from City Without A Name

--Czeslaw Milosz

10

Unexpressed, untold.

But how?

The shortness of life,

the years quicker and quicker,

not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn.

Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts,

giggles above a railing, pigtails askew,

sittings on chamberpots upstairs

when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch

just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter.

Female humanity,

children's snots, legs spread apart,

snarled hair, the milk boiling over,

stench, shit frozen into clods.

And those centuries,

conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night

instead of playing something like a game of chess

or dancing an intellectual ballet.

And palisades,

and pregnant sheep,

and   pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters,

and cows cured by incantations.