The Fourfold
Automobiles are flowing like droplets down the string of the highway,
then all of a sudden they’re absorbed into housing estates and courtyards,
the reinforced concrete gardens of hypermarkets. Water
does not wash anything clean, it insistently drums on the brow, seeking
the plumb-line; droplet asking droplet what’s the way.
I turn onto my other side, here naked trees
flex themselves, as if trying to use their youthful branches
to prop up the sky’s support wall, on which weevils
are skillfully pretending to be seagulls and a damp mark is just as
remarkably spreading to form some artificial rose.
I get up, wake up, switch on the TV; the world goes
back to the beginning.
by Tadeusz Dabrowski
translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
from The Boston Review