Four Part Harmony: Poland, 2009

I. Stare Miasto in the evening, Warsaw, Poland

Karol says it's all been rebuilt
and it looks it, the colors blown out,
reds & blues too bright,
souvenirs for the eyes, for the cameras.

Off-season, the square seems quiet.
A flock of pigeons,
an old man with his cart full of whistles & postcards,
an artist selling paintings

whose tints are faded
in comparison with the buildings they represent.

And now Karol is saying
this is where the pictures were taken;
you know the ones,

Warsaw in a rubble,
triptychs in black & white & gray
of nothing but dust on stone on bare,
hard ground,

and sometimes a face in one corner
or the next. Yet here we are now,
discussing the finer points of Polish beer,
and a group of girls

goes before us, laughing.
It was raining before, but it's not now, and they're shedding
hats, scarves, gloves, hands full.
and one of them drops

her green scarf, oblivious, leaving a bright
banner, sodden, on the still-wet ground.

II. Day of the Dead, Lodz, Poland

Reconstruction is, here, incessant.
Today's a day for the dead-as last night was for the living,
all of us costumed, dressed to the nines-and there

are a million candles lining the walkways,
ornate gold & red, sunset-variegated roses on headstones,
huge wreaths around the necks of the statues:

Mother Mary, St. Christopher, and Arthur Henkel, whomever
he is (father, beloved son?).
Behind Arthur's gravestone they're rebuilding a church,

old bricks & ironwork obscured on one side
by construction, platforms & rebar crawling up the walls.
It's not done yet, but it will be.

They'll install plaques to tell us how it was built,
& by whom, & when, yet for now it's off-limits,
so instead I watch a Polish woman showing her small grandson

how to dust the yellow leaves
from his grandfather's grave, how to replace an old bouquet
with fresh white chrysanthemums,

& the old church blocks their uncovered faces
from the wind, & all of it is here tonight, in this cemetary:

the past, the present,
and the dead are here too,
with us, with the scaffolds we build
to hold it all together,
to hold ourselves up.

III. Central Park, Stare Miasto, Krakow, Poland

They're always feeding pigeons here
and this park is no exception.

There's an elderly man with a whole bag of bread,
throwing the crumbs out into the path,

dozens of pigeons crowded around.
On the corner there are groups of students,

waiting for a tram; across the street, old women
vending pretzels and pierogi and flowers.


Someone is playing the accordion; unseen,
his voice echoes out into the center of this park.

The sun has just come out
from behind its cover of cloud for the first time

in two days. Behind me, the open-air market,
bins of russet apples, the smell of ripe tomatoes, brewing coffee.

One man sells mulled beer, & I'm surprised
when it's good, permeating everything with orange & barley & clove.

It's the noon hour.
It's not too early here for this beer

or these people, for their lives,
for living.

IV.

Imagine all of this.
Now blow it all up.