Staring out of a train window
As it hurtles through the countryside,
One knows that life eludes all taxonomies
Can never be reduced to diagrams.
You raise your face to the breeze,
Life’s essence passes through you
And seeps into the bones.
Where is the river’s source?
Is it on Mt Abnoba?In Hesperia?
In the land of the Hyperboreans?
This is the zone of hybrids and metamorphoses.
In a small dip in the hillside the Breg
Bubbles up from underground;the meadow
Is steeped in water,sodden and flooded
By countless rivulets...
Once the primeval Danube flowed
Into the Gulf of Thetis,into the Sarmatic Sea,
Its mouth where Vienna now stands.
In the Clock Museum at Furtwanger,
Timepieces by the thousand tick off the hours
In a dream of perpetual motion,pendulums
And cogwheels dividing eternity
Into mathematical units,while life
Flies up and down and in and out
And all around...The relief of science,
Distracting us from our inner torment,
Turning our gaze to the world outside!
Perhaps ths way we will keep our heads,
Discover a world secure and structured,
A home for the self-tormented spirit.
Stations I pass through,words I write...
The struggle to fill in the blank spaces,
Annul the nullity, escape from insignificance...
Why did it all turn out as it did-myself
And the world-from the beginning till now?
Keep moving bravely forward,do not rest.
The mystery of the Hapsburg Empire
Draws me in,through paradox and oxymoron,
The irreconcilable contradiction,the puzzle
Never to be solved,too many pieces missing,
The synthesis that cannot be achieved.
This is my future,forever postponed,
My mind,like a Klein bottle.
Must one believe in God to have faith in the world?
Very early I began to doubt priests’ words
And see in their rites mere theatre.
One must love the created world,all the same,
Be it underwritten by the heavens
Or by ourselves alone.
The Danube is, with no need of affirmation,
Promising nothing,flowing on, oblivious;
I will bridge and ford it however I can,
Accept my destiny as the seasons determine.
A parasite on the hide of Europe,
A parasite feeding on the ideas and emotions
Of the living and the dead,I mime a life
Inside a carapace of rhetoric.
Am I Roman or barbarian? I am drawn
To the empire’s crumbled stone frontier,
Dividing and defining all the way to the Black Sea.
In Ulm, the sparrow’s nest,the shrine
Of Ahasuerus’s shoe,German law and custom
Bless the sad clerks at their desks,
Their hidden passions distorted by convention,
Rendered pitiful and grotesque.
Close,so close to perdition,I dig into the black roots
Of a language I cannot speak,a culture
Far from my birth,and maunder on,
Sure,at least,of desire’s ordeal,
That binds me to the indescribable beloved,
That face,those hips, those shoulders...
Triple-rivered Passau,floating and flowing
Away on the current,gold and carnation marble
Palaces and churches ,streets winding beneath
Arches,domes and colonnades-a cosmos
Of curves,spheres,circles and ellipses-
The nearest is the furthest away,
The simplest is the most mysterious,
As we seek a home on earth, a hearth
To tend with care and hope,
Discovering grace before nothingness.
Smell of snow in Linz,the hills and river
Heraldic in the still-the imperial AEIOU
Spells infinitely receding possibility
To the heart.To break out
Of this landlocked desolation and reach
The sea!-There we might be happy
As humans, as animals,as gods.
Ochre and orange buildings fade
Into the evening’s watercolour,
In Artstetten Castle crypt,they lie,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Sophie,
Their idiocies annulled by martyrdom.
The old Europe died in their arms,
As they died in each other’s,
Pulling the whole world down with them
Into the bottomless wishing well,
Keeping forever their lovers’ secrets
Deadlier than bullets or bombs.
The first blood flowed out onto his blue tunic,
From the sleeve and chest,as his hat
With huge green feathers fell unharmed.
In Vienna’s Cemetery of the Nameless,
Treading over the Danube’s sacrificial victims,
I watch big crows rise on the wing,
Inhale the simple joy of morning.
How hard it is to tell the real from the unreal,
Fact from feeling,life from death.
In the Museum of Medicine,among
Anatomical models sectioned to reveal
The madness of muscles,organs,arteries
And nerves,I stop before a beautiful
Colourless male head,the lips drawn
Into the smile of a kouros,the skull
Exposing,in median sagittal section,
The cerebellum’s tree of life.
A woman with abdominal walls removed
To lay the genital organs open
Lies serenely prone,in a blonde wig,
A necklace round her waxen throat.
Plump white hands of Hungarian princes,
Earthen hands of Slovakian peasants;
Renaissance palaces winged like griffins,
Hovels made from straw and dung;
Only the trees and stones know
The lives that have gone into this soil.
Wave on wave of invasions, superimposed
Upon one another, have steeped
The earth with Eurasian dreams.
Solitude is their birthright,these souls
Abandoned to the horsemen’s plains,
Forever,even in victory,defeated.
In an open-air cafe in Budapest,I spoon
Icecream into my lying mouth,and watch
The Danube run beneath titanic bridges,
To some unseen horizon,which the spirit,
Fed on books and pictures,can reach for
But never,to its anguish,attain.
Powerless in a marginal province,
One hears the muffled cries of lives
Unknown, destinies arbitrated elsewhere.
Sunflowers and maize cover Mohács field,
Wooden statues planted in the ground
To mark the battle,men and horses.
Faces contorted with ferocious agony,
Crosses and crescents opposed;
The day when the olive tree at Pécs
Turned barren,and King Louis II,
Egged on by his nobles,shrugged
And gave the accursed order for battle.
Like Gaius Scribonius,unwilling
To advance his army into the dark forests
On the other shore,clinging to the pure
And noble Latin tongue as his shield,
I plot strategic victories of speech.
In Bulgaria,-no man’s land of heretics,
Among late nations half-mapped
By Western arrogance,where the dark
Vowels of Old Church Slavonic swung
Their bronze bells in high towers,-
I spy on a church wall an anathema
Against the Bogomils,the peasants’ friends,
Who denounced the satanic princes
Of the earth, its irredeemable evil
Perpetuated through human lust.
Forward the Thracian horseman
Charges,serene in the face of death,
Cloak-wings flying out in the wind.
At the gibbeted crossroads,in the path
Of evil,Romania lures me in where many
Gods have been created then sacrificed.
Only the most fallen, the most corrupt
Can long so for redemption,-
The swarming world,condemned
By sensual delusion,staggers
Under its own desire’s burden.
The delta ravels its secrets before me:
Stream on stream,ramified rivulets
Feeding the great dissolution,
The terminus of death and rebirth.
Nature’s bass note booms through me,
Amid the vast jungle of land and water
Merged,the cavernous shadows
Of overhanging trees, the deep bays
Where time moors,like the Argo returning.
Loosen,release,abandon to the flow!-
Gulls and herons crowd the evening air,
Shouting madly to the sea’s horizon.
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