April and Silence
Spring lies forsaken.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.
The only thing that shines
are yellow flowers.
I am cradled in my shadow
like a fiddle
in its black case.
The only thing I want to say
glimmers out of reach
like the silver
at the pawnbroker’s.
Insecurity’s Kingdom
The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her earrings dangle like Damocles’sword.
As a spotted butterfly turns invisible in a field
so the demon blends in with the spread-open newspaper.
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother turtle flees, flying under water.
Nightbook Page
I stepped ashore one May night
into a chilly moonlight
where grass and flowers were gray
but their scent green.
I drifted up a slope
in the colorblind dark
while white stones
signaled back to the moon.
A time span
several minutes long
fifty-eight years wide.
And behind me
beyond the lead-shimmering waters
was the other coast
and those in command.
People with a future
instead of faces.
Sorrow Gondola No. 2
I
Two old men, father- and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal
together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas,
he who changes everything he touches to Wagner.
The ocean’s green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors.
Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before,
his face a white flag.
The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way.
II
A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft.
Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by two one-oared bandits.
Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meteorites!
Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down
to the Brownshirt years.
The gondola is heavy-laden with the future’s huddled-up stones.
III
Peep-holes into 1990.
March 25th. Angst for Lithuania.
Dreamt I visited a large hospital.
No personnel. Everyone was a patient.
In the same dream a newborn girl
who spoke in complete sentences.
IV
Beside the son-in-law, who’s a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur.
It’s a disguise.
The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him—
the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face.
V
Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine
and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station.
A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission.
He always has commissions.
Two thousand letters a year!
The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he’s allowed to go home.
The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.
VI
Back to 1990.
Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain.
Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens
sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf.
Dreamt I had drawn piano keys
on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute
The neighbors came over to listen.
VII
The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has something to say.
Sighs. . sospiri. .
When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down
so the ocean’s green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the stone in the
building.
Good evening, beautiful deep!
The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.
VIII
Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late.
Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask.
Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.
Landscape with Suns
The sun glides out from behind the house
positions itself mid-street
and breathes on us
with its scarlet wind.
Innsbruck I must leave you.
But tomorrow
a glowing sun stands
in the half-dead gray forest
where we have to work and live.
November in the Former GDR
The almighty Cyclops-eye went behind the clouds
and the grass shuddered in the coal dust.
Beaten sore and stiff from last night’s dreams
we climb aboard the train
that stops at every station
and lays eggs.
It’s rather quiet.
The clonging from the churchbells’ buckets
collecting water.
And someone’s unrelenting cough
telling off everything and everyone.
A stone idol is moving its lips:
it’s the city.
Where iron-hard misunderstandings rule
among kiosk-attendants butchers
sheet-metal workers naval officers
iron-hard misunderstandings, academics.
How my eyes ache!
They’ve been reading by the glowworm-lamps’ faint light.
November offers caramels of granite.
Unpredictable!
Like world history
laughing at the wrong place.
But we hear the clonging
from the churchbells’ buckets when they collect water
every Wednesday
—is it Wednesday?—
that’s what’s become of our Sundays!
From July ’90
It was a funeral
and I sensed the dead man
was reading my thoughts
better than I could.
The organ kept quiet, birds sang.
The hole out in the blazing sun.
My friend’s voice lingered
in the minutes’ farthest side.
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