Albrecht Dürer and me (2 page)

Nicholas Lanier, 1628
, by Anton van Dyck

his long nose and wary look, cocked

right elbow, left hand casual on a rapier

poking back from the sparkle on its hilt

and the brightest mark? his wide forehead

below an abrupt line where brown curls

shine and announce pride, head's width

of blue sky softly clouded, sun-streak burning

above a background of fake ruins

and the focus? Lanier's lips, straight and stern

ready to sneer, yet showing beneath refinement

how many times he has been bruised

(note the hint of green at the left temple)

hairs on his red moustache curving up above

his pointed beard ready and set to quiver

he sat seven days for van Dyck, and both

clearly relished that wide swath of rich cape

tumbling down from his left and out of which

bulge his arms in red-striped fabric

such a pleasure to paint that the artist

could manage in an afternoon, highlights

of folds easy compared to the eyes some

call cold, others unarmed, the gift of art

to reflect and reveal each viewer accurately

commemorative rooms

Georg Trakl (February 3, 1887, Salzburg to November 3, 1914, Kraków)

not a word in English, yet I understand

yellowing paper holds up faded words

small books plain in design

black and white photographs

light from windows muted (a storm

is building, and later its mountain

violence breaks and drenches

my T-shirt: Salzburg, it says)

from in here I can almost see

the school he attended, still severe

and grand and yet submitting

in this city of churches, it is functional

first and only with time dignified

and perhaps saddened

that many were dead

in the short film a man's voice

intones his poems so tenderly

I am reminded that language

this harsh can be loving – because

back home we'd read translations

but never softly: scenes of the Eastern Front

required at least a twisting

of the jaw so out would come

how he himself may have sounded

gurgling on his deathbed from

an overdose of cocaine, unclear

whether suicide or error

– but forever clear his small

self-portrait: a painted darkness

of reddish hair, green face

makes a mask so unlike

the blond young man in striped trousers

seen sitting, eager not for war

but for his life – and I see

how summer light comes in

and tries its best to tell me

not to believe this possessed glow

here on the wall set to trigger

my dismay but instead to step

back into the street, where

he'd walked, shadows from clouds

falling on him as they fall on me

with sudden heat and thunder –

and did he hear in that rumble

guns that ended more

than an empire swept away

with his twenty-seven years?

what
I
hear has by now

been returned to nature, and I know

enough of this timelessness

spreads ahead, so I continue still

to look upward at stone walls

grateful they had been there

to hear a schoolboy singing

Goethe, Ringstrasse

your green mantle of bronze

rose up on a street new to me

dazed me: this chance wander

and encounter! in my half-

hope to find an age not yet

complete, I saw your girth

x
times larger than in real life

but what's a statue for

if not to magnify, focus, inflate?

and felt unnerved, until I spotted

the double row of buttons marching up

how classically draped your coat

how sturdy your boots, casual

drooping of your hands, your air of

certainty and even, yes, touch of

chagrin at becoming this . . .

immovable icon

earlier I'd passed towering Handel

(or was it Haydn?) I can hardly recall

now you and I are familiar: my third

(or is it fourth?) journey to remove

broken green bottle bits from

the base of your pedestal, its one

word, your name, raised in caps

I ignore traffic swelling behind us

pulse and drone of Mercedes buses

touring among snappy winds this place

has faced since long before you became

yourself, dispensing clarity as if

it were the simplest of languages

more and more you look all inward

as I gaze up, a ritual in which

I've had my umbrella blown out

by wind driving rain, same angle

I felt as a child, and I marvel

standing here, that I am able still

to find a hero in your travelling

toward Italy, in a polymath's

colours, plants – old cosmos

streamed through your mind, alchemized –

arrogance dropped, dross you spun

for us into wise gold, your face here

forever stained from rain running

to catch your down-turned lips

and I wonder if all alloyed eyes

stare into past worlds with such doubt

Galileo . . .

lived on this street, so says

a tall handsome woman

whose apartment I'm renting

one thousand years old

with modern plumbing

and beams so huge I think of

Pacific coast giants

I look across the narrow way

of Costa dei Magnoli to where

a church waits with fresh flowers

under a fading madonna's smile

when I open wide the window

and then walk out, locate his home

and high in a circle, his bearded face

a Pisces with Leo rising

hard to see, just another pale

fresco, yet strength to outlast

generations who trudged

this slope back to when

the nearby city wall held

against enemy knives

and where now I meander

pushing up along the stones

May grass high and red with

poppies as if from shed blood

and also a fragrance I catch

and fail to identify until at last

I see small dangling lemons

not quite globes, not quite suns

and think of starry ideas, just begun

his, all earth-changing, my own

no bigger than a brain's sphere

or a handful of this warm soil

to sail home with

onto a cold coast

no new moons to discover there

no orbs to name even as the lenses

I look through rearrange me

daily from fuzzy to clear

in case a heaven swims by

pushing toward the Alps

I can't believe they will open and reveal

passes because from an hour away

though cloud-speckled and so

somehow soft, they're a wall

we keep driving toward, Volvo

unperturbed by the road rising

to where limestone breaks and piles

and leaves white points in the sky

summits subject to the
whap

of a climber's ice axe far above rivers

we roll across, their gravel bottoms

almost white, scoured by rushes

of glacial flood while mountain light

slants into an evening's yellow

and shadows elongate for dusk

as a buttery castle floats past

these peaks remain unfazed

even by Zeus-fuelled lightning bolts

as if their true trick is not to think

not to have any apparatus with which

to think, their solid fame and

eye-glad beauty never knowing

that one who passes below is visited

by the flash of a former motoring

(with frayed parents that Sunday)

buried under massing decades and

arriving with a pang, alive like rain

fleeing the windshield

in Kapfenstein

in Schloss Kapfenstein I discover I have forgotten

how to dance – at my daughter's wedding

under the portrait of a long-nosed Austrian

in blue silk, descendant of Turk fighters

I stumble and step on delicate feet: three women

attempt to lead, and fail, though we enjoy anyway our

pleasure at arms up not in time with lederhosen music

and along the Danube, I find bewilderingly

I have forgotten how to ride a bike, wobbling

wildly, almost running into ambulatory tourists

and those other trim walkers from nearby vineyards

stepping along, catching breezes, in this particular

incarnation watching barges bearing down

under black, red, gold faded German flags

what everyone says cannot be forgotten

I forget and blame being unbalanced on

the hammer of intercontinental flight but know

somehow it's otherwise, as in the dream

night before the wedding: fighting off men

with moustaches and crowbars who are breaking

glass walls of my house, one man among them

attaching explosives so no hope remains

of driving him off when he turns to me and says

‘Why are you so invested in this structure?'

or perhaps more like the dream the night

following, having passed through a father's tears

and into another beginning, when I am hoeing, really

cutting the ground, gruelling work, and then

an even greater effort is required: to wear

a bulky x-ray unit strapped to my chest so everyone

sees what I am feeling, that I've worked hard

at becoming soft with rewards of love's

continuance, joy's release

dislocation

child takes the hand of an older brother

leads him into a house where kind-faced

violinist reaches his instrument down

and before the two boys begin

to sing to his vibrato, the child

turns back to remaining

family members clustered outside

tells them to ready their hankies

so sweet will be the music made

for the father, for whom especially

these songs are sung

my own damp

pillow awakens me in a foreign bed

where I wonder if this dream

arrives only in dislocation, to uncover

how a constancy remains

and requires thought

so that, here, closer to the village

of my forefathers, its dust

might enter me

on this table

peonies eager to open and bless me

with their cut dying – they might have

in incarnations of earlier seeds

graced a meal when my father's father

came home weary

found his family singing not hymns

but rhyming paeans even the youngest

knew were both his own and everyone's

our common dust

lovemaking in Vienna

August night so heavy with damp

all exhaled breaths from the dead

in the Danube are falling upon the city

soggy and hot, and I throw open

casements and hope the famous
Föhn

with its hint of pinewoods will find me

but it does not, I am too hemmed in:

tall stucco walls, windows overlooking a small

courtyard full of green feathery treetops

climbing up in moonlight – and so later

a woman's moaning slides across the leaves

close by, uninterrupted queen of the night

and I'm waking and not waking but awake enough

to wonder out of which window does love fly

and later still, when silence returns, I'm fully

attentive to hearing it, no traffic beyond my bed

to deflect or ignore

– and then we're all

drowsy beyond sad dreams, spines feeling

rare breeze so welcome on wet flesh

that wakefulness grows almost into desire

though sleep is strong and best

on first hearing Mahler's Fifth

first violin throws her blond braid

severely down, then up as if to knock

second violin out of tune, as if possessed

by torrents of rising and falling, mellow and unmelodic

depths that vanish into ears of listeners where nests of

feelings up till then half noted (half unwanted)

fill with formless murmurs from a forgotten life of fury

were I given a chance, a second chance, it is not

her I'd want to be, nor the popinjay-conductor

who kisses her hand held high as her head, nor even

Mahler with his face full of rivulets and futures even he

could not foretell, he with his star in the sidewalk

outside the opera house, but rather let me be

the percussionist who sits serenely

hands in his lap, cymbals tucked away in slots

until slowly he rises, pulls out the glowing alloy discs

crouches slightly, feet placed apart

for grip, legs like a wishbone, hurls his

hands together in a whammo
khurshliiiing!

finishes by opening cymbals upward, mouths

lifted high to eat all other sounds

then he subsides into a kind of sleeping

waiting for the moment he is called upon again

to bring forth a perfect punctuation, an exclamation

for which oboe and French horn, string bass and bassoon

have been mere prelude, his the culmination

of the kind a boy-child makes when in an alley

he clangs the lids of the garbage cans, and above him

a fat matron yells down from overlooking window

into inner courtyard, Italian, German, Dutch

message always the same, to halt, to which the juvenile

replies with one more reverberation rising upward unstoppably

over all commands, obliteration that brings

primal, cup-ringing delight, his heraldic shields

victorious over adulthood's demands for quietness

out of which nothing worthwhile has yet been rung