Sweeps.

Cole, Clouds, 1838

SKY

I should have begun with this: the sky.

A window minus sill, frame, and panes.

An aperture, nothing more,

but wide open.

I don't have to wait for a starry night,

I don't have to crane my neck

to get a look at it.

I've got the sky behind my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.

The sky binds me tight

and sweeps me off my feet.

Even the highest mountains

are no closer to the sky

than the deepest valleys.

There's no more of it in one place

than another.

A mole is no less in seventh heaven

than the owl spreading her wings.

The object that falls in an abyss

falls from sky to sky.

Grainy, gritty, liquid,

inflamed, or volatile

patches of sky, specks of sky,

gusts and heaps of sky.

The sky is everywhere,

even in the dark beneath your skin.

I eat the sky, I excrete the sky.

I'm a trap within a trap,

an inhabited inhabitant,

an embrace embraced,

a question answering a question.

Division into sky and earth —

it's not the proper way

to contemplate this wholeness.

It simply lets me go on living

at a more exact address

where I can be reached promptly

if I'm sought.

My identifying features

are rapture and despair.

Wislawa Szymborska

Although.

Tintoretto, Summer, 1555

NOTHING TWICE

Nothing can ever happen twice.

In consequence, the sorry fact is

that we arrive here improvised

and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,

if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

you can’t repeat the class in summer:

this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,

no two nights will teach what bliss is

in precisely the same way,

with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue

mentions your name by accident:

I feel as if a rose were flung

into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,

I can’t help looking at the clock:

A rose? A rose? What could that be?

Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day

with so much needless fear and sorrow?

It’s in its nature not to stay:

Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer

to seek accord beneath our star,

although we’re different (we concur)

just as two drops of water are.

Wislawa Szymborska

Look.

MIRACLE FAIR

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

Wislawa Szymborska

Look.

MIRACLE FAIR

The commonplace miracle: 

that so many common miracles take place.

The usual miracle:

invisible dogs barking

in the dead of night.

One of many miracles:

a small and airy cloud

is able to upstage the massive moon.

Several miracles in one:

an alder is reflected in the water

and is reversed from left to right

and grows from crown to root

and never hits bottom

though the water isn't deep.

A run-of-the-mill miracle:

winds mild to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

A miracle in the first place:

cows will be cows.

Next but not least:

just this cherry orchard

from just this cherry pit.

A miracle minus top hat and tails:

fluttering white doves.

A miracle (what else can you call it):

the sun rose today at three fourteen a.m.

and will set tonight at one past eight.

A miracle that's lost on us:

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers

but still it's got more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:

the inescapable earth.

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:

the unthinkable

can be thought.

Wisława Szymborska

Amazement.

Van Allsburg, Untitled, n/d

I am who I am.

A coincidence no less unthinkable

than any other.

I could have different

ancestors, after all.

I could have fluttered

from another nest

or crawled bescaled

from another tree.

Nature's wardrobe

holds a fair

supply of costumes:

Spider, seagull, fieldmouse.

each fits perfectly right off

and is dutifully worn

into shreds.

I didn't get a choice either,

but I can't complain.

I could have been someone

much less separate.

someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,

an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,

bred for my fur

or Christmas dinner,

something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground

as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede

of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness

dazzled some.

What if I'd prompted only fear,

Loathing,

or pity?

If I'd been born

in the wrong tribe

with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind

to me thus far.

I might never have been given

the memory of happy moments

My yen for comparison

might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,

that is, someone completely different.

Wislawa Szymborska

Accessible.

MAP

Flat as the table

it’s placed on.

Nothing moves beneath it

and it seeks no outlet.

Above — my human breath

creates no stirring air

and leaves its total surface

Undisturbed.

Its plains, valleys are always green,

uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,

while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue

beside the tattered shores.

Everything here is small, near, accessible.

I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,

stroke the poles without thick mittens,

I can with a single glance

encompass every desert

with the river lying just beside it.

A few trees stand for ancient forests,

you couldn’t lose your way among them.

In the east and west,

above and below the equator—

quiet like pins dropping,

and in every black pinprick

people keep on living.

Mass graves and sudden ruins

are out of the picture.

Nations’ borders are barely visible

as if they wavered — to be or not.

I like maps, because they lie.

Because they give no access to the vicious truth.

Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly

they spread before me a world
not of this world.

Wisława Szymborska

Here.

I like being near the top of a mountain.

One can’t get lost here.

Wislawa Szymborska

Astonishing.

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events." But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Wisława Szymborska