Wislawa Szymborska

I AM TOO CLOSE

I am too close for him to dream of me.
I don't flutter over him, don't flee him beneath the roots of trees.
I am too close.The caught fish doesn't sing with my voice.
The ring doesn't roll from my finger.
I am too close. The great house is on fire without me calling for help.
Too closefor one of my hairs to turn into the rope of the alarm bell.
Too close to enter as the guest before whom walls retreat.
I'll never die again so lightly, so far beyond my body, so unknowingly as I did once in his dream.
I am too close,too close, I hear the word hiss and see its glistening scales as I lie motionlessin his embrace.
He's sleeping,more accessible at this moment to an usherette he saw once in a traveling circus with one lion, than to me, who lies at his side.
A valley now grows within him for her, rusty-leaved, with a snowcapped mountain at one end rising in the azure air.
I am too close to fall from that sky like a gift from heaven. My cry could only waken him.
And what a poor gift: I, confined to my own form, when I used to be a birch, a lizard shedding times and satin skins in many shimmering hues. And I possessed the gift of vanishing before astonished eyes, which is the richest of all.
I am too close,too close for him to dream of me.
I slip my arm from underneath his sleeping head -it's numb, swarming with imaginary pins.A host of fallen angels perches on each tip,waiting to be counted.

the poem is from Wislawa Szymborska Poems New and Collected, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.