The poetry of cities
I walk like half a person. It’s the jet lag. And the loss, which never leaves, just rests there on the shoulder, a little blackbird, claws digging when faced with Babcia, my grandmother and Mom’s Mom, who has it even worse. Who catches herself still saying “Maybe it’s Kasia” when the phone rings around 4 o’clock, because that’s when she always calls.
And the flat Mom grew up in. Where her rosewood urn now rests by a window before going underground, rests near her photos and still more of her paintings, rests where once she kept a hidden box full of broken glass; the glass she’d pluck from the ground on walks home from school, and later, when no one was looking, she’d open the box and hold up a piece and look into the shine, wondering what the story was there, and what the missing parts were. Sometimes she wondered also in the glass about her own story, and where the other parts would be, and would they sparkle?
It’s fog. Being here in Warsaw again. It’s gray. Going for walks in the old spaces, along the paths where she found her glass. I find other things now, other half stories. I find leaves down and trampled over and wet with dew, a Golden Autumn just barely missed, yet hinted at by some of the downed leaves still holding onto the color.
Yet: it feels right, this.
Feels — good? No, that’s not it.
Well it feels true, anyway, at least more so than the sunshine of LA ever felt, or the view of the Sound or mountains some days ago. No, this here is how it feels, and there’s a certain uncertain comfort in it. In walking the paths and finding the trees mostly bare. We know each other, these trees. We’ve known each other in green times and in yellows and reds, in powder and in other grays, now this one.
And it strikes me — how Warsaw has been this for me. My place, my poem, when I’ve needed it, when I’ve come here looking for some thing missing. The city speaks to me. Tells me its own stories, draws my eyes up and away from even myself. It gives me company, maybe especially in my grays — and maybe because here is a place that knows of grays more than any color, more of absence than I ever could.
And on the walk, it shows me. Just past the old duck pond, now dry, and the water well where Dziadzia and I used to lug water from, the place unfolds for me an old set of stairs there in the park, the stairs which draw me always — I realize this only when I get there. Realize this is where I almost always come the first day back, when half a person. I come here and look up, and on this day I go yeah, yeah that’s it exactly.
~
This is no new story. Every person has a place. Or like me, a city.
Every soul has a spot that feels somehow like an exhale when they get there. When they tune into that frequency.
For me (and for countless others, I know) this used to be New York. It didn’t matter how tough it was to live there, how grimy, how expensive. On the way in I would look up for that point in the sky and find it, the blinking light atop the Empire State Building, and know I was with a friend.
For my mother, it was LA. A place I didn’t care for as much, yet for her it was poetry — literally; she wrote a whole collection of poems dedicated to there. And still I remember how she begged, just begged, to help get her back there when she was in Warsaw last, and rumors of a pandemic and cancelled flights and a “shut down” swirled. Suddenly panicked she sailed with me to the airport to look into the situation, and then pressed for the next available flight out, even though that flight would be through Dubai and I thought she was overreacting (she wasn’t). We bought her the ticket home. We didn’t know it would be the last time she would ever leave here. But she simply missed her place, her frequency. And she couldn’t think of being stranded away from it, away from her palms, her sun, and let’s face it her cats.
I do appreciate this, though. How cities are sensory. How they’re rhythm and hues. How they’re each so unto themselves and how each of our different selves are so drawn to these different places of being.
And I like it how when I get a taxi out of JFK, I know exactly how the cabbie might sound, just as I do here on the ride out of Chopin.
I like how in LA I’ll be asked how I’m doing, with no expectation of a real answer, and how in Oregon I’ll be asked the same question but with more expectation, which confuses me, and how in Warsaw one would never think to ask such a stupid question.
I like how in New York the poetry for me exists underground, in the subways jammed full of the tired, the poor, the crazy and homeless, and how these varied selves sit or stand alongside each other just trying to get somewhere, while buskers provide the soundtrack.
I like how the bagels will just always be better there (the water, everyone will say), or how I missed my train once because I was so transfixed by the sound of some Chinese string instrument (a Guzheng, I later learned) on the platform where the Q train came and went, and I just stayed, just had to hear more of that movement and sound someone was playing for coins in a hat. I like it how when I think back on this or a thousand other moments, I can simply label them: Only in New York.
I like how the people smile in Houston, and how they don’t in Łodz.
I like how in Philadelphia you have to bring your own bottle of wine to the restaurant.
Or how in Portland they will always give water with your whisky. (it’s the law)
I like how in Copenhagen there is a word for the cozy atmosphere offered there by candles and cocoa and other such simplicities throughout the long and dark winter, a word no foreigner can pronounce, but it’s hygge.
Cities.
I don’t know if I can ever live away from one, even if my vacations move increasingly further from them as I get older. Still some calm, some energy comes back to me when I return to a city, maybe just something about the pulse of such places, or their people — even if sometimes I really can’t stand the people.
Warsaw.
I like how today my Faceboook account suggested to me a photo “memory” to look back on, an album I apparently created on this day in 2014, called Pieces of Warsaw, and how the photo it showed remains exactly how it looks and feels, nothing changed: there in the photo a bit of the fog, the blur, the leaves on the ground and somewhere there also a streaking bird, a flapping of movement and life.
The photo was taken just beyond the steps. Just above them where there is more stone and yet more steps going up finally to the crest of the escarpment that runs through this particular city.
Today when I left those steps and cut back through the park lane canopied by the towering and skinny trees I’m always photographing, I came to some words also in the stone. Poems printed there, for the first time in my memory.
Slowly, slowly, death /
turns us into a fairy tale / d
ark procession of love /
darker existence
In the night someone scratches at the door / — maybe the cat is hungry / Autumn sings in the garden / rain chorals
~
I like how here in Poland, the word for November is Listopad, which means Fall of leaves.
And how Mom, after she collected glass here, then began to write poetry, and as a teenager penned one called Marzenia, or Dreams, in which she wrote Let November blow me away / That storm which will break me / Let the mice cover me with sleep / A gray dream
I like how after a sleepless night, in my own gray dream, I went, I followed. And found again those steps, as always, and then the words, and how I can add this now to my own box, labeled Only in Warsaw. And how it felt, just almost, like a hand on the other shoulder.
