Albrecht Dürer and me (4 page)

crying in the Belvedere

young woman quite near

presses against young man

black hair dishevelled

ragged mouth twisted in tears

pushed open on his chest – is she

reseeing
The Kiss
, the way it pulsed

(so unlike kitschy postcard's gold message)

or was it Napoleon on his silver

steed, crimson cape twirling over

forward thrust of conquered soil?

did a different draft of history

creep near and enter her?

in upper rooms von Ribbentrop

forced two men from Belgrade

to capitulate, sign Axis papers

in presence of Italian and Japanese

government men supercilious

in their self-regard and disrespect

for two seized Slavs, whose people

would repudiate their signing and fight

fully knowing they must die

I look as closely as a furtive glance

allows: her luxurious hair flames,

face now not completely crumpled

though wet, shining – the man?

stares over her head into

futures not perfectly free, lips pursed

perhaps praying for rescue by

regiments under the command of

hero-warrior rewarded with

this mansion, Eugene of Savoy

whose iron statue dominates

entry to another palace safely far

from here, with other trysts

Vindobona

along the river I sniff out traces of you

of the Roman legions, emperor, philosopher-king

the term best suiting you, smell stones older

even than you, blank odour of rock

still hard and striated, rounded

not at all diminished since you arrived

with your phalanxes, here

determined to keep back un-order, a requirement

I recognize as necessary in myself although

my forebears fought against you, in the curled wood

their wild hair filled with light from gods (less rational

than yours) that you never doubted

walked among forest foes

at this place where the river bends, guards posted

at night, you writing Greek

shards of illumination that help when I wander

now by our Danube, my eye returning to

dip of wave repeating against stony shore

coming to announce an endless way like wind

among shoreline poplars, wooded hills

dropping down to water where vineyards crowd

and where across the river under the trees

once lurked a strength you pitched yourself

against, taking in its chthonic politics and fighting

for a different border between here and hereafter

four workers

two short women in green uniforms

cross the street with me, their talk

pleasurable in the cozy way they bend

to and from one another, dirt

on their knees as we walk past flower

patches and quivery shrubs

summer leaves wearing

clear droplet pearls

now two men in neon

orange overalls push wheelbarrows

of trash the city has offered them

both gaunt giants snarling into smoke

swirling up from lips as they scan

gutters in a silence marked by

glowering neither notices in the other

the way they talk and signal

by placing rake at an angle

amidst our common dust

a moment of missing bells

rugby in the seventeenth district

young men ram, thrust, brace against

one another, pass the ball backwards, kick it

high and out of bounds, squirm along

grass and stain their shorts and knees

with mud – yet how they run, ignoring

strain because of what lies ahead:

the flash of victory or (too raw to consider)

its counterpoint, a fiasco bringing tears

and incrimination in post-game review

in the stands, fans, two kinds only:

for favourite and for underdog

each with colours and erupting into

roars and monster chants though

rooters sit side by side on wooden slats

many smoking, then leaping to cheer a rush

a scrum, groaning when a critical kick

goes wide and linesman's orange flag

does not flash up to announce a triumph

and so famous local beer is downed

those tall green cans of yellow brew

that help enliven even a limp game, which this

championship is not, the golden cup waiting

medals glinting, eager to grace sweating necks

of victors – and women wave, not themselves

just now, catapulted into those who lean

out to touch heroes of the plastered hair

while ignoring around them the handsome men

though steady partners they may otherwise be

and who themselves bask in the gusto of

their fellow paladins, their sex's zest

confirmed at a remove they appreciate more

than the contact and knock admired

in the moment by their wives

armoury at Graz

‘goose belly' they called the breastplate

that presented a 16th-century foot soldier

to his enemy as someone rich and fat

and thus a victor in any battle with mace

and halberd, and all soldiers of any side

short then, a grown man's foot

no bigger than a child's now

only horse soldiers slightly larger

each with two pistols, two shots

to pierce opposing helmeted heads

about flank height

their mounts also small and tough

though not so they would jump

rows of upraised pikes, chest level

I wander these floors of weaponry

the cannons decorated, their cannonballs

plain and larger than a schoolboy's globe

I try on a helmet and feel its weight

bend my neck, crest of grey metal

reaching up to give an ego advantage

and even an hour after I hefted a sabre

the smell of iron clings to my fingers

while smoke from front-loaders blows

and men and horses scream as they fall

on blood-and-piss-soaked earth that a duke

determines worth defending or gaining, borders

always a line no one dying could be sure of

another threshold requiring crossing instead

I come to noticing last the small windows

their original panes rippling and wavy

so I see imperfectly the world beyond

and this one so remote it holds no fear

the long-barrelled guns needing

hardly any light except what little

we might throw their way in our thinking

of what creatures we once were

and still remain in our claiming

of ground – my own country like this too

far enough away that I do not feel

its grasp upon me though I know if pressed

I would find its war-light flickering within

Anton Bruckner

the fabled musicians perform Mozart

as if it were mere play, but when they move

to Bruckner, the violinists sit up like cats

ready for lunch, first violinist

first among favourites, black hair

a heap upon a gleaming brow

raked by fingers of supple power

earlier, at intermission

the second violinist had stepped out

for a cigarette needed not for nerves

but for air outside the hall, walls

golden as the secured waves in his curls

and returning late to the stage, apologized

profusely but quietly (but profusely)

to the conductor whose sharp forgiveness

for tardiness runs through the horns

like a charge, shock

perhaps all the better (thinks

the conductor) for the Bruckner

from the second row, I admire

these working faces, the bending

and near lifting-off of backbones

from stiff chairs, and though I admit

little know-how with such sound

I hear with my heart

the undulant green landscape

the brook, near, below a bridge

roving melancholy never far

and as sometimes happens

I fall under a spell partly

of my own making and awake

only when the clapping and bravos

ignite around me, uniting us with

the magicians who beam and bow

each effortlessly convinced

that their music was intended

as its composer intended

to speak of polyphonic God

Central Cemetery

. . . we arrive at the graveyard, one of mankind's most underrated symbols of civilization.
— Josephine Hart,
The Truth About Love

we walk through the walled place

admiring the quietness of the dead

the often tidy commemorations

of the three million who stopped here

some in crypts, or in fresh graves, a few

decorated wildly, rightly – Beethoven's

bones hum there beneath the stone

and there, someone not so famous (though

to his daughters perhaps more notable)

lid of the crypt lifted off, its iron

handles handled once more before

bones are lowered and added to an older

layer of familial skeletons waiting

meanwhile wind pushes at us

and at the trees, squirrels (one red

chasing the black) fling themselves

up trunks – it's then we enter old

Jewish grounds where 60,000 lie buried

and paths narrow, overgrown

ivy triumphing over headstones

of Hirsch and Epstein, nettles reaching out

from graves to brush our ankles

and bird calls seem to intensify

as if to compensate for what the shrunken

community cannot manage: to keep visible

these hidden markers and toppling

indicators, this jumble history's way

of leaving behind an unexpected scene

and yet how perfect an example of

what Freud (whose ashes repose not here

but in London) affirms: the animate

triumphs over the inanimate – and we

find in the amassing of grass and tendrils

a tenderness cool with natural shade

not so evident in trimmed lawns

below crosses, mounds, carefully

tended flowers brightly coloured just

across the road, closer to the centre

where a building with cement saints

and bulging green dome points up beyond

any name undergoing erasure whether etched

recently in marble or already eaten by seasons

of leaves, roots, leaves, roots, leaves

Sigmund Freud Museum . . .

I avoid and then its attraction

overcomes my aversion

and what's unconscious in me

begins to walk up Berggasse

wind blowing trash and sand

in my teeth, telling me to sidestep

into a second-hand store across

from #19, an easy diversion

then in his former rooms I watch

old home movies: his white head

wobbles, his clacking jaw says

even a giant turns frail, fails

needs a blanket over the knees

in some flower garden far from here

strong grandsons near his cane

the look-alike visitors: eager, studious

whereas I'm in the toilet wishing

I had the nerve to scrawl a joke

on white walls, one to make him laugh

but I have no marker and no

wit either, just a bit of

bratty vile-and-bile I can't express

though, believe me, I know it's there

what remains? the ratty maroon

furniture (the couch left with him

when he fled), not the Nazis

who hung their flag in his doorway

maybe some sentences, the few

I have read, but greater than these

this image of agedness: perhaps

paltry, not tattered, in tie and suit,

near enough to death to be hallowed

which grieves me, that he who said

all was drive and fatality would

himself be required to turn and face

what came next, as if I were thinking

– wildly, strangely, wrought by dust –

that someone among us might be exempt

from the final exit out of flesh

knowing of course it wouldn't be me

the one still talking, hoping for a cure

James Joyce / Italo Svevo Museum

on via Madonna del Mare

I take the stairs up to discover letters

he wrote, his daughter Lucia recording

his words though omitting the essential

recovered
: ‘I am dictating this, and

in English, as I have not sufficiently

from a fresh eye attack to be able to read

or write,' which draws me back

to photos of the man with his obscuring

glasses as if his imagined worlds

were of such vividness he could not

look both out and in, and the fates knew

in
would be the greater view

this letter written to console

the widow of Italo Svevo, dead

nine years after a sepia print presents

him and his wife on their anniversary

(30 July 1919) watching fondly

their daughter Letizia whose husband

Antonio Fonda Savio gazes at his

beloved, and she broadly smiling

in her receiving of pure adoration

on my way down the steps to the street

a student comes up, frowning, occupied

by his worries, not quite seeing

though we manage not to collide

and something of
his
blindness comes

into me, I grasp he is wanting

to fill the holes he feels, or perhaps

he desires a brother to rescue him

the way Stanislaus helped James

before war tore Trieste beyond aid

later in another nearby museum I

stare at Greek statuary and reflect how time

is tough on noses, each one here broken or

shattered, how sad these features appear

staring from blank eyes, and I am grateful

that photographs and phrases bring me close

allow my eye and imagination to believe in life

even if some pieces now and then are missing