The Maze Beyond the Garden: Collection of Poems

By Janusz Czubakowski

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462889082

Janusz Czubakowski

Janusz Czubakowski was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1935, the second son of Polish immigrants. At 10, Longfellow’s ``The Skeleton in Armor” awoke his love of poetry. He has worked as a counter of holes in IBM punch cards, a technician for the University of Chicago library’s photo-duplication laboratory (drilling holes in concrete, among other duties) and as a copy boy on the New York Daily News. He once was obliged to subsist solely on 3 pounds of bananas a day for 11 days (they cost 6 cents a pound). He enlisted in the Army in 1955 and worked on the TB and men’s closed psychiatric wards at the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Eventually, he became copy desk chief for Electronic News. He is married, with one son and two grandsons, both with English accents. He lives in Maine with his wife of 50 years, Alexine.

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Copyright © 2011 by Janusz Czubakowski.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011910140

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4628-8907-5

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-8908-2

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Contents

Toilers of the Sea

Acolyte

4 a.m.

8th Street, Greenwich Village, 1970

16

17 (I)

17 (II)

Preludes. For a City.

Come, Out of the Wind

A Modern Education

A Sort of Schooling

Aesthetics

Acrobat

Answer

To a Kitchen Fly

Old Horror Films I

Old Horror Films II

Beyond

Identity

Fugue Underground

Always They Ask

Brownstone Summer. 1951.

Anthem

The Boundary

I Fear

At Easter, in His Age

Thoughts of One Removed

After Dinner

After Anthologies

Again the Long Doors Open

An August Afternoon

Here Nothing Dies

An Old King

At Senlac Hill

Another Self

Anthologies

Afterward

The Old Prince

The Old Prince II

Three Black Stones

The Other Room

Architect I

Architect II

In the Library

Listen to Me!

Listen to Me II

The Distance

Analysis

Arthur

Boy on the Beach

Captains and Dogs

Casualties of the Cold War. 1961

Autumn

Choice I

Choice II

Cinema

Circe’s

Circus

The Count’s Account

Telemachus

Ten

Terminal

The Builders

The Cave

The Idols

Testament

Portrait

2006

That Summer

The 60s

The Absolute

Tour

Tourist Attraction

My Name Is Wallace

Here Nothing

At Four a.m.

Biography

Brownstone

Medusa

Lost

Lizard

Mother and Starlight. 1944.

Voice

Encounter

Children of Salt and Lightning

Chicago. 1958.

Five Letters

Faustus in Paris. 1956.

Come, Let Us Reason

The Serpent’s Priests

Crossing the Isthmus

A Contemporary

Confession

Aesthetics II

Attempt at a Portrait

Early Aesthetics

Consequence

Mare

Void

Customs Inspector M.

Consilience

Costumes

Diary Entries

Iberian Projections. 1957.

Doggerel. For B.

Four Haiku

The Prisoner

Unbound?

Unfinished

Found

For Alexine. You are my Garden.

Toilers of the Sea

(After the painting by Charles Ryder)

To what strange shore, while crying shadows sail, sail you?

"The moon is as a sun, the sky is light and dark;

We sail—to where the moon’s a moon, the sun a sun.

Acolyte

The distances were arms embracing me.

What need for maps when all the world was gardens?

But forest mists are acrid shapes,

Its leaves are tongues of fire

Whose sound is dead birds’ wings.

Deserts blacker than burned bread

And hills of sand horizons climbed to hills of sand.

Darkness and day slid off the sky

Like water from parched lips.

And stars so close they stung like tears.

The seeds I carried made my footsteps deep

But they were lost like prophecies in dreams.

Not even spiders could exude survival.

Until I found this iron place

That burns without a flame by day

And freezes all who touch it in the dark.

Here nothing grows but rust

And frost that vanishes.

But seeds have sprouted into orchards

Surrounding it with fragile colors,

And I eat rust and roots

And bring wild flowers to the steel cathedral

And dusk and dawn I carve a chapel there

Where shadows of my bending form

Climb to the dome whose height I cannot measure,

And sparks of music are my fingers scraping.

4 a.m.

A jet plane slows to lower worlds and fades.

The road a narrow box my shadow does not fill.

And traffic curves away.

Roadmaps of the mind the highways cross,

Confuse with alternate directions.

Above the soapy water draining from the basin

Addresses slanted on a mirror,

And on the counter in the plastic diner

Headlines left beside a soiled plate.

The coffee chaliced in a paper cup

As pie and lotteries fill the mind.

Spilled sugar spreads directions

From a lost center to uncertain edges.

Reaching prevents

The ache of thinking where to reach.

The slap of metal screens returns the world

And harsh as sunlight glinting off a windshield

The will unwinds a road.

⁸th Street, Greenwich Village, 1970

Capes and rags the scrawny flowers of youth,

Opened to light pulsing from a different star.

Drab as a duffel coat,

I walk the orchid street

Intent on cactus in a desert spring.

In angled windows

The counterman keeps strict account.

Pizza is an abstract art,

The trashcan is collage,

A swerving cab intimate physics.

Invaders from the future:

Seeds of kingdoms

Still to be settled, mapped and ruined—

Some few, perhaps, to reproduce

The subtleties that turn such pavements in the filtered light

To forty years of memory

And gardens blossoming like cracks in concrete,

With open hydrants flaring liquid flowers

Into rhythms in gray gutters.

16

People on the bus

Shared messages about him with their eyes.

He knew from films life came with music,

Time compressed, expanded

Like monologues his mother spoke to air

Or him or furniture.

For her the past was gardens full of dresses

Displayed beneath the trees that speckled light,

And music near the tables bright with cakes—

The present narrow corridors that had no end.

They lived in brownstones families once had owned,

Where children were the wings

Of stately seated parents, but where he

Shared with his mother one small room

Whose carpet lint he picked with claws on bony hands.

Steep stairs led to a stark high toilet

Cold in a closet without sink or window.

Other stairs had banisters bent over space.

Neighbors were muffled sounds, faces nodded to in passing,

And numbered rooms with twice-locked doors.

He read until type squirmed,

Lice he feared would enter him.

Escape was to a fenced and silent lake

He found, whose Shinto shrine preserved

What little Heaven he believed in.

He walked each day, past heavy smells of bread

And laxatives from factories, past groceries

Displaying cans of motor oil in windows

Specked with flies and dirt, past racks of headlines

Less real than narratives, philosophies,

And histories he learned

And whispered to himself and read aloud

As to adoring skies, unclean and cold with hunger.

17 (I)

Summer, and humidity

Heavy on the mouth, to make

Each breath a sigh.

Each day a rope,

A ladder into emptiness,

A snake collapsing to a