A Convent of Schizophrenic Nuns
Let's burn this witch
- then we'll be warmer
Try to understand - we have been accused of madness
and also of a certain underhand sort of sin:
namely that time has become the ultimate insult to us
and a dizzying mirror
all this is the state of utter anxiety
Try to understand -
The convents prostrate in the afternoon heat
where each glance liberates drops
of nervous music from the flowers
and where vows of hand extension
are continually being renewed
so both zeal and whiteness
as well as all despised suffering can be grasped -
such convents have something of a choked magic about them:
in them you are a hundred years old and have yellow fingers
and can clearly see living time bleeding down the walls
flowing right up to the altar - like the hair of God
and these are not hallucinations
but our compulsions:
withdrawal
We all withdraw - under our closed eyelids
where we have erected a cemetery
we lay clocks on a stretcher in their agony
and embalm them together with their silence
and then the immortalised silence begins to accumulate
we are the extension of the silence too
locked in our tomb we die
with exact precision like terrified clocks
nevertheless sensitively reproducing time
an unbounded point of ambush.
We are frightened. For these are sorts of fairy-tale pictures
which we can only wound, like any measured metallic motion
and that is our understanding of time:
it needs to be killed
perhaps within ourselves.
They accuse us of madness - but can there be any better way
of going into hiding
than to become the mechanism itself
and so really not have anything to do with what creates us
or with what we are bound to measure
We murder bloodstained infinity
the world's blind catastrophe - just by looking it
straight in the eye
and not giving way to its sightless stare
Suddenly we know that we are so very dead
so ceaselessly dead
that we simply get bored by our own demise
it is this boredom that is the origin of time
April 1975
The Four Horsemen of Human Passion
All I desire today is pain, a conclusion, evil days
in expectation of this I walk out into the road.
Its stone ribbon solidifies in its bends and curves -
someone will say that Satan in the form of a snake
has turned into stone inside it and heaven
examines its complexion in the devil as if in a mirror
while the shadows of the clouds
hold the beast radiating sparks
down on the pavement
will say that love, hate and fear -
the three elements of the beast's like the beast's three quarter phases -
will cast down into the depths
their dust-ridden cores
The fourth element
will gather the husks -
And on that road at dawn I saw a woman
with a stove-sized sack to contain the seed. She said that she wanted
the road's cobblestones
to be unpassable and as proud as Babel,
so that on the bends and turnings of the way the hunchbacks
off-loaded their experiences
into her sack -
she wanted to bear the chalice
of the confusion of scripts,
and to satisfy the thirst of the road's grey mass with that madness,
over its cobblestones Fear
turns as if it were a quern
and yet love and hate watch hard into the stone's madness
like two mirrors glaring into each others' eyes.
The arteries of the beaten path stand out
the grain separates from its husks
and I hear an old woman laughing,
that the Fourth element is drawing close
that the beast
rises today
in his last quarter
after the next bend -
The moon like a blue snake
renews its waxing journey on high
The day is ended.
She is ready, holding out her sack.
22.11.81 Grudziadz
Joy
An essentially strange pathology arose out of our love.
Passion only exasperates a narcissistic childhood
(a mutual narcissism, it is free of the alienation or the silence beside the
spring . . . )
and only in that sense
do you remark on my nakedness - with one eyebrow raised -
you consider it with the expression of an aphorist
and your caress resembles
an aphorism
as we walk down cold, uninviting Avenue Duquesne.
But I submit quietly to these facts
with a matching, raised eyebrow,
I am never able to be as patient and brimming with charm
as when I wait for the climax
which can lash me or you
like a conductor's baton - with the unexpectedness of Strauss
in the shadow of a ball that unreels
the streets behind us . . .
the North blows down from the Champs Elysees
my childhood blossoms in my decollete, and in your hand,
placed on my heart.
But our audience discreetly dozes
hugged by the violets in the conductor's buttonhole
2.12.83 Paris
Pedestal
The city was razed by fire in successive stages, whose levels
arranged themselves pyramidically in the form of a pedestal,
standing for the proof of the existence of things impossible. Yet the City
was possible, and so too burning it down had become equally possible
so utterly that no one under any conceivable circumstances
would be able to reconstruct it or even initiate an attempt
irrespective of failure or success
of renovating it.
All personal, practical and theoretical powers were burnt down
and so too were methods, forms, questions, answers and rationalisations,
even the Ultimate justification and consequence of such conflagration,
and the stakes were burnt down as well.
The burnt City's irreducible existence endures in the perfect sphere of the
Pedestal
which in its essence is not complex but homogeneous,
unequivocal and impossible and thus
cannot be burnt down.
Well with Demon
The demon of our wedding has taken up residence
in a tin bucket by the well on the edge of the woods
and since he came we go there
separately
night after night:
I send down the bucket, you pull up the rope
and when we drink, with every mouthful our hands
move further away
and no voice
disturbs the clear splash
when the demon of our wedding takes his seat on the surface of the water
as the bottom becomes visible he bares himself
and gives each of us an enormous umbrella:
beneath yours is our day,
beneath mine is our night,
so you have no night, and I have no day
and we return home seeing nothing through the umbrella's canvas
and first we circle around the well, where
with those hands of his
which we do not know how to touch,
he bangs loudly against the sides of the tin bucket.
And then, deafened beneath the umbrellas
we smile sleepily and run all the way home
even though we did not know each other before
to make each other's violent acquaintance.
Dream Me
your dream petrifies in my soul
in a sort of underground cloister - down its tight corridors
following the breaches in your dreams I encounter the dead:
decomposing silk, like the modest schizophrenia of the bracelets
is transformed on a song-book discarded during childhood
endless smiles
from fourteen-year old Phe
she is the shadow of your dream because other than the real existence of rocks
besides the real fact of catacombs and of my scream with no echo
in the deafening world of symbols
(I sometimes feel suffocated by such self-knowledge)
Phe is your flute
You sit at the entrance of a pot-hole, it is midday
the sea is silent at your back
a dog licks a watch wilting in the heat
the dog's saliva mingles with the shimmerings of the passing hours
and dog is grey-haired and sea is grey-haired
and your playing enters into the glinting of the clock-face
like a glance
Sometimes Phe understands it and appears from underground
like a shadow of the childood we spent together
gold in her hands is grey, a dusty pain
yellowed with the demands made by metaphors
when Phe's head rises up and is close to its full phase
the dog raises its head, howls quietly, and the watch on your wrist loses its
breath
You put the flute down
you only utter my name
evil's sadness in the underground lake splashes noiselessly
I float on my back naked in this tristesse - a dark wave
carries me like a piece of bark scribbled with words
I do not remember what route we take (all dimensions are adjacent here)
and so I take my place on the surface of the mirror
I see you I fall to my knees as if before the Resurrected One
and yet only the tears of your malleable watch
of your childhood have brought me the touch
of your hands
and the dog listens to you and the desert becomes weightless and hopeless
and the flute turns transparent;
Phe outlined like the moon's new phase illuminates your whisper:
dream of me
I shall lead you out of here more lovingly than Orpheus
Adam Hertz the Builder
I have constructed thirty seven mechanical angels
so far
and given them names and swords,
and each of the swords I have also named:
the first was called Egomunda, and the last
was called Esmeralda
(and indeed I honed it out of an emerald
as large as an obelisk)
My angels have no faith in me, and
when I pass by the cages designated for my swords
they state that I do not exist
and following a battle in their own blood they write out proofs
of my non-existence,
which I believe firmly.
It is possible to believe anything, and I will it so to be
and the whole of my artistry
I dedicate to the raising
of a translucent temple where I shall duly honour
my swords, which astonish me so much
(and particularly Egomunda and Esmeralda
whose statues of mechanical metaphors
remain the ultimate mark of approval.
for my work)
Mystery depends on creating ever newer
Codices complete with their exegeses and apologetics
and these conflicts between
angels and swords, which just like banners
raise high my emblems
ambiguously etched on dark blue silk
containing within them
the anxieties of astronomy and theology.
And the angels like the sharp blades of the swords
engage in lengthy disputations and raise enormous armies,
and carry out covert assassinations
bringing with them the tortures of an insatiable audience.
My life, in as far as it exists at all, is subordinated
to these Codices. And in the end I feel the grace of
my swords flowing down onto me:
To those fallen for the truth of my non-existence
I shall build mausolea
of poetry and prophecy.
And my exertion is not isolated: I repeat
the deeds and the beliefs
of my master
Johann Ezechiel Krantz
whom on his deathbed angels and swords
judged and carried out
the sentence of execution,
which was just. And neither does my breast
tremble at the judgement of the swords.
And my disciple Johan Hertz will also construct
ever newer, ever more perfect
Codices, their Systems and their Mechanics,
and he will not tremble either.
Auto-da-fé
A girl is seated by a fire. It is night. Marshes - like madness
in the eyes of a soothsayer - gently sparkle among the alder trees
an oak tree bears its shaggy brow of a giant
high above the forest,
and in the fire at the foot of the oak the bones turn relentlessly
the smoke defines pale bluish forms in the darkness;
a man, who is creeping up from behind to push her suddenly
into the flames - steals towards her from the reed beds.
There is only the wind. A boat dances nervously by the shoreline.
In the boat - a devil. Like a huge bird of prey on its nest,
or Charon the boatman- he watches his fellow conspirator
and from this hidden vantage point, through the movement of slippery branches
he sends the man his devilish dream.
The man dreams of a whole retinue of maidens rising from the ashes
who went before the girl unwarily
guarding the fire.
Young maidens' shadows graze the eyelids
of this keeper of the flame.
She senses nothing. She has lost all memory,
having entered into the logic of these rituals
not noticing the difference
between herself and the skeleton of the fire
which in a strong, bony retinue
circles the oak tree
looks into the marsh as if into a well
and its flames chase purplish hoops
high up into the sky beyond.
The girl sits motionless by the fire
totally at one with its inner order
and the man hidden among the reeds
that invisible huntsman
sent into this country from the opposite shore
manipulated mechanically by the devil's dreaming
senses his own hopelessness
when, carrying within him a devilish passion
he can not recognise what will be her stake
or what burns upon it:
bones,
memory
or is it consciousness.
Temptation
You should stop walking behind me like this -
I don't know these streets myself, clocks burn at the road's turnings
it looks extraordinary
in rain that flashes so intensely with neon
I'm only going to spend under an hour in solitude
I want to shake hands with that hour on some helpless square
yesterday for example I saw
a small boy casually stroking one
of those clocks alternately burn dark blue then emerald green
and at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery
he exposed his closed eyelids to the rain
and it is only when I understand that child
that your smile penetrates me
so I want to see what he must have seen
The Last Stop Cafe
A nothing to write home about sort of establishment . . . on
Terribly Square, I Want You
and in the midst of all this there is fog, mad mirrors, the stairway's keyboard.
Hawthorne's shadow serves coffee and punch.
only the stars above us are real but the night
is beginning to flow out of us
the shadows of our hearts twitch slightly in the coffee grounds
the pact with the devil is reflected in the saddened greenish
eyes of my cat, Taboo -
inside them hieroglyphics glare like meteors, you and Hawthorne . . .
the deepest shade of love . . .
And the water, sir, thinks intensely about us in the fountain
and in the night becomes an apostrophe of darkness
Taboo's tracks beneath the gas lamp fall silent and the stars enchant
and grow up from the very roots of the Cosmos
On Terribly Square, I Want You Too - a nothing to write home about
sort of establishment.
Except the climate here has such an English accent.
Isn't it a bit cold sitting here drinking
and watching Taboo's fur glisten when we stroke it?
Translated by Donald Pirie
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