by Tom Kuhn
Untended beyond the hedge the grass grows wild
Around a giant wild rose. Zinnias and bright bindweed
Hang over the slope. Sweet peas and ferns
Sprout amongst the chopped firewood.
In the corner under the spruce trees
By the wall you find the fuchsias. Like immigrants
They stand, fine shrubs, unmindful of their origins
Surprising themselves with so many daring reds
With fuller blossoms around the smaller native plants
The delicate yet sturdy growth with its tiny trumpets.
There was also a garden within a garden
Under a pine tree, so in the shade
Ten feet wide and twelve feet long
But as big as a park
With moss and cyclamens
And two camellia bushes.
And it was not only with his own plants and trees
That the master of the garden worked, but also
With the plants and trees of his neighbour, and saying this
He smilingly confessed: I steal from all sides.
(But the unpleasant things he hid from view
With his own plants and trees.)
Scattered around were
Little bushes, the passing thoughts of one night
And wherever you went, if you looked carefully
You would find living designs.
Towards the house there is a cloistered walk of hibiscus.
Planted close so that, strolling by
You have to bend them back, and they vouchsafe
The full scent of their blossoms.
In the cloister-like walk by the house, next to the lamp
Grows the Arizona cactus, man-high, every year
It blossoms for just one night, this year
To the thunder of big guns from the ships on manoeuvres
White flowers as big as a fist, but with the grace
Of a Chinese actor.
Sadly this beautiful garden, high above the beach
Is built on crumbling stone. Landslips
Without warning, drag sections down into the depths. It seems
There’s not much time in which to complete it.
On hearing the news of the Tory bloodbaths in Greece
In the midst of the greatest stench
The greatest words are spoken.
You may have to hold your nose
But how are you to stop your ears?
If the big guns weren’t so hoarse
They’d say: we do it in the name of order.
If the butcher would take the time
He’d say: But I’m completely selfless.
Since my fellow countrymen, the Hellenists
Were driven out of Homeric pastures
Where they studied olive oil and sheep
The liberators are returned from the battle
To find new masters ruling over their cities.
From out between the guns the shopkeepers crept.
But when he walked to the block . . .
But when he walked to the block, to be killed
He went to a block made by men like himself
And even the axe now awaiting him
Was made by his own. They had then only
Moved off, or been driven away, but they were still there
And present in the work of their hands. Even the light
In the corridors, through which he went to his death
Would not exist without them. Nor the building
From which they led him, nor any other building.
Why
Must he be alone, he who had spoken for so many?
Because:
The exploiters are gathered together
But the exploited are disunited.
Letters on recent reading
Horace, Epistles , Book 2, Epistle 1
Beware, oh you
Who sing the praises of Hitler! I
Who have witnessed the May and October processions
On Red Square and have seen the inscriptions
On their banners, and also on the Pacific coast
On Roosevelt Highway the thundering
Oil trains, and trucks laden with
Five vehicles, one on top of each other, I know
That he will soon die and, dying
Will already have outlived his fame, but
Even if he were to make the earth
Unlivable in, by
Conquering it, still no song
In his praise could endure. Granted, all too quickly
The cry of agony even of whole continents
Fades and dies before it can extinguish
The hymn to the torturer. Granted
Even the singers of misdeeds
May have mellifluous voices. And yet
The song of the dying swan is reckoned the most beautiful: he
Sings without fear.
In the little garden in Santa Monica
I read under the pepper tree
I read in Horace about a certain Varius
Who sang the praises of Augustus, or rather: all, that luck, his generals
And the corruption of the Romans had done for him. Just fragments
Transcribed in the work of another, they bear witness to
Great poetic skill. They would not be worth
The effort to copy out more.
With pleasure I read
How Horace traces the evolution
Of Saturnian verse from rustic farces
Which did not spare the great families, that is until
The police banned mischievous songs, and
The taunting writers were forced to develop
A more noble art and to taunt
With more elegant verse forms. That at least
Is how I construe this passage.
Parade of the benefactors
And if the war’s unending
There’ll be a funding drive:
The general gives his orders
The soldiers give their lives.
In seven uniforms
Fatty Göring hauled his paunch.
In none of them did he look human
Give one of them up? Fat chance!
Then came dauber Hitler
And chanced a pretty picture
Of Germany’s bright future
But it was all a fiction.
The doctor of deceit came next
And goebbled his blahblah
He’s got a withered leg and like
His lies won’t travel far.
Then came another teetotaller
Strength through joy perhaps?
But Robert Ley was lying too
His foul breath reeked of schnapps.
Then came death himself
In the person of General von Bock
With invitations to a mass grave:
“Come at dusk and knock”.
And Mr Krupp von Bohlen
You can bomb him all you like
But in his pocket he’s still got
The next Führer for the Reich.
A film by Charlie Chaplin
Into a bistro in the Boulevard Saint-Michel
One rainy autumn evening a young painter came
Drank four or five of those green liqueurs and told
The bored billiard players of his harrowing meeting
With a onetime beloved, a delicate soul
Now the wife of a prosperous butcher.
“Quick, sirs”, he implored, “please, your chalk
That you use for the cues!” And, kneeling on the floor
He tried with trembling hand to draw her likeness
Her, the beloved of long-gone days, despairingly
Rubbing out what he had drawn, starting over
Coming again to a halt, trying
Other strokes and mumbling: “Just yesterday I still knew her”.
Cursing guests stumbled over him, the angry landlord
Took hold of him by the collar and threw him out, but now on the pavement, restlessly
With shaking head, he chased the chalk after those
Melting features.
Crooked cross and Double-cross
Crooked cross and Double-cross
Squared up like the thugs they were
Swastika was swathed in smoke
Double-cross in hot air.
Swastika was kicking ass
His friendly words were fake.
Double-cross murmured, Help yourselves!
And gave the people cake.
Double-cross believed in God
Swastika couldn’t see the point:
Double-cross had stolen stuff
Now Swastika was casing the joint.
Double-cross wreaked havoc enough
Swastika was worse however.
Swastika wanted ten thousand years
Double-cross wanted forever.
Crooked cross and Double-cross—
They’re easily spooked for all their clamour:
Swastika flinched at the sight of a sickle
Double-cross at a hammer.
In the sixth year
Beneath the spattered banner of the brute
Defending his predation
Our young sons fight like lions.
From the uninhabitable homesteads
The bombers rise up in attack.
From their burning towns
The tank hordes still roll towards the Arctic.
The peasants of Champagne
Listen to the heavy boots of the conquerors
Whose parents lie buried beneath the rubble of our cities.
Reading without innocence
In his wartime journals
The poet Gide mentions a huge plane tree
Which he has admired—for some time—because of its enormous torso
Its powerful branches, its poise and its balance
Achieved by the great weight of its leading limbs.
In distant California
I read this note and shake my head.
The nations are bleeding to death. No natural plan
Provides for a felicitous balance.
On hearing the news that a great statesman has fallen ill
When the indispensable man coughs
Three empires quake.
When the indispensable man dies
The world casts about like a mother with no milk for her child.
Were the indispensable man, one week after his death, to return
In the whole empire he wouldn’t find so much as a job as a porter.
Everything changes . . .
Everything changes. You can
Begin anew with your very last breath.
But what has been, has been. And the water
You once poured into the wine, you can
Never drain off again.
What has been, has been. The water
That you poured into the wine, you can
Never drain off again. But
Everything changes. You can
Begin anew with your very last breath.
Report on a one-hundred-year war
War no longer appeared as an earthquake
No longer as a typhoon, but
Like the sunrise. As man bakes bread
So he waged war.
With all the regularity of the seasons
The iron birds of death filled the skies. Everyone
Expected them. As once the wild seas
Swallowed down our feeble boats in which provisions came
So now warships held them back
From entering our harbours.
In favour of a long wide skirt
And wear that wide and generous peasant skirt
The length of which I mischievously prize:
To lift those heavy folds above your thighs
And bottom adds a frisson to our flirt.
And when you sit down on our couch, succumb
Let it slide open, so that in its pleats
And through the smoke of serious debates
Your flesh reminds me of the night to come.
And yet it’s not just base desire and lust
That make me call for this skirt’s heavy pleats:
You walk proud in it, as through Colchis’ streets
Medea once walked down to the foaming sea.—
But even had I not these visions, still you must
Put on that skirt! Base lust is good enough for me.
Five long years . . .
Five long years the heavy bombers came
In the sixth, guns hauled by horses from Ukraine.
Steel and fire rained down from the sky
And smashed the fortress Germany.
And see, from the Ruhr a great stench rose up
And it came from the villas of Thyssen and Krupp.
And another stench rose from the Bendlerblock, and
And it came from quarters of the High Command.
And a third stench rose from the Eastern provinces
It came from the estates of junkers and princes.
And a fourth stench came, that one was toxic
It came from the court of so-called justice in Leipzig.
And a fifth and sixth and seventh stench hung in the air
And that was the smell of the Nazi Brown Houses everywhere.
And the whole of Germany stank like Frederick the Great
He never washed. So great was the stink of one hundred years’ shit.
There wasn’t a handkerchief big enough to save
Us all from the stench of parade ground, bank, pulpit, chancellery and grave.
The town builder, from the Visions
When they had built the city, they came together and presented to each other their houses and showed each other the work of their hands.
And the friendly one went with them, from house to house, the whole day, and praised them all.
But he himself spoke not of the work of his hands and showed no house to any man.
And it came to evening, and they all met again on the marketplace, and on a raised platform each one stepped forward and gave report on the manner and size of his house and the time it had taken to build it, so that they might ascertain which amongst them had built the greatest house, or the most beautiful, and in how long.
And according to his place in the alphabet, the friendly one was also called upon. He appeared down below, in front of the podium dragging a large doorframe. He gave his report.
This here, this doorframe was what he had built of his house.
And there was silence.
Then the chairman of the gathering stood up.
“I am astonished”, he said, and there was a rumouring of laughter. But the chairman continued:
“I am astonished that only now do we talk of these things. This man here was, during the course of the building, everywhere, over the whole plot, and everywhere he lent a hand. For this house he built the gable, there he installed a window, I no longer know which one, for the house opposite he drew the floorplan. It is no wonder that he appears here with a doorframe, which, moreover, is a very fine one, but that he himself has no house.
“In consideration of the time which he expended in the building of our houses, the construction of so fine a doorframe is a work of wonder, and I propose therefore to award to him the prize for good building.”
I am the patron . . .
I am the patron of ploughers and sowers
I teach the fruit pickers, I teach the mowers:
Milk froths in the pail, fresh bread on the side
The grapes and the pears . . . all this I provide.
Instruction in love
Hearken, girl, to my advice
Try to make your cries endearing
I like souls to have some flesh
And flesh with soul is more alluring.
Chastity won’t dampen lust
When I’m hungry I could eat you.
Virtue’s better with a bust
And a bust in turn needs virtue.
Leda once was raped by Zeus
Now maidens fear to play along
Though she herself quite liked abuse:
The god would have his swanny song.
Legality
When the Russians had got as far as Spandau
Strizzi began to fear the noose
And he decided to take that last corner and end it all; but first
There was, he felt, a certain item of lawful business
That had to be enacted. So he appointed
In his capacity as Führer and Chancellor
Some odd-bod to be registrar and, in proper form, he wed
His mistress of so many years. A faithful SS man
Ran through the hail of shells in search of a rubber stamp. Thus
The mass murderer demonstrated his deep respect
For bourgeois custom and the law.
Epistle to the Augsburgers (1945)
And when it came to the month of May
See, a thousand-year Reich had withered away.
Down the Hindenburg Road they sauntered
Lads from Missouri with cameras and rocket launchers
And asked for directions and where to go looting