Early May Stanzas
A May wood. The invisible removal load,
my whole life, like a haunting here. Birds in song.
In the silent pools, midge larvae—
their dancing furious question marks.
I escape to the same places, and the same words.
Cool sea breeze. And the ice-dragon licks the back
of my neck while sunlight blazes.
The load is burning with chilly flames.
Berceuse
I am a mummy at rest in the blue coffin of the forests, in the perpetual roar of engines and rubber and asphalt.
What happened during the day sinks, the homework is heavier than life.
The wheelbarrow rolled forward on its single wheel and I myself traveled on my spinning psyche, but now my thoughts have stopped spinning and the wheelbarrow has grown wings.
At long last, when space is black, a plane will come. The passengers will see the cities beneath them glittering like the gold of the Goths.
Streets in Shanghai
1
The white butterfly in the park is read by many.
I love that cabbage-white as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!
At dawn the crowds get our silent planet going with their running.
The park fills with people. To each one there are eight faces polished like jade, for every situation, for the avoidance of mistakes.
To each one, also, the invisible face that mirrors “something one doesn’t talk about.”
Something that turns up in tired moments and is acrid like a mouthful of adder-brandy with its lingering scaly aftertaste.
The carp in the pond move perpetually, they swim while they sleep, they are models for the faithful: always in motion.
2
It’s midday. The washing flutters in the grey sea-wind high above the cyclists
who come in dense shoals. Mind the labyrinths to left and right!
I’m surrounded by written signs I can’t interpret, I’m totally illiterate.
But I’ve paid what I should and have receipts for everything.
I’ve accumulated so many illegible receipts.
I’m an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can’t fall to the earth.
And a puff of air from the sea makes all those receipts rustle.
3
At dawn the crowds get our silent planet going with their tramping.
We are all aboard the street. It is packed like the deck of a ferry.
Where are we going? Are there enough teacups? We can count ourselves lucky getting aboard this street!
It’s a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.
Behind each one of us hovers a cross that wants to catch up with us, overtake us, unite with us.
Something that wants to creep up behind us and cover our eyes and whisper, “Guess who!”
We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from wounds we don’t know about.
Deep in Europe
I a dark hull floating between two lock gates
rest in the hotel bed while the city around me wakens.
The silent clamor and the grey light stream in
and raise me slowly to the next level: the morning.
Overheard horizon. They want to say something, the dead.
They smoke but don’t eat, they don’t breathe but still have their voices.
I’ll be hurrying through the streets like one of them.
The blackened cathedral, heavy as a moon, causes ebb and flow.
Leaflet
The silent rage scribbles on the wall inward.
Fruit trees in blossom, the cuckoo calls.
It’s spring’s narcosis. But the silent rage
paints its slogans backward in the garages.
We see all and nothing, but straight as periscopes
wielded by the underground’s shy crew.
It’s the war of the minutes. The blazing sun
stands above the hospital, suffering’s parking place.
We living nails hammered down in society!
One day we shall loosen from everything.
We shall feel death’s air under our wings
and become milder and wilder than we ever were.
The Indoors Is Endless
It’s spring 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death mask and sails off.
The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northward.
Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.
The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.
Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.
Privy barrels in sedan chairs like pashas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.
The cobblestones make them stagger
mam’selles loafers gentlemen.
Implacably still, the signboard
with the smoking blackamoor.
So many islands, so much rowing
with invisible oars against the current!
The channels open up: April May
and sweet honey-dribbling June.
The heat reaches islands far out.
The village doors are open, except one.
The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.
The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.
It happened like this, or almost.
It is an obscure family tale
about Erik, broken down by a curse
disabled by a bullet through the soul.
He went to town, met an enemy
and sailed home sick and grey.
Keeps to his bed all summer.
The tools on the wall are in mourning.
He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter
of night moths, his moonlight comrades.
His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain
against the ironbound tomorrow.
And the God of the depths cries out of the depths,
“Deliver me! Deliver yourself!”
All the surface action turns inward.
He’s taken apart, put together.
The wind rises and the wild rosebushes
catch on the fleeing light.
The future opens, he looks into
the self-rotating kaleidoscope
sees indistinct fluttering faces
family faces not yet born.
By mistake his gaze strikes me
as I walk around in Washington
among grandiose houses where only
every second column bears weight.
White buildings in crematorium style
where the dream of the poor turns to ash.
The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.
Vermeer
No protected world . . . Just behind the wall the noise begins,
the inn
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din of bells
and the insane brother-in-law, the death-bringer we all must tremble for.
The big explosion and the tramp of rescue arriving late,
the boats preening themselves on the straits, the money creeping down in the wrong man’s pocket
demands stacked on demands
gaping red flowerheads sweating premonitions of war.
And through the wall into the clear studio
into the second that’s allowed to live for centuries.
Pictures that call themselves The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter—
she’s in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind is a wrinkled map of Terra Incognita.
Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed to the chairs.
The gold studs flew in wi
th incredible speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been other than stillness.
Ears sing, from depth or height.
It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall.
It makes each fact float
and steadies the brush.
It hurts to go through walls, it makes you ill
but is necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself—
we know or we don’t know but it’s true for us all
except for small children. No walls for them.
The clear sky has leaned against the wall.
It’s like a prayer to the emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
“I am not empty, I am open.”
Romanesque Arches
Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”
Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,
and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.
Epigram
The buildings of capital, the hives of the killer bees, honey for the few.
He served there. But in a dark tunnel he unfolded his wings
and flew when no one was looking. He had to live his life again.
Female Portrait, 19th Century
Her voice is stifled in the clothing. Her eyes
follow the gladiator. Then she herself is
in the arena. Is she free? A gilt frame
strangles the picture.
Medieval Motif
Beneath our spellbinding play of faces there waits
inevitably the skull, the poker face. While
the sun’s unhurriedly rolling past in the sky.
And the chess continues.
A barber-scissor-like clipping sound from the copse.
The sun’s unhurriedly rolling past in the sky.
The game of chess comes to a standstill, in a draw.
In the rainbow’s silence.
Air Mail
On the hunt for a mailbox
I took the letter through the city.
In the big forest of stone and concrete
the straying butterfly flickered.
The flying-carpet of the stamp
the staggering lines of the address
plus my own sealed truth
soaring now over the ocean.
The Atlantic’s creeping silver.
The cloud banks. The fishing boat
like a spat-out olive-stone.
And the pale scars of the wakes.
Down here work goes slowly.
I ogle the clock often.
The tree-shadows are black ciphers
in the greedy silence.
The truth’s there, on the ground
but no one dares to take it.
The truth’s there, on the street.
No one makes it his own.
Madrigal
I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living change places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.
Golden Wasp
The blindworm that legless lizard flows along the porch step
calm and majestic as an anaconda, only the size is different.
The sky is covered with clouds but the sun pushes through. Such is the day.
This morning the woman I love drove away the evil spirits.
As when you open the door of a dark shed somewhere in the south
and the light pours in
and the cockroaches scurry into the corners and up the walls
and are gone—you saw them and you didn’t see them—
so her nakedness made the demons run.
As if they never existed.
But they’ll come back.
With a thousand hands crossing the lines in the old-fashioned telephone exchange of the nerves.
It’s the fifth of July. The lupines are stretching up as if they wanted to catch sight of the sea.
We’re in the church of keeping-silence, of piety according to no letter.
As if they didn’t exist, the implacable faces of the patriarchs
and the misspelling of God’s name in stone.
I saw a true-to-the-letter tv preacher who’d piled up money.
But he was weak now and needed the support of a bodyguard,
who was a well-tailored young man with a smile tight as a muzzle.
A smile stifling a scream.
The scream of a child left alone in a hospital bed when the parents leave.
The divine brushes against a human being and lights a flame
but then draws back.
Why?
The flame attracts the shadows, they fly rustling in and join the flame,
which rises and blackens. And the smoke spreads out black and strangling.
At last only the black smoke, at last only the pious executioner.
The pious executioner leans forward
over the market square and the crowd that make a grainy mirror
in which he can see himself.
The greatest fanatic is the greatest doubter. Without knowing it.
He is a pact between two
where the one is a hundred percent visible and the other invisible.
How I hate that expression “a hundred percent.”
Those who can never exist anywhere except on their façades
those who are never absentminded
those who never open the wrong door and catch a glimpse of the Unidentified One.
Walk past them!
It’s the fifth of July. The sky is covered with clouds but the sun pushes through.
The blindworm flows along the porch step, calm and majestic as an anaconda.
The blindworm as if there were no bureaucracy.
The golden wasp as if there were no idolatry.
The lupines as if there were no “hundred percent.”
I know the depth where one is both prisoner and ruler, like Persephone.
I often lay in the stiff grass down there
and watched the earth arch over me.
The vault of the earth.
Often—that was half of my life.
But today my gaze has left me.
My blindness has gone away.
The dark bat has left my face and is scissoring around in summer’s bright space.
THE SAD GONDOLA
SORGEGONDOLEN
1996
Note: From 19 November 1882 until 13 January 1883, Franz Liszt stayed with his daughter Cosima and her husband, Richard Wagner, at the Palazzo Vendramin, on the Grand Canal in Venice. Inspired by the sight of funeral gondolas, and also “under a premonition,” Liszt wrote the two piano pieces La lugubre gondola I and II. Wagner died on 13 February 1883.
April and Silence
Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.
The only thing that shines
is yellow flowers.
I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.
The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.
National Insecurity
The Undersecretary leans forward and draws an X
and her eardrops dangle like swords of Damocles.
As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground
so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother turtle flees flying under the water.
A Page of the Nightbook
I stepped ashore one May night
in the cool moonshine
where grass and flowers were grey
but the scent green.
I glided up the slope
in the color-blind night
while white stones
signaled to the moon.
A period of time
a few minutes long
fifty-eight years wide.
And behind me
beyond the lead-shimmering waters
was the other shore
and those who ruled.
People with a future
instead of a face.
The Sad Gondola
1
Two old men, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal
together with the restless woman who married King Midas,
the man who transforms everything he touches into Wagner.
The green chill of the sea forces its way up through the palace floors.
Wagner is marked, the well-known Mr. Punch profile is wearier than before
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Page 12