The Particleboard Parable
for Louise Glück
a puzzled flake
a flimsy mineral
from whatever element
guess
the imaginary mineral
in transient fat
crumpling catechesis embedded
across
you stick out no matter what
the world says
you illuminate it
palely
you react lively
with a plutonic zot
in a platonic knot
lyrical
So the abyss. Here you go. The field installation that it was, fell apart, transformed, went like dust into the abyss. What supplied it? What magnet works in nothingness, emits from it? Because even nothingness has to be imagined. Nothingness imagined, freed from non-existence. That’s what I mean, dirty nothingness, like an engine, a magnet, an abyss giving back. Weren’t all the days, conversations, gestures already a ghost, a fold of light sent from somewhere? Because surely there’s some kind of reflexivity? Surely we satiate? Every system has a capacity. Every installation of space, words, movement in the electric air – every gesture has changed something, has left its mark on what I change every day. Is the abyss more alive with him now, the way my installations were more alive with him? Does nothingness loom with its own capacity to give back? And it’s night, here you go, another one, the funny rotation of the planets, the growth of light. And the reader that I am glows, hums, a mechanic in the morning, a cube of text, density, buds pulsate, crumbs, though weak – refuse funds, change a light bulb in the workshop, print a statement. I can already see it, how we fall apart alive, words evaporate into gaseous clouds that shine for me with light taken from many, when I perform simple tasks. I go to the store in the morning, down an empty street, I buy bread. The street is there and isn’t, the bread is and isn’t, and so on, alternately, pulses. Restore it. How it begins to play in the body, the body hums, evaporates. When I walked and talked to him. When he came over and we talked to each other. What is matter, if not time, chemistry, electricity, feedback? What is matter, if not the history of saturation and disintegration, of exchanging heat? You aren’t a lump, but a device with a magnet set to speak, to exchange heat. In your speech, adhesions and connections, fillers, conductors, that’s the thing. Then it’s created. A thing. You don’t have to want everything, only what you’re restored into, in nothingness that isn’t, in the interchangeable, reflexive abyss, like a street in the morning, in the voice of a thing. That’s what he showed me without having the faintest idea about it.
Tree of life
nearby gas stations
wink at atomic springs
almost material
chemistry is setting in the air
you can feel the static electric integration
in the sky the ring of our age
the tree of life grows in a radius
to the radius I apply a description
the description applies me
we crush each other lovingly
I go active tangent and disjoint
in such abundance
Translated by Mark Tardi
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
