Spring lies forsaken.
 The velvet-dark ditch
 crawls by my side
 without reflections.
 
 
The only thing that shines
 are yellow flowers.
 
 
I am cradled in my shadow
 like a fiddle
 in its black case.
 
 
The only thing I want to say
 glimmers out of reach
 like the silver
 at the pawnbroker’s.
 

 
The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
 and her earrings dangle like Damocles’sword.
 
 
As a spotted butterfly turns invisible in a field
 so the demon blends in with the spread-open newspaper.
 
 
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
 The mother turtle flees, flying under water.
 

 
 I stepped ashore one May night
 into a chilly moonlight
 where grass and flowers were gray
 but their scent green.
 
 
I drifted up a slope
 in the colorblind dark
 while white stones
 signaled back to the moon.
 
 
A time span
 several minutes long
 fifty-eight years wide.
 
 
And behind me
 beyond the lead-shimmering waters
 was the other coast
 and those in command.
 
 
People with a future
 instead of faces.
 

 

I

 Two old men, father- and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal
 together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas,
 he who changes everything he touches to Wagner.
 The ocean’s green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors.
 Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before,
 his face a white flag.
 The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way.
 
 

II

 A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft.
 Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by two one-oared bandits.
 Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off
 to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
 Meteorites!
 Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down
 to the Brownshirt years.
 The gondola is heavy-laden with the future’s huddled-up stones.
 
 

III

 Peep-holes into 1990.
March 25th. Angst for Lithuania.
 Dreamt I visited a large hospital.
 No personnel. Everyone was a patient.
 
 
In the same dream a newborn girl
 who spoke in complete sentences.
 
 

IV

 Beside the son-in-law, who’s a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur.
 It’s a disguise.
 The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him—
 the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face.
 
 

V

 Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine
 and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station.
 A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission.
 He always has commissions.
 Two thousand letters a year!
 The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he’s allowed to go home.
 The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.
 
 

VI

 Back to 1990.
Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain.
 Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens
 sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf.
 
 
Dreamt I had drawn piano keys
 on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute
 The neighbors came over to listen.
 
 

VII

 The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has something to say.
 Sighs. . sospiri. .
 When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down
 so the ocean’s green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the stone in the
      building.
 Good evening, beautiful deep!
 The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.
 
 

VIII

 Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late.
 Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask.
 Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.
 

 
 The sun glides out from behind the house
 positions itself mid-street
 and breathes on us
 with its scarlet wind.
 Innsbruck I must leave you.
 But tomorrow
 a glowing sun stands
 in the half-dead gray forest
 where we have to work and live.
 

 
 The almighty Cyclops-eye went behind the clouds
 and the grass shuddered in the coal dust.
 
 
Beaten sore and stiff from last night’s dreams
 we climb aboard the train
 that stops at every station
 and lays eggs.
 
 
It’s rather quiet.
 The clonging from the churchbells’ buckets
 collecting water.
 And someone’s unrelenting cough
 telling off everything and everyone.
 
 
A stone idol is moving its lips:
 it’s the city.
 Where iron-hard misunderstandings rule
 among kiosk-attendants butchers
 sheet-metal workers naval officers
 iron-hard misunderstandings, academics.
 
 
How my eyes ache!
 They’ve been reading by the glowworm-lamps’ faint light.
 
 
November offers caramels of granite.
 Unpredictable!
 Like world history
 laughing at the wrong place.
 
 
But we hear the clonging
 from the churchbells’ buckets when they collect water
 every Wednesday
 —is it Wednesday?—
 that’s what’s become of our Sundays!
 

 
 It was a funeral
 and I sensed the dead man
 was reading my thoughts
 better than I could.
 
 
The organ kept quiet, birds sang.
 The hole out in the blazing sun.
 My friend’s voice lingered
 in the minutes’ farthest side.
 
 
I drove home seen through
 by the summer day’s brilliance
 by rain and stillness
 seen through by the moon.
 

 

 I

 The knight and his lady
 were petrified but happy
 on a flying coffin lid
 outside of time.
 
 

II

 Jesus held up a coin
 with Tiberius in profile
 a profile without love
 the power in circulation.
 
 

III

 A dripping sword
 obliterates memories.
 The ground is rusting
 trumpets and sheaths.
 

 
 Like being a child and an enormous insult
 is pulled over your head like a sack;
 through the sack’s stitches you catch a glimpse of the sun
 and hear the cherry trees humming.
 
 
But this doesn’t help, the great affront
 covers your head and torso and knees
 and though you move sporadically
 you can’t take pleasure in the spring.
 
 
Yes, shimmering wool hat, pull it down over the face
 and stare through the weave.
 On the bay, water-rings teem soundlessly.
 Green leaves are darkening the land.
 

 
 Each on its own side of a strait, two cities
 one plunged into darkness, under enemy control.
 In the other the lamps are burning.
 The luminous shore hypnotizes the blacked-out one.
 
 
I swim out in a trance
 on the glittering dark waters.
 A muffled tuba-blast breaks in.
 It’s a friend’s voice, take your grave and go.
 

 
 Outside the window is spring’s long animal,
 the diaphanous dragon of sunshine
 flowing past like an endless
 commuter train — we never managed to see its head.
 
 
The seaside villas scuttle sideways
 and are as proud as crabs.
 The sun causes the statues to blink.
 
 
The raging conflagration out in space
 is transforming into a caress.
 The countdown has begun.
 

 
 It’s teeming under us. Trains depart.
 Hotel Astoria trembles.
 A glass of water by the bedside
 shines into the tunnels.
 
 
He dreamed he was imprisoned on Svalbard.
 The planet rumbled as it turned.
 Glittering eyes passed over the ice.
 The miracles’ beauty existed.
 

 

 I

 The high-tension lines
 taut in cold’s brittle kingdom
 north of all music.
 
 
                 ~
The white sun, training
 alone, runs the long distance
 to death’s blue mountains.
 
 
                ~
We need to exist
 with the finely printed grass
 and cellar-laughter.
 
 
                 ~
The sun lies low now.
 Our shadows are goliaths.
 Soon shadow is all.
 

 

II

 The orchid blossoms.
 Oil tankers are gliding past.
 And the moon is full.
 

 

III

 Medieval fortress,
 a foreign city, cold sphinx,
 empty arenas.
 
 
                 ~
Then the leaves whispered:
 a wild boar plays the organ.
 And the bells all rang.
 
 
                 ~
And the night streams in
 from east to west, traveling
 in time with the moon.
 

 

IV

 A dragonfly pair
 fastened to one another
 went flickering past.
 
 
                 ~
The presence of God.
 In the tunnel of birdsong
 a locked door opens.
 
 
                 ~
Oak trees and the moon.
 Light and mute constellations.
 And the frigid sea.
 

 

 I

 One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty,
 the bay’s grave cold rose up through her arms
 and into her life.
 
 
Her tears froze into spectacles.
 The island raised itself by its grass
 and the herring-flag waved in the deep.
 

 

II

 And the swarm of small pox caught up with him,
 settled down onto his face.
 He lies and stares at the ceiling.
 
 
How it had rowed up through the silence.
 The now’s eternally flowing stain,
 the now’s eternally bleeding end-point.
 

 
 Walk past, they are buried. .
 A cloud glides over the sun’s disk.
 
 
Starvation is a tall building
 that moves about by night—
 
 
in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens,
 a dark rod pointing toward the interior.
 
 
Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.
 Walk past, they are buried. .
 
 
The table silver survives in giant shoals
 down deep where the Atlantic is black.
 

 
 A blue light
 is streaming out from my clothes.
 Midwinter.
 Jingling tambourines of ice.
 I close my eyes.
 There is a soundless world
 there is a crack
 where the dead
 are smuggled over the border.
 

 
 William Turner’s face is browned by weather;
 he’s set up his easel far off in the breaking surf.
 We follow the silver-green cable down into the depths.
 
 
He wades out in the long shallows of death’s kingdom.
 A train rolls in. Come closer.
 Rain, rain travels over us.