The Woman from There
October 9, 1980, I am in San Francisco, new to America.
At the University of the Pacific.
When I come in the door of the lab, they all stare at me.
David points to the newspaper spread along the spectrometer
asking, “Danuta, how do you pronounce this name: Czesław Miłosz?
Impossible to say out loud, though looking good next to Nobel.”
Susan interjects, “He teaches next door, at UC Berkeley,
a BART ride away. Is he famous in Poland?” He will be now.
His books are banned. Published abroad. Smuggled in.
Wow. I’m learning to say Wow.
Waving the paper, the phlegmatic David bursts out
to the guys who just stepped in:
“And we thought her name was difficult,” he points to me.
“A few months ago we had to look Poland up on the map.
When we met her at the airport, we didn’t know what to expect.
A person from behind the Iron Curtain.
Smiling eyes. A houndstooth suit, matching her golden locks.
She didn’t know peanut butter & jelly sandwich.
Had no money till her first stipend payment.
Interesting, is her response to microwave ovens or strangers
in the elevator asking, How are you, not expecting a real answer.”
Today I’m fine.
East/West
At 17, I don’t know English. Don’t know much about the West. Fluent in Russian and German, I translate back and forth for my friends. Theater, film, Brecht, Eisenstein.
Meet my future husband, already in his third year at the Warsaw Polytechnic. I sit for my entrance exams while outside he paces, smoking Sport cigarettes. Hurry with the answers, always the first one out to stroll with him in Łazienki Park. Chopin, roses, swans.
Turn 18. The smartly dressed Zoology professor smiles at my companion waiting by the Dracaena in the mezzanine. The Botany professor, a black cassocked priest, calls him a wzdychulec, the sighing one.
Co-organize the university’s film club. Travel to East Berlin with Andrzej Wajda’s movies. His Everything for Sale for students there a taste of the West. I take S-Bahn to West Berlin to see Star Wars. Checkpoint Charlie, barbed wire death strip, the Reichstag, Kurfürstendamm.
January wedding vows in Kraków: my freesia bouquet, crocheted long dress, snowflakes veiling us on the Town Square, St. Mary’s hejnał trumpet call. A week in the Tatras.
Months expand into volumes of years: plan experiments, perform, analyze, discuss, repeat. Price hikes. Food stores with empty shelves.Workers’ strikes. I hear it through the grapevine. Wounded, imprisoned, dead.
Scientists visit. Sarcoplasmic reticulum by day, Warsaw Jazz Jamboree by night. Conferences. English in accents from the European map. Dresden, Vonnegut. Copenhagen, news of Elvis’s death. One night to read The Gulag Archipelago.
1979. Winter of the century, trudging to the lab, public transport paralyzed. Konwicki’s underground novel, A Minor Apocalypse, passed from hand to hand. More experiments. Plan, perform, analyze, discuss, publish.
1980. My dissertation typed. End of May graduation. Celebration, farewell party. My signature cheesecakes with multicolor jelly. Hurry. Leave for the USA on a fellowship. Alone. He’s denied the passport: “Just wait the two years until your wife returns.”
1981. In this movie, my husband arrives in San Francisco in time for the lab’s move to the East Coast. Our April cross-country drive, the American way. Before T-55A tanks roll into cities across my frozen homeland.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Ground Floor At the contemporary photography show she pauses by Time on Scales. Two clocks compared: ten past ten weighs more than ten. Does art add or take away weight?
Main Floor The ancient mosaics in the Antioch Court which her toddler son loved as much as she did, tiny square-tile puzzles create big pictures. Thirty years later he weighs more, they seem ethereal. She keeps on moving —forward in time through European Art galleries: Medieval works, Renaissance, a large cast of Rodin’s The Thinker —toward the East Lobby, where she entered the museum two hours ago.
She stops in the Mezzanine at eye level with Entangled Orbits, polygons mobile, models for future homes in the sky. Descending the stairs, head up she glimpses herself balance in the iridescence above. Lighter. Happier.
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is a bilingual poet, translator, and photographer. Author of two collections: Oblige the Light (CityLit Press), winner of the Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize, and Face Half-Illuminated (Apprentice House). Shades of Isolation is forthcoming in 2026 from Finishing Line Press. She is also the translator for five books by Lidia Kosk and works by other Polish poets, including Ernest Bryll, Stanisław Lem, Marcin Świetlicki, and Wisława Szymborska. Her English to Polish translations of poems by Maryland Poets Laureate Josephine Jacobsen, Lucille Clifton, Linda Pastan, and Grace Cavalieri have been published in Poland. Danuta’s works appeared in Poet Lore, San Pedro River Review, SLANT, Spillway, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as the Poetry Translations Editor for Loch Raven Review. Danuta grew up in Poland and now resides in Maryland, USA. More at: danutakk.wordpress.com