Allegorien Deutschlands

HERZ

I went into the Laden for cigarettes. The man behind the counter was Ottoman. Turkish, or Greek, or Serbian. There was a small television suspended over the counter with a convex screen. It was in a foreign language but it sounded like sports commentary. I showed the man where the cigarettes were and he put them on the counter. The hair on his arm was wild and grey. There was a pale reflection of it in the glass of the cabinet behind him. When I had given him the money he sat back down, and his eyes returned to the television. I took the cigarettes, went a little way down the road and found a wall to sit on. It had rained the day before. There were small, muddy patches of water in the road, into which yellow leaves had fallen. They had started to evaporate, drawing back into themselves. Former domains. Alte Räume. “Help Me Rhonda” was playing in a Wirtshaus down the street. I could hear it coming from the doorway. The smoke and the road and the buildings opposite were blue. There was a sparrow under the bench of the bus shelter. I looked at it and looked at my hands. They were pale and blue. I could see the veins and feel the pulse in my wrist, and then I began to feel it in my neck and in my head, and I took another drag of the cigarette, and felt worse. Ash dropped into my lap. My heart felt tight, my breathing tight. I closed my eyes and exhaled and when I opened them I felt worse, dizzy. I put the cigarette down on the wall next to me, and then I leant down to the wall and put my head in my arm and it spun. When I sat back up I had to cough and I could feel that my eyes were red and moist from coughing. An old woman walked past and looked mournful watching me cough, and I began to laugh, coughing, seeing myself as she saw me. I wiped my nose. I'll eat a meal somewhere, I thought. I watched a plane go through the branches of the trees planted along the road.

HIRN

My flight came in at dawn. We were delayed landing and made another loop to the southwest, over the city. The earth rose in the window as the plane banked. The river was dark green and calm, yellow streetlights strung along the Fahrbahn on the north shore. I saw a motorboat pass under the old bridge, the water swelling in the shadow of the bridge at its tail. The lights were still on everywhere, in the windows of the Opernturm and the Post Tower and far out into the suburbs. Traffic seemed to drift down the roads like particles in a stream. We made our slow circuit, the city turning beneath us. I took my flask from the back of the seat and drank a little from it, then rubbed my legs where they ached from sitting. I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. Music came over the speakers and they thanked us for having flown with them. I opened my eyes and looked out the window and into the back of the seat. I took out the flask for another drink, which made my head hot, and I could tell I had had enough. I started to feel it in my stomach. The sun was coming up, and as we came back around to the north it lit up hundreds of windows along the lateral streets. It was as if fires had sprung up inside all the houses and offices. I let my eyes relax. There were flowers moving in the wind. The flowers moved as the light moved, and as the plane moved, and as the earth moved. I looked back down into the water and there were lights there too. I felt her body close to mine, I could smell her in my clothes. I leant into the seat in front and put my hand to my eyes, and wiped my eyes and wiped my hand on my knee. I undid my seatbelt and tried to get up, but the stewardess got me back down into my seat. I looked back out. The fire had gone out of the windows. I saw a train coming down through the Bahnhof to its terminus.

STIMME

You must write as a conductor would write, he said, looking around at us. You must be a conduit as he is a conduit. In the moment before you begin to write, your meaning is there, in potentia. It is silent. It is silent until you move yourself into it. Your faculties lie dormant in their quarters. They are subject to you. They are your instruments. Raise the baton : summon up what you have to summon. It is a movement so slight, those outside may not perceive it. A movement like waking. A quiet movement, a kind of resignation. To those born to it, a instant comes in which the voices they hear – the voices in the world around them – grow dull, blend together, draw out, disfigure. The words lose their sense ; the voices themselves fall into a certain harmony. For the most part, we are too agitated to hear this music. Il faut que nous nous ralentissons. All understanding is an understanding of cadence. Call up your voices, call up your familiar spirits, mes enfants! Attend to them well. Observe their sequence. Your thoughts must be like chains. For all the esteem you might hold me in, I should not be your model in this ; I am only a jester at the door. Turn to our kings. Unsere Volksdichter. Take down one of their archetypes. The hopeless lover, for example. Your knight aspirant cries „Ich bin verloren!“ and weeps into his hands? So, he is your instrument. We should hear a song die in his throat.

He put his hands together and looked at the door.

In any case, he said, you have listened to a great deal of my nonsense today. Thank you. Next week we will be back to our usual room. As a point of notice, I will be holding an unscheduled seminar in a half an hour's time at the estimable Frau Göldner's public house. Any who wish to join me are welcome and will find me in a buying mood.

There was snow on the ground outside. He gave me a cigarette and clapped me on the back.

MUTTERSCHOSS

It was summer in Bayern. That day we went up the valley, through the woods and further on to where there were stones down by the river. We swam over to the far bank and we could see upstream some children fishing. Later, back at the chalet, we played cards and ate potato dumplings and Mama let me have some of her wine. Helene and I went to sleep in the little room. Papa came in and woke us up and said there were shooting stars. We got in our coats and went out. I could only see the shapes of the trees and I felt like I was in water. We came to the field on the hillside. Papa shouted and fell down and rolled over, I could see him roll over in the grass. He said „Wer hilft mir auf die Beine?“ and laughed again. He pulled Helene down and pulled me down and we rolled down the hill. We lay in the grass. Mama came and sat next to me and did up my coat button by button. She pointed to a band of lighter sky and said that it was die Milchstraße, that it was thousands and thousands of stars so far and so many that they were like dust. Helene saw a star fall across the sky but I didn't see it. We lay very still and watched the sky for a long time. A line cut across the darkness like a white pencil mark, silently, and disappeared. It was faint and I didn't know if it was a shooting star but Papa said it was. Then I listened to the crickets, and I knew they were around us in the grass, but I thought that the stars were changing and the noise of the crickets coming from the sky. I saw one jump across the sky, fainter this time, red. I started to fall asleep and my hair was wet. Mama helped me up and kissed me on the head. We walked back to the house a different way, Papa lifted Helene and me over a stile. Mama sang us a song on the path back to the house. There was a light on in the window.

GLIED

From the front door and through the corridor and the kitchen and into and out of the dining room, and into the outhouse and into the yard and to the wall of the barn, I ran, my dress pulling at the buttons, the skirt flying up and brushing the walls and brushing the water from the bush before the door. Mama's shouts came from every part of the house and when I came out of the door and into the yard a damp wind came through the Hoftor and I ran in circles with my arms like wings, feeling the wind push me and the stones shift under my feet. Low clouds passing overhead in a shoal. I felt tired against the barn wall. The dandelions at my feet went pale and my breath came slower. I had dreamed that I walked through a field at night and there were birds passing over and a windmill at the hillcrest where the birds had landed and that an auguste clown had a fire in a barrel there, which we rolled down the hillside and into the river, and that the birds—I knew they were geese when I woke—had waddled down and swum over the water into the fire, into the fire until we saw them no more. I picked the flowers at my feet and walked the long grey wall down to the stable, fighting my hair down out of my face, getting burrs from the grasses in my socks. There were the empty stalls. All away at the shows this week. Two summers ago I saw the dapple stallion mount and I felt what made my stomach pinch and after dinner I was sick. I was such a baby then that am eleven now and grown. My blood is a secret, Mama says. When the mares come from the field in winter they wet their hay in steaming falls and their water is golden and their Kacken is golden for all they consume is gold of grass and gold of grain and gold of apples and gold of oats. I am golden. Vater burns his hand and he says „So ne Scheiße!“ and when the stallion walks it moves between the legs.

PANTOMIME

I did my medical Praxis in West Berlin. Johns Hopkins had an exchange with the Freie Universität at the time. There was a bookshop that was also a coffeeshop where I spent my morning hours after the early early shift and it faced our side of the wall. I had started going there with friends, every so often, but soon found I was in there alone every day of the week. It was close and the coffee was not so terrible as elsewhere, and the girls that worked there were neither terrible. It was a good place to be half asleep. I used to look at the graffiti and watch the traffic out of the big windows at the front of shop. One morning there was a performer under the wall, face painted white, gloves, black slouch hat, kind of a clown. A mime, I guess. He was making some gestures in the direction of the East. He would run planes in front of his face with his outstretched hand and crash them into the concrete and have them fall to the earth and mime the smoke. He was close enough I could see his makeup. He had a frown and sad lips painted on but he was grinning like crazy as he crashed planes into the wall, like crazy, and when he grinned it broke up the design of the lips. White teeth, red gums. Then he changed hats and started goosestepping up and down, stopping each time and turning about on his heel and grabbing himself. Then he was running into the wall and falling back from it exaggeratedly. That went on for some time. There was a huge design of an eagle stencilled above him on the face of the concrete. It was a Reichsadler, smoking a snub cigar, with dice held in one claw and the old Schwarz-Weiß-Rot crumpled in the other, the eyes crazed and blue. I watched the performer moving silently underneath it for ten minutes or so until the sun came across the windowpane and my head began to hurt in its heat. I moved back into the shop and took a booth. I ate a pastry and drank coffee, looking over the newspaper. When I left the shop there were three police around him and he was no longer grinning. He was screaming what I'm sure were oaths in German as the officers lifted his kicking legs from the scrub and refuse and soil he had been sitting in. His white, limp member was hanging from the fly of his black pantaloons. He cried out raucously, each cry falling in thick steam onto the air, like puffs of ordinance from a cannonmouth.

ÜBERICH

An angel spoke in the morning dark. It saw that we, living and dying, felt the vastness about us ; that we reached back into our past and feel a great nothing, an unending Zeitraum ; that we felt our world had had no genesis and would have no end. Seeing us so, the angel said : “My children, it is not an hour since the world began.” –I look through our great leatherbound family album with my grandfather. He in the green armchair, I at his shoulder angling a lamp over the yellowed pages. He opens it at the back. My uncle. My cousins. My mother dancing. My mother receiving her degree. My father, the suitor, disfigured by frame-spectacles and an untamed mustache. My grandmother at the stove wearing my grandfather's hat and sticking out her tongue. The old house in Bremen. My uncle at the age of ten, wearing running shorts and a vest. A photograph of boys I do not recognise. A photograph of a girl I do not recognise. The photographs are monochrome now. My grandfather in uniform. My grandmother, young, pretty, in a spotted dress beneath the sign of a restaurant. My grandfather with another man playing cards, former in shirtsleeves smoking a cigar. An old woman in an extensive swimsuit on a beach. My grandfather says it is his mother, on the shore at Sylt. There are many photographs now and I do not recognise the faces. They become more formal. There are heavy backdrops and curtains, and the clothes slowly begin to age. My grandfather turns the pages slowly. I see features of my mother and of my grandfather and my grandmother here and there, but distorted, tempered, stretched over unfamiliar frames. The pictures become strange to me. The album is open on a page dominated by a large portrait. It is of a man in a dark uniform, a man in none of the other photographs. The man's eyes are large and piscene, his neck thick and bullish. A face set as if in the effort of command. I recognise the uniform, and the white insignia on the collar. My grandfather is silent. He smooths the page with his left hand, and I hear his breathing shorten. He draws a strand of hair away from his forehead. After a short interval, he gets up and replaces the album on the shelf. I stay by the chair. He comes back to it and sits and for an instant we both stare ahead at the carpet. “My father,” he says.

382

382

I worked an early shift on the last day

That year, and in the afternoon went back

To drop the keys and to collect my stuff.

It was four o'clock and dark already.

A wind was blowing down out of the woods,

The trees at back leant over the houses.

Sparks from a chimney wobbled up into

The bare branches, and the wind put them out.

She stood silently in the kitchen as

I went from room to room and picked things up,

And when I left, kissed my cheek and did not

Look at me for more than a brief moment.

I ate breakfast food in a service station,

Watching families eating breakfast food,

Listening to the lull of voices. There

Was a choir singing at the front :

The automatic doors opened and shut,

And the singing floated in snatches through,

And when the doors were closed persisted as

A gentle movement at the outer ear.

As I drove I saw a car broken down

At the hard shoulder, and a pale face

Over the hood, and another standing

Smoking a cigarette in the headlights.

My parents were asleep when I arrived,

And I soon went to bed. I dreamt I was

In the tropics, and that light was rippling

Over the hull of my boat. There was music

Playing down the shore, and the sand was hot.

An old woman sat before her cabana

Had a magnolia bloom in her lap,

And held a glass of water up to me,

And called to me, smiling, and the sunlight

Came through the glass. I turned back to the sea.

My father woke me, shaking my shoulder,

Whispering, telling me Merry Christmas.

381

381

There was a light behind in the window

And candles on all the tables, last time

Jansen was here. It was after closing

And he played for half an hour just to me

And Rosalie and James. Wearing a tie,

A dickey, and black velvet waistcoat

That I had only seen him in at wakes.

December. He played “April in Paris”,

“Blue in Green”, “In a Sentimental Mood”

And “Stella by Starlight”, and then he played

For a long time in a mode I didn't know,

An extemporisation, chords of which

Troubled me for hours after, no part

Of which I can clearly remember, but which

Made Rosalie cry a little, quietly,

As she moved back and forth behind the bar.

I remember though that it touched upon

A thought I had had just around that time

Of picking up and leaving town, of going

South into the light and the storms and heat,

Finding a quiet locale to blanch myself.

Something latin in it, like a song out

Of the Dia de Muertos. Death was there

Already, in his figure, in the gaze

He sent over the bar as he performed.

When he had done he sat there at the keys

For some time. I brought him a double scotch,

Which he took. It moved in his eyes. He rose

And kissed James and I, and kissed Rosalie

Tenderly on the hand, and straightening,

Adjusted his white shirt and his bowtie.

He went down in the street and found a car.

An hour later a gust of drizzling wind

Whipped the threshold and I shut the place up,

And drove Rosalie halfway back up the

Grand Reservoir to where her father lived.

380

380

Rilke : von DIE FRÜHEN GEDICHTE

These are the hours I find myself.

The pasture wells darkly in the wind :

The birchbark shimmers

As evening comes on.

Where the birches hang fire, I augment.

I would bloom, throw our my branches,

Draw all about into my bacchanal—

Into a singular harmony.

379

379

Rilke : LIEBEN, XIII

Already the day was dying.

The woods were otherworldly.

Bullocks stood among blooming cyclamen,

Under ranks of tall dark firs

That a fragrant wind blew.

You were dozing, tired from the road.

I spoke your name, softly :

From your white heartseed

A force of ecstasy broke, and a firelily rose.

The evening was red,

And your mouth so red,

And so warm, where my lips found it,

The flames passed through us,

And would climb the walls

And bring the house to ashes—

The wood was silent. The day had passed.

A ghost had risen to us,

Had purged the daylight and our want.

The great moon alighted on our hilltop.

Our peace stepped to shore

From a white boat.

378

378

Rilke : VOLKSWEISE

They move me so,

Bohemian folksongs!

They steal quietly into the heart,

They make it heavy.

A child sings softly,

Weeding the potato patch,

Song that will return to you

In later dreams.

Should you be driven far over land,

It will remain to you.

377

377

Rilke : IM ALTEN HAUS

I am in the old house.

All of Prague

Goes out from me in roundelay.

I watch the dusk pass,

Descend.

The hour elapses silently.

The city distorts, dislimns,

As through a glass.

One point is clear :

The cupola tower of St. Nicholas,

A Titan's-helm

In lofty green of verdigris.

Here and there a light bounds,

Prickling through

The turbulence and gloom.

I am in the old house.

A faint “Amen” sounds,

As out of a communicating room.

376

Darling, the night is over

And the lights are closing down.

Orion runs for cover ;

The bear resigns his crown.

We have seen our bodies tremble

In the water of the lake,

Seen our figures disassemble

And the water shake, and shake.

But now the hour elapses,

And our understanding falls out

In silence. The lamp collapses

And draws the curtain down,

And its light goes strangely about.

Shadows move where they are thrown.

375

375

As the salt carries, on the air,

Through the maples and the ragweed,

Up to the window and over the hair

And shoulders, a part of the sea ;

As the sea swells in the maples,

And as the idea of it

Varies in light before the eyes

And the brighter tree branches split ;

As milkblood undulates into the air,

Earthblood runs up into the fire

Of their departing foliage :

So word is carried in its sound.

The maples sea-sea from the ground,

Knowing nothing of their carriage.

374

Silence and snow over the fell.

The heavens throw their blistering circle wide.

No quadrant dims or brightens

Of those that climb the sky. Kein Unterschied.

In the hollow below Mam Tor

The ravaged, bloodied body of an ewe whitens,

And a stark projection drops before

Its erstwhile host. What its now spirit intends

The abandoned will not tell.

It is become a casing, blown out into the wind.

The wool at its back dusts with snow.

Figured there in what weak light the stars send,

We may watch the brow fall,

The musculature subside, the silent overthrow

Of all our charge had been. Germ ; door ;

Carriage ; catalyst ; shell : chains in the stream.

373

O advance me an evening's rest!

He thought, raking back

The thin strands of his dullblonde hair,

Inclined over his soup. Its white steam,

Pluming, bent to him as he exhaled.

“The doctor returns to find his house in order.

All instruments in their set places. Instruction

That leads down practice

Out of abstraction. Behind the house,

In the long darkness, overrun with wildgrasses,

His wooden shed,

The project of a lost summer, subsides gently.

Starlings have built their nest under the eave.”

He thought on his parable ;

Thought, resting the spoon on the tablecloth,

Of the empty house of the stare. Fallow,

That mind's-corner. Fallow,

He asserted. Barren as heaven now may be :

Its starfactories still, its great loud mechanism

Dormant. The blue feather

Floating out upon the flood. Our memory.

The soup was hot and nourishing. He calmed

And thought of his dream,

Of the dark, spare child that had come to him.

Come build in the empty house, he intoned.

He passed an hour at table

And read Corinthians, drowsing over his wine.

372

He stopped where he stood, at the door of the

Sacristy, the roomward side.

The moderate chamber swung under the swinging

Lightbulb that he had lightly brushed as he turned

Doorwise. He clasped broad

Hands and bellowed inwardly that it was a damn,

Damn, damn, damn thirst to be situated so.

What fatherkind was this,

That prickled out galaxies in restless condescent?

That burbled the names all other godmatter took

In his first infant word?

That cupping his hands, and waiting for the water

There to pool, and narrowing them, watching how

The water rose in kind,

Said “hosannah canoe”?

Nothing causelesser could be.

He took the hand down out of

Its blighted circling and saw it.

There were liverspots riding on the front knuckles.

Solar lentigo.

The organ withers before the candleflame,

He thought, and all its boozy descant shudder,

And its semblance in shadow,

The livlier soul, leap, ragged rascal, out of the cage,

And set itself more serious music up. “Hold me now,

While I am lonely.”

His heavy baritone rang against the windowcasing.

371

It occurred to him, gelegentlich, to found

A system, wherein the purer

Outlay of his intuition, all trace and circuit, by

A great draughtman'sboard'sworth of schematic

Would be held,

Where the lightframe might shudder slightly

And the thought consume, at each instant he stir,

Should he wished to impress

With force upon the world his will.

Harrow, he held himself down upon it blindly ;

The ur-world split ; his eyes

Opened and he reentered his devotion.

Hot damages! He rose, head of the clutchymen.

Too great a portion of wine

Was sanctified by me le soir, he thought sillily.

He thought : I have played this role in each

Of four previous lyrics.

I find myself adrift on artistry ; this is good will

To waking but no progress man may name.

I must about my work,

Should only the good author grant fairly me to it.

But he would not, and he found himself perform

The round again and over and further and on,

That no action wear upon him

Without the Kaisergeist address him firmly to it.

Blood lies in the hands of its

Author : no unsanctioned motion on the frame.

370

Woken, he faltered in his own sense,

As at the edge of a fabric,

Plucking at a point to disturb the expanse.

Light poured in the bay, through velour drapes.

The folds converged.

What is woven can be moved, he thought :

Water, though it has no memory ;

Fire, though it joins nothing ;

Light, though we cannot know it rent.

He drew at the filament and beheld the pattern

Ruck, draw out, tatter,

As at the wind's behest.

He felt his ribs ache from the bed and he thought

That, though time and space

Coincide there for a while in stillness, though

His sleep fasten him still to indeterminacy, given

All contingence held behind,

He must allow both soon to reassume, for place

To take him back into its heart, for time to throw

Him out on its measure again.

Beyond the pane, the trees bore up their signals,

Commanding him to motion. He thought:

“Let the trees of the forest sing.”

Raunenden Beschwörer. My arborescent keepers.

He had read of fire and known its codeword. Bitter

Ghostshapes called down to ash.

Fiat lux! He hauled himself up and went to the sink.

369

Michael, child Michael, lightlimbed, darkeyed,

Creature too delicate

To endure us long. Ai! Domine, quis sustinebit?

The will fractures before such things. Holyrood.

Unchained impetus,

The subtler momentum of all such occasions.

A prince out of thy star, he thought. Bare limbs

Wove above the rectory tile,

Slate grey, capillary. Trunks dark with the rain,

Scarred by parasites. No thought worked there

That he were a Polonious.

Institutional men do not imagine themselves so.

Vagaries, rather, of the captive Geist : lion, gone

Against itself to injury,

Set about by its keepers. Bloodmane and furious.

We had been the regents of the earth, he thought.

Power of command.

Peasant's mind shrinks before freedom. Barony.

Find ourselves now in a debased state. Ah,

They would spare a shackled child for us, jadis.

Marrow for the Gespenster.

Cruel thought. He drank from the waterglass,

Rose heavily, gathered up

His coat and briefcase, went slowly to the door.

In the limpid water of the pond, orange lilies,

Winter-flowering, swayed.

Vermiculo. Darkness over the surface of the deep.

368

Life were the ascent toward one ideal,

Sisyphus' toil, broken only

In the stillness of sleep and in those moments,

Before prayer, when the mind should clear

And loose of its association ;

Life were such process, given avowal,

Given clean lacklove, word bound in trust ;

So sober a song come over

All, nothing any longer could be forced.

He thought thus, when the snow fell

And the grounds sterilised,

Walking down from the chapel where branches

Lay strewn across the path,

Costing himself though

Regions of metaphysic, led by his pluming breath

Into clarity.

Each child before their Lord kneel,

Each Lord dance within their orbis. Roundelay!

Element pass into element, cadence into cadence.

Faint music out of adjoining

Quarters. An hour passes so. The snow falls.

He waits, temperately, for the curtain to gather

Into dark heights, for the

Allappertaining to allume, and the action procede

Cathedralwise. Organwhite melody, limpid bloom.

The leaves are votive, where

Remaining : Grün in Rot in Blau in Violett in Gelb.

367

367

“Blick aufs Grüne”.

Such was his mild expression,

Queasy, seagreen. Parlous wager, Padre Piscine!

The need of adequate space for contemplation,

Burdens of praxis,

Of regulation. The white collar that binds us fast.

His entry into the ministry and his first station,

In the Preparatory School.

Moments of burdensome Angst, unter vier Augen.

Of all places for a depilated man to tread—among

Schoolchildren! The heart

Bound fast to the dying animal. Dear, dear mercy.

And there, his moist lip

At the waterglass's rand. What does it afford him,

That quiet “Blick”? It may be in the silence

Of the basement office, through the membrane

Of his broad window,

In the shade of the library, dense intimations pass :

The construction of the exact body of the Lord ;

Pale, diverse quantities ;

Proportions triplicate and further ; great diagrams

In which, perhaps, the particular implies the whole.

Basta, Vater. One lights one's

Flatus with a match and witnesses braver auroras.

One must have a mind of water

To regard the sloping lawns so.

Still, novice, we do. Or the stars recall us suddenly.

362

I take your tickets on the Hudson line.

Out of my infrequent death no flower grow,

Out of my solitude no overt word,

Out of my silence

                              An eloquence,

In which my instrument move, dumb to all

Command, and my life fall upon its cause.

I take your ticket on the Hudson line,

Watching in its each instance

                                                Tired arms,

Infant-eye's dark wellshaft, barren scalp,

Slender girl-thigh, fallen mother breast,

All, move in recognition of some other,

As my instrument move, but not speak of it.

Look to one another, and I watch you

Through our passage, out of my practice

Less love than may come between you all,

Broken as I am, in these sullen clothes,

Hard at my métier, that I stand until

Out of it I fall and my tears fall from me,

And that I love you all where you lay silent.

For that my body cannot communicate,

I chemical am, here,

                                 Waiting to be resigned.

361

Will you bring to me my ceremony

In what clothes I have now demanded it?

Or stay yet on the dull border of things,

White blooms of air erupting from your lips,

In mushroomlike ascent and in the colour

Of the water that, bending, now disperse—

Will you? Are these arctiidae that gather

At your nostrils, or of some manufacture

Else, of which I know no more than horror?

Our centuries have gone above us to

Where coral breaks the starshoals. The bear,

Once my companion, dances for another King.

I wait only for your word or your touch

To tell me that the music has elapsed

And we return into the earth, that all

Our lineage give out and like the lantern

The curtain quieted, dim. I will go down

Gracefully, as if a final sovereignty

Allowed itself to lead me there. My crown

Holds in its band the stars and all my making :

Nephropid, I wake, dressed in my armour.

Let us leave this dream, my last child—

I see where sparks blow out upon the tide.

360

A moment while I determine myself.

Lay us a further note upon the bar.

My hope to you, proud friend, and

What's more of it God give you health,

And Mr. Creeley I withdraw, modest,

A modest word that I had gone too far.

Your muttonchops cannot err in respect

Of my comportment. So, good night to you.

Last of the pier against the dark window :

Last of my breath blown soft into the flask.

We do only what all the others do,

Given half an allowance of our self,

To stir, and may it be beyond it go.

And it is in that spirit that I pass

Among you brave dragoons, that watch

My body so well, that keep me before

The time should come. Watch the fire, sir,

That it not dwindle in your hands! Be sure

I will address you a measure tonight,

If I make it up Cavendish's stairs.

Or halfway only, father bless his might

That takes me damaged up to sleep.

I will not for the station or I will

Not find freedom there. I am thirsty here,

In my lightest clothes, Lord, still.

Now down the pier and we again shall drink.

Keep you Creeley, friend, and may he you keep.

359

How out of its trajectory our project

Grows, now that in our later colouring

We appear, shy, each with a cigarette,

To speak a while and haul our memories in,

Before the Flatiron building's grey façade!

There is no longer the selfconsciousness

That lit your voice for years. What we shared

Then, of blarney and romantic address,

Must have atrophied while you were away.

You are become that sad old master we

Once lampooned, who spoke of his own day

As it should compass every fire, every

Farflung grandeur. I cannot see you through

The smoke : a person stands in place of you.

358

How should I speak naïveté

In sight of you and not go down

Before the wall and all remove

And slightly worsen in the sound,

As you of all things sunder from

Subtle sense, that stability,

In its broken costume, whereof

The deadened colours amplify?

No gesture yet to conjure up—

Haul out, my cherished fires! Befard

The wholesome panther in his first

Uniform, show there loveliness

And the dolent Schande bloom

In great salt washes from his heart.

An instant bears its weight forth : so,

Hold there the sentence in its place.

I am in every ambulance

Carried, that would restore me out.

O now hollow memory, rest ;

Allow the animal its tristesse.

357

It is a pleasure to

Watch you speak in all your,

John Berryman, broken

Finery. Your greybeard,

Apronlike, hangs before :

Dispeptic mouth, sodden

Eyes. Drone of loveliness!

Flowering! Inchoate!

All your words abandon,

And then you read a verse.

Now—great, unbowed, raging,

Bloodlit, masterful—bring

You the music forth in

That toneless voice. In words

Their struggle be the beauty

Born. Woodsmoke curls itself

Slowly out of you. We

Are left, illogical,

At the border of our

Dull sense, feeling for your

Gloomy, substantial hand.

Still, in whatever dark

Comes, there is a notion

Of your tigerlike voice.

356

Oh god and if they cut

Him down it will not be

A dignified approach

To earth, and for the fall

He will only be held

In their arms and come to

The soil dressed in his rags

Of flesh and flogged once more,

And if they think of him

As anything it will

Be as an animal

Had happened to be born,

And, known as nothingness,

Could go back in that void

Content, and without pain.

In any case he will

Not be cut down again.

He will there longer stay

Than life endure, and his

Verve still in him slowly,

And quiet breath run out

As one more slow desire

Lost on the chosen air,

Free now of its master.

355

Yes, as it will support

This strange device, let life

Be said good. Our music

Goes before the barricade :

Lustrous instruments, we!

No lesser god will end

Our lineage, without

That his novitiate

Promote him out of every law.

No more. Of powers he

Has only those adjunct

To his station. Sound now

The horn, we near! Border

All the flowers, for we

Are unbounded, fellows

In this thousanded course.

More force to you, comrade!

Be not as dull as that!

Go out of your birth human,

And follow in the fire

And make good food of it.

This all will not be long,

Rather passing brief, out

Before the air folds in,

Its heaven but an empty shrine.

354

And of those seldom dreams

We spoke, he and I, how

They worked themselves away

Into lonely, darker

Territoires d'outre-mer

Where they not founder, but,

Livid in their corsage,

Press in meaning yet more

Strange, and we founder there.

They are so unlike us :

To our visitation

Improper, dispiriting.

We wake, empty of love,

To roll our bodies on

Into that further sea

Breeding high at the rim

Before the shallow curtain

And the falls. Humble life!

It will not let us know

Ourselves, and keeps our names

From us, and makes us child-

Like, without attention,

While our being complicates.

No words for the Gespenst.

He took his drink again,

And something of it went

From him, burning him off.

353

How low and in the waves

Our outcry sank, I give

To you to reckon, my

Cold brother. What means we

To a protest is blunt

And cannot but injure.

For all surveillance

Dances at our call, now,

Here, in the heart of things.

The high lords of the day

Sound out their reasons and

Make benifice of fraudery.

Stop up us our ears then,

The tune is wearisome.

No drearier shout than

The groan of the allpower

As it sloughs its skin. Hark!

Bring us our darkness in.

352

I had spoken to you

Before the trees came down

And took you into them :

In that fragile bearing

Out a sound remained, that

Came not from our voices.

We had known of bolder

Concepts in ourselves and

Passed between us what else

Might bind them there in place,

And yet, when morning came

You were no longer there

And the withering grass

Spoke only now what it

Could not articulate.

Dogstar, you are the part

Of me suits best. Come back

Inside the circus, let

Not the day chide you with

Its murmurs! I have of

My sleep grown into you.

351

Grackles step through the clover
At the curb, their bodies swaying

In the measure of a small pendulum,
The white cloverflowers brushing

Their dusky sides, wading through
It as workers at the harvest push

Through reams of standing corn,
Labouring at their passage, blank

Eyes trained secretarially on the
Earth before them : sequins of bone.

Their alien colours turn in the light,
Barely visible, a penumbra of blue

And violet and gold, uniform, dull,
Drawing heat from the staid air.

They wear cowls of faint brown.
As at some signal, one breaks from

Its pose and clatters into flight,
Towing its diamondshaped éventail.

350

Les Baigneuses, vers 1900-1905

We will not know you, particolour
Figures, while you hesitate so—

You must force yourselves into
Action, slip entirely into the grey

Water, feeling it yield to you,
Weed and stones blowing about

Your solid calves, moved as if by
A sudden, capricious breeze.

There is a kind of fire in the water,
Bellowing softly of its power—

An old fire, dwindling inside an
Ashen frame of brittle wood—

Liable at any second to collapse
And bear your fair bodies with it

Down the tide. O do not remain
So chastely at the water's edge!

Be taken, in this first way, if you
Would not fall to lesser powers.

Abandon yourselves, Mädchen, to
The cool flame, the desolate wind.

349

White Canoe, 1990-1

It is ivory, or marble—
Some blinding material else,
Some godbone out of the
Shadow of a singularity—

It is fulminant, impossible,
Cleaving the water without
Seeming to touch it,
Its reflection bowed

And no less bright.
In the stern a creamy shape
Lies, indistinct. Feathers?
We cannot say. About it,

Marigold lights play,
As if radiating from
The very water. In the
Surface, the colours of

The forest tremble, fragile
And cool. Frond greens,
Cloudlike blues, dying
Amber, here and there

Orbs of white, as though
Some beneficent spirit
Had hung gig-lamps in the
Trees and sown them with

Fire. Below these veils of
Colour, yet more luminous
Shapes may float, trailing
Captured stars in their gills.

348

Pelican (Stag), 2004

Stride, dunkler Held, through
The cobalt-grey overflow
Of daylight between palms :
No room here for timidity or
Complaint, no room than for
The language of the animal
That dies before you, under
Your lance, in the heat of its
Own blood and breath, while
Its last song elaborates, as it
Waits for you to bring it into
Silence. The palms are bold
In their blazon, spilt yoghurt
A callous white, mustard,
Sickening green. Who dress
The trees in such harsh shade?
May be some lower god,
Some insensate servitor, some
Atom out of farthest stars,
Paint them so, thoughtlessly.
You prowl the jungle floor,
Hauling life in with your eyes,
Throwing your hunger upon it.
Go with the spirit : swift, still.
Follow its darker waters there.

347

Gasthof zur Mundentalsperre, 2002

Fireflies move in the grasses,
Faded, flowerlike points at the
Dark edge of luminescence :

In the empty vault overhead, far
Correspondents mirror them,
Motionless carriers of a brighter

Fire, caught there in the arms of
Nebulæ, sung to sleep above the
Softening world. Our bold pair

Stand in their antique costumes
Next to a white gate of frail
Wood, looking wordlessly out

From behind their generous
Moustaches. There is something
Rueful in their posture, as if

They sought uselessly to warn
Against the first mistake of an
Already doomed hero. We are,

In a certain measure, their last
Charges. The wall beside them
Is coralline, bright with colour.

346

Bewegtes Wasser, 1898

Alberich, what faith is still in you,
Watching those white bodies pass
In the water above you, and their
Carmine hair billowing in great
Clouds? Your eyes are shallow
And grey as musselshells. They
Seem to glow with a dull longing.
Come out from behind the torn
Curtain of your beard, speak to
These bright women, come out
Before their nakedness. Forth
Also, words of awkward devotion!
The maidens rise sleepily out of
The deep water : slender, almost
Brittle legs trailing back into the
Dark, backs arched languidly,
Slight breasts hanging softly on
The tide. Their faces flowerlike
And motionless. Ah, he cannot yet
Speak, for love. The water moves
Gently, a fabric of violet and gold.

345

As he passes one house, he sees
An open door at its side and in
The rigid light the door casts a
Pale, shapeless object, as if in
Passing a stranger had made the
Place an offering, leaving it at
The boundary, before the portal.
The shape stirs, revealing itself
To be a bulldog, an albino, red
Around the eyes and gums, no
Collar about its grizzled neck,
Its ears ragged and scarred. He
Slows and stops, watching the
Animal pace wearily out of the
Light toward him, its tread even
And resigned. A few feet from
Him, it stops and seems to wait
For a command. It is darker in
The moonlight, its fur the blue
Of shallow water. Its eyes bear
Out miniature reflections of the
Moon and the stars. There is a
Film of liquid over its nose that
Is silver in the ambient light.
He begins to walk away down
The street. It stays where it is.

344

A sparrow calls outside the
Window, and the grey light
Of morning comes through it.
Before the window, the voices
Of the congregation. Of the
Faces there a light bears out
Other than the fittings bestow.
The voice of the Lord is a
Powerful voice! and it is hope,
Against its abiding futility.

An egret steps gently into the
Shallows near a runoff pipe,
Its plumage a cold white in the
Shade of a willow. Lights wind
Silently across its legs, ribbons
Cast up by the slight motion of
The pale green water.

How empty we are,
In our shackles, each cool day!

343

Stati d'animo serie II. Quelli che vanno, 1911

Are you sleeping, madame, or only resting,
As the carriage forges its darkening way?
What appointment awaits you we cannot
Divine, whether at this moment a family
Stations itself about the table to receive you,
Or whether yet some engagement of another
Sort—some vagabond in a broad raincoat!—
Waits in a restaurant near your country stop,
Watching the hour in each light before the
Stationhouse, ready to identify your figure
As it should appear momentarily before him.
Rain weaves slowly across the pane of your
Compartment, wavering in ropes of a dull
Light, that sustain boldly, only collapsing as
Further gusts force them down. At each
Coupling, the carriages seem more fluid.
A faint, calming light shivers in the corridor—
Home now? What hour is it? She murmurs
Into the darkness of her collar, rousing quietly,
Motionless. There is a blue lamp at her bedside
Table she would extinguish, and so to sleep.

She opens her eyes to the dim compartment.
Far yet out of all rest, all home. For a moment
Her thoughts part from her in her weariness.