LABYRINTH OF MADNESS

A hollow quadrangle in the wall, a door maddeningly multiplies somewhere,

where I don’t look, grows a door a hundred times as flat as a rectangle –

where I don’t go, there will be doors, and where I don’t come, they will remain,

until they grow a wedge in my brain – until they bite into me and lodge into me as a wound,

and there will be four-framed emptiness, and there will be the nonsense of four angles,

there will be the madness of wounded walls, its flesh has been torn out with a perch,

it will screw itself into the brain like a vortex with oblique turns,

a whirled array of doors, which together are and are not doors.

And in this madness there will come a thought that will pierce me like a motto,

that in the intricacy of hundreds of doors, one is silence and simplicity –

it will drive me backwards and forwards and each chasm torn into a square,

until at last unity takes me, battered before by multiplicity.

A thousand-thousand non-door-doors through which I must pass, though I don’t want to,

will lap up the threshold awareness with a toothless maw’s grotesquerie,

the thousand-thousand-and-first doors could already be huddling in peace,

but there is this lunacy, which prefers the pain of wandering to a port’s armour.

If I stop rushing forward in inhuman days full of human pain,

a thousand-thousand white days will pass through me in silence –

but I want at every painful blow to rush ahead eternally,

instead of waiting in the fog of deafening silence until the way out comes to me.

15 December 1933

JOYFUL MYTHOLOGY

Like Atlas I carry my own sky hard upon my shoulders –

upwards I extend myself with a plumb line:

of nitrogen –

of steam –

of oxygen –

the barometer of my heart presses blood like mercurial silver,

to measure the weight of happiness

on the scale of the sermon’s pulse;

but I know not at all the figures of which the scribe-compasses speak

and I know not the numbers of barometric pressures,

when at night the weight of the heavens

in the boughs

of my

arms

blossoms with the brightness of stars like a petite-flowered

cherry –

That’s quite the trick:

to bear one’s own happiness –

joyfully,

sacrilegiously

not to collapse below the borne sky –

– like Atlas, I carry hard upon my shoulders the blue space,

upon which the copper sun

marks

its course

in arnica. –

1 January 1934

ON CENTAURS

Sharpened verses, rhyme to rhyme, rubbed against each other with a chatter

– trust not the narrow faculties, that none would possess you,

– trust not fingers, like the blind,

nor eyes, like handless owls.

Here I preach passion and wisdom

tightly conjoined at the waist

like a centaur.

I profess the dignified harmony of a masculine torso and head

with the exuberant body of a stallion and thin hocks of its leg –

– to the cold, feminine cheeks

and haunches of rotund mares

they gallop majestically, the centaurs

in horseshoe bells from meadows of mythology.

Their passion focused and wise

and their wisdom smouldering like rapture

I found in a harmony dignified

and I alloyed them in waist and heart.

Take a gander:

a reflection

of an ancient face

entrusted its divinity to flushed horses,

and quivering senses rush through June

like trammeled steeds across the arnica.

EXPLANATION IN THE MARGINS

I did not arise

from the dust,

I will not return

to dust.

I have not come down

from the sky

and I will not go back to heaven.

I am heaven herself

just like a vitric ceiling.

I am the earth herself

just like native soil.

I did not escape

from anywhere

and I will not return

there.

Apart from myself, I don’t know another distance.

In the bloated lung of the wind

and in the calcification of crags

I must

find

myself

here

dispersed.

Translated by Alex Braslavsky

Poems reprinted with permission of the publisher. Originally published in:

Zuzanna Ginczanka
On Centaurs & Other Poems
World Poetry Books

2023