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She read his final letter on the radio.
She sang his favorite lullabies once on TV.
And once she even acted in a movie, in tears
from the bright lights. Yes, the memory still moves her.
Yes, just a little tired now. Yes, it will pass.
You may get up. Thank her. Say goodbye. Leave,
passing by the new arrivals in the hall.
Innocence
Conceived on a mattress made of human hair.
Gerda. Erika. Maybe Margarete.
She doesn’t know, no, not a thing about it.
This kind of knowledge isn’t suited
to being passed on or absorbed.
The Greek Furies were too righteous.
Their birdy excess would rub us the wrong way.
Irma. Brigitte. Maybe Frederika.
She’s twenty-two, perhaps a little older.
She knows the three languages that all travelers need.
The company she works for plans to export
the finest mattresses, synthetic fiber only.
Trade brings nations closer.
Berta. Ulrike. Maybe Hildegard.
Not beautiful perhaps, but tall and slim.
Cheeks, neck, breasts, thighs, belly
in full bloom now, shiny and new.
Blissfully barefoot on Europe’s beaches,
she unbraids her bright hair, right down to her knees.
My advice: don’t cut it (her hairdresser says);
once you have, it’ll never grow back so thick.
Trust me.
It’s been proved
tausend- und tausendmal.
Vietnam
“Woman, what’s your name?” “I don’t know.”
“How old are you? Where are you from?” “I don’t know.”
“Why did you dig that burrow?” “I don’t know.”
“How long have you been hiding?” “I don’t know.”
“Why did you bite my finger?” “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you know that we won’t hurt you?” “I don’t know.”
“Whose side are you on?” “I don’t know.”
“This is war, you’ve got to choose.” “I don’t know.”
“Does your village still exist?” “I don’t know.”
“Are those your children?” “Yes.”
Written in a Hotel
Kyoto is fortunate,
fortunate and full of palaces,
winged roofs,
stairs like musical scales.
Aged but flirtatious,
stony but alive,
wooden,
but growing from sky to earth,
Kyoto is a city
whose beauty moves you to tears.
I mean the real tears
of a certain gentleman,
a connoisseur, lover of antiquities,
who at a key moment,
from behind a green table,
exclaimed that after all
there are so many inferior cities
and burst out sobbing
in his seat.
That’s how Kyoto, far lovelier
than Hiroshima, was saved.
But this is ancient history.
I can’t dwell on it forever
or keep asking endlessly,
what’s next, what’s next.
Day to day I trust in permanence,
in history’s prospects.
I can’t gnaw apples
in a constant state of terror.
Now and then I hear about some Prometheus
wearing his fire helmet,
enjoying his grandkids.
While writing these lines
I wonder
what in them will come to sound
ridiculous and when.
Fear strikes me
only at times.
On the road.
In a strange city.
With garden-variety brick walls,
a tower, old and ordinary,
stucco peeling under slapdash moldings,
cracker-box housing projects,
nothing,
a helpless little tree.
What would he do here,
that tenderhearted gentleman,
the connoisseur, lover of antiquities.
Plaster god, have mercy on him.
Heave a sigh, oh classic,
from the depths of your mass-produced bust.
Only now and then,
in a city, one of many.
In a hotel room
overlooking the gutter
with a cat howling like a baby
under the stars.
In a city with lots of people,
many more than you’ll find painted
on jugs, cups, saucers, and silk screens.
In a city about which I know
this one thing:
it’s not Kyoto,
not Kyoto for sure.
A Film from the Sixties
This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.
He first took the shape of a small boy.
The boy would lean his head on his aunt’s knees.
Where is that boy. Where are those knees.
The little boy got big. Those were the days.
These mirrors are cruel and smooth as asphalt.
Yesterday he ran over a cat. Yes, not a bad idea.
The cat was saved from this age’s hell.
A girl in a car checked him out.
No, her knees weren’t what he’s looking for.
Anyway he just wants to lie in the sand and breathe.
He has nothing in common with the world.
He feels like a handle broken off a jug,
but the jug doesn’t know it’s broken and keeps going to the well.
It’s amazing. Someone’s still willing to work.
The house gets built. The doorknob has been carved.
The tree is grafted. The circus will go on.
The whole won’t go to pieces, although it’s made of them.
Thick and heavy as glue sunt lacrimae rerum.
But all that’s only background, incidental.
Within him, there’s awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy.
God of humor, do something about him, OK?
God of humor, do something about him today.
Report from the Hospital
We used matches to draw lots: who would visit him.
And I lost. I got up from our table.
Visiting hours were just about to start.
When I said hello he didn’t say a word.
I tried to take his hand—he pulled it back
like a hungry dog that won’t give up his bone.
He seemed embarrassed about dying.
What do you say to someone like that?
Our eyes never met, like in a faked photograph.
He didn’t care if I stayed or left.
He didn’t ask about anyone from our table.
Not you, Barry. Or you, Larry. Or you, Harry.
My head started aching. Who’s dying on whom?
I went on about modern medicine and the three violets in a jar.
I talked about the sun and faded out.
It’s a good thing they have stairs to run down.
It’s a good thing they have gates to let you out.
It’s a good thing you’re all waiting at our table.
The hospital smell makes me sick.
Returning Birds
This spring the birds came back again too early.
Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err, too.
It gathers wool, it dozes off—and down they fall
into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death
that doesn’t suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws,
&nb
sp; their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing,
the heart’s sensible sluice, the entrails’ maze,
the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in stunning enfilades,
feathers deserving their own wing in any crafts museum,
the Benedictine patience of the beak.
This is not a dirge—no, it’s only indignation.
An angel made of earthbound protein,
a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,
singular in air, without number in the hand,
its tissues tied into a common knot
of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama
unfolding to the wings’ applause,
falls down and lies beside a stone,
which in its own archaic, simpleminded way
sees life as a chain of failed attempts.
Thomas Mann
Dear mermaids, it was bound to happen.
Beloved fauns and honorable angels,
evolution has emphatically cast you out.
Not that it lacks imagination, but
you with your Devonian tail fins and alluvial breasts,
your fingered hands and cloven feet,
your arms alongside, not instead of, wings,
your, heaven help us, diphyletic skeletons,
your ill-timed tails, horns sprouted out of spite,
illegitimate beaks, this morphogenetic potpourri, those
finned or furry frills and furbelows, the couplets
pairing human/heron with such cunning
that their offspring knows all, is immortal, and can fly,
you must admit that it would be a nasty joke,
excessive, everlasting, and no end of bother,
one that mother nature wouldn’t like and won’t allow.
And after all she does permit a fish to fly,
deft and defiant. Each such ascent
consoles our rule-bound world, reprieves it
from necessity’s confines—more
than enough for the world to be a world.
And after all she does permit us baroque gems
like this: a platypus that feeds its chicks on milk.
She might have said no—and which of us would know
that we’d been robbed?
But the best is that
she somehow missed the moment when a mammal turned up
with its hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen.
Tarsier
I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son,
the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,
a tiny creature, made up of two pupils
and whatever simply could not be left out;
miraculously saved from further alterations—
since I’m no one’s idea of a treat,
my coat’s too small for a fur collar,
my glands provide no bliss,
and concerts go on without my gut—
I, a tarsier,
sit living on a human fingertip.
Good morning, lord and master,
what will you give me
for not taking anything from me?
How will you reward me for your own magnanimity?
What price will you set on my priceless head
for the poses I strike to make you smile?
My good lord is gracious,
my good lord is kind.
Who else could bear such witness if there were
no creatures unworthy of death?
You yourselves, perhaps?
But what you’ve come to know about yourselves
will serve for a sleepless night from star to star.
And only we few who remain unstripped of fur,
untorn from bone, unplucked of soaring feathers,
esteemed in all our quills, scales, tusks, and horns,
and in whatever else that ingenious protein
has seen fit to clothe us with,
we, my lord, are your dream,
which finds you innocent for now.
I am a tarsier—the father and grandfather of tarsiers—
a tiny creature, nearly half of something,
yet nonetheless a whole no less than others,
so light that twigs spring up beneath my weight
and might have lifted me to heaven long ago
if I hadn’t had to fall
time and again
like a stone lifted from hearts
grown oh so sentimental:
I, a tarsier,
know well how essential it is to be a tarsier.
To My Heart, on Sunday
Thank you, my heart:
you don’t dawdle, you keep going
with no flattery or reward,
just from inborn diligence.
You get seventy credits a minute.
Each of your systoles
shoves a little boat
to open sea
to sail around the world.
Thank you, my heart:
time after time
you pluck me, separate even in sleep,
out of the whole.
You make sure I don’t dream my dreams
up to that final flight,
no wings required.
Thank you, my heart:
I woke up again
and even though it’s Sunday,
the day of rest,
the usual preholiday rush
continues underneath my ribs.
The Acrobat
From trapeze to
to trapeze, in the hush that
that follows the drum roll’s sudden pause, through
through the startled air, more swiftly than
than his body’s weight, which once again
again is late for its own fall.
Solo. Or even less than solo,
less, because he’s crippled, missing
missing wings, missing them so much