Vienna (Beautiful Corpses)

Spring in Vienna and the parks are heavy
With lilac and golden-rain,
Vinous lethargy plumps the air.
In the Wienerwald’s sweet-smelling heath grass
Bloom bee orchids, snake orchids, wild roses.
I go drinking new wine under the chestnut trees…

Curiosities in the Treasury of the Teutonic Knights :
A red coral salt-cellar tree hung with fossilized sharks’ teeth,
Thought to be adders’ tongues, able to detect poisoned food;
Bezoars from Persia with the power of healing,
A poisoned dagger with a handle carved out of rhino horn
Into the form of the Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows…

In Vindobona, Marcus Aurelius sits at his desk,
Scratching out philosophy by lamplight,
While across the Danube the barbarians gather,
Wolfskinned warriors of the blood-red moon.

In glittering ballrooms the beautiful waltz to exhaustion,
While the Jewish vampire sucks the blood of his victims;
Johann Strauss, overwhelmed with female worshippers’ requests
For locks of his precious hair, resorts, with a smile,
To sending them clippings from his poodle.

With one eye laughing and one eye weeping,
I chase skirt, get drunk, tear myself apart,
Revelling in the delicacies of malice and intrigue,
Spying through the keyhole as a beautiful woman shits.
I lick the wet dark fanny of Death,
And disappear with a biting bon mot.
Why is it I only remember the bad dreams?
The suicide’s hand is writing in the dark,
And only the cruel and the crafty endure.
Show me any card ,and I will trump it;
Though I hate the game, I love to play;
Come to me, as to a disillusioned priest, who will hear
Your worst confession with an envious sigh.
In my mind I sculpt ecstatic Baroque,
Black pearls of madness, too fantastic for words,
And glorious women, Amazons on horseback,
Riding through the mist with operatic flair.
My doctor says, “It’s hopeless, but not serious,”
So I carry on as usual, refining my sad art,
Singing Requiems for every vagabond moment
With apocalyptic relish, a merry gravedigger.
I love only the gloomiest cafés, where death itself
Seems to wait upon one’s shoulder, guiding the hand
To the cup, and parading sights before one’s eyes
With the charlatan flair of a master showman,
Glorying in deception and legerdemain.

At the Kirche am Steinhof, ravaged minds
Embrace white marble and light, to be healed
By Him who has humbled and punished them,
Begging His mercy, to set them free,
To show them the way out of the wilderness,
And lead them to green meadows and clear streams.
In the Burial Museum, I peruse the exhibits,
The coffin with a bell pull for the prematurely buried,
The reusable coffin with trapdoor,
The stiletto for stabbing corpses before the lid is closed.
In the Red Room in the Hotel Orient,
The lovers rent each other’s body by the hour,
Exchanging masks in the mirror,
Molten gold flesh in electric danse macabre,
Ghosts from a seventeenth-century tavern,
Refusing to leave their old haunt.
In the Armoury Collection in the Neue Burg,
I imagine myself in the eagle armour
Of that bellicose dandy, Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol,
A griffin in flight over the battlefield;
The embroidered saddle of Kara Mustafa
Conjures the magnificent defeated,
Attended by houris in Paradise.

In the coffeehouse, among chess players
And grumpy waiters, in the sullen afternoon,
With smoke-stained walls and faded velvet,
I weigh alternatives with refined disdain,
Multiplied by mirrors, to no conclusion.
I could linger all day in junk shops’ gloom,
Sniffing bygone glory’s autumn must,
Adding more dreams to my private collection.

Out in the Wienerwald,
Amid steep cliffs, thick forests, rushing rivers,
I took you from behind, up against a tree,-
If only I could live through my cock,
And run wild like a feral child !

In the Jüdisches Museum,
Prophecies from the Torah
Drip down the walls;
Here is the knob of Theodor Herzl’s walking stick,
And a picture of a man kicking an old Jew in the arse,
On a busy street, in the year 1911;
And here are Hanukkah candelabra
Rescued from the burnt embers of a vanished synagogue.

In the Michaelerkirche crypt,
I stumble past piles of paupers’ bones
And musty coffins with their lids off,
Desiccated bodies,
Still clothed and grimacing.

On the wall of an old house, in Judenplatz,
Besides a relief of the Baptism of Christ
Is the triumphant inscription :
By baptism in the River Jordan
Bodies are cleansed from disease and evil,
So all secret sinfulness takes flight.
Thus the flame rising furiously
Through the whole city in 1421
Purged the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs.
As the world was once purged by the flood,
So this time it was purged by fire.

Standing at the door of the Jesuitenkirche,
I gaze up,suitably impressed, at the dome above,
But as I approach the altar
The spectacle reveals itself as sham…
Nearby, one day in 1212,
A dreaded basilisk was discovered
At the bottom of a well,
And a baker’s apprentice volunteered
To climb down and capture the beast,
Taking a mirror with him;
The basilisk, seeing its own reflection
In the glass, turned to stone.

The Venus of Willendorf
Suckles us all at her drooping dugs,
Bears us all in her domed belly…
Walking through the Cemetery of the Nameless,
All the forgotten people fished out of the Danube,
Never identified,
I ask myself: who will be the next
To possess the Holy Lance
And hold the world’s destiny in his hands?

In the Academy of Fine Arts
Bosch’s Paradise, Last Judgment and Hell,
Bestial demons torturing sinners
With infinite ingenuity,
And a very few survivors
Making it to heaven…
I think of young Hitler kicking his heels on the steps,
A shabby little vagabond,
Brooding over his exclusion from Paradise,
“What the world has lost
Because of those fools in the Academy !
Or has fate reserved me for some other purpose ?”

In Dürer’s Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand,
The artist himself, clad in black,
Strolls, deep in conversation with his recently deceased friend Conrad Celtes,
Amid scenes of mass murder, oblivious…
In Cranach’s Stag hunt of Elector Frederick the Wise,
There is an air of careless jollity
As the stags are driven into the water
To be picked off by the nobles’ crossbows…
Rubens’ The Fur, a celebration
Of his sixteen-year-old second wife, Hélène Fourment,
A saucy little angel, no, a saint,
Who brought an old man so much pleasure…
In Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath,
The artist has painted his self-portrait
As the giant’s severed head…
In the Egyptian galleries,
Mummy cases and canopic jars,
And shabti figurines once placed
Inside tombs to perform any tasks the gods required,
And mummies of cats, falcons, snakes and crocodiles;
And the Reserve Head found at Giza,
Smooth limestone, serene and beautiful,
A surrogate vehicle for the ka;
And all the scarabs that were placed
Upon the chests of mummies,
Bearing a spell that implored the dead one’s heart
Not to bear witness against him
During the Judgment of Osiris;
And the miniature wooden pleasure boat
Built to sail the ka through eternity…

Down into the dark
My poem sinks,
A coffin with a bell inside,
For the prematurely buried to ring
Should he come back to life.

Oh, life, world, you make me feel
So hapless, like that doctor summoned
To the bedside of the dying Franz-Josef I,
Only to be reprimanded:
“Go home and dress correctly.”
(Perhaps in the fashions of the Imperial Army,
The best tailored in Europe,
Whose white and cream uniform won first prize
At the 1900 Paris Exhibition?)

I stand before the convertible
In which Archduke Franz Ferdinand
And his wife were shot dead
On June 28, 1914;
It still has a bullet hole in it;
Here, also, is the archduke’s bloodstained light-blue tunic
And unblemished hat with green feathers,
And the chaise-longue on which he died.

I walk the streets of the Innere Stadt,
Bewildered by Mozart’s peregrinations:
Thirteen addresses in ten years.
Yet I understand the urge.

Like Sacher-Masoch
Buying his mistress yet more furs,
I indulge my Muse
And accept the punishment,
Sure that such is my fate,
A Lippizaner,
Born brown, later turning white.

In the Prater
The Ferris wheel is turning
And hysterical laughter slides
Down the helter-skelter
Of a kiss-
What is this world to me?
Planetarium,
Puppet booth.
Fifteen million years ago
This was the floor of the Miocene Sea;
Now, a child with a lollipop in his mouth.