You know, I think more and more often

You know, I think more and more often
that I should go back.
Maybe I'll meet you. And happiness?
Happiness is being sad together.

So I look through the moonlit window
and listen.
Nothing. A breeze stirs somewhere.
Alone among the leaves - the moon.

Like a golden wheel it rolls
above the windblown leaves.
Such moons, only paler,
shone over the Wisla.

Even the Big Dipper on its course
stops in a tree at midnight,
just like at home. But why here?
Truly, I don't know.

What's here? Longing and sleepless nights,
unknown streets and somebody's verse.
I live here as a nobody:
a Displaced Person.

I think of you. I know I must leave.
Perhaps we can return to our past,
but I know neither what youth will be like
nor where you are.

But I'm yours or no one's
forever. Listen,
listen, read this poem
if somewhere you are alive.

----------
Some additional things I found about this poet, not sure if they are true: Borowski is a Dachau and Auschwitz survivor. This poem was written for his (not yet) wife, Maria, who went missing while at the camp. They did find each other but Borowski was already too far gone. He gassed himself at the age of 28. 

To levitate

My mother swears she saw
my baby brother rise from his cot
one stormy night when
we were living upstate.

She was awake, checking the shutters,
when she saw him levitate,
a foot or more, covers rising
with him the way they do

in carnival shows, so you don’t see
the wires. But, he lay soft and pliant,
a floater, weightless as
a shadow on the wall.

“Something in the air,” Mother said,
because she believed in such things,
and reminded us often that most
children know how to fly.

And I do remember running down a hillside,
breathless, the ground rising to meet me,
my heart lifting my blood
so effortlessly

I knew that if I stepped out onto the air
that it would hold me.
I may even have done it
without realizing

how easy it is, before doubt takes hold
and weds you to the ground.
Odd that we should forget
such things.

Odd, too, when I tell the story
how no one believes exactly,
but the room gets quiet
and everyone listens.

I have this to say

One day, long after this
when we meet again.
Oh perhaps it will never happen
but if it should
kiss me
and don't stop until  my body
melts like sugar in your mouth
or until you see
my soul flowing in the water beneath our feet.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

One day

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

~Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

I've Dreamed of You So Much

I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your literal, living and breathing
physical body
and to kiss that mouth which is the birthplace of that voice which is so dear
to me?
I've dreamed of you so much that my arms--which have become accustomed to
lying crossed upon my own chest after attempting to encircle your
shadow--might not be able to unfold again to embrace the contours of your
literal form, perhaps
So that coming face-to-face with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me
and ruled me and dominated my life for so many days and years
Might very well turn me into a shadow.
Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!
I've dreamed of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up
again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life and love
and yet
when it comes to you--you, the only being on the planet who matters to me
now--
I can no more touch your face and lips than I can those of the next random
passerby.
I've dreamed of you so much, have walked and talked and slept so much with
your
phantom presence that perhaps the only thing left for me to do now
Is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowy
than that shifting shape which moves and which will go on moving,
stepping lightly and happily across the sundial of your life.

The Old Poets of China

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

What Remains

Years ago, one night when I was sad, I asked for a sign;
I've forgotten why.
All I remember now
is that two deer stepped onto the beach below:
their hooves clinked when they crossed the shale,
and when they walked up the beach,
their hoof prints filled with seawater.
Each pool held a moon.
I sat on that rock and tried to understand what it meant.
The stink of kelp floated closer;
coarse fronds washed back and forth
while the sea breathed below me.
Now I know it wasn't a sign.
It was just thirty or forty holes, shining.

Lamentation chant

South Mountain's peopled with such grief.
Ghost-rain keeps sprinkling empty grasses,

and autumn fills Ch'ang-an past midnight:
how many are turning old in all its wind?

Yellow-twilight paths blurred deep away,
streets of black-azure oak twist and sway,

trees standing in shadow beneath a moon.
Pellucid dawn will cover whole mountains.

Lacquer candles welcome new arrivals to
dark tombs. Confusions of fireflies flicker.

~translated from Li Ho by David Hinton