I have been arguing all morning with your Puritans, I must tell you,

in their strange hats.”

It is good to think you fought to the last with those who would narrow the mind.

I cannot remember now your opinion of Milton,

but I think the beauty of his Lucifer, falling and arguing back,

is not dissimilar to your own.

IV.

We sat outside your house on Grizzly Peak,

looking at phrases from Schopenhauer,

a Tygodnik Powszechny holding your poems, cartoons in a new New Yorker.

A half-timbered cottage from the Brothers Grimm,

steps spiralling down in rough-laid, unmatched stones, hiding its wolf.

Who liked laughter, eating, the hour of the evening cocktail.

Then in a Kraków apartment,

turning for you a book whose pages

showed Lithuanian countryside; you in your eighties; Carol.

Your undiminished amazement—

no matter the houses had vanished, the curve of the river remained.

I long believed ironical your claim it is wrong to love this world as it is.

Then understood. I was mistaken.

And now I cannot ask you: How did you live?

V.

Round cheeses of cows’ and of sheep’s milk,

wild mushrooms, roast lamb with garlic, red wine:

in Poland, as in Mexico, one feasts by the graveside in autumn.

Laid out on plates, in glassware,

set down on its own mowed grasses, the consumable portions of earth.

What we offer the dead, we offer not them, but ourselves.

You would wish us, I think, less longing.

You studied Shakyamuni’s teachings

because he also could not turn his face from suffering,

though for you liberation required

a soul—singular, real, believing beyond any proof that it will last.

Your immutable “Why?” remained, like Job’s, unanswered.

And still in the halls of silence it echoes again.

Words cannot reach you. Orpheus played no lyre as he walked.

Yet they come—

offering, in earlier, Sanskrit version,

the invocation spoken in Polish throughout your own poems:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha

“Gone now, released one, far past returning, freed one, suffer no more.”

THE DEAD DO NOT WANT US DEAD

The dead do not want us dead;

such petty errors are left for the living.

Nor do they want our mourning.

No gift to them—not rage, not weeping.

Return one of them, any one of them, to the earth,

and look: such foolish skipping,

such telling of bad jokes, such feasting!

Even a cucumber, even a single anise seed: feasting.

September 15, 2001

IT WAS LIKE THIS: YOU WERE HAPPY

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—

between you, there is nothing to forgive—