el capitan
moment
I walk on the slope of a hill gone green.
Grass, little flowers in the grass,
as in a children’s illustration.
The misty sky’s already turning blue.
A view of other hills unfolds in silence.
As if there’d never been any Cambrians, Silurians,
rocks snarling at crags,
upturned abysses,
no nights in flames
and days in clouds of darkness.
...
It’s nine-thirty local time.
Everything’s in its place and in polite agreement.
In the valley a little brook cast as a little brook.
A path in the role of a path from always to ever.
Woods disguised as woods alive without end,
and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.
...
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
____________________
vernal fall
sky
...
The highest mountains
are no closer than the sky than the deepest
valleys to the sky
No place has any more of it
than any other place.
A cloud is as ruthlessly crushed by sky as grave is.
A mole is as high, sky high
as an owl beating its wings.
Whatever falls into the abyss,
falls from the sky into sky.
Friable, fluid, rocky,
fiery and volatile
stretches of of sky, specks of sky,
gusts and heaps of sky.
Sky is omnipresent
even in darkness under the skin.
...
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
____________________
upper yosemite fall
any case
...
You survived because you were first.
You survived because you were last.
Because alone. Because the others.
Because on the left. Because on the right.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.
...
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds)
____________________
tenaya lake
utopia
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
...
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
...
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
____________________
yosemite valley
clouds
I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds—
a split second’s enough
… for them to start being something else.
Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.
...
Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.
Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.
...
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
____________________
giant sequoias
plants
...
I have names for you:
maple, burdock, liverwort,
heather, juniper, mistletoe, and forget-me-not;
but you have none for me.
After all, we share a common journey.
When traveling together, it's normal to talk,
exchanging remarks, say, about the weather,
or about the stations flashing past.
We wouldn't run out of topics
for so much connects us.
The same star keeps us in reach.
We cast shadows according to the same laws.
Both of us at least try to know something,
each in our own way,
and even in what we don't know
there lies a resemblance.
...
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
____________________
woodland
plants
...
Undergrowth, shrubbery,
meadows, and rushes…
everything I say to you is a monologue,
and it is not you who's listening.
A conversation with you is necessary
and impossible,
urgent in a hurried life
and postponed for never.
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
____________________
zabriskie point
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Wisława Szymborska
____________________
badwater
torture
...
Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among these landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
____________________
sunset
negative
Against a greyish sky
a greyer cloud
rimmed black by the sun.
On the left, that is, the right,
a white cherry branch with black blossoms.
Light shadows on your dark face.
...
You look like a ghost
who's trying to summon up the living.
(And since I still number among them,
I should appear to him and tap:
good night, that is, good morning,
farewell, that is, hello.
And not grudge questions to any of his answers
concerning life,
that storm before the calm).
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
