By: Michael Downs
As I try to write these words, a little more than a month has passed since Marcin Oświęcimka drowned while swimming off one of the Canary Islands. Marcin, a writer and graduate student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, had begun a semester abroad at Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife, working to complete his degree in English philology with an emphasis on American language and culture.
Though I am a writer and professor in the United States, for a brief time in Spring 2022 I taught in Kraków, which is how I met Marcin. Quickly, I came to admire his writing and to feel grateful for his spirit. Smart and witty, Marcin connected to others through tenderness and empathy. He organized events for the campus’s English language and literature club. He could talk about skateboard wheels as well as he could discuss poems by Charles Bukowski.
For an assignment in my class, he wrote a poem based on a painting by Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Some 75 years after Hopper finished his “Summer Evening,” Marcin looked closely at the image of a man and woman standing in garish porch light, and he called them “a couple like any other.” Such a bold statement! Literature usually explores what differentiates the individual from others. So, Marcin’s description challenged my expectations and raised questions. What would the poem reveal about couples that make them all alike? At the end of his “Summer Night,” published here for the first time, Marcin offers a paradoxical answer that leaves the reader to wonder about the distances between people in love.
As seen in “Summer Night” and a second poem, “August Wind,” Marcin was a writer and poet of great potential. In an email before he was to leave for Tenerife, we talked about the possibility of him studying in the United States. I knew of a scholarship, and he hoped to conduct research into attitudes toward different foreign accents in English. “No other country can provide so many opportunities to research that field,” he wrote.
As for his creative writing, Marcin told me that he’d been traveling back and forth between composing in Polish and in English. It turns out, he wrote, “that I’m a completely different poet in my mother tongue, and I’m currently having adventures exploring this side.”
Summer Night
after Edward Hopper’s Summer Evening
the guests returned to their homes
it was an enjoyable evening
(for them)
or at least it looked as if it was
firewood and charcoals are crackling still
in the barbecue
they are a couple like any other
the night has come and
moths are headed to the lamp
sizzling on the bulb
and grasshoppers and
an occasional owl
are looming
from the meadows
and from the woods
this corner of the world
is where time flows how
it was meant to
with the idle wind strolling along
and perhaps too many chances
to think about what we all
think we think about, but we don’t
a neighbourhood like this is too small
for having secrets
so that’s how I know
they are a couple like any other
I see their undraped curtains
and the door blind undrawn
And it doesn’t mean much
nor does it bare a soul
I see them in the spotlight
sitting on the ledge of the veranda
quite close to one another
but they are a couple like any other
here
infinity spans between them
august wind
august wind
sometimes carries
notes of autumn
to itself
although it’s still
summer around
and silver moon
shows up
now and then
in the middle of a golden day
so I find a single dry straw
among lush blades of grass
and a lonely white cloud
in a patch of clear blue sky
old age reminds us that
it not only reads our memoirs
but also
writes us back
– Marcin Oświęcimka