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May/June 2019 |

The Third Planet

By Tomasz Różycki

Translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

A river’s twists, the rusting crown of light
above the bank, a meadow burned by winter’s breath—
I come here on behalf of this world’s form,
its stunning attribute that never does it want

to keep the next day in quite the same dress.
Beyond the shore are chimneys altering the heat,
a sash of smoke above the grass, a spider’s web
in which we wade. This evening. In the ground

are five huge cisterns to amass all time
evaporated—most acute today. The river turns away,
flashes and in one fell swoop steals half the sky,
the color in your eyes. This evening. Only stars:

scales on lash and lid. To get in a single package
consciousness plus mortality, what a joke.
I say this in the dead of winter, on the third
planet from the Sun, spinning within the abyss.

Translator’s Note

 

Tomasz Różycki
Tomasz Różycki’s most recent collection, Letter by Letter (in which this poem appears), was a finalist for the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Award. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized widely. Over the last decade he has garnered almost every prize Poland has to offer, as well as widespread critical acclaim internationally. Mira Rosenthal’s translation of his volume Colonies won the Northern California Book Award and was a finalist for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2018 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Residence in Berlin. He teaches at Opole University.

Mira Rosenthal, a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University’s Stegner Program, publishes poetry and translations regularly in such journals as Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, New England Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. Her first book of poems, The Local World, received the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. She teaches in Cal Poly’s creative writing program.
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