History? Memory? How could I awaken
From the nightmare after you had taken
All records in the Daedalus of night?
Portraiture ceased when artists lost their sight.
Part the Second:
Schloss Hainhofen
I leased a castle in a water meadow,
Not far from Augsburg. Ringed by innuendo,
An eastern holy man there set up shop,
Courting German youth with Mantra-prop.
He sang the yoke of history shaken off,
Like dogs shed water after summer swim—
And German youth did follow after him,
Persuaded that his lazy lemur eyes
Concealed a waiting door to paradise:
Our German virgin’s sin needs no contrition
For freedom is but memory’s deletion.
They wore out both their mystique and panache,
Attention spans grew shorter, as did cash,
Pied Poona’s Piper left, seeking
greener
fields of fools,
The Orange Disciples wandered back to school.
My castle cooled, then grew new moss, new ferns,
And ghosts, and deer, and ducks. And time returned.
Part the Third:
We
walked where seawalls strain to fend the tides,
Where man has learnt to rob farmland from Pluto;
Sunken, sullen acres, thatch on dust,
That yearn to sink the shoe and greet the waves.
Where foam-fingered breakers pound on
mankind’s rickety gates,
We saw a half-dead sea-beast roll and gulp,
Wild-eyed it called for aid from creatures
since aeons not its own,
Its real cry—perceived by us—was but
To stop, or slow, the course of time expired:
To sate the urges to continue being,
Despite the work of atoms in the mire.
We knew by all the bite wounds on its side,
The half-exposed rib cage, still spilling gut,
That time no longer cared, and had no reason to delay:
Blood, nerve and sinew ran to new assignments.
Yet empathy for things decayed caused us
To linger where the accident had been:
The strange convergence. Stoff, und Geist,
und Kraft,
As if all matter had a shape, a goal,
A destiny as loud as crashing waves.
Frontpage
Part the Second:
Where foam-fingered breakers pound on
