* * * *

I have a stove
Like a triumphal arch!

They are taking away my stove
Like a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
Like a triumphal arch!!!

Took it away.

After there was only a
gray
naked
hole
gray naked hole.

And that's enough for me:
gray naked hole
gray-naked-hole
gray-na-ked-hole
graynakedhole.

Initially, the speaker is proud of his stove, comparing it fancifully to a "triumphal arch," as if one could mistake a mass produced appliance for a civic monument. Of course, a stove can be a kind of monument. It is tangible proof of bourgeois respectability. It could also, after a fashion, serve as proof of collective triumph, given the era: look what Eastern bloc industry can accomplish! Still, the simile is faintly ludicrous.

Things quickly become more serious. Mysterious, unnamed people take away the stove, and the speaker first pleads for its return and then laments its absence. The comparison to a "triumphal arch" now becomes poignant. Empires might vanish, but they leave visible impressive traces of their power (the Arc de Triomphe, the Arch of Constantine, the India Gate). The speaker has nothing by which to remember his prelapsarian bliss, only a blank spot, a "gray naked hole."

What makes the poem stick in the memory are the repetitions. It is built according to the fairytale logic of threes: three statements of the simile, three exclamation points, three words ("gray naked hole") repeated six times.

In the original, the words "gray naked hole"--szara naga jama--are all rhyming disyllabic words with a stress on the first syllable. They are positively chant-like. Moreover, they seem to bubble up from the poem itself. Their one vowel /a/ is insistently present throughout on stressed syllables (mam, bramy, triumfalnej, zabierają,zabrali, została, and wystarczy). Indeed, the first word of the title, ach, could be said to set the ground tone for the rest of the lyric's sound play.

When the speaker says "that's enough for me," it might appear ironic. In what way can a "gray naked hole" ever suffice as a replacement for his beloved stove? By separating syllables and running them together in the poem's closing lines, the speaker suggests that a thing might be gone but what appears in compensation is language, a stream of spoken words.

Many poems and poets argue that suffering and loss find at least partial redress by being transmuted into verbal art. Białoszewski manages to dramatize that process. Readers witness vigorous word play arising out of a moment of violation and trauma.

Stoves provide warmth and sustenance. Take one away, and a home becomes distinctly less homey. It takes a sizeable step away from being a dwelling, a place where one can live and flourish, toward being just another building, a place in which one spends time. Poetry, Białoszewski warns, is cold comfort when home ceases to be home. It might provide "inexhaustible joy," but its joy is mixed with, and inseparable from, pain,

Yet--verse is also seductive. Rhythmic. And it gives you something to do--song!--when the Powers That Be, or the Things That Go Bump in the Night, or Vengeful Gods invade your cherished private world-apart and effortlessly prove that security and safety are precarious illusions.

Now that's a cheery thought. But it's not foremost in my mind as I scour and scrub. Instead, as tackle the soap scum, I chant "szara naga jama, szara naga jama . . ." Downstrokes on the first syllable, upstrokes on the second.