Three Poems by Marius Kociejowski

PN Review 80, July - August 1991

COAST

1

We moved among delicate instruments,
Taking for a theme the sovereign light,
The scrimshaw, the parliament of water.
We then sought a division between things.

Once divided, truth divides forever.

We abandoned the angelic forms, smashed
Against the wood our heavenly quadrant,
Struck aimlessly from island to island.

2

We embraced without shame what was simple.
We wept to see the wild geese heading home,
The small blue flowers we could never name,
The women so ripe in their summer clothes.

The compass we held true is stopped inside.

We worship as pure the broken circle.
A blind foghorn sounds our way towards shore,
The old bleached houses dispossessed of love.

3

A band marching in circles slays a tune.
A megaphone blares garlands of welcome.
What should we return to, and what survives
Of love? And who are the boys skipping stones?

The shallow waters keep our image moored.

We were proud scavengers once, and we come
As ghosts here, savages brandishing grace,
With nothing to give but this our silence.

4

Speak kindly of those we have abandoned,
The innocent who in their madness strayed,
Who mistook for seraphim a bright lamp
Beneath the waters camouflaging death.

Such tenderness the depths would not abide.

There was nothing could be done to save them.
We trembled as the gulls swallowed their cries,
And as the distance took what else remained.

5

Who shall carry them across the harbour,
These stranger particles that seek congress?

We say words alone keep our nature whole
Against the hard weathering of fractions.

So what now siphons our breath from inside?

There is no way home, and the petty schemes
Are brushed aside, and the horoscopes too,
The mock images, the lights on the shore.

6

As with fish entering the broken hulls
Or the blind eel tunnelling through the weed,
So shall we make darkness our corridor.
We will by dead reckoning tempt fortune.

Go, catch the slightest air should any come.

It is better so than light which is false,
Better the rougher shape, the ruined voice.
Ask nothing more, as more would madden us.

BABEL

So it has come again -
Only the particulars differ.

There is such commotion.
Stones are gathered
Against a wooden door.

The voices are loud, indistinct.

I imagine torchlight,
A man pushing a wheelbarrow.
One could list endlessly,
Only where would that lead?

This tower they have conjured -
An architecture for the times,

Columns of stagnant air,
Emptiness upon emptiness.

THE STAG
for Zbigniew Herbert

1

The predator blends with the innocent
And things of beauty make their betrayals.
The woodcock is sprung from its sleeping nest,
And once again we keep a chilled silence

As though wasps have settled upon our lips.
Our temper has been trained to this moment
As keenly as sight to the quick target.

2

The forest is a cathedral of light.
The sun swings a bayonet through the leaves,
And descends in slow widening columns.

A stag turns towards us, and lingers there
As though immaculately groomed for death.
He sees through the dark tangle of tendril
And branch the cold eye, the colder knowledge
We are what has always been said would come.

3

We were nothing in ourselves, nothing more.
If you must blame, blame those who merely watched,
And who were brothers to none but themselves.
Were they not summoned as we were summoned?

How to say that once again darkness falls,
That plainness of speech ripens into song,
A nightjar swooping through its silences.
We are smuggled home to our sleek places,
The malevolent wasp its empty comb.

---

Marius Kociejowski was born in 1949 and lives in London. Poet, essayist and travel writer, he has published three collections of poetry, two books based on his travels in Syria, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool (Eland) and The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (Biblioasis), God's Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (Carcanet), which depicts a journey through the world cultures of contemporary London, two books of essays and feuilletons The Pebble Chance (Biblioasis) and Zoroaster's Children (Biblioasis) and The Notebooks of Arcangelo Riffis. His Greville Press pamphlet Coast was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1991. He is a frequent contributor to PN Review.

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