They slip away, those creatures who once caught my eye and ventured near, near enough to smell of snow as cold lingered in their fur and breath warmed my sleeping ear; who ate an apple from my hand and lounged in sunlight, unconstrained. Such old affections slip away, all but one, la douce dolor: she…
We arrived at our goal in the dark, via the Avus. The green eye of the Radio Tower winking, as we saw the city sprawled below us. The broad streets radiated inwards reaching towards a center, monsters’ fingers, from the days of silent film, closing round a throat. The journey passed by ditches, new building…
I picked roses on the Wannsee and don’t know who to give them to. Jakob van Hoddi We left the city on muddy paths along the riverbank. Bare trees dogged us unseen like shadows in the icy water, the grey cross hatching. We brushed past blackthorn, breaking off alder branches with our shoulders. We…
The cold glint of gold in the winter sun. The monuments no longer blaze like back in the day, the barrels of anti-aircraft guns, clumsy tanks. The old capital of terror turns over in its sleep, shifts from one side to the other: East-West. A great listening ear hovers in the air above the Tiergarten…
This black train, puffing out clouds of white smoke, still races towards the viewers. They say some jumped up in fright, thinking the catastrophe was about to occur. The light on the wall of the salon, light from an incarnate summer’s day – so different from the Paris light at the same moment, outside on…
Enough of these silver spoons and tropical helmets, widows’ broaches and porcelain; enough of these bent and antiquated bird cages, and the photo portraits of dead children. Set up in rows on wobbly tables, under canvas in wind or bad weather, what do they say, what do they hide, these remnants of the nameless crimes…
What makes you think I can live in a room from which you have removed – admittedly with considerable tact – one of the four walls? I agree, the view has really improved (not that you can see the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio in the distance) but is the (let’s call it) “radical renovation”…
Biographers and scholars agree: he was mad. But does it matter whether he really used to see angels dancing in the trees in his garden, or would spend long evening hours conversing with Isaiah and Ezekiel? Isn’t it enough that that he left us “Proverbs of Hell” and “Jerusalem”? Shortly before closing his eyes he…
Each morning when you go out on the balcony to enjoy your first coffee of the day you face the same intolerable backdrop: Delos reposing nonchalantly in precisely the same place you left it yesterday. How much you wish that nature, just for once, would cast off for a while its earnest attire and, like…
For Anne Carson In the second book of the Iliad, he calls him a mighty king: λάσιον κῆρ – in Rieu’s prose: “Pylaemenes of the shaggy breast led the Paphlagonians”. In the Fifth Book, he decides to have him killed – without too much fuss, in just two lines: “the great spearman Menelaus son of…
Lower your eyes. When beauty invades your life with such force, it can destroy you. The two ants hurrying along next to the soles of your feet are burying their summer dreams deep in the ground. The load they are carrying will not crush them. They have measured their strength accurately. Your shadow melts into…
After the smooth up-pull the car dove fish-efficient in the tractor-trailer’s wake. By then the thick wheel cuts had tapered down the long, curved grade then vanished, leaving undulations in the drifts. All the way from Montreal through French-toned Vermont we’d held to mostly all alone through night-time Massachusetts, the Berkshires rhythmic now, the rise…
