Map by Wisława Szymborska Page A

one visits but the meter reader
is writing in the guest book:
“God be praised
for letting me
see a genuine hermit before I die.”
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Teenagers write, too, using knives on trees:
“The Spirituals of ’75—meeting down below.”
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But what’s Spot up to, where has Spot gone?
He’s underneath the bench pretending he’s a wolf.

Portrait of a Woman
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She must be a variety.
Change so that nothing will change.
It’s easy, impossible, tough going, worth a shot.
Her eyes are, as required, deep blue, gray,
dark, merry, full of pointless tears.
She sleeps with him as if she’s first in line or the only one on earth.
She’ll bear him four children, no children, one.
Naïve, but gives the best advice.
Weak, but takes on anything.
A screw loose and tough as nails.
Curls up with Jaspers or
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Can’t figure out this bolt and builds a bridge.
Young, young as ever, still looking young.
Holds in her hands a baby sparrow with a broken wing,
her own money for some trip far away,
a meat cleaver, a compress, a glass of vodka.
Where’s she running, isn’t she exhausted.
Not a bit, a little, to death, it doesn’t matter.
She must love him, or she’s just plain stubborn.
For better, for worse, for heaven’s sake.

Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem
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    Â 
In the poem’s opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, “too many stars for our own good.”
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In her depiction of the sky, one detects a certain helplessness,
the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,
she is startled by the planets’ lifelessness,
and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)
a question soon arises:
whether we are, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone.
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In spite of all the laws of probability!
And today’s universally accepted assumptions!
In the face of the irrefutable evidence that may fall
into human hands any day now! That’s poetry for you.
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Meanwhile, our Lady Bard returns to Earth,
a planet, so she claims, which “makes its rounds without eyewitnesses,”
the only “science fiction that our cosmos can afford.”
The despair of a Pascal (1623–1662,
note mine
)
is, the authoress implies, unrivaled
on any, say, Andromeda or Cassiopeia.
Our solitary existence exacerbates our sense of obligation,
and raises the inevitable question, How are we to live et cetera?
since “we can’t avoid the void.”
“‘My God,’ man calls out to Himself,
‘have mercy on me, I beseech thee, show me the way . . .’”
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The authoress is distressed by the thought of life squandered so freely,
as if our supplies were boundless.
She is likewise worried by wars, which are, in her perverse opinion,
always lost on both sides,
and by the “authoritorture” (
sic!
) of some people by others.
Her moralistic intentions glimmer throughout the poem.
They might shine brighter beneath a less naïve pen.
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Not under this one, alas. Her fundamentally unpersuasive thesis
(that we may well be, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone)
combined with her lackadaisical style (a mixture
of lofty rhetoric and ordinary speech)
forces the question: Whom might this piece convince?
The answer can only be: No one.
QED.

Warning
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Don’t take jesters into outer space,
that’s my advice.
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Fourteen lifeless planets,
a few comets, two stars.
By the time you take off for the third star,
your jesters will be out of humor.
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The cosmos is what it is—
namely, perfect.
Your jesters will never forgive it.
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Nothing will make them happy:
not time (too immemorial),
not beauty (no flaws),
not gravity (no use for levity).
While others drop their jaws in awe,
the jesters will just yawn.
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En route to the fourth star
things will only get