Trieste

Here is the watchtower of my soul,
Besieged between harsh mountains and sea;
The limestone oracle riddles in underground streams,
In my bandit head, in sleep’s quarantine.
Here I can refine and perfect my solitude,
Slavonic sky’s remittance-man.
What passions and terrors are my burden to sing ?
Hazy bay hallucinations beguile me,
Archduke of rain-drenched thoughts,
Continental drifter ever distant and distracted,
But not lacking in a certain grace and guile.
I like to loiter on the margin of things,
Strolling these streets while ridiculous history
Prances and pratfalls in its circus ring, elsewhere.
On a steep stone staircase I pause and look back
Over the autumnal city, crepuscular and quiet,
As a ferry siren sounds across the water
And the white castle rises alone in my mind.
Call me the plagiarist, the thief of memories,
Stealing into foreign bodies, other lives,
Making their imperial pretences my own,
Figments of the vortex, the continuum.
The dialect of the air is sibilant slur,
And, far away in Mexico, hapless Maximilian
Writes ordering two thousand nightingales
To be sent to him from his beloved Miramar.
Ah, to make happiness your life’s ambition,
Is that not the surest promise of grief?
Better to trust in uncertainty, and wander on.
At night, with the lights of the fishing-boats
In the bay, stilling the heart for a while,
One holds the ancient questions close and dear,
As if, indeed, they were all one truly had.
Winter’s bastard, the bora saws my bones
And grinds my teeth, blackening my blood
With fantastic afflictions, that only suicide
Might purge,- I sit like a poisonous toad
In the undergrowth, as cracked bells toll in my head.
Tall, skinny and myopic, in buttoned tweed suit
And straw hat, smelling of booze, tapping the ground
With his cane, James Joyce strolls the streets,
Dreaming up masterpieces and get-rich-quick schemes,
Dropping into churches, pubs and brothels,
Staggering sozzled through the night streets
To his favourite brothels, La Chiave d’Oro
And Il Metro Cubo, praising God in the synagogue
Of the word, in the exile of his restless eye.