Maja Trochimczyk
It was a strange day, back in August 1988, that I stepped off the plane into the humid hell of a Montreal summer It felt foreign, alien. Terra incognita.
I lost the ground under my feet, I lost my name, my language, my identity. Slowly I started re-building myself, trying on various identities, all in a foreign language: English, the language of by the Beatles, of classes in my Warsaw high school, and, during Martial Law in 1982, BBC news reports about Solidarity secretly recorded by our teacher.
When I left my language and my home, I was forever marked by my foreign accent. I turned to writing poetry for myself, as a journal of my new life, an emotional diary to record what touched me deeply and what was tangential to my life. I wanted to master the language so I could express the most intimate shades of feeling and describe impressions.
For eight years I was Dr. Maria Anna Harley; I got my doctorate in musicology, on the esoteric subject of “Space and Spatialization in Contemporary Music.” I specialized in avant-garde topics, and started Polish music projects with the support of a post-doc from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
In 1995, I was recruited by the University of Southern California to direct the Polish Music Center at the School of Music. Los Angeles was nothing like what I had seen in the movies: freeways, graffiti and barbed wire. It is a city of mountains and gardens with orange trees, roses, bougainvillea-covered fences, and butterflies everywhere.
The Huntington Library and Descanso Gardens became my playgrounds. I never tired looking at the mountains beyond my window—their colors, their sunsets and clouds. I bought a house in a neighborhood that reminded me of my grandparents' village, Trzebieszow, in the district of Lublin, where people did not lock their doors and all neighbors knew each other.
My new neighbors were friendly, too. I started hiking in the Big Tujunga Wash, a dry riverbed covered in chaparral, with its rocky paths amidst sage and cactus. I watched the hummingbirds in my rose garden. They were hard to get used to; buzzing around your head, they really sound like hornets.
I wrote a lot of poems about nature, the gardens, the dragonflies, the rivers. Whenever police sirens set off the neighborhood dogs barking, a pack of coyotes joined in, howling. Wild and frightening compared to the distant Polish woods where Telimena and Tadeusz went mushroom-picking and ended up hunting ants.
I have no urge to learn Spanish or French; it is enough to continue my life-long adventure conquering the terra incognita of English. I make new friends in my linguistic homeland of choice – here in California and around the world, those who write about music and those who write poetry. We have created a new universe of our own.
When I go to Poland, I now speak with a foreign accent. I am bilingual and forget words in two languages. I’m a citizen and a stranger in both countries. I’m at home in the kingdom of words.
Dragonfly Days
The California dragonflies are
as they should be – orange,
enormous, flying in formation
above green algae blooming
in the winter stream.
A hairy bug looks for a crevice
to hide his ugliness,
straight from the pages
of a horror book or a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch –
a creature that could have been,
but is not.
A blue heron floats down.
His majestic wings beat slowly
until he finds a reedy alcove
for an al fresco dinner. Transfixed,
I watch his shape-shifting ways –
a cruel flash of movement erupting
from a graceful silhouette
standing still, a priceless etching
amidst the rocks.
Once, I knew such dark-winged herons
watching us scare away the fish
from their river with our childish giggles.
Red-billed storks picked their lunch
of frogs and crickets from the trail
of freshly cut grass, its straight rows
measured by the motion
of my uncle’s scythe
across the meadow.
Like long-legged pets,
storks followed the man
who fed them. They paid no notice
to a silent child trying to catch
a butterfly in her small hands,
watching bright blue dragonflies
over a ditch filled with rainwater
and forget-me-nots.
Blue and orange, the dragonflies
still haunt my memories, hovering
above the smooth surface
of long forgotten stream,
beneath the tranquil expanse
of high noon sky.
Published in Miriam’s Iris, or Angels in the Garden (Moonrise Press, 2008).
Rivers
I knew my river,
but my memory still mixes its golden sand
with the squeaky quartz crystals of the Baltic.
Vistula: a grey bandage of coolness
dressing the wounds of a forsaken land,
where Vars and Sava lived happily once
and a mermaid helped them
to defend the city from Germans.
With her shield and sword
she rose from the depths
(otherwise inhabited by the somber
and mustachioed catfish).
I know, that story is too old-fashioned
for today’s bombs and bullets.
Parochial, receding into insignificance,
my childhood monster: rzeka Wisla.
I flew away and above. I saw –
muddy browns spread in wide ribbons,
murky waters telling tales
of Old Man Mississippi
flood the newly conquered lands –
Green embroidery coiled around
the meadows like emerald snakes,
more luminous than freshly watered lawns –
Concrete paths weaving in and out
of the city – beneath walls of graffiti
a tiny trickle brings leftovers
from the other season in L. A. –
The diamond surface of the stream
scattering riches on smooth pebbles,
to disappear amidst dry twigs
of suffocating, cricket-laden summer.
I should remember – this is California.
I should remember – I’m not at home.
An Ode of the Lost
to Adam Mickiewicz and all Polish exiles
Tired exiles in rainy Paris listen to Mickiewicz
reciting praises of woodsy hills, green meadows—
distant Lithuania, their home painted in Polish verse,
each word thickly spread with meaning,
like a slice of rye bread with buckwheat honey.
“Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie. Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie, Kto cię stracił”—he says, and we, homeless Poles
without ground under our feet, concur,
sharing the blame for our departure.
There’s no return.
Are not all journeys one way? Forward,
forward, go on, “call that going, call that on.”
The speed of light, merciless angel with a flaming sword,
moves the arrow forward. Seconds, minutes
stretch into years. Onwards. Go.
The time-space cone limits the realm of possibility.
If you stay, you can go on. If you leave—
Can you find blessing in the blur of a moment?
In a glimpse of soft, grassy slopes shining
like burnished gold before the sun turns purple?
Can you learn to love the sweet-fluted songs
of the mockingbird, forget the nightingale?
How far is too far for the lost country
to become but a dream of ancient kings—
where children never cry, wildflowers bloom,
and autumn flutter of brown, drying leaves
whispers of the comforts of winter?
Sleep, sleep, eternal sleep,
in the spring you will awaken…
Note: Quotation from Adam Mickiewicz’s Invocation to Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania (“My country! You are as good health: /How much one should prize you, he only can tell who has /lost you”), from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, and from the author. CR
Maja Trochimczyk is a poet, music historian, photographer and consultant to non-profit agencies. She has published two books of poetry illustrated with her own photographs (Rose Always – A Court Love Story and Miriam’s Iris, or Angels in the Garden, Moonrise Press, 2008) and recently edited an anthology commemorating the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse (2010). A noted specialist in 19th and 20th century music, Dr. Trochimczyk has published four books on music (After Chopin: Essays in Polish Music, Los Angeles: USC, 2000; The Music of Louis Andriessen, New York: Routledge, 2002; Polish Dance in California, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; and A Romantic Century in Polish Music, Los Angeles: Moonrise Press, 2009), and hundreds of articles, essays and reviews. www.trochimczyk.net/
