Magdalena Zurawski Poems

I was sympathetic to language, but often
it shrugged me and kept other lovers.
I crawled through the commas of

Romanticism and rejected the rhythms,
though sometimes at night I could feel
a little sad. I could emerge now

into a new kind of style, but the market
is already flooded and my people
have lost faith in things meant to land

a clear yes or no. It's good to welcome
a stranger into the house. Introduce her
to everyone sitting at the table and wash

your hands before you serve her, lest
the residue of other meals affect your
affections. "If something is beautiful we do

not even experience pain as pain." (A man said
that.) "I think I owe all words to my friends."
(I said that.) "We speak to one another

in circles alone with ourselves." (He said
that, too.) That's why we go to war.
We've gotten too big to be friends with

everyone and so I like to feel the fellowship
of the person next to me shooting
out across a foreign plain. The streams

of light on the horizon are something
I share with him and this is also a feeling
of love. I spoke to his widow and touched

his dog. I told his daughter how his last breath
was Homeric and spoke of nothing but returning home.
...

Instituted at the desk but not yet overcome
by the banality at the end of imagination, you ask
the page: will all tongues
run dry? You're invested personally.

A light so trumpetlike in its tone knuckles the breeze,
but it's a blue world no matter how brassed. Whole books
are left undigested, while the telephone maintains its place
as the object of every preposition.

The down on an arm can, however, on occasion, stand on end,
as if your skin sensed an open field behind the bursting silence.
There the wild globe perspires in its desire to overcome the limits
of your landscape, like something endangered and alive slinking
away from the tiled agenda of a roadside restroom. Your eye
now unimpressed by donuts and funnel cakes finds a stellar
sequence of moons rising through the pines above a morning.

When back in your office you see a kid grate his teeth against
a sentence hollowing through the static of the intercom, you inform
the clerk in a short-sleeve shirt that the time has come:
you must rearrange your life. You command him to cuff you and
in a set of disposable restraints, you become a saint, arrested and
arresting. Your eyes full of suffering turn to the ceiling tiles, through
which your gaze pierces to a beyond of copper wires
in vinyl casings—yellow, green, and blue—linking you to every terrestrial
being above and below your floor,

an elevator of voices,

an orphic infinity.
...

You arrive in a sentence
where you would like
to stay, but you are told

to move on to another,
so you do and wish only
this time to keep to imaginary


places. You are not
given Zanzibar or Timbuktu
but Paducah were two

soldiers compare figures on
a motel balcony. You
note the exits and a sign

announcing no free breakfast.
One says, "You look good, man,"
to the other, who nods. Though

you had always understood
figures differently, you
respect their loyalty

to a cause impossible
to understand. "I've been
through two surgeries and

still smell as fresh as
a piano," the admired one
says. The moon is quartered,

and the air is mild. You
sleep in a rented bed
overlooking asphalt. Through

the vents your German
professor repeats, "Ich komme
aus Dodge. Woher kommst Du?"

over and over until your
True Being separates
from a cough that will not

go away. The professor in
the morning seeks out your eye
as he slips out the door,

"To be in a sentence,"
he asserts, "is by
nature to be passing through."
...

Incapable of limiting themselves to petty
offenses, my hands broke into my chest and choked
every slumbering deity.
After that I no longer cared
to argue about the nature of the flesh. Whether powered by vitalist or
mechanical forces, the spirits had in either case evaporated
as easily as life from the nostrils of a drowned man.

Oddly, I did begin to care about numbers, but only in exchangeable forms.
"Bread," I heard a man say once
and it made me a depressive materialist, not
unlike a Franciscan without a dove. I collected frozen peas, greeting each one
like a lost friend, then dispersing them in green streams to the hungry mouths
in the surrounding counties.

At home I have an old painting to comfort me, a fine example
of Impressionism from the Eastern bloc circa 1981. In the subtle oranges
singeing the trees one sees the foreshadowing of martial law.

As a child sat in my Western living room and watched
the Molotov cocktails fly behind the Iron Drape. Back then no one thought
to explain to me how walls against the flight of capital might end in flames,
how on TV I was witnessing soldiers clip the wings of the very same paper birds
that here flew all around me.
...

The way I'm strapped into myself
I can't escape. Wake up and be a better person! Clip your toenails,
and by sun-rise make sure
you're sitting at the table reading Arendt.

With a little focus
I could become
everything I ever wished
to be: level-headed and
buoyed,
a real (wo)man of conviction. But no, at night,
I'm like an old towel on the line, tossing and
turning in the wind of the dear leader's
words. What does
it matter, if I grind
my teeth for the old ladies of
Puerto Rico? Or take a knee
in the front yard every time I hear
the national anthem
in my head? The neighbor just thinks
I'm weeding and waves.
...

We decided I
should go alone
on foot. I

would find
him in
the pharmacy. If

he said ‘In
the head of
God all propositions

have existed
always,' we would make
the exchange.

He was standing
in front of the
calamine lotion.

He spoke to the
air. I slipped
the envelope into

his pocket and
bought a topical
analgesic to

avoid suspicion.
When I left, I
had a face

again, could open
an account, drink
coffee in the

sun. On the street two
women talked
of money. I paid them

no mind. I
could now always
walk with my light

to the front.
...