still hangs over the chairback.

In its folds,

like a perfume

that cannot be quite remembered,

inconceivable before.

for L.B. (1950–2004)

THE BELL ZYGMUNT

For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,

or possibly kiss it.

The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent.

At ten kilometers, even those who have never heard it know what it is.

If you stand near during thunder, she said,

you will hear a reply.

Six weeks and six days from the phone’s small ringing,

replying was over.

She who cooked lamb and loved wine and wild-mushroom pastas.

She who when I saw her last was silent as the great Zygmunt mostly is,

a ventilator’s clapper between her dry lips.

Because I could, I spoke. She laid her palm on my cheek to answer.

And soon again, to say it was time to leave.

I put my lips near the place a tube went into

the back of one hand.

The kiss—as if it knew what I did not yet—both full and formal.

As one would kiss the ring of a cardinal, or the rim

of that cold iron bell, whose speech can mean “Great joy,”

or—equally—“The city is burning. Come.”

LETTER TO C.

I.

Your own writings began, you said,

with a path turned away from.

An unnamed girl in a forest, a snake killed with a stone.

But the trajectory of witness inscribes a circle.

For eight decades, the girl looked back at you, along with the others,

vanished and not.

And you?

Late, you saw yourself Orpheus.

Defeated by his own gaze, continuing to sing.

II.

Living memory holds the dead as a hand holds water,

as a dry window keeps the traces of rain.

And still we speak.

I write in these lines what I hear myself saying to others—

that you wanted most, it seemed, to preserve

the dresses and potions of women, an unmetaphysical spider and cat.

Against the age’s erasures

praising a blacksmith’s forge, a dish of olives set on a table.

Other writers you praised by rebuking,

though I recall no complaint against Whitman,

whose capacious lists and tenderness must have seemed

to you the path of a mirroring soul, if less singed by self-judgment.

This did not keep you from forming your theory—

Whitman’s poetry as one cause of the First World War.

Incomprehensible to Americans, obvious to a Lithuanian Pole.

III.

A theology of faith requires acceptance.

Yet transience harrowed you,

as it does whoever loves what exists only in time, in place.

In Paris, Szetejnie, Warsaw, Vilnius, Berkeley.

In certain realms also of hell,

whose ashes darkened the water you leaned to drink.

Beneath your face, a trout’s expressionless watching.

Beside it, a dragonfly’s wing, inside a cloud.

Near the end, you could not lift your head,

but offered a visitor this:

“At least I am conscious.