Ashes for Breakfast Read online

  Zu sein war das größte Übel,

  Nichts zu fühlen im Frühling, wie amputiert

  Vor defekten Riesenrädern …

  Wie uns der Wind in die Baumkronen hob,

  Aus denen wir fallen sollten,

  Glücklich, mit einem langen Himmelsschrei.

  Ging das meiste nicht spurlos an dir vorbei

  Ins Schweigen? Kaum aufzuhalten,

  Der ferne Wolkenzug, der verregnete Tag,

  Ein Unfall, der tödlich endet.

  Und jede Krise fing an mit dir. Du selbst

  Warst der eine zuviel im Stau.

  Um dich her den erstaunlichen Schauplatz

  Verdunkeln Affekte. Ein Schock

  Hellt ihn auf. In Gesprächen fließt Zeit ab,

  Beim Händewaschen, beim Essen.

  Vor den Grausamkeiten schützt das Gebet,

  Das Idol vor der Zugluft —

  Ein Gesicht, gealtert, kaum taucht es auf.

  Ahnst du, wie überfüllt dieser Luftraum ist

  Mit Stimmen und Staub, schwirrend

  Durch die Tiefen der Zeit. War die Libelle

  Von den Propellern des Weltkriegs

  Ein Splitter? Tanzte der Mückenschwarm

  Sein Ballett nicht im Magnetfeld?

  In den windkalten Korridoren der Straßen

  Erfaßt dich, noch aus der Ferne,

  Der wache Dohlenblick. Aus dem Geraschel

  Des Laubs steigt der alte Disput

  Theologischer Thesen. Zitternd verfehlst du

  Den einzelnen Kiesel, den Grashalm,

  Die Umarmung der Erde, gefährlich wie nie.

  VARIATIONS ON NO THEME

  To digress … where to? Even that, remember,

  (“Goof off”) was just the usual formula

  For flight, for carrying on elsewhere

  Thoughtlessly or otherwise.

  Comes to pretty much the same thing, no?

  Assembling a new excitement

  Feature by feature, a face

  In among the clockfaces

  In the window, the glasses for love,

  For higher definition TV, drive-through

  Funerals and furniture for faster living,

  Angels manning the checkouts, deaf

  To their sweet, necrophile, hello.

  Back in front of the telephone, under the cheese cloche,

  The cosh, the Alexander Graham Bell jar,

  No sooner was the door shut, you froze, a cynosure,

  A dead ringer for passersby on the sidewalk,

  Staring at the dial-pad, digits

  Like the stellar magic forest

  In the night sky … decimal mandala

  Tempting you by its availability

  Sudden nearness, whispers, betrayal,

  Egad, love, even—all of it seemingly

  Hardwired, a sort of “I’ll call you” life.

  The numbers no sooner punched

  Than a voice explodes in your brain.

  Traveling the dial between mother earth

  And mother ether, the pulse beat

  Of the bleeding rabbit in my ear, desensitized

  Like the skin under a leather glove

  By the thousands of inner voices—who knows

  Whose the individual voice was,

  Untraceable in the genetic choir.

  Grandmother’s Ach or the Hhm

  Of all the stone guests in the basement …

  Till the walls break out in sweat,

  And you hear yourself whisper:

  What a lot of panic

  Just for a spot of suction, at night.

  And in the morning, you turn on the shower

  And out comes … water, what did you think?

  Red and blue stand for hot and cold.

  The skin wasn’t peeled off in strips like wallpaper.

  That’s just a nightmare, silly.

  There’s no thorn in the towel, no blood

  On the tiles—the plug hole’s gurgle

  Signifies cleanliness, not death.

  As to whether they still make soap

  Out of bones, the foam drying

  On the lines of your palms takes the fifth.

  Dragged along by the hair, briefly, fear-

  Fully animated, a short-lived suspicion dies.

  “Everyone follows his or her own bent”

  Was really no excuse for so much time

  On the road, oblivious to the fact

  That that, too, is fugitive. Before long,

  You’ll be completely done up and done in,

  The years call out to the peregrine.

  Because life takes whatever course it will,

  Without inducements. You get out of bed

  On the wrong side, lobster red

  With the hormones in your bloodstream,

  An anatomical torso in the mirror,

  And you stand there, arms akimbo, eyes

  Peeled … to see what?

  No one without some expectation … and they’re off

  Into the evening, which rapidly makes it-

  Self scarce in the face of so much interest.

  Streets become thoroughfares. An irrational

  Feeling that it’s all complete without you.

  Like someone, miles adrift, noticing

  Too late that everything round about him

  Is unfamiliar, you finally join in

  The murmurous throng, the reciprocal

  Assembly line of the noisy majority.

  Red lights sizzle in the rain, until

  The high-kicking legs in their canny cancan

  Call it a night and go dark.

  Unreal the room you live in by yourself,

  The fly-spotted mirror, dust

  In the corners clustering round a long hair

  That’s been lying there for weeks.

  No bowl of fruit, no vase,

  The only cornucopias, stacked tight,

  Are the books. The only surviving elements

  Of the still life are little tropes,

  Banal riddles like the blue 13

  Tattooed on your wrist,

  Wounds, opened, a birthmark.

  Smiling and almost not at all appalled

  You look to alphabetical charms for help.

  As soft and yielding as the backs of your knees,

  The dream of desire that might come to you

  Asleep in bed (in your dreams!),

  Or else wide-eyed, awake, walking:

  A flash of something fleeting, captivating,

  Oysterishly cool and damp

  Round a crease, a tuft of flamy hair.

  The pink of gums, maybe, or the crack

  Of an eyelid, the infrared eye sniffs human warmth

  And infers interred bodies.

  A shake of the hips will do it,

  And all over again something begins

  That will end so staggeringly, so unresistingly.

  And then the surroundings, the hiding places

  Of separate lives, so single,

  Driven by lack, by want, in love with winning

  That you forget how you got here,

  Among these camouflaged houses that witnessed

  All the ancient and recent trades along

  The arterial routes into the countryside.

  Better to follow the bodies

  In their Brownian motion, politely

  Obeying Phoenician protocols,

  Instead of the forbidden aromas, obscene

  Oaths, and this crooning available

  On one or two frequencies since Orpheus.

  Skeptical, well read, irritated … you were

  In the style of the small ads, infinitely remote

  From any landscape limned

  In one or two strokes, the newspaper man

  With his twilit soul, that was you.

  O the frailty of those lungs …

  The xylophone of hidden bones

  From the cranium to the little toe.


  The trouble bodies have finding

  What their desires seek, the violence

  That forces them into its trammels, till,

  Hurriedly, eaten up with gossip,

  They press toward the exit—what to do there?

  To be invisible, moving silently

  In space, an ethereal body,

  Turning doorknobs as though remote-controlled,

  Gliding upstairs and down,

  Hanging out the window as though dangling

  On the spider’s web of a block and tackle, an Ariel

  Without orders and under no one’s paternal eye,

  At home in tenebrous cinemas,

  In bank vaults, ship’s cabins, and luxury suites,

  A stowaway, lacking for nothing

  Behind the billowing curtains, unaffected

  By the light, by the ship’s manifest:

  In a world of murder and mayhem—run for it.

  Negligently, the way everything begins,

  You yawn and bleed, you stare at

  Your cut chin in the glass, the skin puckered

  Under the Swedish steel,

  The eye glazed in the morning light, an animal

  In double jeopardy, practicing

  The use of edged tools while standing on its hindlegs.

  The beard hairs swarm like lice

  In the basin, and each time you shave

  The haggling begins again, your fear

  Seeks an equilibrium: a first plea

  For the innocent heart,

  The amnesty long before the opened veins.

  Just before Good Friday, as before

  Every holiday, narcolepsy hits. Nothing

  Disturbs the passing of the days. Blasphemously

  You hear the hydraulic hiss and thrum—

  Some new premises coming into being, a department store

  Celebrates its incarnation with new prices.

  Almost with relief, the law report

  Describes the killer breaking down in tears—

  So much industry all those years ago.

  Easter quarantines family by family.

  (The children are dreaming of Christmas.)

  Soon it will be time for first-footing,

  Coals, and champagne at midnight.

  What a bloody little leprechaun you once were,

  A wrinkled imp with knotted

  Arms and legs. Bluish skin,

  As though kicking for your life,

  Early concerned with your impending death.

  And it all began so unconsolably,

  With a piercing yell, when the world

  Moved into your lungs with a rattle.

  With a shock (“so much light!”), a slicing

  Of deft scissors and knives

  Into the only flesh that wasn’t you.

  The umbilicus was like the thread,

  The Fates’ love of sundering from the get-go.

  Embarrassing—the way even the earliest photographs

  Of you show the same trusting smile

  At the lens, which bunches your beams

  Into a nostalgia, opened

  For milliseconds, the body seduced

  By the promise of the return

  Of everything familiar. And later

  Time is palpably passing,

  A vanishing, shocking, on celluloid.

  Just as your smile seems to dissolve

  As you look at it years later. Chary

  Of the unknown, fixed on something

  Long ago and far away, your gaze rejects you.

  The thick lengths of piping you crawled into

  As a child in your games of hide-and-seek

  Were enormous tunnels in the dreams that ensued,

  Bunkers, and limestone caverns,

  Where you were a primitive man, or a soldier …

  But above all, you were grown up,

  Slipped from your frail bonds of the feebleness

  Of your family and size. You lay flat on the meadows,

  Stunned by the overwhelming smell of earth,

  As close to yourself in the grassy hollow,

  As a pear to the pear tree.

  Till it was time to wear the team shirt,

  And piss—look, no hands—in padded shoulders.

  What is childhood anyway, after years

  Of running away, an extorted wish

  Quivering on your lips, a nursery chant

  Like home and belonging.

  Spat over your shoulder the deadly look

  Back was a poor exchange

  For the shrinking of both day and night.

  The colors washed out, the pink idyll

  Of lambskin. That was it: the whiff

  Of regurgitated milk, the conspiracy

  Among the growns to feed and stifle you,

  Great clouds of hysteria

  Where you learned to walk, and to fight back.

  Strange, the things an eye can get used to:

  The sealed rim of the horizon

  On every side, and the substitution

  On X-ray photographs, of black for flesh,

  Light flecks for bone and marrow.

  Even in the act of love, the pink leaks out,

  The bodies are a tangle of individual limbs.

  And the eye goes cold even before life chills.

  An unaccountable yen to be palped,

  To lie under the knife, and awake,

  Is repaid by glittering droplets,

  Tears in which joy collects:

  A residue, an overplus, a meniscus.

  How many gestures are futile, and yet

  Their inadequacy keeps them going.

  To make menaces at a fly, to lower the head

  In mute respect before the departed,

  To sweeten your time in solitary by waving

  Or greeting, can be diverting

  Or decent. It’s all absurd anyway,

  Against the slothful clouds.

  No one sees the clown making an ass of himself.

  The witnesses nodded off, and missed

  The blink of an eye, the expression

  Of a spread hand, when cunning

  In the presence of proof loosens the tongue.

  The identity of the hands, the piece of sheet music,

  The out-of-tune piano,

  Are unknown to you, you know only:

  Bad études in the anteroom

  To one of your fears, one of your chambers,

  Verboten, tight as a grandfather clock.

  On closed lids, the keys for

  Excess, for the rumbling of tummies …

  What metronome, what vocal?

  Fine sand spills out of the rattle,

  The fetish masks on the dusty keys.

  Do you hear the constriction

  In which you live and breathe?

  That it’s things that have made a mockery

  Of you, fading away into the daylight

  Left to your own devices; that time goes after living

  Things first, imponderable smiles,

  The backs of necks and hair-fine hair;

  How long since you first saw

  How far the past extends that the furniture

  Stakes its life on? From the vantage point

  Of a chair leg, every table is a coffin,

  Immovable in the shadow realm

  Of former tenants, residents long since dead,

  Paying nostalgic visits. Listen

  To the tight-lipped vase, the laconic doorknob.

  Fat chance of taking to the air with a chest

  As flat as an ostrich’s or emu’s.

  Too much bulk on the ribs, insufficient momentum

  In the limbs, not enough lightness.

  As you stand by the window with folded arms,

  Watching the gulls plummet and curvet,

  It feels like toothache, and every swoop

  And curve and conjunction leaves you

  Earthbound, an instance of a
species

  Threatened with relapse, an invalid

  With a cricked neck. Only a penguin

  Can stand to stand on the brink, stand to

  With wing shrugs and heavy dreams.

  What else is it but magic, that chasm

  Between things and their names,

  The only echo sounding into the forbidden realm

  Of the taboo? A leathery cactus leaf

  Lies under the table like a severed hand,

  A bare fishbone on the plate

  Resembles a hairclip in a pool of grease.

  The idea that you doll up the dead

  Is something the trousers say in their press,

  The shirt draped over the chair back at night.

  A bucket makes its contribution to available space,

  A magnifying glass scrutinizes the crazed cranium.

  Paintings like grave ornaments on every wall.

  As providentially as life comes into being

  It’s ready to go again, in your throat,

  Between your fingers, dribbling down the walls.

  What remained constant was fear.

  On offer in every diner, in the right spot

  It was the steam issuing over the bar,

  The smell of dead chicken from the kitchen,

  The rancid oil, the boiling

  Of shellfish to fertilizer. With a shudder

  You see the crab with rubber bands

  Round its claws, the trout and eel nuzzling

  The slimy belly of the vast carp.

  A cat cries in the car trunk for air.

  And often death itself is interrupted half-

  Way, before it can effect its own

  Interruption—a blockage in an artery,

  Leaps up, downfalls, commiserations

  Over as many endings, as many beginnings

  As there are reflexes, changes

  Of opinion between amoeba and astra.

  The weariness of vagaries,

  Of singularities, of the versions of fission,

  Cleverly tricks itself out

  In broken mirrors in the pose of forgetfulness:

  Every crack is a missing piece,

  And the effort of finding it is a psalm.