One Lark, One Horse

by Michael Hofmann

  intemperance hotels, and one music venue after another,

  and all of them Spelunken and grotto-dark,

  and the endearing bars with their windows wound down,

  and the customers staring out at the continuous paseo

  of the young, the buxom, the drapey, the stringy:

  the pre-owned and the pre-loved, the much-travelled

  and the want-away, the ripped and the buff

  and the sweatered and coated, the baby-dolled and the muscle-shirted

  and the skirts pulled over trousers and leggings,

  and the flipflops and biker boots, and tote bags and shoulder bags

  strapped across the bosom. (And it was all one style,

  and the name of that style was called Alternative, or maybe,

  Consensual Alternative at the World’s End.) The Judy.

  The little nest – suite – of three or four subdivided rooms

  – that plasterboard and aluminium arrangement

  so relatively permanent in its provisionality –

  the red daubed walls and purple foam sitcom furniture.

  My office – hardly ever used in anger – though I did stuff

  a thousand pages of Alone in Berlin into a cake box for collection once,

  and then surfed home down ten blocks of Brunswick Street,

  out of the green sky of the short northern dusk.

  (Brisbane)

  Cricket

  Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call it

  an expyrrhience. A day at Lords, mostly rain,

  one of those long-drawn-out draws so perplexing to Americans.

  Nothing riding on the game, two mid-table counties

  at the end of a disappointing season, no local rivalry or anything like that,

  very few people there, the game itself going nowhere slowly

  on its last morning. The deadest of dead rubbers.

  Papa had his beer, but you two must have wondered what you’d done wrong.

  Did I say it was raining, and the forecast was for more rain?

  Riveting. A way, at best, for the English

  to read their newspapers out of doors, and get vaguely shirty

  or hot under the collar about something. The paper, maybe, or the rain.

  Occasionally lifting their eyes to watch the groundsmen at their antics –

  not just hope over experience but hope over certain knowledge.

  It was like staying to watch your horse lose.

  And yet there was some residual sense of good fortune to be there,

  perhaps it was the fresh air or being safely out of range of conversation

  or the infinitesimal prospect of infinitesimal entertainment.

  One groundsman – the picador – mounted on a tractor,

  others on foot, like an army of clowns, with buckets and besoms.

  The tractor was towing a rope across the outfield to dry it –

  we saw the water spray up, almost in slow motion –

  as from newly cut hair. The old rope was so endearingly vieux jeu.

  It approached a pile of sawdust – two failing styles of drying –

  and one of the groundsmen put out his foot to casually flick it over,

  as sporting a gesture as we expected to see all day

  in terms of finesse, economy of movement, timing.

  He missed, and instead the rope sliced right through the sawdust pile,

  and flattened it. A malicious laugh, widely dispersed and yet unexpectedly hearty,

  went up on all sides of the ground. Soft knocks that school a lifetime – no?

  Letter from Australia

  to Ralph Savarese

  The early worm gets the bird –

  it’s morning in Australia.

  It’s strange to be so bilious

  so far away.

  Little to do with Australia,

  which so far as I can see

  seems mostly delightful:

  airy pastel buildings and trees I can’t name.

  There is some peculation

  among the local pols,

  mainly relegated to the business section:

  a few million hectares rightly or wrongly grazed or mined.

  The shilly-shallying of Costello (who has a book to sell-o),

  the ill-mannered couple at the Iguana,

  the chair-sniffer unluckily caught in the act,

  a victim of his own special brand of gallantry.

  Then there was the recent South Sea shindig

  all in matching shirts and kilts,

  except for poor Fiji, which

  was sent to Coventry.

  The local parliament yammers all day –

  you can get used to the phantom

  pinpricks of short ‘i’s in words

  like beach, bush or bake –

  and then the Beeb burbles all night

  dreaming to itself in Queen.

  And when we wake up,

  the world is still spoiled

  by the comical malfeasance

  of its whilom last best hope,

  the familiar American galère

  fourteen hours abaft of us:

  Cheney the sinisterly skewed orang-utan,

  the worn charmlessness of Bush,

  the clumping one-armed snowman McCain,

  looking either to club or hug.

  And now – the commentariat agog

  at the promised mélange of snowsports and watersports –

  Sarah P., the driller killer,

  the uterine shooterine.

  The ‘real’ routinely trumping ‘politics’

  – as if politics weren’t real.

  There are no more anchovies,

  but there is still fishing and (apparently) Anchorage.

  If you can have little Englanders,

  can’t you have little Americans,

  half-awash with Washington’s hormones,

  half in rebellion against them.

  The imprisoned balloons

  in the false ceiling of the ‘Palindome’,

  hang above the fat freed faces.

  Cyclothymia in the USA.

  My friend in the bonsai liberal exclave

  in your biodiesel flyover state,

  I can still register my first

  Zolaesque frisson of horror

  at the fried turnip smell of the cars

  that ate not Paris, but whatever you called it –

  I Oughta Went Around it.

  There is no going around it.

  Old Mexico

  They can’t get enough of the indecent

  toy skeletons in copulo every which way,

  the perpetual action heroes, the cast-off clothes

  with writing on them, the mufla

  and vulcanizadora shops, the girls in bathtub jeans

  from no label they ever heard of,

  no film without Schwarzenegger or Willis,

  wrought iron and tin mirrors, sad tenor crooners

  over brass, caja de ahorros (chamber of horrors),

  joyerias (brothels), the prettier the place

  the uglier the music, the men growing more and more

  like themselves, the women more and more like the men,

  an orange balancing on an orange

  balancing on an orange, no dry stick poking

  out of the ground without a flower, and those

  flagrant skeletons – like there’s no tomorrow.

  Recuerdos de Bundaberg

  for Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  No, I don’t remember Guildford

  ROBYN HITCHCOCK

  Did I fly there? I may have flown there.

  Maybe in something with the specifications of a crop-duster.

  The Sugar Coast. Everything comes with a name. A name and a nickname.

  The Soaked Coast. Bundy. Blue rustle of cane. Home to Rum City Wrecking.

  [Farewell,] Bundaberg, Home of Bricks. Big Daddy’s Pies. Hair Force One
.

  And the nature. Grass trees, wedding bushes, acid frogs, termite nests.

  Beaded or bearded dragons. Together or separately, I don’t remember.

  I saw one, though, it was huge, in some undergrowth.

  Harmless, probably, but ferociously ugly.

  I left the workshop in the Rotary Club. I took the Bra Challenge,

  or did not take the Bra Challenge. I headed down Bourbong Street.

  Towards the Bennett or the Burnett (the sources are unclear).

  One of those short catastrophic Australian rivers. The old bones of sugar refineries.

  The pocked mud glistening with thousands of alert little mud-crabs.

  The farmers came in to buy dry goods and do their banking and get soaked.

  The mercantile brick paving, awnings, shade and a gentle breeze.

  Horace would have appreciated it. Amoenus, I can hear him saying.

  The twentieth century, the Wild East.

  I occupied an array of public benches. Hours went by.

  Chinese tourists mooched disconsolately down the pavements. Sol or sombra, to taste.

  The Mediterranean social life of lorikeets. The inverted magpies.

  The Golden Basket, the Golden Casket, the Golden Gasket.

  Three for the price of four.

  Bundaberg. Somewhere I’d no reason to be.

  Anywheresville, as in miles from.

  No dot on a marconigraph, semicolon, on no radar a single ping.

  Or if there was, then just a ping singing to itself.

  see something say something

  every transparent man his own bar-

  code his own passwords account

  activity iris scan fingerprints

  tribal/ maiden name payment

  history gold/ silver/ platinum/

  lead cards ID (non-drivers incl.)

  mobile number(s) email

  addresses medical records

  organ donor card insurance

  allergies next of kin pets

  police record age next birth-

  day employer’s letter tax

  number implants joint re-

  placements cranial plate

  pacemaker social network

  aliases chatrooms mother’s

  birthday and middle initial

  welcome on board unusual

  activity prior religious affili-

  ation GSOH soul patch smell

  Before she met me

  after Ovid

  There was the narcoleptic giant,

  the absentee clothes horse,

  the petrified virgin and the flaky sadist.

  Then she met me.

  Cavafy: Subrosa

  Both of us disposable/so disposed/at each other’s disposal,

  so put me away, have me ejaculate against your hip

  as part of some exhaustive totalising method,

  leave the children with someone

  (‘make the necessary arrangements’),

  park around the corner at some ungodly hour twenty years ago,

  give the barest touch on the doorbell, hush, and tiptoe down

  to the blue daybed with your hair electric from the cold.

  Hudson Ride

  ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten

  HEINRICH HEINE

  Red and yellow bittersweet; Poughkeepsie;

  the ice jags are silver, rush spikes gold

  in the blue December. A big old eagle,

  white head, white feet, perches on a tree

  like a postage stamp or a glorified house cat.

  Socks in excelsis. – God, what is it with separation?

  A soft freeze. The woods are rusty stone, henna fuzz ravines,

  snow slicks. Ice blinds and dries. Dazzles and steams.

  Swans outside Croton. I sit in the train,

  at the very back of the last car,

  rueing every mile. Some sort of folly and exhilaration.

  A caffeinated feeling of being all heart.

  ‘Shouldn’t I ask to hold to you forever’. I rather think I did ask.

  They thought it was the New Rhine, here, or wanted to.

  Rhinebeck. Germantown. Dutchess County.

  My girl, someone’s girl, her own girl. Perhaps

  the only other time in my life I’ve opposed the machinery

  and scale of the world. My personal insurrection.

  Auflehnung. A leaning up against – say, and by preference,

  you in your kitchenette and sweater among the hi-hats

  and bolt-cutters and beheaded pin sculptures.

  Now here come the hard options: the cracked old Nabisco plant,

  West Point, Indian Point, Ossining, Rockland Psych.,

  Drachenfels. Bacharach. Loreley. Loreley. Loreley.

  Baselitz & his Generation

  for Hai-Dang Phan

  I have no doubt where they will go. They walk the one life offered from the many chosen.

  ROBERT LOWELL

  They are all also, it should be remembered, West German artists, with the partial exception of Penck, and are all male.

  JOHN-PAUL STONARD

  He was born in the countryside / the provinces / the blameless sticks

  in (false) Waltersdorf (recte) Dresden

  in what is now Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic (laughs) / Czechia,

  if it ever catches on

  what’s it to you.

  Stripped of his East German citizenship, he fled

  on foot with a handful of pop music cassettes

  in a pantechnicon mit Kind und Kegel

  in pandemonium

  nach vorne

  cool as you like, in an S-Bahn from the Russian Sector, in the clothes he stood up in.

  Germany (thus Goethe’s friend Mme de Staël) is the land of poets and thinkers

  der Dichter und Denker

  or of judges and executioners

  der Richter und Henker

  or of Richter and Penck.

  He drew innocent geometrical shapes

  boxed shirts / boxer shorts / boxy suits

  men without women

  hairy heroes of the Thirty Years’ War / lansquenets / strangely fibrous figures a bit like those New Yorker caveman cartoons

  empty Renaissance helmets / mostly US fighter jets

  the suicides of Stammheim.

  He took the name of an American boxing promoter

  a German Ice Age geologist

  the village of his birth

  the one he was given.

  His first work to really catch on / be banned / get him in trouble / cause widespread revulsion was Onkel Rudi

  Die grosse Nacht im Eimer

  Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! / oyez, oyez,

  oyez, Politburo decree: upper right hand corner in ebony!

  ohne Titel

  a mural in the cafeteria of the Hygiene

  Museum, since painted over.

  He wound up in Düsseldorf

  Berlin, doh!

  la bella Italia

  tax-exempt Ireland of Böll- and Beuys-full memory, where the earth-apples bloom.

  His paintings were fuzzy geometry

  like the country, ripped across the middle

  upside down (especially effective: the trees)

  shovelled out of the window

  later withdrawn.

  His favoured technique involved stick figures

  Polke-dots

  out of focus grisaille photographs

  scribbling on his pictures

  woodcuts à la Dürer.

  The numerals on his graphics represent a recent shopping bill

  an attempt to disconcert the onlooker/Ostranenie

  amortisation

  barcode

  some other code

  Durchnummerierung.

  He studied with Joseph Beuys

  the least doctrinaire painter he could find

  for the best part of ten years, in East an
d

  West, so that everything cancelled itself out

  what’s it to you

  he didn’t.

  Fontane

  for Jan Wagner

  Acacias. Acacias and rain make May here, the way

  lindens and rain make July. Layers of complication and sorrow,

  which precipitate as opinion. Brusque. Off-kilter. Uncalled-for.

  A long and hopelessly trammelled backstory. Midnight.

  The biggest brick church in the whole of Brandenburg.

  Two burly men head off into the park with their impossibly tiny dog.

  Sankt Georg

  Sankt Georg, what was it, questionable, doubtful, shady, twilit,

  a something area, something Jan said, and he was born in Hamburg,

  and went to school here, so he would know.

  A little isthmus between the Alster with its freshwater sailors

  and the railway station, always a reliable drag on things anywhere in Europe

  (the transients, the drugs, the pre-set collisions between the foolish young

  and the unscrupulous old), though this one piped classical music – not any more –

  to the forecourt, where taxi drivers got out

  and walked their Mercs around in neutral

  because they were hours without a fare and were saving diesel,

  (which was all very well in summer),

  and the immediate, somehow always slightly grubby or compromised view