Artificer

Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,

machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk

canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that

   shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into

   motley halves;

pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:

throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against

   the floor.

This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg,

every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,

then one day he plants a big load of dynamite

and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.

Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:

globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.

They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.

While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,

   flutters,

and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.

Wilno, 1931