Poems

Marek Makowksi

A University Professor Chastises My Niece for Her Essay about Beauty

You don’t analyze enough, he says, too much feeling

for style, ambition. Senses aren’t specters of things,

shadows aren’t sources, and tears can’t tremble 

from words. You should have quoted Edmund Burke,

Nietzsche, Darwin, and our seventeen associate, assistant, and adjunct professors.

In America we use commas in pairs, and periods

punctuate sentences, not breaths.

You didn’t even define epiphany

or transcendence. I don’t care about your grandfather’s wrinkles,

your red polka dot dresses outgrown and swaying on the clotheslines, 

any cow bells ringing, any dusty treasure chests

locked with letters and pearls, or the sun setting

on the wheat and the long and graceful blades of grass.

What does it mean

to be moved?

A reprieve to mysticism.

She fills her lungs with air.

Vows Exchanged at the Ghost Wedding, Long Overdue

Groom:

Is it too late? It is not

too late. What I thought

I never said; what I said

I never thought. I waited,

like we all wait for the time,

never being. But of late 

I have seen you in the moon-

river beside the poppies and peonies

on the hillocks of my dreams…

Bride:

Official:

You may now burn

the paper maid.

Our dreams are paper

dreams. Set them 

to flames.

Heritage

“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?”

—“Vocabulary,” Wisława Szymborska

A man approached me in a café. He pointed to my book—is that Polish? 

Yes, I said, showing him the cover: Adam Zagajewski’s Poezja dla Pozatkujacych. He said, You know Polish? 

Yes, I told him, my parents were born there. I grew up speaking Polish and I learned English from Barney and Elmo, and when I left for college I longed for the scents of dinner, the heavy scents of my ancestors’ kitchens, my parents’ lost youths. But in the university library I met Czesław Miłosz and brought him back to my desk and spent a month tracing my fingers over the lines in his face and realized how much I loved Polish how beautiful it was and the poets, they live on the page, like this one, I saw him twice in Europe and I felt I knew him, for me he was already alive, and how beautifully he writes and how beautiful the people, beaten but how persistent, the spirit, how beautiful, how life persists—

Yes, the man said, I have Polish in my blood. My great-grandfather came from Pole-ski. On Fat Tuesday we eat ponchkeys. And we buy those things at the grocery store…how do you say it? Keelbasi?

Poem

A good poem is a moment, I said to the bartender.

Like how the rows of rocks glasses on your shelf glinting remind you of four thirty-three on Thursday afternoon last August.

Or how you dry them after the dinner rush like your father showed and you were five and you feel nostalgic and sad. 

Do you see?

Okay, said the pumpernickel, but what about 

that woman holding the martini glass?

That too, I said, because the martini quivers

in her hand and her eyes fall into the drink 

every time she looks at her watch.

What about my fat knuckles, said the Australian flag,

or this stained pile of cocktail napkins?

I don’t know about your knuckles, I told Neil Armstrong,

but the spots on the napkins look like stains to you

while to the drops of cranberry juice the napkins look like exile.

Can you see?

I see, said the dress shirt, vest and tie, desperate cologne and pomade in rows.

What about that one time I slipped holding the stack of dirty glasses and the glasses shattered and my head snapped and everyone looked down on me and I could not even joke or breathe I was out of breath the first time in my life out of breath and everyone looking down and I could not stand up and I had to work late anyway but it didn’t matter because I didn’t have any plans and it was my birthday and they were all looking down on me and why did somebody not mop the floor?

Yes, I said, that is a poem.

Because your pants were wet, 

tears leaked from your eyes 

and everybody laughed.

Okay, he said.

What about Love?

No, I told the hippopotamus, that is simply

nonsense.

Philosophy at 12:15; Or, At the Office of the Dentist

Marco? I stumbled; she had dark eyes and spoke with a voice scrubbed clean of the waiting room’s false inflections and tones. Fifteen years in her profession, she said, now in the hasty flights of summer, the blind speed of work and birthday parties, enjoying oneself without checking the time (how soon the leaves fall). I returned all of her questions with interest and she spoke as if patients had never asked these things of her, never asked about whether the beige retirement home aesthetics tired her, never asked about her yearnings, about the hourly ritual of entering people’s mouths—she must know us better than our daughters and wives, and ourselves—nobody ever asked her about what she wanted, only waiting for the shoots of water, the gloves, the red raw throbs of the gums burnished and flossed. She spoke so eagerly at the question—she had misunderstood, she thought I meant all mouths were the same, another banality of life—and we talked of smiles, the coursing of the eye at one’s first encounter, the lastingness of teeth after the body has decomposed—we talked, we talked, and she talked and I listened as she lingered beside me, as she cleaned.

—No, no no. This is no good. None of this is right. The man wore a dress shirt and tie; black hair combed in militial rows; a heavy jaw; a face with tan creases from the cruise ship sun. Three, four, seven, thirteen, fourteen, twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six. Third molars—unnecessary—all of them. Yes, another filling, beside the root canal—how long ago was it? answer me—and a crown beside. She stood by the wall and said nothing as he lowered his giant hands into my mouth. She spoke only once, quietly, asking, Are you sure? He removed his gloves—this isn’t a fantasy—a cold palm pressed, laughter, the gathering of papers, and an escort out of that little room, that beige and pastelated room, designed to be the same, to be calming, she said, calming, but it wasn’t the room, the familiarity, the odorless and matte-clean floors, it was her, of course, her, and I stood at the front counter, and before I could muster a goodbye she had turned from me, calling another woman, another man, leading them to those true and miniature rooms, those replicas of life, of the loss of childhood, the loss of youth, the bright flashing and slow decay of teeth.