Three Poems

Three Poems Jacek Gutorow photo: jens mayer 30 | World Literature Today The Winter’s Tale It was snowing the entire day. So heavily it buried thoughts. In the eyes of the passersby it snowed as well. So much of it that there was no doubt: in the end everybody will start speaking in tongues of snow, barely audible, rustling through the night and all of next day. Origami Three cardboard houses. Nobody lives there. Sometimes I think I’m moving into one of them. I start a fire in the stove and sit hunched in an armchair while paper smoke rises from the chimney. What the Dutch Didn’t Paint With coffee in my head, I’m lying on the wood floor, beyond the window acres of orchards and farm fields, the wash drying on hundreds of kilometers of lines. In the prehistory of my head: grain crops and scythes waiting for the harvest, wetlands reaching the horizon. One gets there by walking among trees, through a valley fallen off hinges, from rain under the gutter of fruit when they fall from hands and shut mouths. I’m freewriting in the beige shadow of a high window. Swallows take another turn. I want to walk out beyond the frame of the poem – toward what’s unnamed. I want to throw poetry off like an old skin. When the bell tolls; when the footsteps swish; when the setting sun is pointless. When you don’t feel like fantasizing before bed; when windows don’t reflect the sky; when Holland shows up in the corner the way we put it together with leaves collected in Delft, and the varnish is peeling off poems. Translations from the Polish By Piotr Florczyk Editorial note: From The Folding Star and Other Poems by Jacek Gutorow. English translation© 2012 by Piotr Florczyk. Jacek Gutorow is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic. He has published five books of poems, which have recently been collected and published by Biuro Literackie in Nad brzegiem rzeki. Wiersze z lat 1990– 2010 (At the river’s edge: Poems 1990– 2010). His most recent individual collection, Inne tempo (2008; A different tempo), was nominated for the three most significant literary awards in Poland: the Nike Award, the Cogito Award, and the Gdynia Award. Gutorow teaches American and British literature at the University of Opole. Piotr Florczyk is a poet as well as a translator of poetry by Julian Kornhauser and Anna Swir. His collection of Gutorow translations, in the Lannan Translations Selection Series, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in June 2012. He lives in Los Angeles, California. photo: grażyna niezgoda march–april 2012 | 31

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