After the Satires
By Durs Grünbein
Trans. Alys George
[Draft 3/12/2002-3/25/2002]
Who but the wealthy get sleep in Rome?
There lies the root of the disorder.
Juvenal, Third Satire
Feelers first, like the snail breaking into a run,
You return home early through the bloody pulp
Of these cities, the dried blood on the soles
At the changing of the façade.
A new year
Has begun. The first children remained on the asphalt,
The first elderly in sleep. Behind chapels,
Burned bodies rise forth as smoke to the heavens.
Due to the mild winter, the consumption of home heating oil drops,
The birds of passage return earlier, in the air
An encouraging for higher stakes, brutal conquest –
Fast love in bucket seats, yoga in the nearby park,
A far-eastern smile that floats over rooftops,
Alights in droplets on blueberries, grapes
In wooden crates on the roadside, soars up with the familiar wind.
Time to crawl out of the holes…
Make a list
Of all the things that are important to you now. How does it look,
Your Achilles’ shield, this timetable of trivialities,
Event-heavy. Are they heroic hours, thunderstorms
Over bare trees, screams from the depths of slaughterhouses,
Museum-like, the surging bodies on a giants’ frieze?
Or were they rivulets, pregnancies, wallpaper patterns
From oozing wounds, dried on the side of the road,
Scenes scratched into empty tin cans, caricatures in the dirt
That collects itself at the feet of regulars’ tables, near
Grimly determined dogs and their owners, locked in fights?
O these dogfights on every third street-corner, the clambering
For the glimpse of a man, the scent of a woman
In the thicket. For this the muscles play
Before the opened hood like clockwork above the engine block.
For this legs shimmer through stockings, threaten slogans
On smoke-dark walls with monstrous crimes.
A playground poised to become a crime scene at any moment. A procedure
Sorts arriving victims by age and weaknesses,
Seldom by wealth. Someone in a wheelchair, a beggar,
Escapes a robbery no less than the old woman at the cemetery gate.
Someone is run over because he was blocking a parking space,
Because his smile was suspicious and the sun too hot.
Who risks helping now if an injured person
Drags himself half-dead through shards of glass after an assault.
That he was alone: his mistake; that he resisted: his bad luck.
For the band moves on, disperses. Minutes later
They crouch scattered in the parks, lurking by the swimming pool,
Sluggish at the basin’s edge, until the water turns red.
Where someone was slain playing skat in bars
Because he was too loud, there, brisk business reigns under ventilators
In the days that follow. It counts for normal that rape occurs,
That a window invites a burglary, a trashcan burns.
Observing is everything… “Life comes and goes in the heat of the moment.”
Every day can be a day that tears everything
In an hour like any other, everything and nothing,
The retina retains.
For disaster is blunt
In the moment of appearance, forgotten,
Where a street-sweeper has the last word, in the morning,
Polishing the curbstone like the murderer’s pair of shoes.
Says Juvenal, two thousand years before your admittance
Into the ranks of contemporaries, urbane outcasts
Whom a beauty attacks between two blocks of houses,
Here where the heart of violence beats. An air-current
From old cities catches on your temples. In your hand,
The coin reminds you of the coolness of Rome’s thermal springs
In the time of satires…
When the suburb turned to hell,
Not only for Christians, when no more water
Washed clean the villas’ marble, full of cynicisms,
The poet slipped on fish-scales, the fat slave,
And the century stared into the mouth of a moray eel.
Still unwritten on the walls What is the evil?
That was actually everywhere, like the innocence, the curiosity
At the circus slaughter, when the crania crashed,
The satisfied wink when the Jew died on the cross.
The spring, the new lilac, was not terrible; terrible
Was this blank eyes’ gaze, the inertia
Behind the executioner’s back, betraying his calm.
For the crocus returns, the earth breaks open again
With the cool skies’ blue. Down near the asphalt,
Grass is reflected in the showcase of the jeweler
Who will one day be robbed. A
bullet to the head
Makes the counter a blood-heavy altar.
In the blink of an eye, the city is a hysterical dream
In which trees are counted, hedges, and panic
Grabs at pedestrians out of the bushes. Pigeons, nodding pedantically
Before cafés, follow every false move
Like tricksters’ victims. Armed children move
Through loud streets to a schoolyard duel.
The mute vendor pushes half-wilted roses
Like a hunted animal. Even the mother is taken aback
By the evil eye glaring from the baby carriage.
A girl is hacking heads of cabbage at an intersection.
Perhaps they are foreign here, all of them, furious about
Being born at the wrong time, under the wrong sign.
…Where there is wonder enough, like horoscopes and dogs
Leafing through newspapers with their muzzles, demons
Abandoned in hallways, whimpering.
In these close quarters
Every scream leads from gardened balconies to a rumor
Among neighbors, a door is shut like a suspicion
With a dull yank. Somewhere manslaughter is the result
Of a mistaken plea. Blind rage, anger,
Rustles under metallic leaves. A curse that rouses the past
Drapes itself like the smell of gas over streets in twilight, squares,
Dark during the day, and the air is already aflame.
And there you are,
In the moments of revolt,
While your body walks beside you, astonished,
Hundreds of lives since Juvenal, does it leave you speechless
To see how a knife intercepts words, hissing,
A match tears open the scene, the magic circle
Of violence and reflex, - until one stands alone,
Ruined, back to the wall.
And again evening wind drives
A piece of news through the lime-trees, rises and falls in the branches.
Cars glide by, peaceful, shimmering pikes
Amidst the rainy reeds. Whistles regulate traffic,
A chirping from birds’ nests, discrete tip-offs.
Not the pollen, delicately distributed, not this pain
In the hair follicles, renewed with each spring,
Not the awakening is terrible. What then?
Is it the malicious moments, the small shocks
When something dead lay there on the road, a meal for flies.
When you watch a blind man grabbing at thin air, smiling,
A face, closing itself off. When suddenly a rupture
Ran through the day, revealing entrails.
Is it the pressure in your temples when the vault of high spirits,
Upon which you so steadily tread, soundlessly collapses,
And nothing stops here, nothing interrupts the endless flow
Of complaining and jokes, distraction and confused prayer,
Which displaces the tables, weirdly, allows the glasses in the cupboard
To clink after years, reveals the drama of disappointed closeness
Deep in the bedrooms.
Until the cold blows in, the hate
Through curtains, grey like smokers’ lung-tissue,
With voices from beyond, from the gurgling drain-pipe,
From the world of accident victims, familiar corpses,
Brooding over timetables, no more arrivals
Like the recent spring night on the black lawn.
…where everything came together. Then from buried cellar-stairs,
Through grates in the pavement, steam in the airshaft,
Songs are audible, the most beautiful arias,
The missing person, pronounced dead long ago
Beneath the earth in their eternal Rome.
So there you walked,
Mornings still sleepless, as if held in predators’ eyes,
In the rivulets on empty streets, where the asphalt stretches out
After the downpour. From its humps,
Oily pearls of water, in which newspapers soaked, remnants
Of food and purchases, the recent hours’ refuse,
Edges blurred, zoological manure.
So there you walked, dreamless, with registering stride, -
One of the bodies, taut in thoughts, robbed
Of the reflexes necessary to jump aside, to dodge
The shingle from the roof, the car, the glass door in the way.
Someone who incurred debts and wrote verses on a banknote,
Hesitating at the wrong time, euphoric when a gesture succeeded.
Someone whose sole possessions were the passport in his pocket and the notebook,
Filled in while walking, nothing else; no lizard, after Juvenal,
A kind of happiness that means everything, like having your own space to breathe
In these close quarters. One who stood amazed on the sidelines,
Where the shadows of traversed lives congregate
Amidst the ruins of fast money.
Here, his comfortable brain
Was the only thing that helped free him, lured in over and over,
With lacerated mouth, from the hook
In the blood-darkened current. Episodes of pain, -
Was that the body, its memory the melody of violence,
Passing through tissue, the neuralgic refrain
In the dorsal vertebrae, his heartbeat an echo sounder into time?
A time into which you arrive, complete, a witness set to vanish.
One who went forth to learn fear, and whose head
Rang in the morning from scraps of speech and market-cries,
Shrill scenes, returning like swallows in nose-dives
Under skies. Where does what you are, what you would have become,
Vanish to, how did that get lost?
Your forgotten shadow, does it not follow you mockingly,
Squinting at an Other on every corner,
The thought of being equally as grand, as assured, as sound?
Until the next exhaustion returns, chronic at the sight of the clock,
Any time, any day. The too late, the too early
Keep the body tense, and the memory
Always returns from the wrong end.
On the morning after,
The post offices are closed. The letters become clammy from moisture
In the yellow boxes, which no one empties until twelve. Money
Sleeps in banks, on constant alert, behind sealed doors,
A dangerous material like viruses in tropical laboratories,
Whose victims die far away from here, safely distance.
The blinds are drawn tight like in a civil war, behind bars
The stores are mortuaries, glazed in the morning,
With body parts in every freezer, vein-blue
Beaming from every ice-block, the meat of dead animals in cans
Reflected in shining tiles. No woman’s face
Comforts the crying of things, the sharp gravestone-gleam
From the shelves. Shut down between waking and sleep,
The city forgets itself in the city. The day’s traces of angry outbursts
Dry inside the bars. The restaurants
Famous for the filthiest floors have long been posed
To be tomorrow’s crime scenes. Vacant are the big cinema bunkers,
Where the zombies were celebrated, the ghosts
Of the screen, casting shadows until well past midnight.
Burning Rome, Nero’s stage, went under, not for the last time,
In the blizzard of images blowing in from Atlantis –
In the same scenes in which Troy disappeared -,
From the Californian groves of the dead, flooded by music.
And the victor who saw the evil in the film was named Christ.
Blind for morning, monsters lie in beauty sleep.
The last werewolf trotted home, the youngest vampire,
Crept to the cross with a toothache, lay himself remorsefully to sleep.
Spread across meadows, crouching in trees as if stuffed,
The crows, patient birds, their uniform plumage,
Wait for their hour, owe their future to refuse,
Since the worms became too lean to eat.
Eyes narrowed to slits,
You see spring advancing, streets marked
By tires of delivery trucks from all over Europe.
One who wants to go home before it becomes day, and
His Yesterday has already been far too long, and the taste of blood on his gums
Keeps him grounded, running, and this murmur was comforting
From birth on, when, from the other side
Of sleep, he encountered himself, hands held high in surrender,
Nothing more to say or deny, a mute witness
To the puddle draining away, the soft remains on the curb.
To the bobbing shrub, the trace of a bust.
To every incident, disappearing like breath
Condensed on glass, the flashing blue light reflecting in the eye of one dying.
To the slime-ring from the horizon, the splendor
Of monstrous feelers of raw flesh, still
Dawn on the last meters. To every morning,
Creeping over the rooftops in the first light of day.
II
“Did you think it would be pure,
This life, no punches on empty stomachs,
And no lies for your loved ones, and every murder
Is cleared, sometime, and no victim loses
His speech? What did you think when it began
In the white sick-room, when later, roaring,
The air embraced you and the grass on the knuckles.
And everything was heaven in the third summer, seen
Through a knothole in the fence, with eyes that
Followed every butterfly. And everything was hell
When suddenly you stood alone during blind-man’s-bluff,
Head spun round behind the black blindfold,
Dizzyingly grabbing at thin air: what did you think
After the first betrayal, when the mouth remained
Behind cold smoke, and many a word was an age-spot,
Long in advance. And no one was alarmed, no one
Saw how the incision cut through the day and made
Every thing an accomplice. No dream was immune
To twilit rooms, laughter from graves
Or the din of a clock. And in the fifteenth winter,
Night was this sheet, drenched with your own sweat, you
Who blackmailed a fly, a twitching nerve.
What did you think, lost in the woods, in the violence
Of this soft fungus earth, which called you, drunk from the resin-scent,
To rest under spruces, and pulse
Taken when you were sick, cared for till morning.
And what was left of you, bleeding, on the edge of the playing field,
Behind the lines, where every motion obeyed the ball,
Suddenly superfluous, and the scrapping of bodies
Went on without you, and nothing was as painful
As ignorance, - the certainty of posthumous happiness
At the sight of clouds moving overhead.
What did you think
After
the first fatality, the second, and after the third
The regret caught up, the appetite
Returned and everything was inexorable,
The eye took on the case, the ear followed
The destruction home to the set table.
Unsuspecting of every hunger, how did you feel,
Satiated, over the bones of beheaded fish, and how did you feel later
When rummaging through garbage and standing before the idyll
Of a burning heap of stuffed animals, before a puddle,
From which a sneaker drank blood, a textbook entitled German.
On intimate terms with disgust, finally, and without homesickness
For a different kind of being lost, alone
With secret pleasures: why the smirks
In the nineteenth spring, seized by idleness
In washrooms, train stations, dawning offices
Which anticipated no memory. And every year
Brought new promise, branches on the roadside
Which lashed out at you, and the abandoned life
Continued behind your back. Chased by hornets,
In flight through the seasons, in pollen,
A hundred times dead in the dream, encountering
Yourself wide-eyed while drowning, shocked
By your own sympathy, - what did you think,
Torn from sleep, surrounded by the humming of memories,
Naked in the hotel bed at last in the thirtieth autumn,
At five in the morning, the blackbirds’ sharp chirping -
Did you think you would escape that, Orestes?”
III (The
long sleep)
Like the early morning wind
Sweeping clean the streets on which people walked yesterday,
Tomorrow’s corpses and ghosts, restless in the city-center;
Like every day taking new hostages, who, anaesthetized at night,
Cast creases in the sheets, shadows on the ceiling,
Free as long as sleep keeps them from gravity;
And like dying continues nevertheless, secretly takes its anger out
On a bouquet of tulips, which filled the room,
Quickly disheveled, stripped of leaves like after a downpour,
The listless stalks, and the stinking water in the vase,
One liter of Wannsee on the table.
Like teeth growing from the walls, you see clearly,
After a night with heavy dreams, through the wallpaper,
The old newspapers, black from the reports
Of war on all fronts, of loss of man and gain of land
And of entire cities’ disappearances in minutes,
In which someone sang a few hit songs and a piano concerto
Enraptured the audience, while far away at a conference table
Three men divided up the world among themselves, laughing heartily,
Minutes of rapture and of boredom.
From Job’s grief in the air-raid cellars, and like Cain,
Violent Cain, was betrayed as punishment for fear.
And over coffee you read,
Gratified by the defeat of your own gang of murderers,
That the die was cast long before,
Decades earlier, and decades later.
How clear dawns the day they all left,
Some of them dead. A street sign
Still records the name of a doctor, a man of great deeds
In a time of horsehair sofas, in damp cellars,
Where a woman, weakened by the birth of her next wretch,
Died on her childbed. A razed avenue
Named after the bearded prophet, who roamed it
With his absolute contempt, with Epistle to the Romans and manifesto,
The day laborers and the theologians and the army
Of dream-comrades, who saw another agent at his post,
Saw the missionary of the unconscious behind the whisper-curtain
Go from one sleep into the next.
How harshly the light falls through the youngest maple leaves
Onto the scaling trunk, which you will never see
The deserter on the bough, the cold noose –
A summer light that is always Today, in every flash
Of a passing wheelchair or baby carriage; how it dances
And plays with glasses and tips and utensils on the tables,
After the widows have left their late breakfasts
Over newspapers, heavy with so much announced death,
Subscribed to long ago. How quickly
A heart attack tears the beautiful morning. How easy,
Here begins a bloody new chapter,
On a splinter that protrudes from a wall, on a thorn.
And then?
Then the news that warms and melts yesterday’s snow
Arrives, and under the grass
You see shards shimmering, green bottle-glass,
And apothecaries’ porcelain, dolls’ heads and knuckles,
The bones of a time when families were separated in camps
And Bible passages hung above sinks
And killings followed party assemblies
And Ten Commandments were nine too many. And then?
Then lead was poured on New Year’s in the war, and a house
Was a target, and its collapse
Seemed a godsend, and the rifleman,
A quiet bird at the telescopic sight, a drunken grenadier,
Was a tiny mascot under rubble and tank-scrap.
The cities were at the mercy of the heavens. The last remaining
Founders’ walls fell.
The final act (“Death of the Holy Family”)
Was performed on an open stage, in rooms stripped bare,
And the street barely noticed when the sofa hung over the sidewalk.
Memory went bankrupt with every cemetery,
The milieu in the grey aerial photograph. And resurrection
Was a weekly newsreel running backwards. And then?
In the loam the backhoe hit on something pale
That crunched and gave way. Was it the skull
Of a new empire’s youngest dreamer?
Schwarzbraun ist die Haselnuß…My gal
Did not see my death in the shrapnel mines.
The steel helmet did not protect the warmth, the softness.
It was so hard to die among the machines.
I was so miserable as a young private’s corpse.
Like old hit songs singing something about light and moths
In telephones, distantly distorted.
And women’s voices, raw from smoke, transfigure a room,
To which survivors have no access. A string concerto
Plays on the spot where those who set out from the city for their deaths
Rot in the ground. The attraction here
Was a gnome foaming at the mouth.
And his number was the hate-dance between plates of stew.
His career led him from beer tents to stadiums and opera houses,
Before his audience was silenced in cellar ruins.
And over the radio came the saying That was Europe…
(That was Europe, - and the bull a witches’ broom.)
Now the horrors are behind glass, and showcases
Protect the lampshade of human skin, the gold trophy
Filled with ground bones, the cannibalistic knick-knacks
Of the terror that dug its claws into the ground in the collapse.
How this earth reeks, uprooted, from cable shafts.
And bubbles rise from the mud of the only canal
Which carried forth corpses between allotment gardens after the murder.
Behind the curtains of spared houses,
The last witnesses spoon their meals out of cans.
And you saw walls growing, tunneled, walls falling,
The city, the monstrous playground, dismembered under the Four Powers,
And hardening to trans-Siberian concrete
On light sand.
You saw Berlin,
The last, disappearing, returning, and disappearing anew
With each explosion, when the wall of dust fell before the gloom.
When under half heavens, new houses closed their ranks
On cellars, never evacuated, torn
Plane-trees budded again and busses advertised
Socialism and Persil under lime-trees.
Like every hallway dreaming its dead,
Since then a single day holds as much as this shabby century.
And each name in the directory effaces ten others,
Which no longer testify for themselves. Chosen
In a moment of weakness, while many still listened,
Amazed, to the civil roar, no amulet,
Not even a knuckle, remained of them. What the smoke reveals,
The crumbling balconies deny to the last bullet hole,
And the polished doorknobs still forgotten by every hand.
No
finger, stiff between cemetery grass, threatens
From a grave, as the fairy tale would have it. And yet:
Like a sleeping city, defenseless when airplanes cast shadows
Over
grey residential areas while descending
Into their approach at dusk, parks flanked by warehouses,
In which goods, tomorrow’s junk or reason to kill,
Wait to be transported away.
In thousands of back rooms, sports console people,
Whose daily lucky lotto numbers have passed them by,
With eyes, glassy from watching television, bloodshot
From years of marital trouble.
And like forgetting
Propels the hours till the anecdote and the war novel
Fall asleep in front of cold leftovers. Like night
Taking city fortresses and poking in ashtrays becomes a nuisance
To restaurant guests, the yawn
At every joke. Like the last one laughing,
Alone at the site of the parked sheet metal
That lines his way home. Like the salivary gland singing along
To the song of the satiated and the fear that
The teeth will suffer the same final fate as the façades here. Weakened,
They see the roadway, driven like litmus
By oil and animal blood and gasoline. Like myriad shadows
Running alongside a monument, some king
Mounted on horseback, plagued with gout and larger than life
Hammer in heavy hand, the proletarian,
Head bowed as if about to fall.
Then comes a pothole that turns spirals in the sky.
How many lives does a lullaby capture… the singsong
For a nameless nihilist… How much silence goes
Buried alive in conurbations… As if from everywhere
Babbling, babbling… Berlin… penetrated skin and walls
Into their sleep, into your sleep, into my sleep.
IV
“ (……………)”
We went long silent through the morning, he and I,
Two duelists, measuring the streets with one glance,
The distance between every tree and every house.
And behind the conversation what was city disappeared,
As long as one searched for food here, night-company, sleep,
Along the nightmare-paths to the clubs and bars.
And behind every sentence a passage opened up, labyrinthic,
Through which the years passed – his, mine.
Did you understand what it means You could die here?
Did you understand what it means There is no coincidence?
From Zoo Station you can hear the ring-tails’ muffled screams
Drift over. Did you know the Romans
Heard the singsong of the lemurs in that, he asked
With a look which revealed to me that he dreamed,
When not of Hamlet and Orestes, the film stars,
Perhaps of Madagascar. “Strange how the jungle
Swallows sounds that every metropolis scatters with sirens.”
…The
dead shrieked in the streets of Rome…
Was a line we laughed about (albeit softly).
For this city was our head, and what made noise in the city as an idea
Went through the head. “Did you notice
How quickly houses are demolished here? The new ones
Are already calling the evacuation commando, which does not need the blueprint
After which it was constructed.” A neon sign
Proclaims destruction to the glass façades,
Before graffiti realizes this wish in garish colors.
Here excavation sites are assembly points for ghosts
That drink from the drainage. Their trace
Is the scent of buried life, the miasma
That breeds chest-pains and the suspicion:
In the end man is nothing but a turbid puddle
That evaporates from the asphalt when his flesh is history.
What is a scrap of mucous membrane compared to the concrete wall,
With which an architect takes revenge for childhood coldness.
What is a neck vertebra compared to an iron girder,
Still looming from the foundation.
What is a knocked-out tooth, rattling in a box,
Compared to the rumbling of the cement mixer next door.
We walked, and he made me nervous with his questions.
Before us the glass-roofed train station extols escape
In the next express train. But regardless from which South,
Every arrival on the same track was a mockery
After the disconsolate stench of ammonia in the tunnel.
Did you say I’m having bad dreams? Tell me, about what?
“Long ago, as schoolboys on the zoo tour we squeezed
Into the ape-house, acned foreheads against the cage.
And when the old orangutan came, we smirked.
And we made faces at the female chimpanzee.
We pointed, grinning at the fire-red vulva,
Which she scratched with her shovel-hands in the wet straw.
I have often dreamed of these hands, of these callosities.
And the glass of the cage was always smeared with filth –
From the outside. Do you know what that means: from the outside?
Where grownups gaped over children’s shoulders, the voyeurs.
And where the children spit and screamed like little banshees,
All of them shameless and excited.”
Does from the outside mean
That you saw yourself there and were dismayed about
How closely related we are to our cousins? That since the exodus,
The flight, millennia-long, out of Africa, the affinity has remained?
As if that all were only one school-day ago, which you skipped,
Gambled away with tree climbing, scuffles and pubescent talk.
And that you were indeed outside and yet squatting inside,
Where the clan cooks their soup and scolds one another
In comfortable caves, - had you thought of that?
“I don’t know what it was. In the dream I still stood
Rooted before the cage, while the class had long since moved on to the hippopotamus.
A search party was sent out, and those who found me
Said something about my tear-stained face, about the cage’s wet panes.
It was the one scene that hung over me like a dark cloud.
And if anyone wanted to get to me, he called me loudly by name,
Stood up, and did Huuh…huuh…huuh…the ape.”
We politely avoided eye contact as he let the sound escape.
And I, his neighbor, heard myself ask in the silence –
How is it that something like that always overcomes us
When we are tired of it in sleep, the next morning,
Distancing us from something that we never got over.
During the night it makes its rounds aimlessly in the skull.
During the day it arranges scenes from Grimms’ fairy tales, intended only
For us and still barely conceivable, the uncanny.
There is a stairwell, in which thousands disappear,
Shadowy faces covering their retreat.
There is a customers’ parking space, and the sinking in your stomach
Comes from open auto trunks, felt-covered.
There is the new intersection, a year-round accident scene,
Recorded in case files under a philosopher’s name.
There is the shredded lettuce-leaf on your shoe, the withered leftover
Of a princely meal, during which the cooks slumbered.
And everything points to everything else, every hint holds
You, who went forth to learn fear, captive in a center
That is no longer your own.
It was bewitched. He spoke
Like one who had known me for a long time, and whoknowswherefrom –
I knew him. He was the brighter of us two.
For I understood him, and that made me wary,
Suspicious not of him, whom no time propelled, but of myself.
I saw specters where the other saw babies in diapers,
Advertisement-smiling, glued high on walls,
The final resting place of a layer of fat made from placards, sopping wet.
Were there a footpath, I saw a chalk outline for the bodies
That would soon lie there, sketched out, an autopsy table.
He saw the zebra-stripes and spoke happily of safaris,
And of the homesickness we all share, - for savannahs.
If I were hurried, he soon fell behind. My silence
Was too gloomy for him. He sold me what he held as insight:
That we only know what some one discloses to us, this clearing,
Where everything happens and becomes meaning, garlands.
That minutes are easy to crack open like peanut shells,
And this cracking open makes us wise to the fact that nothing has happened.
That what blurs the sight collects in the corners of eyes.
“It is better that you keep step with forgetting and breathe,
Like cheetahs and antelopes do, deep in the flanks.”
Thank you. We were almost home. Did you say grace?
So it went when you walked staggering alone at night
Like the twice-trepanned man with the turban in Paris, bleeding
From a wound that no doctor ever found, the outcast,
For whom hotel rooms became widows at night.
As long as they were empty of people, on every street corner,
Here, where no shadow found asylum, his met mine.
In passages under elevated train tracks, our steps made
An echoing sound that allowed us to forget
That we were the last ones on our feet far and wide.
So we passed by grills, funeral homes, Travel Agency,
And past showcases where, laid out in state, in stacks, in colorful concord,
The season’s prose awaited customers. “So many books
That need no one to read them, because they are reminiscent of nothing.
So many pages without qualities…,” he murmured
To me behind my back with a voice that sounded like mine.
I knew it from bushes, station concourses and barracks,
Nights in the country, where I closed my eyes for the first time,
Trembling from impotence, overcome by history.
I knew that the one speaking here had been there long before me,
And would remain there still after me. With the same question, -
Did you understand what it meant You had all the time in the world?
Was he the twice-trepanned man with the turban in Paris?
The gentle friend of birds, who spent his last rouble
At the market for a goldfinch, to buy its freedom, the confused man?
Was he the starveling from Peru, sleeping on the park bench?
Was he one of those who withdrew early from the rest,
Their retirement from the ranks of the violent an experiment in humility?
Was he the one ahead of his time, whom I encountered yesterday,
And tomorrow again and the day after, in every Today,
When our spirits finally parted ways as a result of experience.
For I knew from experience that our journey ends in offsides.
That you pause only to let yourself pass by, without return.
And yet, and when I looked up, for one moment, the city
Swam with all the rooftops glittering at sea level,
Which for us sleepers here marks ground zero. In the distance
Was a tumult, and something impacted on the horizon from below.
Then the morning sky shone Pompeiian red.