by Tom Kuhn
3
Later in the years of loneliness
Still there will be white clouds to see
And the waters will make a roaring over stones
And the wind will shiver in dead greenery.
There at the beginning . . .
There at the beginning, the first day
When that entwining couple entered here
The threshold knew they would not get away
It took the footfall that would be their last.
Behind the lattice the green tree sank to sere
And yellow discreetly, very fast
And climbing trembling to bed they were
With a smile by the wind they loved dismissed.
Ballad of the Captain of Köpenik
That was Captain Köpenik
A brave soldier was he.
Him too, however, the Republic
Forgot ungratefully.
So Captain Köpenik fell prey
To bitter dejection
Till God the Sharp Eyes looked his way
And took him up to heaven.
There, waving palms of martyrdom
The saints stood and with what
Delight they’d have doffed their hats to him
But not one had a hat.
So Captain K. stands on the spot
And all day long alone
Remembering his happy lot
Below in God’s sunshine.
He stands and dreams of marching feet
Alone and miserable
Until his miseries excite
Compassion in an angel
Who now each Sunday afternoon
As long as the Captain will
Like one struck dead or turned to stone
Stands before his Captain, still.
There’s rejoicing in heaven these days
And the reason why is this:
Captain Köpenik enjoys
The purest kind of bliss.
The lovely blue of his beloved skies . . .
The lovely blue of his beloved skies
Was such a dear thing to him that each day
Gladdened him anew going his ways
In the common people’s company.
The evening’s brown hills, the stars’
Bright shining sufficed him. He ate the bread
He loved, drank the beloved water, from a stranger’s
Platter and jug and was contented.
Of many villages he saw only the one
In the four winds and in every season.
Its soft grass, its hard stones
Were for his brief time his companions.
Later he came almost to forget the skies
The village and the ploughed fields around.
He had them as he had his hands: always.
Grass too knows little of the earth which is its ground.
Oh my youthful days . . .
Oh my youthful days! Already
The fading of their memory has begun.
Light shadows! White-washed rooms and red
Within them stood the orchestrion.
In the apple-shining ponds we circulated
In the windy waters like voracious carp
And went at evening in raspberry-coloured
Shirts and bowler hats, playing the harp.
Oh squawking, rasping, croaking of guitars!
Oh heavenly utterances from bloated throats!
The stiff-with-love and muck-encrusted trousers
Such din of couplings in the green and slimy nights!
Among the willows lying in sleepy lairs!
Under the apple-green heavens, oh the smokes!
Soaring like doves away on spirituous liquors—
Ending like stuff the rag-and-bone man takes.
You, tender mutton in your stiff linen
Already the Good Shepherd is mad to track you down.
Yes, you will graze awhile yet and within
Sits a red heart that will go rotten soon.
Balaam Lai in July
In July after the decline and fall of the Marquise
And his expulsion from paradise
Standing in the dead bulrushes
At a pond with flies
Buzz buzz
Balaam Lai, supersaturated drunk that he was
Balaam Lai got smitten by the sun
God help us!
Balaam Lai, spirituous spirit of The White Carnation
Spat offhandedly into the pond of flies
Splash
Chewed things over and composed an invitation
To Anna Clouds
To join him that night in a solemn lamentation
And went and purchased another pair of duck eggs.
God have mercy on Anna Clouds!
But when the evening palely and in great pain began to darken
Balaam Lai had doubts
When Anna Clouds in the twilight came
Sailing along with her parasol, white as cream.
For Anna Clouds when it came to it was quite without
Any false delicacy in her free views
On love, God knows, she was the last person
To be fobbed off with lousy conjuring tricks
And not judge a man on his performance as though
He fed on the wafers of the Lord and raw eggs
And Balaam Lai knew this.
In brief, she observed that windows are made of glass
And when he didn’t draw the curtains she did
And at eight o’clock was lounging on Balaam Lai’s lily-pad
(Whilst he like grim death read the Evening News).
Now when Anna Clouds began chewing her pink toes for boredom
Balaam Lai gave rapid thought as to how
This unchaste creature could be evicted from his wigwam
But saw no way and the best he could do
He thought, was trot off and buy red wine and quickly get
Her very drunk on it.
And she might pass out
While he sat over a noble and corpulent tome oppressed
By the decline and fall of the West.
But she, full of wine and wriggling around on his cushions,
Stared him stiff to share
What had occurred to her.
Well then, she slugged the bottles and was the cold-soberest
Most frivolous person on earth when with all the winningness
Of a valkyrie desperate for corpses
She invited him to join her in a little tenderness.
The shipwrecked sailor’s report
When the ship began to break up
I went in the water. Its violence
Flung me onto a bare lump of rock.
I became unconscious at once.
It was then my world sank. Admittedly
When I woke up
My hair was dry already.
I ate some things out of shells
And slept in a tree
Three days, they were the best time
And because all I had was room
I walked a good deal.
What I saw was new to me.
I touched nothing. Then
After three nights
I recognized the moon again.
I hung a sheet in a tree
And stood by it
Once for a day and a night.
The water was quiet
Not a breath of wind in my sheet.
No ships came and there were
No birds either.
Later I did see ships
Five times I saw a sail
Three times smoke.
Song of lost innocence folding the linen
1
The thing my mother told me
It can’t be true, I’m sure.
She said, Once you are soiled
You’ll never again be pure.
That isn’t true of the linen
And it isn’t true of me.
Let the river run
over the linen
Quick it’s clean as can be.
2
At eleven I was as sinful
As the cheapest girl-for-cash
And really not till fourteen
Did I mortify the flesh.
A shade grey was the linen
I dunked it, the river ran.
Now it lies there fit for a virgin
As though never breathed upon.
3
I was fallen already
Before I went with a man.
I stank to heaven, a scarlet
Whore of Babylon.
The linen in the river swishes
Gently to and fro
And feels in the rippling kisses:
How softly I whiten now.
4
For when my first embraced me
And I held him embraced
I felt from my breasts and belly
The wickedness released.
That’s the way with linen
And that was the way with me.
The waters run, they hasten
Where the dirt cries, Set me free!
5
But when the others came
A doleful year began.
They gave me a bad name.
I was a bad woman.
Saving up and fasting
Was never a woman’s cure.
Linen left long in the basket
Goes grey even there.
6
And then another followed
In another year.
I saw that myself and all things
Were other than before.
Dip it in the river, rinse it!
Sun, wind and dolly blue!
Use it and dispense it:
It will be good as new.
7
I know: much still may happen
Till nothing happens anymore.
But if you never wore it
What was the linen for?
And when the linen’s ragged
And the dirt won’t wash away
The river takes the tatters.
All comes to this one day.
Ballad of the death of Anna Cloudface
1
Seven years passed. With kirsch and juniper
He swilled her countenance out of his head
And the hole in the air grew blacker and empty
Of all but the Flood of schnapps was that head.
2
With kirsch and tobacco, barrel-organs and orgies:
How was her face when she melted from here?
How was her face? It blurred in the clouds?
Ha, face! What he saw was this white paper.
3
Wherever he voyaged, along how many coastlines
(Not voyaging merely as you and I might)
Whitely to him a voice cried on the waters
A voice whose lips were vanishing white . . .
4
Once more he did see her face: in the cloud!
Already very pale. For he stayed too long . . .
Once more he did hear her voice in the wind
Far away in the wind that drove the cloud on . . .
5
But in later years what was left him was only
Clouds and the wind and they also began
To fall silent like her, they also began
Passing as she had into oblivion.
6
Oh when he, soaked through by the salt-sea-waters
And his wild hands torn to shreds by the gales
As he drifts down, the last thing he hears is
A seagull shrieking over the sails.
7
Of the green bitter doses, the winds, the skies
The heavens in flight and the radiant snows
Of kirsch, tobacco, barrel-organs was nothing
But shrieks in the air and salt when he swallows.
8
But still towards those sickening hills
In the white winds of April in riot
Like clouds the wishes fly paler and paler:
A face fades to nothing. A mouth falls quiet.
Tahiti
1
The schnapps is all pissed up the porcelain
The rose-coloured blinds are down
The smokes are all smoked, life won’t come again
We set sail, Tahiti-bound.
2
We sailed away on a horse-hair settee
Stormy the night and high was the sea
The ship, she rolled, the night came down thick
And six of us three were seasick.
3
Tobacco, schnapps, paper and irrigator
Topp saw to the bed-sheet sail
With: Gedde, strip off! It’s hot, the Equator!
And: Bidi, hold on to your hat in the gulf-stream gale!
4
Round the Cape of Good Horn through the smelling-salts foam
What a battle with pirates and the ice-green moon!
Off Java what a typhoon! And cannibals three
Sang at the far horizon, Nearer, my God, to Thee.
5
Back of Java then more schnapps must be swilled
For Bidi shot Topp, no choice, mutiny
Two days later a seagull gave Gedde a child
And into the northern trade-winds they sailed, those three.
Silk brightly glowing round it like an orange . . .
1
Silk brightly glowing round it like an orange
Thin slit exposing an incarnadine
That shimmering red as though from bathing shines
You feel it like a melange on your tongue
2
And as the fruit is bound in by the peel
So, for a peel, this flesh had on this shawl
And as the peel comes open if you feel
And from the peel the fruit will lightly fall
3
So the shawl fell and that incarnadine
Wholly exposed now fills those hands of his
And shimmering red as though from bathing shines
And veiled now solely by a crucifix
Hangs on the flesh as down a black stitch-line.
Mary
The night her first was born
Was cold. But in later years
She wholly forgot
The frost in the miserable rafters, the smoking hearth
And the retching of the afterbirth towards morning.
But most she forgot the bitter shame
The poor feel
At having no privacy.
And chiefly for that reason
In later years it became a festival
All the world was at.
The shepherds’ coarse nattering
Ceased. Later
In the stories they turned into kings.
The wind, that was very cold,
Became a choir of angels. Yes
All that remained of the hole in the roof letting in the frost
Was the star, looking through.
All this
Came from the face of her son
Who was easy
Loved singing
Said to the poor
Come unto me and
Was accustomed to moving among kings
And to seeing a star above him in the night-time.
Ballad
And when she lay on her deathbed
She said to him: I have been
Faithful to you nearly fourteen years
And now what does it mean?
He spoke to her and held her hand
That was whiter than the sheets of the bed.
My dear wife, for these fourteen years
I thank you, he said.
The dress I always wore, she said
The colour of it was grey
And what I ate was soup and fish
I’m almost sorry to say.
He held her hand the way someone holds
A weak rop
e in the sea
Already drowning and said: You were
A good wife to me.
And she said to him, How quickly it goes!
How white my hand is, look!
And she saw the words “Like a broken reed”
On a page in an old schoolbook.
But he stood by her and said to her
(And didn’t immediately know
Whether what he said was right) and he said:
Perhaps it’s all one now.
Calendar poem
It’s true my skin’s been eaten by the snow
My face is tanned red by the sun
Many have said they do not know me now
But fighting winter would change any man
He might sit quiet among the stones until
His bowed neck sprouts dry rot
The stars that shine upon him coolly still
Have no idea is he thin or fat
Indeed the stars know very little, they haven’t seen
Him yet and he’s already old
And the light is getting blacker, lard or lean
He sits and shivers in the sun, he’s cold
And long ago alas and dearie me
He stopped cutting the nails of his black toes
He lets them grow and when they’ve grown you’ll see
Him shed his boots and take a larger size
For a while he sat there in the sun
