Old Dog

One problem with reading and rereading Czesław Miłosz is that I am prompted to write poetry. (The problem comes in not being a poet.) Something about his verse—the detached voice, the subject matters and the rhythm, the rhythm of the translation, anyway—triggers imitation, a kind of call-and-response, a Slavic dozens in which one is doomed to a worsting. And so, here it is.

Invitation to an Old Dog

At eighty-seven, Czesław Miłosz was writing

poetry, Roadside Dog, “Piesek przydrożny.”

At eighty-seven, my father watches Fox.

(I refuse to call it “News,” “Fox Lies” then.)

And he dozes, thankfully, before the big screen.

Rancor and unreason are a tiring business,

lucrative, though, it seems to howlers and yippers.

Sleep, Old Dog, the Bucs’ll be on in an hour.

Retired now for a quarter of a century,

you would seem to have done nothing.

Watch the world through that perverse window,

eat sweets, complain about your body’s demise…

(And grouse that medical science doesn’t understand it. “You’re eighty-seven, you’re an old man!”)

As if its demise had nothing to do

with sitting all day in front of the TV,

(Recall how you taunted your children for that very habit)

absorbing the poisonous rays like Madame Curie.

Yes, I guess, you’ve golfed religiously,

taken skins from your fellow old men—in quarters,

a couple of bucks a week over the years adds up.

And from me, damn you, that is something.

Too, you have bestowed upon your second son

a mission to revisit the evenings of our forefathers

in the dim and far-off past, in a difficult language.

No small gift, thank you for that.

And, yes, you have written your memoirs, which have their moments,

but only up to, not even up to, when you met the mother of your many children.

And not a word about losing your son. Not a word.

There is yet to write. Miłosz lived to ninety-three.

Białowieża

Little new to report on the process of my BecomingP, though what there is to report does encourage me even in my summer lassitude. A cousin, David, one of the provocateurs of the family’s reconnection to the old country, has closed on an apartment in Kraków, within walking distance of the market square, the rynek. Sweet, słodki. He has offered quarters therein if my recess request is approved. A meeting on that request, slightly, bureaucratically delayed, as bureaucracies are wont to do, will take place Monday, the 13^th. It will then be submitted to the Dean.

A colleague has returned from a trip to Poland, bearing gifts: soup mix, a refrigerator magnet, and photos, hundreds of photos. I peruse the ones particularly of Białowieża Puszcza, the considerable remains of the primeval forest that once covered most of northern Europe. Białowieża, (biały “white” and wieża “tower”) refers to a hunting lodge, legendarily built and apparently painted white, by Władysław Jagiełło in the early 15^th century, the first Polish king (he was Lithuanian) of the Jagiełło dynasty. Puszcza means “forest primeval” and echoes pustka, pustelna, pustelnik, pustkowie, pustoszyć, pusty, pustynia, words for “solitude,” “hermitage,” “hermit,” “desert/wilderness,” “devastate/lay waste,” “empty/hollow,” and “waste.” These images appeal particularly, sublimely and subliminally, to a Borowicz (bór “forest” and owicz “son of”). Poles are the people of the fields, of the pola or pol, but before the fields were the ancient oaks, five hundred years old and more, the deep woods, the fens, the swamps, and their denizens. Vestiges of those ancient beings reside still in these photos, though concealed, “see, there!” and recall our origins, all of our origins, and our youths.

 (Photos courtesy of Maggie Kubak)

Miłosz has a few lines in “Rivers Grow Small” that conjure our change of perception of our past owing to aging, but of the changelessness and universality of our initial perception.

The forest near the village of Halina once was for me primeval,

smelling of the last but recently killed bear,

though a ploughed field was visible through the pines. (198)

We all lived in Eden once—and Poland still has one, an original.