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Poetry

This Is My Room

By Tomasz Różycki
Translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

This is my room. The ice in the glass will melt
here in a moment, will melt before the eye,
and by the time the hand and fingers have felt
what’s happening, an inkblot takes the page, dyes
snippets of letters, turns mud. Again the cobalt
night grows vast, streetlights, and you can hear nearby
a rattle as the continent moves and shudders,
searching for land in the East. Back, thigh, shoulder.

Columbus was wrong. There’s no earth whatsoever
after sunset, a boat sails into the dead
of night and goes on and on forever:
you discover islands, christen all dream worlds
with names, and your crew fast asleep in Never
Never Land grows younger and younger instead
in the Freudian hemisphere. If they return,
Circe will change them once again into men.

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

English

This is my room. The ice in the glass will melt
here in a moment, will melt before the eye,
and by the time the hand and fingers have felt
what’s happening, an inkblot takes the page, dyes
snippets of letters, turns mud. Again the cobalt
night grows vast, streetlights, and you can hear nearby
a rattle as the continent moves and shudders,
searching for land in the East. Back, thigh, shoulder.

Columbus was wrong. There’s no earth whatsoever
after sunset, a boat sails into the dead
of night and goes on and on forever:
you discover islands, christen all dream worlds
with names, and your crew fast asleep in Never
Never Land grows younger and younger instead
in the Freudian hemisphere. If they return,
Circe will change them once again into men.

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