Breitenau (Osterzgebirtge)
Take comfort! You would not seek me had you not found me.
—Blaise Pascal
Where I came from, I cannot say for sure. These paths
bear no names. The houses to which they lead
over the remains of snowfields hover in the east wind like hawks.
Fog born from the Bohemian basin, and aglow in the distance,
the last village before the border, the rocks sinking into sleep,
broad-browed, cold, having drunk from Saxony’s Lethe.
The eyes dim, the temples mildewed with white:
that it is me who remembers, who could make this claim?
Owls housed in the church steeple, crouched on the clock hands at night:
then daybreak, the broom plants struggling awake, whipped
this way and that in the crusted snow. The dogs fall back, an echo
drifts across the moss in a long and muffled semblance of itself.
Just yesterday I still knew what it was I believed in—the shape
of warm lips, breath, and musical tones; and the last few farmyards
below the Saddle open their gates: I let myself be borne along,
here and there another patch of landscape, a windmill’s clatter.
What I forgot now finds me again, like a mirror image,
though clearer, framed by this mild mountain light.
Aquarium
To be free? An empty question, it would seem, as I follow these creatures
in all their sunken streaming mirrored beauty behind the glass:
the sharks as they circle, the moonfish as they wax and wane, the rays
in flight, as telling as the tides . . . followed by the sight of chewed-up fins,
white wounded blurs of skin, with the light now growing far more matte,
the bodies caught in a slow dissolve, numbed into oblivion . . .
And here I sit, alone, reflecting on this, encircled by fish
that snap at the light in my eye, then disappear from sight.
Red jellyfish fray in the water, pulse in the stillness, domes
afloat, in flight, their bodies like liquid glass finely blown
into the void, veils of timelessness.
A solitary seafarer, the medusa,
majestic in her many-fringed train,
a cup in which to capture power,
persists, an echo of herself,
forever the same, never too early
or too late to venture out to sea
on her journey in, every contraction
widening her sphere of action.
Who were they, plunged into dream, nudging the glass?
Images, comparable to nothing, free from gravity or signification:
sunstar, monkfish, seahorse, dogfish, black moray eel . . .
absolute particles, monads, their evidence beyond question,
without ground, without aim, in this cosmos doubled-up in blue.
Their bulbs abob in the tank, the sea tulips imagine oceans . . .
Lips to the pane, as if man and fish were kissing a looking glass—
but it’s cold inside, and the brightness meets with no reply.
Here an observer, there a tuna refusing to meet my eye:
these sleeping bodies, left by Nature to their own devices?
Names on panels, but as no naming can occur without desire,
every gaze gets lost in this open reach of blank stares.
