Ashes for Breakfast Page 7
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.