And once you came — it was probably Agnes — and wanted to hear me scribble for just a little while. Think back. My name was Martin. I came from Bunzlau. The man with the rules of poetics. But you didn't want to know why I'd stayed on so long in the Catholic service and never again collab-
orated on secular operas with the pious Schiitz. All you wanted was to hear me scribble. But I wanted to die and escape from the vale of tears, as naked as I came.
If only I knew whether you died of the fever after me, in giving birth to your daughter — Ursula was her name, Ursel for short. It was another plague year, and all sorts of things were possible with so many people passing away.
As I lay dying because in my niggardliness I had made a beggar give me change for a silver gulden, no one opened the door. Only Niclassius, the preacher at Saint Peter's, was there. Later on he bowdlerized my deathbed in Latin verses. Or can it be that you came and I didn't hear the door open?
In the summer of the year 1639, after Martin Opitz gave a silver gulden to a beggar who held out his hand at the door of Saint Catherine's, and, stingy by nature, demanded copper in return, he acquired the Black Death along with the change. Before he became incapable of doing anything, he wrote letters to Oxenstierna, the Swedish chancellor, and to Wladi-mir, king of Poland, and ate a little of the codfish that his kitchenmaid served him in dill sauce. (Agnes shook out his pillow. Agnes daubed away his sweat. Agnes changed his bed sheet when he shat black in it. Agnes heard him breathe his last.)
Immediately after his death, before the straw he had died on could be burned and the house fumigated, someone broke in and robbed the poet's room. Some of his papers are missing (to this day), including the Dacian material and all the political correspondence. A Swedish colonel accompanied by two mercenaries is believed to have seized the depositions of Generals Baner and Torstenson, Oxenstierna's letters, and the Polish letters acknowledging Opitz's reports, and secreted them in a safe place. We do not know the colonel's name, but kitchenmaid Kurbiella was long suspected of being an agent of the Swedish crown, of having been in contact with this officer, and of having made off with documents on previous occasions. But nothing was ever proved against Agnes. And before the Women's Tribunal the Flounder had only his usual obscurities to offer. "My dear ladies who always want precise information: we know too little. True, the rape of the thirteen-year-old Agnes Kurbiella by cavalrymen of the Oxen-
stierna regiment may have imprinted her at an early age, leaving her with an undying attachment for one of the four debauchees — it seems his name was Axel — but the circumstances attending the poet's death nevertheless show neither rhyme nor reason. The one thing we know for sure is that his kitchenmaid gave birth to a daughter soon afterward, and that both lived for many years to come."
Excrement rhymed
Steams, is examined.
Does not smell strange, wants to be seen,
to be known by name.
Excrement. Metabolism or bowel movement.
Shit: what settles in a ring.
Make little sausages! the mothers cry. Early modeling clay, knots of shame and leftover fear: what has gone into the pants.
Recognition: undigested peas, cherry pits,
the tooth that was swallowed.
We look at one another in amazement.
We have something to say to one another.
My waste — closer to me than God or you or you.
Why do we part behind a bolted door
instead of admitting the guests
with whom, sitting noisily at the table the day before,
we predestined beans and bacon?
From this time on (per decision) we will each eat singly
and shit together,
thus neolithically fostering insight.
All poems that prophesy and rhyme on death
are excrement that has dropped from a constipated body
in which blood meanders, worms survive;
thus did Opitz the poet,
whom the plague incorporated as an allegory,
see his last diarrhea.
Only one was burned as a witch
And yet witchcraft was carried on in kitchens if anywhere, in all kitchens. All cooks knew and handed down recipes for purees, soups, and broths which were thick, ash-gray, or cloudy, one that bloated, a second that physicked, a third that induced numbness. From the very start (Awa), henbane had its uses, ergot was mixed into things, and fly agaric (dried), grated to a powder, steeped in milk, or imbibed with mare's urine, was good for a journey into succubine transcendence. We men were as dependent on Wigga, who raised mandrakes along with other roots, as if she'd bewitched us. Mestwina ground amber into fish soups for us. (And Ilsebill, too, I'm sure, adds, mixes, stirs this into that.) I've always lived among witches. Don't go thinking there weren't any; it's just that the wrong ones were burned. None of those shorn herb-women, virgins, and matrons on the quickly burning woodpiles were real witches, even if they confessed under torture to such abstruse rubbish as broomstick riding and misuse of church candles.
Naturally there were no witches' sabbaths, no goat-legged cavaliers, no Devil's spot or evil eyes, but let's not doubt the existence of witches' kitchens and witches' brews. Why, didn't I see Dorothea fry slimy toads' eggs in the fat of stillborn baby boys, which she got from Corpus Christi Hospital, moistening the mixture with holy water from Saint Catherine's. Why, you could smell it all over the house when that pale witch, alone in the kitchen, burned the hoofs of a kid to ashes. Why, everybody knew that she stirred not only the ashes of rotten coffin wood into her Lenten soups but horn ash as well. It was rumored that she carried the dishwater from the pesthouses, where, with her pious airs, she came and went as she pleased, straight to our kitchen. It was rumored that she filled little bottles with lepers' scabs and the sweat of women dying of childbed fever. And it was rumored that, before the Teutonic Knights went campaigning in Lithuania, she boiled their mail shirts in virgins' piss. But only rumored. She was never put to the question. Others were burned:
plain, dull-witted neighbor women who had always cooked dutifully for their husbands but had hairy birthmarks on their buttocks or breasts. (I am sure that Dorothea, whose body was without blemish, gave her Dominican confessor little hints, for poor women and patrician ladies came to her in shamefaced secrecy, asking for ointments against warts and moles. With maybe a magic spell or two thrown in.)
And Fat Gret, too, knew witching recipes but wasn't burned. Who doesn't remember how, when Mayor Eberhard Ferber lost his manhood on laying down his chain of office, she perked him up again with herring milt and the semen of runaway Franciscan monks; how she fuddled the memory of the aged abbot Jeschke — who had too much political information — by taking a spoonful of his excrement, kneading it into a dough with peppercorns, poppy seed, wild honey, and buckwheat flour, and baking it into spicecakes for Advent; and how she bewitched me, too. I don't know what with. For she mixed everything with everything. She never cooked for taste alone. She stirred raisins into goose blood, made beef hearts stuffed with prunes in beer sauce. When I turned up and became a long-term guest in her box bed, she often fed me carrots that she had anointed with her pussy. And what all else, without a shred of shame! Everyone knew she sent away to far-off places for more things than Indian spices. Everyone knew — though details remained in the dark — that witchcraft was practiced when she sat down at table with her nuns and that she offered up heathen sacrifices. She and her free-ranging Brigittines were said to have nibbled pastry figures (with an intimation of three breasts?) and sung from the Wittenberg hymnal, "The house that God hath never blest. ."