JOZEF CZAPSKI
Only a sketch, a drawing, a cartoon.
Scrawny shivering prisoner
reading a book (Siberia).
This upright Pole, from a dead platoon
survived, somehow (so tall, so
innocent). Budding artist
from Paris, now of Tashkent –
following Proust into gulag, ghetto.
Somehow. Like mast on frigate.
Colors mime sky...
Poland, we must die.
Yet he shows up (seraph, implicate).
Survives. Grows old in Paris,
having kept his conscience
into Moscow (blessed
nonsense... bunks his paradise).
Grace is the sign of something human,
intelligence the trace
of civilization, Falcon-Ace
(O hoary Horus of the hunted men).
Isis (in West Branch) is your mother,
Belgium’s deep divide
the humdrum Hoover prelude
to a splenetic Grant Wood war –
Virgo, we know not who we are.
Speak of the grain of wheat,
Persephone. Complete
your D.C. scan (Henry’s North Star).
3.3.19
from Jozef Czapski, Inhuman Land : Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 (NYRB, 2018)
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