I got kohlrabi and celeriac and other non-existent vegetables,
Like so many chimaeras and hippogriffs.
I got Kinderkaffee from malted barley, and Katarzynki from Mr Continental, but only on Thursdays.
I got vermillion worm medicine, with bitter lemon
That didn’t begin to take away the colour or the taste.
The four of us round the table. We all had to do it. It was like a suicide pact.
It was the winter of ’63, the Plath winter. I barked for months.
I juggle the numbers, the way I sang my times tables
On the swing. (They are all I have in the world.) The sevens, the nines.
They mostly begin with the scalene 19—. I swing them around, sling them and swing them.
Lennon and Kennedy and punk and the Wall and the moon.
Big numbers, jagged numbers, like someone with very heavy weights.
I invented sepia. Sepia came for me. Something discoloured
Behind me, in my past, like a hobbled Clovis ad. Our charlady smelled so terrible,
My father smoked a pipe (‘Fair Play’) after she was gone. My young mother still giggled.
She and my father played badminton on the street at night.
You could read the Times past eleven. (You could read the Times.)
School uniforms, playground fights. Goalposts. Polar ghosts. British bulldogs.
I should have liked to be called Roger or Arthur. The bully Brian Lorry pummelled and pummelled.
All Trutex or Aertex. Caps. Striped ties and the striped elastic belt with the snake mouth hook.
Melrose, RHS, Loretto, George Watson’s, Boys’ and Girls’ – all mauled us.
I was at bat for days without scoring a run.
Practically everything was a shibboleth. Harwich was a trick.
Berwick was a trick. Worcester was a trick. Geoffrey was a trick. I didn’t know Sundays were no-go.
My home German was compared to a serendipitous knowledge of Welsh;
I knew better: it was less. My only friend, McVicar, had a Greek mother. Maybe Clytemnestra.
They moved further North, so that he could be with Prince Charles.
Coventry
Two of us in the chandeliered room, the only ones
not speaking to anyone. Me and a man twice my age,
which unfortunately puts him at a hundred and twelve.
He might be Ernst Jünger’s older brother, a frazzled cherub with a war wound.
He has worked out that, if you are to be alone,
then like a suicide bomber in the middle of a cluster of people.
Sweeps of radar. A turning circle of sorts. Ultra-approachable.
I imagine his hearing aid off. Procuring the companionable human jostle.
Shoulders. Feet. Excuse me.
On Forgetting
IQ of 145 and can’t remember?
TROUBLING HISTORIC BROADSHEET ADVERTISEMENT
‘Empiricism’ has been gone far more often than not;
I think I originally learned it in my teens.
Now I sometimes find it by alphabetising, but most of the time it’s gone and stays gone.
I don’t know if I dislike it because I can’t remember it, or I can’t remember it because I dislike it.
It’s as though it’s on permanent loan somewhere. Someone else’s problem.
I don’t know what would alarm me – really alarm me.
‘Galicia’ was gone. Both Galicias. ‘Boarding pass’ recently disappeared for a while.
I keep a firm hold on ‘ocarina’ and ‘Hoffmeister’,
eschewing ‘Hoffman’ and ‘Hofmeister’, that tacky 1980s lager when German became respectable.
I do Corona, Corona and ‘Corinna, Corinna’ and la Coruña. That’s the el camino one.
I walked thirty blocks the wrong way down Derision.
The ordered numbers seemed to make no sense.
I was unclear about Hamilton and Harrison. Weren’t they presidents?
If not, why not? Confound it, I didn’t know which way was up or west.
I hoped the Post Office might be a Travelodge, where I finally posted my letter.
‘Abstemious’ was gone for years, now I keep hold of it
by tethering it to ‘facetious’. What if ‘facetious’ goes? Imagine not knowing ‘facetious’.
It would help to have a crocodile, a street of crocodiles.
‘I was here yesterday, and I lost a brown glove,’
says a loud voice in a bar, not mine. Or not yet. Actually, it was a blue glove.
I get my Magyars mixed up. Was it Zsuzsa Rakovsky or Agnes Nemes Nagy? A or Z?
‘Deborah’ has displaced ‘Dorothea’, or was it vice versa. Now where are they?
I disappear into my room to look for a book,
and emerge hours later with the wrong one, or with none at all.
Tell me, is it ‘singular universality’ or ‘simple unavailability’?
Tiger-striped spectacles and a lazy eye.
‘How about I come over and make you forget all about him.’
That’s not me either, that’s for something called Grub Hub,
over a 10,000 calorie picture of alamode or miracle whip. There’s comfort.
Probably, come to think about it, the ‘him’ would be Grubby Hubby.
My spelling isn’t what it was. I talk when I have the words.
They are not always there when I talk.
I’m not sure if that makes me long-winded or delphic. Perhaps both.
I remember, I wrote ‘apotropaically’ once,
I wrote ‘anamorphosis’, I wrote ‘aporia’.
It’s 12 / 12 / 12. Rien ne va plus. ’Bout them Mayans.
The Pope has tweeted assurance, or his astronomers have. Sweet comfort.
Sweet tweet comfort. It’s not la Coruña at all, it’s Compostela. Ah, Stella.
Stella or Vanessa, make a decision. The pilgrims with their scallop shells of quiet,
their Jakobsmuscheln, on their hats. Strange place for a shell, no.
(Chicago)
Cooking for One
I put five small potatoes in a saucepan,
hold it under the cold tap
till they’re covered with water,
add a squirt of washing-up liquid.
– There’s a man who likes his life.
Idyll
The windows will reflect harder, blacker, than before,
and fresh cracks will appear in the yellow brick.
There is no milkman or paper boy, but presumably
the lurid pizza flyers and brassy offers of loans
will continue to drop through the letterbox.
The utilities will be turned off one by one,
as the standing orders keel over or lose their address,
though there was never that much cooking or bathing or
phoning went on here anyway – the fridge will stop its buzz,
the boiler its spontaneous combusting – till there is nothing
but a mustiness of gas. The dust will coil and thicken
ultimately to hawsers around pipes and wires;
ever more elaborate spiders’ webs will sheet off the corners;
rust stains and mildew and rot will spread chromatically
below the holes in the roof, radiate from the radiators;
eventually mosses and small grasses and even admirable
wild flowers, hell, an elder or buddleia, push their heads
through the chinks between the boards; a useless volume of books –
who could ever read that many – will keep the moths entertained,
generations of industrious woodlice and silverfish
will leave their corpses on the clarty work surfaces,
and a pigeon or two will hook its feet over the tarnished sink
and brood vacantly over its queenly pink toes.
Acknowledgements and thanks
Grateful acknowledgemen
t is made to the editors of the following publications, where some of these poems first appeared: Australian Book Review, La Errante, Grand Street, Granta (100), Heat, London Review of Books, The Nation, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, 1914: Poetry Remembers, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, Poetry Review, Raritan Review, The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement.
For a conversation he won’t remember, Jeremy Harding. For the kind use of her name on top of the piece she commissioned, Lindsay Garbutt. For encouragement, support, curiosity, also forbearance, sometimes over many years: Barbara Hoffmeister, Jonathan Galassi, Matthew Hollis, Alan Jenkins, Larry Joseph, Ange Mlinko, André Naffis-Sahely, Robin Robertson, Frederick Seidel, Don Share, Julian Stannard, George Szirtes, Rosanna Warren.
About the Author
Michael Hofmann was born in Germany, grew up in England, and teaches at the University of Florida. He has published four volumes of poems and a Selected Poems (2008). He is known for translations of Döblin, Kafka, Fallada, Benn and Joseph Roth. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001) and Where Have You Been? (2014). Hofmann edited The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems, and has made personal selections from the work of Robert Lowell and John Berryman.
By the Same Author
poetry
NIGHTS IN THE IRON HOTEL
ACRIMONY
CORONA, CORONA
APPROXIMATELY NOWHERE
SELECTED POEMS
prose
BEHIND THE LINES: Pieces on Writing and Pictures
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Selected Essays
as translator
ASHES FOR BREAKFAST: Selected Poems (Durs Grünbein)
ANGINA DAYS: Selected Poems (Günter Eich)
IMPROMPTUS: Selected Poems (Gottfried Benn)
as editor
AFTER OVID: New Metamorphoses (with James Lasdun)
ROBERT LOWELL: Selected Poems
JOHN BERRYMAN: Selected Poems
THE FABER BOOK OF 20TH-CENTURY GERMAN POEMS
THE VOYAGE THAT NEVER ENDS:
Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters by Malcolm Lowry
W. S. GRAHAM: Selected Poems
about Michael Hofmann
THE PALM BEACH EFFECT: Reflections on Michael Hofmann edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard
Copyright
First published in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Michael Hofmann, 2018
The right of Michael Hofmann to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34231–0
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