Continued

Leaves and Comes Back

Leaves and Comes Back There's yet another life, lived in brief, also unacknowledged . A woman with a dog, a black poodle, outside the window of Telimena on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, passes by and vanishes, as if she had no meaning. Life halfimagined , half-observed. Vanishes, while from the opposite direction another elderly woman appears, with a plastic bag, she must be going shopping. But in the shop next door there's still no bread, and still no papers at the kiosk. Yet everything's right today: the morning, the imagination, the waitress bringing coffee, sight. A little hedge in the square facing Dziekanka suddenly takes on a different color. Green, but more intense, and even the steel-gray uniform of a militiaman —who, there's no knowing why, makes for the Mickiewicz monument — is more familiar, though not quite mine. Perhaps he wants to take a closer look. I don't know whether the world this autumn truly has more dignity or whether it just seems so. Besides, now memory wants to mix in: the gas in '68, the old dog Frendek licking up his own blood, other months, other seasons. I guess you can really put your life in order, can live with less. But the heart, the heart doesn't give up easily, and goes on knocking, and the eye, in its usual way, alters backgrounds and planes. The tongue builds sentences, the body trembles slightly. 31 ...