Krakow

March 24, 2026

Evening of an excellent day. 

Swans fly over and float on the green back of the Wistula

The reading was not at the university, but in the market square (“the largest in medieval Europe”), as part of a festival I never properly understood, but whose central events  were a giant balloon and a track meet rather than a gathering of dottering international poets. It’s all right. I was cheered madly by people who likely didn’t understand a word I’d said. I gave my book to a woman standing nearby. Maybe it will be the occasion of my return. The boys flying around the square with batons in their hands were unspeakably beautiful, carrying themselves upright like gods charging into battle. Lunched at Piano Rouge so I could continue to watch the heats. The French family behind me was loud and funny, enjoying one another’s company. 

Today’s foot tour of the city was informative, but– the Guided Tour has never been one of my favorite things, and I’ve fallen into the flaming, thundering core of it. The guide women are supernatural in their ability to keep the vocal stream going minute after minute without so much as an interrupting breath. Even pleasant voices cloy. Had to take the device out of my ear finally to keep from going berserk, thus missing city blocks of interesting information. Visited Wawel Castle, where it all started. Heard the charming story of the Krakow dragon. Got to St Mary’s Basilica in time to be in the front row for the Opening of the Altar, one firmament of sculpted gold opening to reveal a yet grander one. A nun enters with a stick and pulls aside the golden curtain.

Bussed to the suburbs to see the Krakow Ghetto, which, unlike Warsaw’s, still stands. Empty metal chairs stand in the town square, each one representing 3000 people annihilated. One person in six was a Jew in Krakow in 1938. The Jewish population of the city now stands at 350. According to Michaela, one and a half million people in Warsaw in 1938 had become 1000 and 1945.  You’d expect such a place to be a ruin for a thousand years. 

On my way back to the hotel for a nap I trundled through the covered market, where I could choose from a near infinity of items made of amber. At the end of it I met Tomas, who touched my shoulder and said, “You! I want to ask you a question!” I stopped to listen. He lowered his voice to a whisper and said, “What do you think of Trump?” I told him, and we spent the next several minutes enlarging upon each other’s loathing. Tomas lived in Chicago for five years, where a black man aimed a gun at him and he was told to go somewhere else when he pulled into an all-Black service station. He was born in 1986, and had been in the World Trade Center 17 days before 9/11. He was still reeling from an American girl he liked who turned out to be a Trumpist, that being the deal breaker. His aunt is now visiting from Virginia Beach. He typed the address of the art museum into my phone. His parents had sent him to school in London, and he asked me to critique his English, which is clear but also clearly Polish. Tomas is handsome, rugged-looking, with stone green steady eyes. He touched and poked me as he talked, as old (and Polish) friends might do, and I took that as a greater compliment than if the crowd had swooned over my locally unintelligible poems. I think the original contact was to enlist me for a tour, but almost immediately he said, “I don’t want anything from you.” Part of me murmured “pity.” His friend with the glasses speaks seven languages. Sometimes the angel steps out of the crowd and gives meaning to what was a tangle of unrelated impressions. I have a friend in Krakow.      

Black Madonna

March 23, 2026

Krakow. The Radisson. My window looks out on the greenbelt separating the old city from the rest of the town. 

Saw two storks flying as we left Warsaw. 

Was almost berserk with frustration at Michaela’s endless outpouring of data. The amplified human voice is a known torture method. We need only so much history. After a time she did exhaust herself and I feel asleep, until we got to Czestochowa, and the fortress-shrine of Jasna Gora. That place is jam-packed with history, and our new guide about gave himself a coronary trying to deliver it to us. The Black Madonna herself is disappointing from an artistic standpoint, though something has given her an aura of power and holiness. She has several dresses which she changes Easter Day. The most beautiful one is made wholly of amber. One is studded with rubies. The congregation was full of kids praying for success on their exams. America has no place even vaguely like it. The walls of the sanctuary are covered with discarded crutches. 

The land around Krakow is quite different from that around Warsaw. The Warsaw plain could be Ohio, though somewhat messier. Krakow is a fairy-tale city placed amid a fairy-tale forest. Staggered into the Market Square, found the spot with the most insolent waiters, had zuruck and wine while night fell and the fat crescent moon rode high. 

 

Warsaw 2

 March 22, 2026

Slept ten hours. 

My intuition that these cruise vacations were not for a single traveler turns out to be correct.  I am the single single. No table has five chairs. 

Evening. Last night and this morning I feared this trip would be an ordeal to be endured. A rigid schedule, forced and unsympathetic society, the revulsion of guided tours. . . but by turning things back to the travel I remember, this afternoon redeemed all, finally released from the tour, alone, sitting across from Sigismund Vasa’s palace, drinking Belgian beer (which is what the waiter construed from what I asked) and thinking “Yes, this is me, back on the road, taking it all in.” I was happy. I was the man I’ve always been on the road. The great sponge absorbing, the great chameleon becoming. 

The morning bus tour through historic Warsaw was informative and grueling in equal measure. Our very cute guide fixated on the cruelties of the Nazis and of Stalin, but, since the Old City has disappeared, perhaps that is the balance of the story. 87% of the structures in Warsaw were pulverized. We went to the Ghetto, which was devastating even though time has been successful in rooting out every trace of physical remembrance. I turned my back and wept at the monuments. Can I go to Auschwitz? I barely endured the Warsaw ghetto, of which almost no palpable remnant remains. Men sit up at night imagining new sins, new atrocities. Laborious cruelty has been the ensign of the nations.  

Staggering back to the hotel across the many vast public squares I regretted tomorrow’s rush. Having discovered the Old City, I could spend days here in delight now, wandering around, poking into corners. Even the state of my legs was endurable. 

Why is the symbol of Warsaw a mermaid? Turns out she’s a Lorelei, a Wistula Maiden who lured men to their doom in the river when there was no one here but fishermen.

Warsaw

 March 21, 2026

Watched Blue Moon on the plane, then slept in a variety of unrestful positions till the sea was crossed. 

Sofitel Victoria, Warsaw. The design of the city between the airport and here is largely Soviet, softened by elegant plantings of trees. It seems a new city, a development, as I suppose it is, having been obliterated in the 40's. Turned the radio on to a station playing Western standards, “Bring Him Home,” “Perfect,” which are then repeated in Polish. Long expositions between songs of which I, of course, understand nothing. We Viking voyagers are all elderly, some of us in wheelchairs, some so deaf they don’t know how loud we’re talking, asking the thitd version of the same querulous question. I’d not appreciated the profundity of my own decline. Stairs, a fast pace, a high step undo me. Fell twice. I’d not appreciated how much the Americans with Disabilities Act smoothed the path for people who are not counted as disabled. The Munich airport is all stairs, no elevators, the assumption being that if one travels one is up to a little challenge. I am not anymore. Racing for the Viking van I heard myself praying, “Let this be over.” Nobody my age travels alone. I noticed this in every corridor and waiting area. I’ve always been an anomaly, but some variations of that become more difficult to conceal. Give it up. Have some sense of proportion.

My first bartender couldn’t mix a cocktail because she was too young. She’s at school studying :to do somethng with hair.” My second  bartender gave me a cup of wasabi peas for a midnight snack, as I had praised the ones that were set before me with my drink.  

Keanu Reeves speaking Polish on the TV in a Shao Lin combat movie. 

After five or six hours, I judge the Poles to be sweet natured and tribal. 

March 19, 2026

Furnace people came to inspect this AM. One was a Tolkien fan and spent time perusing my bookshelf. 

Lunch with SS to get the skinny on what was a laborious casting process. We seem to be on even keel at the moment. I’m absconding for two weeks, so it’s out of my hands. But, a general comment is that everything is too damn hard.

Ready to fly out tomorrow. Ready for some unseen circumstance to cause me to stay. Glad that those impulses are in equipoise, and I’m ready for any outcome. 

Did not cram German as I meant to.  

Tidy

 

March 18, 2026

Much activity before departure. Sound of the dishwasher on the floor below.

I’ve remarked before how my chronological age is a shock to me when I think of it. The way I feel inside my head is indistinguishable from the way I felt when I was 25. I have the same excitement, the same anticipation, the same naive faith in the goodwill of the universe, the same caution about risk,–not that I’m averse to it in the abstract, but because I fear delay or detour to “What I Am Meant by Destiny to Do.”  You’d think that Destiny’s manifest indifference to me would have pushed that thought out long ago. 

The ferns by the back door are slaughtered by the freeze. Have not looked elsewhere, fearing what I would see, unable to effect redress.

Congratulating myself on finishing off this and that in the refrigerator before I depart. “How tidy he was” the officials will say if I do not return. 

Blessed St. Patrick

 March 17, 2026

Blessed Saint Patrick. Packing; unless I have a change of mind, packed. Angry snow last night, thinning out to a tiny sprinkle of diamonds every few minutes. 

My sister and I both leave the country Friday, to meet in a week in Prague. My emotion is anxiety, hers excitement, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same emotion pushed through different filters. 

Session of prayer deep into the night. “Warfare” would have been another name. It would be nice to be certain of something, anything, some time. I believe my life has come to nothing. To be certain of that would save expenditure of energy in the time left to me. 

The mercury plunges; I drag around in my winter cap and coat, wondering what to stuff into the slits under the windows.