for Kathleen McDonald
Copernicus sits on the heart of Europe lost
in thought his back to the Academy
on the corner of Nowy Swiat the New World
His noble brow is dark his hand outstretched
the day itself is dark and cold the month
the year the boots the eyes the bones the ashes
In his left hand he holds the galaxy
in his right (sometimes) a pigeon also dark
The universe is dark he says the sun is farther
than we thought
The mind is free
He swivels his huge head He looks behind
You never heard this he says Don't quote me
He shuts his blackened eyes They open shrewdly
as I pass Change money? the pigeon cries
Here as everywhere the couples interlock:
more so than Paris more than Rome because
the Poles are perfect existentialists
neither happy nor free We burn like arrows
from the classic bow in helpless flight
or heat-led missiles nosing out the warmest
target to destroy on contact The bleak
apartments bloom through smoke
a futuristic garden where paranoiac
petals blow in the northern wind
Mother to what shall we cling? You'd say Love
and Music Both grow here: one trembles
without privacy in crowded buses
taverns thin-walled rooms The other
an alcohol available to all
spreads its dark pool
to close our eyes and numb the abscessed pain
Surprised by tears I listen to my friend
with unpronounceable name playing the Polonaise:
even the chandeliers applaud flowers
enough to fill a common grave
What is art but God in the blood
crying to get out into this world?
Mother
I remember listening to you play Chopin
the Marche funèbre Sonata in B-flat Minor:
nothing too difficult or esoteric
your trembling fingers and panic-stricken eyes
in the dark house in Brooklyn where Grandpa
and poor paralyzed Uncle George refused
to talk to one another for thirteen years
Chopin then was a lesson to be learned
He still is In Warsaw they played his music
punishable by death in shadowed rooms
off old Krochmalna Street long since destroyed
Arts isn't democratic after all
it isn't equal: children
don't write the Polonaise
their prodigal fingers plunking out
virtuoso combinations without heart
The static music of computers
blossoms in patches of dry paralysis
like Walden II or rolfing
or illustrated manuals of sex:
they soil the air with blooms unholy
and irrelevant Mother you wanted beauty
for your children and fresh air Where
can we go but to the dignified cathedral
whose soaring arches stretch us beyond ourselves?
The first law is clarity or should be
to see as under a microscope what's killing us
the shape of evil the number of its heads
the teeth in each head the sharpness of each tooth
To taste its brass and filth to make
the tongue retract mouth dry up the throat constrict
till every breath is pain Clean to the bone
Then to begin again
The second law is beauty or will be
when our cities are leveled to the ground
and the trees planted When houses
go up there will be space between them
high ceilings and relations between the spaces
where light and air mingle like music
on our souls I told you once we had none
and you cried But you were right:
I feel it here in Warsaw with the strains of Chopin
rising through the fog above the river
that has seen the beating heart of Europe
bleed like a crimson torrent down a slope
till every stone grew slick And still the music sings
Ah mother you Irish romantic
you would love the Poles You burned for beauty
in a world recalcitrant
to poor girls from Brooklyn You did all your work
and more Your teachers were as ignorant
as the fat pigeons burbling by our door
Mother my brave darling
the third law might have been
Love your mother
But we have too many laws
so the third law is
There shall be only those two laws