Nauseous For Days After Stomach Virus

Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet, Nobel Prize for Literature. UNIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY


Elegy for NN

If it is too far for you, say so.
You could have run on the small waves of the Baltic, across the field
of Denmark, the forest of beech,
turn toward the ocean, and you're close,
Labrador, white this season.
You, who dreamed of a lonely island,
if you fear the cities, the flashing of the fires on the highway,
could have taken the path of deaf forests, streams and scrambled
on blue and traces of red deer and reindeer,
to the Sierras, to the abandoned gold mines.
The Sacramento River will have been then,
by the hills covered with prickly oak.
still a eucalyptus forest, and you'll be in my house.

True, when the apple blossoms,
and the bay is blue in the spring mornings,
I think to my dismay at the home between lakes and networks
collected under Lithuanian sky.
The cottage where you spoiling your bathing suit before
was changed forever in a glass abstract.
And it is a dark honey in the afternoon, along the balcony,
and small owls, funny, and the smell of the harness.

How could we live with so I can not say.
The customs, dress, vibrate inaccurate, inconsistent
, tense towards the end.
is such a time we thought of things as they are?
Knowing the years has fiery red horses to the forge,
and small columns in the village market,
and wooden steps and Fliegeltaub Mama Wig.

Much has been learned, you know it well:
how we are removed, item by item, anything that could not be,
people, the counties.
And the heart does not die when you thought it should,
but smile, tea and bread on the table. Only
no remorse as it should have loved that pale ash

Sachsenhausen with an absolute love, which is not the measure of man. You

you get used to new winters, wet,
to the city where the German owner
blood was scraped from the walls, and where he never returned. I
not taken more than I could, city and country.
can not step twice into the same lake,
on decomposed leaves of birch,
and breaking a streak of sunshine close. Your

faults and mine, were not major faults,
your secrets and mine were not great secrets.
When you tie the jaw with a handkerchief,
when you put a cross between the toes,
and the distance a dog barks, a star shines.

No, not because you're so far have not been
the other day, the other night. Year after year
mature in us and invade us,
I, like you, I understood: indifference.

Berkeley, 1963

version

William Ospina