of three theatres, two museums and le Carré’s bunker hotel,
but, hey, it was classy while it lasted,
and you could get to Milan or Moscow if you had to.
Then the Polizeibezirk of underage Puppenstrich about the time
B. came here from the country,
still often the only girl not on the game, among whores
and winos and people ‘with an immigration background’
looking grim and wearing sub fusc and doing the messages, as we once said. Then gays –
is there a pink euro, like a pink pound, and the Pink Pistols and Grey Wolves? –
intrepid advance guard of gentrification.
So up the rents, send in the heavies, firebomb the buildings, locals out,
make improvements, and up the rents again, same everywhere.
A natty pellucid pissoir in the Hanser Platz that it would take Paris to pull off,
drunks round the monument (‘reel around the fountain’), hardy trees and hardier women,
little roosters, little rosters in the apartment block for cleaning the common parts,
little brass squares set in the ground for individual fascist outrages,
with the victims’ names, the massy church at the end of the street –
St George’s, the AIDS church, the rainbow flag,
the fire-breathing community paper called the Dragon.
Sudden sad flurries of flowers, the curt pairs of dates,
a grown-out bleached person with one leg.
The main drag changed utterly,
meaning as usual stylistic diktat from elsewhere
and the birth of an interchangeably frippish hideousness. Three hat shops,
an empty tea bar (tax write-off? money laundry?) boasting sixteen varieties of macaroons,
endless places to stop (if you even wanted to stop) on the narrow pavement
between the heedless cars and the nosy passers-by,
expensive ready-cooked food shops with names like Mom’s, gone
the hardware store that stocked everything and was staffed by people
who advised you where to find it for even less, out of business,
or moved away to less promising parts.
The photo shops, the record store, bookshop. All gone.
And behind that, the Steindamm, our belly and balls,
twinned with Kabul, or Mombasa, or Abuja.
Telephone shops if you wanted to call anywhere with a red, green and black flag
(launch pad of Ali Aĝca and his crew of martyrs), casinos,
thorny or hairy vegetables, fetish stores, Alphonso mangoes from Pakistan,
video brothels, limitless mint and parsley and cilantro, hourly hotels,
cracked olives and fresh cheese, old girls with three words of German, newly baked flatbread.
The birds strike up between three and four (it’s the Northern light),
while at lit intersections they never stop.
Twilit, doubtful, shady, questionable. Something.
Night
It’s all right
Unless you’re either lonely or under attack.
That strange effortful
Repositioning of yourself. Laundry, shopping,
Hours, the telephone – unless misinformed –
Only ever ringing for you, if it ever does.
The night – yours to decide,
Among drink, or books, or lying there
On your back, or curled up.
An embarrassment of poverty.
F.S.
In bed
with Fred;
hugger-mugger
with Ooga-Booga.
Broken Nights
for Bill and Mary Gass
Then morning comes,
Saying, ‘This was a night.’
ROBERT LOWELL
Broken knights.
– No, not like that.
Well, no matter.
Something agreeably
Tennysonian (is there
Any other kind?)
About ‘broken knights’.
Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere.
In my one-piece pyjamas –
My it-doesn’t-matter suit,
With necessarily non-matching
– Matchless, makeless, makeles –
Added top, I pad
Downstairs to look
At the green time
On the digital microwave.
My watch, you must know,
Died on my watch
All at the top, at midnight,
After a few
Anguished weeks of macro-
biotic stakhanovite
And I haven’t had
Time, it seems,
To get it repaired.
Further (weewee hours),
To patronise
My #2 bathroom en bas
(Though N.B.
Only for a pee).
Groping for a piss,
As the poet saith.
Wondering how soon
It might be safe
To turn on the wireless,
Without it being either
New Age
Help you through the night
Seducer mellotrons
(What’s a tron, mellow I can do?)
Or merely
Dependency inducing
And wehrzersetzend,
Deleterious for morale of the troops.
I eat to the beat,
Then snooze to the news.
Drift off to Morning Edition.
Arise/ Decline, Sir
Baa Bedwards.
For Adam
In that aftertime
I wasn’t writing. I never wrote,
I didn’t know what the aftertime was for.
I felt little, collected nothing.
I talked to myself, but it was boring.
Warszawa
Chipping at frozen puddles.
Magpies and varieties of crow.
The halt and the blind.
All day in the bakery.
The rise of the muffin.
Res sacra miser.
The sacred business of pity.
Ministries. Hotspots.
The Chinese Embassy.
Raw sienna and burnt umber.
Brick and stucco.
Strawberry and vanilla.
Lean and fat, roof and wall.
Statues with swords.
Statues with lances and canes.
Profligates, ascetics, martyrs.
Stomatologia to apteka and back.
Lourdes next 7 exits.
Dead Thing
A dead thing floated downriver in Tartu.
At first I thought it was wood,
A rotting bole, some vestigial sharpness and strength.
An upside-down coffee table, with claws,
Imperturbable. Inflated, like a flotation device.
A head end and a tail end, but a
Certain amount of discretion, like a tortoise.
But dead. Under the willows a carcass.
Purposefully downstream, like a blond in the twenties.
Mahogany dead.
Laced football dead.
Brylcreem and sideburns dead.
Dead and gone.
Valais
A working river, a working valley,
The grey-green Rhône
Lined with workings, heaps of dust, gravel, cement
And log-jams waiting for transport,
Like the island exporting itself to its neighbours one barge at a time.
The river, the road, and the railway,
A plait, a tangle, a place of through.
The river not navigable, the boggy valley floor not walkable,
The locals came down from the mountains a little way
To site castles on moraine and regulate trade.
Hannibal marched his elephants through here, dynamited rocks with vinegar.
Poplars were planted en passant by Napoleon’s Grande Armée
Two-hundred-some years ago.
Goethe came to visit.
The shade endures.
Rilke was reminded of Spain.
He lived among apricots at Muzot,
Just the other side of the language barrier,
And fixed to be buried with a view of France.
No one knows who I am, were his dying words.
Smells of hay and dung, the murmurs of subtle conversation.
Next door are tax-efficient sheep.
The underground chicken palace like CERN
Or a discreet gun-emplacement.
The lights come on when we appear, and go off after we’re gone.
Larchwood and rye-bread, chocolate and slate,
Dried beef and stone
All one striated substance,
The staff of life breaking explosively, crumblingly,
If it breaks at all
A stash of daunting verticals,
A washing machine delivered by helicopter
Winched down into the Renaissance casbah.
Time was, a man had to carry his donkey across his shoulders up a cliff,
Now everything is tunnel fodder.
Electricity and water come piped through the mountains,
The vineyards get a sousing under great rainbow arcs,
Who wouldn’t want to die in a thirteenth-century tower
With light sensors and cold running water
Off the hills and a chill in the sunny air of the contemporary archaic.
November
for Jamie Buchan
Eine Krähe hackt der anderen [nicht] die Augen aus.
GERMAN PROVERB(S)
Crows on oaks and cranes and cooling towers,
the sky cracking up, and crows investigating
the cream of whatever crust cracks yellow, milling
early birds, Styrofoam beaker of coffee,
refill, refill, and a spot of red-eye gravy.
(leaving Bonn)
Gottfried Benn, c.1916
I’d rather speak it than write it, rather mutter it than speak it
(disobliging spiffy mutter that no one would understand)
how a man – the thing stiffened; the rogue state
familiarly engorged, bristling, crystalline; Myrmidon formation,
Schlieffen plan; Prussia the North Korea of the age,
four wars in fifty years, colonies in the Pacific everywhere not nailed down in 1880 –
and our man, himself to himself, the run of eleven rooms,
potters, if he cares to (not even Uniformpflicht), in pyjamas and cardigan
neither coward nor conchie, not stricken with disorder, disaffection, good fortune
or even medicine (medicine his sicknote), just immeasurable distance,
distance and froideur, an antipathy to concerted action and human history
beyond the dreams of Keaton or Trakl or Archimedes or Schwejk,
smokes and thinks and writes (béguinage, he calls it)
in his personal monastery behind the lines in plucky little Belgium.
Ostsee
– The water deepens to iodine from brown.
What is there to wait for? The gulls to get bored
of their bouncy slick offshore. The sun to break through the qwerty clouds.
The entire coast to make more hagstones, amber, jellyfish.
The sand martins to file themselves away in their cliffside tenements.
Or the cropped blonde to come back along the beach
with her mystery rucksack and impenetrable wrap-arounds,
her superbly articulated deltoids under the black wife-beater
– to iodine from brown.
Auden
but you would see faces that were worth a second look
GOTTFRIED BENN
It was another world, the world of turned collars and polished shoes,
Hairbrushes once a week laid face-down in what I thought was a specific
But was only a weak solution of shampoo in lukewarm water,
Jerseys were roughed up with a kind of knuckleduster of Sellotape,
Suitcases wore characterful labels and tags on their heavy, leather-effect cardboard
Who can imagine such a world not of cares, but of care,
Once we set ourselves to become unpressed, casualised, short-run, drip-dry,
Encased in thinking synthetics or flash suits, the human fiddler crab and his device
Emerging together from nail bars and tanning studios and whitening salons
Like so many gigolos, soccer managers, politicians or molls,
Wearing our fewer, simpler, less restrictive garments more shabbily or dressily,
Having our manicures, our teeth whitened, our hair and beards repurposed
Every other day, owning either fewer things or they were let go to seed,
So intent on our personal grooming, we neglected impersonal grooming,
The care extended beyond ourselves, the aura of solicitude surrounding our appurtenances,
The world of facecloths and napkin-rings and coal-scuttles
And coir hall-carpets and brass stair-rods and milk-jugs and powdered mustard
And shoe-trees and tie-racks and plumped down pillows and cufflinks and weskits and hats
And hardbound children’s books for our hardbound children
And malt vinegar and baking-soda to take off the worst of the dirt,
How careless, cheap and profligate we have become,
We have stopped shaving against the grain and in cold water,
We didn’t eat or drink in the street in those days, flawed and freckled
An apple was taken for what it was, an undistinguished thing and a privilege,
Not chemistry at the top of its game, ester baby, breathing perfume and yet found fault with.
In Western Mass.
What do I remember of those strange episodic parts of my life.
What they nowadays call outliers. Someone put them in brackets.
(Who put them in brackets? I wanted them to go on.)
A dwindling fall, pumpkins, marriage, winter.
The Pioneer Valley. The roaring American convection heating.
The fluff off our flannel sheets getting everywhere.
You wrote something about the number of windows.
Was it a lot? You seemed to think it was a lot.
Once, an owl huddled there, pecked at by small birds.
It was daytime and just beginning to snow. Such a picture of misery.
Me in my blue shirt, and James’s tie. A frog
hopped over my boot. It seemed like luck. Then the threshold.
I don’t remember kitchen, entertainment centre, bathroom –
just those cream flannel sheets rubbed and blown to lint.
The hereditary medievalist downstairs proclaiming: I have seniority in the car park.
The clever, clueless voice in workshop, hazarding: is it the voice of coffee.
The black tremulous Jules Feiffer chenille dress you married in. Ah, me.
End of the Pier Show
It was – what? –
the triumph of hope
over experience.
But what triumph
(and what hope)?
The continued display
of a kind of unreasonable
fortitude, the man –
Beowulf – stooping
to pick his severed head
off the sawdust, and doing it
again and again.
And she, the woman,
sold, to her mind,
on love
as a kind of motor syrup –
a green linctus –
that was slowly replacing
her blood.
Perhaps lycanthropy.
A pessimistic sublime.
They had made
their bed and they
we
re jolly well
going to lie in it.
The woman’s persistent
complaint that
it wasn’t a life,
the man shrugging,
going away, battening down,
daring her to do worse,
if not her worst.
Siege conditions.
And she bringing out
in him strange abysms
of new behaviour.
Everything went
so peculiarly,
spectacularly skewed.
They were fascinated
by what they seemed
to have contained.
Unspoolings of truths.
Such dire sayings
of hers. Such vehemence
out of his mouth.
Just as well really
his doggish gloom
met her prickliness
halfway.
Attritional chafe,
chafe, bridle
and chafe, and, periodically,
a grin and tears.
Her good will
expressed itself
in a strange persistence
of affection that he
not unreasonably supposed
would last forever.
(It wasn’t to do with him,
was it?)