by Günter Grass
I would leave straight after the concert, while the two of them rushed back to our hotel room. They never saw the midnight sun, saw nothing, experienced nothing but the changing concert audiences, applause.
So we lived in harmony as long as the dream lasted. It might have turned into yet another novel, perhaps one too many. But since the end of the real GDR wasn’t on the program, the question of whether our ménage à trois would have survived the fall of the Wall remains open.
When the Monster’s Eyes
Turn Green
a clenched word occupies
bed, table and chairs,
therapists earn too much doing too little,
exotic fare from other tables
leads us to question what he
or she has that we don’t,
reason sulks, shoved to one side,
dreams are suspect from the start,
green dominates all colors,
knuckles rap on property thought ours,
rage bursts through open doors,
a tie or shawl smells
of forbidden flesh,
films give cues,
hormones go wild,
mirrors go blind,
milk curdles in coffee,
one hand is tempted to open
letters held in the other,
oaths are demanded by the dozen,
toothache afflicts the soul,
hate grabs sharp objects,
glass shatters, longing screams,
and the stock of love,
stored in jars in a cool cellar, threatens
to dwindle, spoonful by spoonful to dwindle.
Fear of Loss
You might before me. Or those friends who remain. The list keeps getting longer. Or someone, a spy, working for whom?, empties secret drawers: abysses dear to me. Lost and not found. Suddenly it’s missing, the key, and I’m forced to wander outside, freezing, although the sun, as if to mock me . . .
Other things threaten to vanish: names, addresses. Memories of a woodland path, heading where? Something I was pleased to discover: the petrified snail has crawled off without a trace. Funny and painful at the same time: I’m traveling with a full pipe, but no match. Or put another way: virility, that swaggerer, has gone limp. Only desire remains and acts as if. Now if desire too were to disappear, leaving just a hole…
And if one day, when tears have long dried up, perhaps in May, I can no longer laugh? And lose all the fingers on my left hand. Or the right. What would I do?
Not long ago I was searching, as I so often do, for my eraser. Hopeless. The mongrel Fear attacked: with my last tooth I might lose other things too, the boulder I rolled, and you, who make up for my more recent losses.
Gone Gone Gone
Recently I opened a wardrobe
locked since ash-gray times.
Coat hangers dangled inside,
holding nothing.
Hanger after hanger I weighted
with the clothes of dead friends.
To make sure they lasted,
I put mothballs in all the pockets.
One hanger stayed empty,
for me I suppose.
Then I locked the wardrobe
and swallowed the key.
In the Greenhouse
for poetic seedlings many gardeners toil. Some sow their seeds in crumbling walls and blistered asphalt, to sprout as flowery sprays or stinging nettles. Others deal with exotic plants, intoxicating fragrances. Many sip honey from paper flowers. And some steal flowers from the beds of others.
I wait. A burned-out bulb may give wondrous light. Or the coin that rolls down the groove may trigger a long-impending collapse. A missing word may be snapped up in passing, fit into lines of verse lying in wait. And footsore opportunities that slow everyone down: nothing falls from the heavens like dew.
From the beginning, rules were begging to be broken as they tripped smoothly along, so syllable-counters ran wild. But now an age-old plant whose multicolored fruits were used for alliteration, inner-, cross-, and end rhymes, is about to hit the market genetically modified.
The effort it took yesterday to pair “computer” with “Martin Luther,” “Internet” with “corset,” or “clone” with “drone” will soon be a thing of the past. By tomorrow, glib robots will provide all the odes and elegies we need to put us in a poetic mood. We can each tend our own little plants in the greenhouse.
But since we already have too many poems, the experts crowd the best of them into anthologies. When Peter Rühmkorf, a high-wire artist of poetry, died around noon one summer day, his wife pulled out Conrady’s big book of poetry and shoved the thick tome under his chin to hold his mouth closed.
But—left behind—I just can’t stop, and since the calendar says March, and decades ago the beginning of spring went to my head the same way, I’ll write another poem about the month, because—as I say—I just can’t stop . . .
March Again
The rose named Shakespeare,
planted by love’s own hand
to the right of my workshop door,
urges the rising sap
to put forth shoots.
She wants to show me how it’s done,
to prick me, morning after morning,
to express myself, as she does,
even if moved only by fears
that promise panic blossoms.
Once I praised March
with words honed to wedges
driven into every knothole.
Everything lay open; only the angels
were too tight and dry.
Unteachable
When I was six and a half, in nineteen thirty-four, having barely started school, I was taught not to use my left hand. The slate pencil scrawled slowly across the matte-gray board.
Since then I have written with my right hand, but I’m more sensitive with the hand I use to hit, throw and hold a knife, and when, stooped by age, I walk along the canal—the dog ahead as always—I take my walking stick in my left hand. In all else too, unteachable, I stand far to the left, even of myself.
The End
After recently steering a sentence
around three corners,
I found by leafing back in time
that I had already written
this three-corner sentence
with more precision in two corners.
That’s the end, I shouted,
but this cry too lay
on paper faded years ago.
My Boulder
When, like other young men and women in the Düsseldorf Art Academy, a cigarette clung to my lower lip as a badge of existentialism, bobbing up and down at every word, it was Albert Camus who rolled the boulder of Sisyphus our way—in German translation—just after the war. We whetted our tongues on it. It gave the naysayers a chance to say yes. And to know: the moment the boulder reaches its apparent goal, it rolls back down again. There’s no stopping it.
Yet it longs to roll back up the mountain. That is its will, and my will submits. True, I haven’t grown fond of it, yet it’s mine and keeps me from placing too much hope in those who make great promises. I may praise it or revere it, I may scorn it, call it a punishment or a gift. It sets me apart from the new aristocracy of cynical conversationalists for whom no boulder is worth the effort. It’s not overpowering; no, it’s rounded, you can roll it, though it’s not easy. It speaks invitingly of human dimensions, gives courage. To try to escape is pointless; its call draws me in.
Even in sleep I lay my hand on it, help with my shoulder. I sweat for it. Pride cajoles me into saying it makes me strong. Sartre, its adversary, peevishly tried to deny one of its aspects—the semblance of happiness.
But now I can do no more. Panting, I sometimes sit on the boulder, sometimes lean against it. Will someone come to relieve me? Someone strong enough to move it? It’s starting to gather moss. The mountaintop is covered in clouds. I still dream of boulders, smaller ones now, pleasing to the hand.
/> What the Beachcomber Finds
Flintstones, rolled by the sea’s fringe,
flecked black and white like the cows
grazing in the nearby field,
bluish-gray, smoothed between ice age and ice age.
Each rounded differently,
long hidden in chalk.
Now they swell my pockets.
Whistling, I carry them home.
Now they lie on the windowsill
in conversation with feathers,
which—not so light as they thought—
fell from the sky.
Stones and feathers share jokes,
primal humor that never ages,
deriding gods in suits and ties;
whoever hears them laughs too soon,
or years afterward, when it’s too late,
too late again.
Last Hope
A cruise ship left Genoa recently and traveled on as usual to seas both north and south, then entered unknown waters. At the passengers’ request, it anchored in the bay of a green-hilled island the tourists named Utopia.
And it came to pass that a submarine left over from the last war, or the one before that, still on the lookout for prey, though its crew had grown senile, spotted the hull of the ship named Hope lying at anchor and, at the word “Now!,” sank it with a torpedo saved for just such an occasion.
As they say: all it takes is the right word and an act of will to find the imagined enemy in the crosshairs.
Now
is over and gone.
Now longs for permanence,
dances on a thin wire,
and cries as it falls: see,
I’m still here.
Now is urged on from behind
by a runner who has no goal
yet whose pedometer
measures time, counts each step,
and each step says: now now now.
No nail can hold it,
scarcely here before it leaves,
it comes and goes in an instant,
unless He swings his scythe
and ends Now’s fleeting being.
Death alone is always there,
the single syllable that waits
on call is his alone,
it breaks off long sentences,
cuts short the sleeper’s dream.
What remains is backdated trash
and frayed adhesive tape
with holes through which the future blinks,
knowing nothing better to say
than now: now now now.
So They Can Converse
The soft pencil suggests
that beside the bare elk skull—
a dusty birthday present—
I lay my dentures
to make a five-line poem.
Nail and Rope
chat about artfully-tied knots;
the nail laughs itself crooked
at all the slips that occur,
but the rope
is plagued by dreams of being tested.
Suggestion for a Souvenir
Calcutta still captivates me. In front of a shop selling mini-cigarettes called bidis, along with betel nuts and fresh white coconut, I saw a bundle hanging, its braided tip a glowing ember used by smokers passing by; my pipe caught at once.
I couldn’t tell what the bundle was made of: sisal perhaps, or hemp.
Later, much later, I asked my friend, the artist Shuva, to send me one. It’s been lying untouched in my workshop ever since; I’ve never used its braided tip as a permanently glowing ember.
A chorus of doctors convinced me that smoking is lethal—though Death, busy elsewhere, is taking his time—so now my pipes lie scattered about, cold and ill tempered.
I still hesitate to give them away; they cry out to be drawn in soft pencil beside the sisal-hemp bundle, with its useless rust-brown beauty.
Twisting a Rope
From loops of gut and leitmotifs,
from spidery-soft twined lies,
from straw plaited with the wind—
glued sugar-sweet—
from a bundle of rust-brown sisal hemp
a friend once sent me
by freighter from Calcutta,
glowing at its braided tip
as a permanent lighter
for the pipe I used to smoke
from dawn to dusk,
I’ll twist a rope—
since my pipe lies cold—
weave wisdom tightly,
till a hundred knots and more
have been entwined as riddles.
Who can or will or wants to solve them?
Painting Portraits
In the far reaches of the East, where distances are measured in versts, not miles, artists whose names, except for two or three, were lost along the way, wandered from cloister to cloister, painting the Madonna and Child on old wooden panels. Just her and the tiny child. Not that they couldn’t have painted other subjects—say, men with long beards—but endless requests made them rest content with this one pious motif. They were specialists.
As a rule their Madonnas stared straight on. A few were allowed a slight tilt of the head. They resembled one another despite their varied formats. The panels were hung to catch the eye in onion-domed churches or took center stage on home altars, with candles on either side. Wrapped in prayer, pilgrims whispered their requests, some of which—wonder of wonders—were fulfilled.
Later, experts spotted differences among the various Madonnas, identified schools of art, and arranged collections in chronological order. A few portraits glistened with gold leaf. Icons were always a favorite target for thieves, looted in times of war and carried off to distant lands where they now hang in museums. Some may have been forged.
When art no longer strove to be timeless, but wished instead to evolve, there were artists who painted icons in the contemporary style, mostly without Child. One of them came from far in the East; his name was Jawlensky. He is famous to this day. His icons are sometimes sold at auction. Often I bid along, but I’m outbid every time, if not by the Japanese, then by nouveau riche Russians with room in their vaults.
Stared Right Through Me
Recently a dream led me
to the Greifswald museum.
There was much to see, fishermen with boats,
solemn men and women, vast landscapes.
But it wasn’t Pomeranian art,
nor Caspar David Friedrich, that drew me.
It was a narrow room
into which I was led.
In it hung a dozen or more paintings
lined up in a row.
They all showed polychrome heads
of great beauty.
When I told the museum guard
that I too owned an icon from this series,
he stared right through me
at a gap between the sightless heads.
His reply, “A Jawlensky was recently
stolen from us,” still troubles my dreams.
On the First Sunday
in May one of my grandsons was confirmed in the village church. After family breakfast at a long table, we set out on what was for me a rather strenuous climb up the hill to the church tower, the pointing finger. Chestnut trees and elders were showing off outside; inside most of the pews were full. The bells rang to hurry the latecomers along.
After a sudden silence the pastor, who had been busying himself between the altar and the congregation, surprised me with his strong voice and rhetorical skills. Rakishly he filled his double role as entertainer and shepherd of souls. Two instructions—“Be who you are!” and “Do something!”—were the pillars of his sermon, which oscillated between song and prayer. He drove home to the dozen or so young boys and girls that they were grown up now. The confirmands stood with their backs to us and received the pastor’s words patiently. Now and then the congregation had to stand, but were soon allowed to sit again. The pastor never sat.
It was all very entertaining. Th
e ceremony, which lasted almost two hours, struck me as a variant of the old East German Jugendweihe, where teenagers were given adult status under socialism, especially the pastor’s galvanizing call, “Be who you are!” and “Do something!,” which, however, he put in God’s mouth. To one side of the altar, hockeysticks, balls of various sizes, and helmets illustrated youthful pastimes. Strangely enough, a gingerbread heart was among them.
Then came the blessing of the dozen or so present, who displayed their multifarious hairstyles. Every now and then we sang from texts before us. As I sang along, my thoughts were lost in the past. Though I’d been inoculated in the Catholic faith, I could not recall the moment when I knelt in the Langfuhr Herz-Jesu-Kirche. I must have been ten or eleven years old. In any case it was before the war, when Danzig was still a Free City, for I saw the image of my grandfather’s communion gift, a silver five-gulden piece. And yes, I could see myself in short pants kneeling at the grille in the confession box, but what I couldn’t recall was just when my childhood faith began to melt like a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
