by Tom Kuhn
But I respect it out of piety and also because I match it
When I’m stuck drunk to the black leather sofa with sweat.
Plastic frame, black lacquered, with glass, and, already quite old
Spinster Meier in comparison with the wallpaper
Not quite so nice, but the black thing gives me some sort of hold
I should despise myself if I ever went so far . . .
And yet really it’s pretty certain that one of these days . . .
I’d get a few pence for kirsch on the glass no doubt
And by now the photo has some sort of liver disease
And every evening the face is harder to make out.
One day perhaps there’d be only a white sheet grinning at me
And then I’d be saying to myself: too late yet again
Kirsch helps you not despise yourself. But truly
I don’t want to do it. So much let go already, gone, gone.
Epistle on suicide
Self-slaughter
Is a trivial subject.
You can chat about it with your charwoman.
Discuss the pros and cons with a friend.
The temptation towards a certain pathos
Should be resisted, although
There’s really no need to be dogmatic about that.
All the same, in my view
Some ordinary annoyance or disappointment is preferable:
You are sick to death of changing your underwear. Better still:
Your wife has been unfaithful
(This appeals to those who are astonished by such a thing
And it isn’t too tremendous.)
In any case
It shouldn’t look
As though you thought too highly of yourself.
In the beginning, in my childhood
1
In the beginning, in my childhood
Which, I hear them saying, is over now
I loved the world and wanted blindness
Or the greatest purity heaven could show.
But in the morning early came the tidings
They will be blinded, who desire to see
That radiant purity of heaven, blinded.
And I saw it. Saw it shine on me.
Why like a beggar crouch in people’s doorways?
What help is that when the lean time never ends?
Shall we not pluck ourselves the crimson poppies
Because by evening they wither in our hands?
And so I said: no rather
Smoke the black smoke, see it go
Into the colder heavens. Oh where
It goes you will too.
2
Often, cooking opium, I wonder
What my enemy, rotting in the poppies, is up to now.
And the ox? How well I knuckled him under
And how I marched with the red flag, oh that too!
But by midday already I knew for certain
How useless all the blood, sweat and tears is
Knowing that you all along were certain
It will not help a single one of us.
Why beat an enemy? Oh, another stronger
Could whack me just like that this very day.
You spread as wide as what you’ve got the skin for
And why lug more fat to your coffin anyway?
And so I said: no rather
Smoke the black smoke, see it go
Into the colder heavens. Oh where
It goes you will too.
3
Always running since my childhood days
Sowing millet, going to mow the meadow
Lying with women, crying to the deities
Getting children who sow the millet now.
But late in the evening I heard the lesson
It wouldn’t matter a fig if I dropped dead
And even the sincerest conversion
Won’t get one god or goddess out of bed.
Why be forever sowing millet in
The stony ground that never will improve
If nobody will give my tamarind
A drop of water when I’m in my grave?
And so I said: no rather
Smoke the black smoke, see it go
Into the colder heavens. Oh where
It goes you will too.
Political observations
For hours they row around on the town lake
It disgusts me to watch them. For heaven’s sake
Rowing around on a pond and we’re up to our ears in debt
The mess the country’s in, I’m surprised they allow it
I hang around smoking and watching, that’s what I do
And I think my thoughts, that’s pretty much what I do
Another thing in this place, they play the mouth organ.
The land’s in the grip of the Black Plague and they play the mouth organ
And I think coldly, carry on playing, carry on rowing up and down
And I spit, but really beyond that it’s no concern of mine
I’ve hung around watching for some years now
And I see exactly where we are rowing to
I read in From Pole to Pole that the inhabitants of Orkney
Did each other’s washing for a living. Well okay
Carry on a few more years like this, just you carry on
They were great ones for boating in Assyria too and in Babylon
Years ago in that bygone ark of mine . . .
1
Years ago in that bygone ark of mine
In the season of tempests around All Souls
A woman voyaged into the dark with me. The deck rolled under us
But she held, she gave me her body to hold.
2
In many an orange daybreak among the timbers
Knee against knee as the stormwinds shrieked
At night black rains fell all the way from the stars
And we had their drunken rhythm in our knees.
3
True, we parted company on a coast among reefs
Also the ship leaked, parting was easy, I’d had my fill.
White with love we looked once more into one another’s eyes.
For many weeks more the sea was tranquil.
4
Many weeks passed. The water pushed into the body of the ship.
Then water and winds wearied me in the flesh. And through
Water and wind for many weeks I voyaged cheerfully
As a man does who on a coast has a home to go to.
5
Returning after many years, in my shack
A fat man and seven children and her
Fat and indifferent, chalk around the mouth
Though it was warm in the shack I was cold as never before.
6
Yes I was cold, for though I knew my sins
My many years of faithlessness, greed and a dirty snout
On that day I said to God, I will not go without these mercies
I am unworthy. But I will not go without.
7
Getting fat is clever and as the years grow colder pleasing to many
A roof, salt fish in the barrel, smoke rising from the chimney
But I raise my voice and refuse reconciliation
And perhaps I will bow under the beams as well one day!
8
After many years, arriving on a boat from Haiti
Fever having pickled me, the salt wind having soaked me through
I’ll say: her voice is done, her face is washed away
But I won’t go without it, I love that too.
Anna speaks ill of Biti
So puffed up he’s near to bursting
Idle as a giant sloth
All he does is scratch his balls and
Open his big mouth
Smokes his fag and reads the papers
Loves the pub and playing pool
Acts like he was God Almighty
Cold at heart and got no soul
Humping whores is all he’s up for
Too idle even to take a piss
When he grins you see no teeth but
Only stumps in that gob of his
One day though he’ll see that he has
Got it coming to him fast
Someone soon will bash his head in
He laughs longest who laughs last
Time will come when he’ll come crawling
Oh he’ll cop it one day or
Where’s the payback, where’s the justice
That’s all I am asking for
To M
That night you didn’t come I couldn’t sleep but went
Many times to the door and it
Was raining and I went back in again.
I didn’t know it then but I know it now:
That night it was already like the later nights
When you never came again and I couldn’t sleep
And was already scarcely waiting anymore
But many times went to the door
Because it was raining there and cool.
But after those nights and still in later years
Whenever the rain dripped I would hear your footsteps
Outside the door and in the wind your voice
And your crying on the cold corner because
You couldn’t get in.
For that reason I got up often in the night and
Went to the door and opened it and
Let in whoever had no home
And beggars came and whores, dossers
And all manner of folk.
Now many years have passed and even if
Rain still drips and the wind blows
If you came now in the night I know
I wouldn’t know you anymore, not your voice
And not your face because things have changed.
Yet I still hear footsteps in the wind
And weeping in the rain and that somebody
Wants to come in.
And I’ve a mind to go to the door
And open it and see has no one come—
But I don’t get up and I don’t go out
Don’t see
And nor does anybody come
On the way from Augsburg to Timbuktu . . .
On the way from Augsburg to Timbuktu I met Marianne Zoff
Who sang in the opera and looked like a Maori woman
And was beautiful in the grass, in bed too and also in her clothes she looked beautiful
And I slept with her and got her pregnant.
(In her sleep she rolled up like a hedgehog.
She was cunning like an animal but her actions were without cunning
When she laughed she nodded her head, looked up at you aslant and pulled a blade of grass through her teeth
She walked for the joy of it
Once she said to me: Stoopid!
She was proud of her legs.
In her passion she had the appearance of scorched grass.)
March
Moon hung in the lilac heavens
Over the liquor factory, bald
When he, God’s naked good-for-nothing
Soaped rope in his baggage, trolled
Through the absinthine evenings
Smelling of some half-had
And some just captured feelings
Bad as a butcher’s slab.
Oh have mercy! Oh have mercy!
Your hands wrung raw, in the after-
Taste of brandy did you
In the green gloamings never
Teeter entre chien et loup?
Between the kirsch and the juniper
Feel the start of an old hymn tune?
Never in brutish terror
Wash a quick Hail Mary down?
Oh have mercy! Oh have mercy!
In all the bitternesses
Should he fish up a childhood song
And soiled and bitten to pieces
Should a verse or two float along
Rotten in the black and dismal
Pool of his debauchery
The blood in him, friend, runs chill.
Oh have mercy! Oh have mercy!
As if snow fell on his skin.
Slowly the sky went dark
And I lifted up my torn heart
More tenderly and was gone
Like snow when March comes in.
Epistle
A man can come over from Ulm and butcher me.
Then a day will lose its colour in the air
The trembling of a few blades of grass that I noticed long ago
Will finally halt.
A dead man who was a friend of mine
Will not have anyone now who knows what he looked like.
My tobacco smoke
That in the meantime has risen through many millions of heavens
Will lose its belief in God
And
Carry on rising.
I used to think . . .
I used to think: I should like to die between my own sheets
Nowadays
I never straighten a picture hanging crooked on the wall
I let the net curtains go to rags, open the bedroom to the rain
Wipe my mouth on somebody else’s serviette.
I had a room for four months and never knew
That the window opened over the back (a thing I love)
Which is all because
I am so much for the provisional and don’t rightly believe in myself
And therefore I lodge just as it comes and if I’m cold I say
I’m still cold.
And this attitude of mine is so deeply rooted
It nonetheless allows me to change my underwear
As a courtesy to the ladies and because
It is certain I shall not always
Need underwear.
I am absolutely certain . . .
I am absolutely certain that tomorrow will be fine
That after rain comes sun
That my neighbour loves his daughter
My enemy is a bad man.
Also I have no doubt
That I’m doing better than almost everyone else.
Also I’ve never been heard to say
Things have got worse
The race is degenerating
Or that there are no women who are happy with just one man.
In all those matters
I am more generous, more trusting, more polite than the discontented
For all those matters
Seem to me of little consequence.
Balaam Lai in his thirtieth year . . .
Balaam Lai in his thirtieth year
Sailed one evening for Madagascar
Because of a longing to see Erna Susatte
Because it was four years since he’d
Seen her
And where she was he had no idea
And so he thought: She’s in Madagascar.
He looked at the map in Thomas Cook’s. She’d
Very likely be there somewhere
He thought and so
He landed up in Madagascar
Rather
As Pontius Pilate did in the Creed.
He travelled with a case full of documents
An umbrella badly in need of splints
A guitar and a bottle of Johnny Walker
And trouble in the heart, an old disorder.
But the sea is a damned bad-mannered critter
So he didn’t give much thought to Erna Susatte
But once he was on the island then
The name (not the face) occurred to him again
But that night he went to bed alone, supposing
He’d hardly come across her the very first evening.
So when Balaam Lai in his thirtieth year
Suddenly one morning was in Madagascar
He asked himself before he went in search of her
Whether it was possible Erna Susatte
Was in Mad
agascar
And concluding it was possible, why shouldn’t it be?
But that his chances of finding her were slight, especially
Since all he’d got with him was a suitcase and an umbrella
And since moreover the interest that he
Still had in the face of the vanished Erna Susatte
Was not great, not very great
And deciding over a vilely concocted punch
That Madagascar wasn’t up to much
He sailed home moderately drunk on punch but
Shot of all the yearning and longing muck
And ordered another punch at The Red Carnation
12 Tauentzienstrasse, run
By another Erna, surnamed Clouds, this one.
Many years later, same street, number 4, in a bar
A supersaturated drunk used to relate
Among various true stories this one about
A daring trip in a schooner to Madagascar
Shipwreck, visions, snakebites
And a face he had seen deep in the swamps of Madagascar
As proof that now and then miracles do happen
For example when
With nothing to go on
He sees the pale and forgotten face of Erna Susatte
In an Asiatic
Swamp, drunk as a skunk on punch.
Now in the night . . .
1
Now in the night while I love you
White clouds are in the silence in the sky
The waters make a roaring over stones
And the wind shivers in dead greenery.
2
White waters hurry
Down year after year
And in the sky there are
Clouds for evermore.
