Shadow

To you, I leave the places where I’m absent.

That one along the Oder, another at the Reservoir,

apart from those some beds and attics, a mattress.

Especially the mattress. It’ll be much easier

to think of you as filling them, growing and going

rampant in places vacated and those that still remain,

to say it plain—everywhere else. From the shadows

perhaps you’re watching me pass through the gate

and snap, I’m gone, no longer. I bequeath to you

what falls apart, burns down, what shifts in shape,

what changes its own state, what’s been consumed

in the grave by a fat worm and is already clay

and grass and wood and chamomile. Please live there

and use it how you want, climb into my clothes and put

yourself in my shoes, set up a table, drink with the neighbors.

It’s my word, these letters against you and your minutes.

Translated from the Polish

Notes:

Read the Polish-language original, “Cień,” and the translator’s note by Mira Rosenthal.

Source: Poetry (September 2023)