Wisława Szymborska

They jumped from the burning floors— one, two, a few more, higher, lower. The photograph halted them in life, and now keeps them above the earth toward the earth. Each is still complete, with a particular face and blood well hidden. There’s enough time for hair to come loose, for keys and coins to fall from pockets. They’re still within the air’s reach, within the compass of places that have just now opened. I can do only two things for them— describe this flight and not add a last line.

It’s good you came—she says. You heard a plane crashed on Thursday? Well so they came to see me about it. The story is he was on the passenger list. So what, he might have changed his mind. They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t fall apart. Then they showed me I don’t know who. All black, burned except one hand. A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring. I got furious, that can’t be him. He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that. The stores are bursting with those shirts. The watch is just a regular old watch. And our names on that ring, they’re only the most ordinary names. It’s good you came. Sit here beside me. He really was supposed to get back Thursday. But we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year. I’ll put the kettle on for tea. I’ll wash my hair, then what, try to wake up from all this. It’s good you came, since it was cold there, and him just in some rubber sleeping bag, him, I mean, you know, that unlucky man. I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea, since our names are completely ordinary—

After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall. Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door. Photogenic it’s not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war. We’ll need the bridges back, and new railway stations. Sleeves will go ragged from rolling them up. Someone, broom in hand, still recalls the way it was. Someone else listens and nods with unsevered head. But already there are those nearby starting to mill about who will find it dull. From out of the bushes sometimes someone still unearths rusted-out arguments and carries them to the garbage pile. Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little. And less than little. And finally as little as nothing. In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds.

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft, mocking magnets, graphs, and maps— in a split second the dream piles before us mountains as stony as real life. And since mountains, then valleys, plains with perfect infrastructures. Without engineers, contractors, workers, bulldozers, diggers, or supplies— raging highways, instant bridges, thickly populated pop-up cities. Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen— crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us and when to vanish. Without architects deft in their craft, without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers— on the path a sudden house just like a toy, and in it vast halls that echo with our steps and walls constructed out of solid air. Not just the scale, it’s also the precision— a specific watch, an entire fly, on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers, a bitten apple with teeth marks. And we—unlike circus acrobats, conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists— can fly unfledged, we light dark tunnels with our eyes, we wax eloquent in unknown tongues, talking not with just anyone, but with the dead. And as a bonus, despite our own freedom, the choices of our heart, our tastes, we’re swept away by amorous yearnings for— and the alarm clock rings. So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books, the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses— if anything fits, it’s accidental, and for one reason only, that in our dreamings, in their shadowings and gleamings, in their multiplings, inconceivablings, in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

Darwin. They say he read novels to relax, But only certain kinds: nothing that ended unhappily. If anything like that turned up, enraged, he flung the book into the fire. True or not, I’m ready to believe it. Scanning in his mind so many times and places, he’d had enough of dying species, the triumphs of the strong over the weak, the endless struggles to survive, all doomed sooner or later. He’d earned the right to happy endings, at least in fiction with its diminutions. Hence the indispensable silver lining, the lovers reunited, the families reconciled, the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded, fortunes regained, treasures uncovered, stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways, good names restored, greed daunted, old maids married off to worthy parsons, troublemakers banished to other hemispheres, forgers of documents tossed down the stairs, seducers scurrying to the altar, orphans sheltered, widows comforted, pride humbled, wounds healed over, prodigal sons summoned home, cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean, hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation, general merriment and celebration, and the dog Fido, gone astray in the first chapter, turns up barking gladly in the last.

I’m a tranquilizer. I’m effective at home. I work in the office. I can take exams on the witness stand. I mend broken cups with care. All you have to do is take me, let me melt beneath your tongue, just gulp me with a glass of water. I know how to handle misfortune, how to take bad news. I can minimize injustice, lighten up God’s absence, or pick the widow’s veil that suits your face. What are you waiting for— have faith in my chemical compassion. You’re still a young man/woman. It’s not too late to learn how to unwind. Who said you have to take it on the chin? Let me have your abyss. I’ll cushion it with sleep. You’ll thank me for giving you four paws to fall on. Sell me your soul. There are no other takers. There is no other devil anymore.