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The Academy of American Poets

April 24, 2008

Today's poem is from Eternal Enemies, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Read more about this book.


Also on Poets.org

More Poems by Adam Zagjewski
My Aunts
Self-Portrait

A View from Above
Beyond Even This
by Maggie Anderson
Body and Soul II
by Charles Wright


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Balance
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the p*** touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport's labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.