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Poetry

In the Evening, Love

By Tomasz Różycki
Translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

The guy who bought the world has his five minutes
and the bartender puts yet another mark
by his name. What is his name? The unknit wisps
of sky, like in Grójec, like in Horyniec.
And snow has covered up this world of yours, right?
White letters hide the black background, but no stark
tracks have been laid yet, no sleigh track pastiche.
In the evening, love leads him on a leash

from bar to bar, from Chinese to Italian
neighborhoods and farther, beyond all borders.
Oh, how he likes it: the glass warming in hand,
the arrangement of object in an order
readily apparent only from a certain
height. Go ahead and solve the code for romance.
As long as love stands in the kitchen and cooks
for us, these knives, these forks make some kind of sense.

© 2013 Tomasz Różycki. By arrangement with the publisher. Translation © 2013 by Mira Rosenthal. All rights reserved.

English

The guy who bought the world has his five minutes
and the bartender puts yet another mark
by his name. What is his name? The unknit wisps
of sky, like in Grójec, like in Horyniec.
And snow has covered up this world of yours, right?
White letters hide the black background, but no stark
tracks have been laid yet, no sleigh track pastiche.
In the evening, love leads him on a leash

from bar to bar, from Chinese to Italian
neighborhoods and farther, beyond all borders.
Oh, how he likes it: the glass warming in hand,
the arrangement of object in an order
readily apparent only from a certain
height. Go ahead and solve the code for romance.
As long as love stands in the kitchen and cooks
for us, these knives, these forks make some kind of sense.

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