore, natalia ginzburg)

They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

------------------------------------------------


There but for the Grace

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened sooner. Later.
Nearer. Farther.
It happened not to you.

You survived because you were the first.
You survived because you were the last.
Because you were alone. Because of people.
Because you turned left. Because you turned right.
Because rain fell. Because a shadow fell.
Because sunny weather prevailed. where did I get the coffeeshop ~ a bomb ~ ? another poem, or, what I imagined not-happening this one, but for the grace

Luckily there was a wood.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily there was a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
a frame, a bend, a millimeter, a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the surface.

Thanks to, because, and yet, in spite of.
What would have happened had not a hand, a foot,
by a step, a hairsbreadth
by sheer coincidence.

So you're here? Straight from a moment ajar?
The net had one eyehole, and you got through it?
There's no end to my wonder, my silence.
Listen
how fast your heart beats in me.

------------------------------------------------


Some Like Poetry

Some--
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there'd be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like--
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments or the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--
but what short of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

-- translated by Joanna Trzeciak, in the collection Miracle Fair I've never had that volume. I think of this on a clipping, fr The New Yorker? maybe clipped & given to me. but Reality Demands I came across (& clipped) from The New Yorker myself, that was the first (for me - and I feel no trouble assuming it was the first of her poems published there - I discovered it, that's how-it-was-for-me, the world & the Nobel noticed her later), I was ~17.