The Wind at the Wedding


The wind lifts the hem of the bride's dress. She is wearing white shoes. Her feet look frail surrounded by the hard stones of the street, the raised hoop of her skirt. The bride is a bell for a moment, waiting to be rung.

Unlike the wind, who is a traveler, the bride is stationary and may never leave Lublin. Possibly she will visit the Black Sea on a holiday with her husband, but she will not be wearing her white dress. She will never be a bell again, all the notes wrung out of her, whether she remains in a flat in Lublin, or suns herself on the sand.

The wind is an old wind, full of understanding, but, like the bride's feet, it has no strength against the stones of the street. No strength to lift the people's hearts, even for a moment. The wind has only enough strength to lift the white hem of the dress of the bride who is wearing white shoes with high heels to match her high hopes.

The groom has white gloves on his hands. The stones at his feet are gray. The stones are gray and as old as the wind, maybe older.

In Krakow there are fossils embedded in the paving stones around St. Mary's Church. There, the brides and grooms step on ancient animals without thinking. There, when the trumpeter plays his notes from the steeple, he imagines he is flinging his song to the sky, which is like the sea, blue and roiled, but by swallows, not fish. What does it matter: fist, fowl, human flesh? We all share the same fate.

The bride and groom are waiting for the bells to ring, for permission to become one flesh. The wind lifts her dress and the bride does not blush when the groom stares at her feet. Why should she?

The wind blowing its way through the old city is a kind wind. Wise and kind and old like a grandfather or grandmother. The bride and groom may be thinking that one day this day will lead them to a garden and grandchildren climbing on their laps in the sun. Peace.

The bride and groom are young. They have never known war, but the wind cannot forget how it blows over the eyelids of the dead in all directions. Today the wind wants to play a simple joke and lift a bride's dress, showing her shoes, her ankles to the world.

The wind harbors no illusions. To lift a dress is not to lift a heart, except maybe his, the groom's, who is staring at the bride's ankles, thinking how they will be his soon. He wants to kiss the blue vein under the strap of her shoe. He wants to begin there.

The wind knows the hearts of the people are hungry, but for what? Meat lines, milk lines, bread lines, lines for vodka. Lines on the palms of his hands, the map of his life lost to a grenade in the Warsaw Uprising.

What is the soldier doing here? Isn't this a wedding, not a war?

In this country there is too much to remember. Better to watch the wind lift the hem of the bride's white dress like a cloud moving across the gray stones into the church.

All poems from This Is Not a Place to Sing, West End, 1987 by Christina Pacosz ,Also appears in St. Andrews Review, Issue No. 37, Laurinburg, North Carolina, 1989.


(More Poems by Christina Pacosz)

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A poem by Izabela Filipiak

Domestic Myths

My giantess works in the kitchen
My titaness feeds me hot meals
makes sure I don't go hungry
juggles pots, twirls smoking pans

She tells me: You used to be such a skinny little chicken
And now you've turned into my tasty little chicken morsel

She leads me to the bed and lays me out
on the sheet like a white statuette washed by the waves
still sparkling from the salt and cuddled by an octopus
her embrace less tender than fierce

Curled up like an oyster, I let myself be consumed
Somewhere in the background, she's running water for my bath


 translated by  Karen Kovacik

( More poems by Izabela Filipiak)

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A poem by John Guzlowski

What Reading Means To Me

There are books I love.
When I read them I feel tears
Come to my eyes. You know
What I mean. Sometimes
You'll be sitting in a car
Reading a novel you've read before
Waiting for your wife or husband
To get done with the shopping
And you come to a part
About something so close
To you that you feel the writer -
Even if she's making it up -
Must have in some past life
Lived that moment you lived
In some life, lived a pain
So hard you want to take
The writer's hand and hold it
Against your own chest
And say nothing

( One long Poem by John Guzlowski )

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A Poem by John Minczeski

My Name

            for Victor Contoski

My name arrived from Poland in 1910 stowed away
in the engine room of a Swiss freighter. The cook
took pity on it and every day brought sausages,
berries and milk. My name for two weeks was deafened
by the sound of pistons and the turning of the ship's screw.
My name, without a passport or extra change of clothes,
without a tooth brush or brown shopping bag,
swam to Staten Island, barely missed being eaten
by sharks. My name didn't know English.
It was taken in by potato farmers and learned
to drive trucks and drink beer. My name tripped
over a cabbage and was cut in half by a harrow.
Thus I was born. I have given it years of pain.
My name has forgotten how to cry.
 

"My Name" was originally published in The Spiders (New Rivers, 1979). It has subsequently been published in a number of anthologies. "Letter to Serafin," the title poem for the forthcoming collection from the University of Akron Press (Publication planned for the summer of '09), was originally published in Fourth River.

( More Poems by John Minczeski)