In a Little Apartment

Adam Zagajewski (Translated, from Polish, by Clare Cavanaugh, 2007)

I ask my father, "What do you do all day?" "I remember."

So in that dusty little apartment in Gliwice,
in a low block in the Soviet style
that says all towns should look like barracks,
and cramped rooms will defeat conspiracies,
where an old-fashioned wall clock marches on, unwearied,

he relives daily the mild September of '39, its whistling bombs,
and the Jesuit garden in Lvov, gleaming
with the green glow of maples and ash trees and small birds,
kayaks on the Dniester, the scent of wicker and wet sand,
that hot day when you met a girl who studied law,

the trip by freight car to the west, the final border,
two hundred roses from the students
grateful for your help in '68,
and other episodes I'll never know,
the kiss of a girl who didn't become my mother,

the fear and sweet gooseberries of childhood, images drawn
from that calm abyss before I was.
Your memory works in the quiet apartment—in silence,
systematically, you struggle to retrieve for an instant
your painful century.