True Life by Adam Zagajewski

Author:Adam Zagajewski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Charlie

in memoriam C. K. Williams

Charlie announced once in New York:

we will be friends—and we were friends

for thirty years.

He was impatient, high-handed at times,

but he understood that only kindness binds.

Tall, with the face of a Spanish nobleman.

He headed for his study every morning

like a worker off to the vineyards

armed with great shears of imagination.

He wrote slowly, revised his poems time

after time—guiding a line of rapture

from thickets of dense prose.

He didn’t seem poetic at first sight.

His father sold refrigerators and TVs

but a messenger approached him, spoke in whispers.

On summer vacations near Lucca he rose first,

and in the garden, in a white djellaba from Morocco,

he hunched over his black computer.

His grandmother told him she came from Austria,

but she was born in Lvov, before Ellis Island

her name was Grabowiecka.

Friendship is immortal and doesn’t demand

many words. It is calm and patient.

Friendship is the prose of love.

Four days before he died he lay in bed, weak, wasted

like an Auschwitz prisoner with large dark eyes

awaiting liberation.

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