The Library
The library
In an unsuitable room
Resembling a closet
A cat peeks from behind the books
No one will arrange
And detective paperbacks
Fantômas
The stench of glue near
A cow waiting to be milked
Geese stretch their long necks
And hiss at a cryptic volume
That looks brand new
A key above the bookcase glitters
Like the one to the cellar
Or attic
In the corner a rolled map
All of it belongs elsewhere
Blinds bound by a string
Agitate a fly
That is particularly manic
Castles affixed to the landscape
From the 19th century
Just like the remnants of a chasuble
Draped over a chair
With no armrest
Water trickles down the walls
Drop by drop
A child’s violin hangs on a wardrobe
A single long-wilted bouquet
Set on the bookcase gnawed
By a woodworm the only inhabitant
The Dry Goods Shop
The shopkeeper
Dozes
Against the door
Several boxes behind it
In the gloom
A backdrop of rolled-up bird-patterned linoleum
He looks at the sidewalk
Where a watering can sprinkles a blazing summer day
And feels a chill
As a cyclist overtakes two rakes
Lying on the hay wagon
Dinner will be a while yet
Wind plays with women’s scarves
The sign above the door belongs in a museum
Two cork wheels dangling
And the cover for a straw bed
Reeking of liquor
Big cans of gas
And patterned aprons
Haunt the back rooms
A rag dog behind the door
Sits on wheels
A butterfly hovers
Casting a shadow
On the dozing shopkeeper’s nose
A whole gang of flies circles
His hat is greased with lard
Like a sugarloaf
He holds a wad of flax
And a small trap in his hand
He sleeps and greets
An actress from a traveling theater
This man seems to have no homeland
Cows low
Best to bike away
The Wayside Inn
On the table
Of the wayside inn
In a wicker basket
With the glittering salt
Of three-day-old rolls
Lies
A telegram read long ago
Everyone has left for the fields
On the coat rack
A hat and cane
The draft ended a week back
This corner is reserved for gamblers
A clear view of the john
The wall calendar fluoresces
No one tears the pages
A dog dozes
Pressed against an orchestrion
A package rolls off a brown bench
An ad for soda water that does not bloat you
In the yard someone repairs a broken cart
And a rooster crows
Not a single waitress at this wayside inn
Nor a single guest
The innkeeper picks pears in the garden
And drops them into a wicker basket
He shakes the tree
Having tossed a gnawed bone into the treetop
From the ditch’s murky waters
A woman stands in front of this empty house
And unlocks it
The Bowling Alley
In the bowling alley
Hens squawk
Lazily bathing in dust
In the gutter resembling a chute
Where balls roll
There is water
With tiny fish flopping
Virtually unseen
A ball ran over a gray frog about to leap
Not a toad
A pile of bowling pins beside a barrel of sauerkraut
A blackbird
Cowering like an old man
Stares at a single spot
Where a small mouse
Incessantly gnaws
A splinter
Stuck in a pear
The ball rolls
And jolts
Like it has several axles
Huge pruning shears hang over the roof
Casting a slanted cross
On mica-sized grains of sand
Pressed into cone-shaped steeples
In front of the dead bowling alley
As Saturday ends
THE ABSOLUTE GRAVEDIGGER
The Absolute Gravedigger
Under a crack in a wooden ceiling the color of smoked meat
Where two wire sunbeams knit a purple stocking
And cast their reflection like fingerprints onto a clay pitcher full of beer
A root thrust from his left shoulder supporting
The beam of the pub of a withered age
The absolute gravedigger
Consumes one of his putrid workaday lunches
So
That
His
Left eye like a pickled egg
Is fixed
On a land map made by a spider on a mold-covered salami
While from his right eye
Enameled with bluebottle larvae
A button-sized bluebottle takes off at intervals
Through an open window
Looking like a field of wheat
Flooded with blue vitriol
Under a gallows made of rakes festooned with cornflowers and the guts of small field mice
The absolute gravedigger
Nearly as wizened as this gneissic land
While a tethered donkey drinks from his manger
The remains of yesterday’s storm
Raises his head with hair of charred schnitzel
And the fungus riddling his hat
Just to bow again over a great snakebite hoe
Propped on the rotted floor with traces of tattered straw bedding
Expiring in spasms in his fist a lark of the smallest particles of earth
He mistakes for a guilder in his absent-mindedness
For the absolute gravedigger is a man of provident thoughts
Strewn like shoe soles across cemeteries
And when he drinks he drinks from bottomless vessels
For the same reason that punctured skulls drink spring water from underground channels
Before the face of the absolute gravedigger resembling a crumpled hat from afar
And an anthill up close
The villagers are sheaves girded by a sash transforming into dung
So the landlady with hips of stuffed duck
With a belly of truffles in grated chestnut
With a left hand of jellied sausage
With a right hand of melted lard and a splinter protruding
With a head of overripe cabbage
With breasts of two tallow puddings
With a womb of calamus
And with legs of soaked sacks of grain
Is not home
For the absolute gravedigger is the great future
Of the shanks of a horse whose rider charges at
Pitchforks pulled from the granary of tomorrow
When the absolute gravedigger smacks his lips
Hens scamper to earthworms that immediately ripen in them into tasty brisket
For the little gourmands
With teeth wobbly as the chair
Of the absolute gravedigger
Who keeps just one eye open
Lulled to sleep by the monot
onous aroma of things
Reeking like cheese
In the stillness that flips the pages of the Innkeeper’s Bulletin
The absolute gravedigger
With a finger-snap crushes the brain of a swallow
That had left his gigantic nose
Resembling the fin
Of ocean cyclones
And again he grimaces with his single decayed tooth topping an axe handle
Above the floor of this afternoon tavern strewn with sand
In that sand
Battalions of reddish ants scurry
The blistered thumb of the absolute gravedigger
Writhes
The blister actually
Part of a bulging slightly trampled woman’s eye
With a blue iris
Covered by a fingernail
Bearing the print of a holy icon
Crushed by the snap fastener
Of deformed slippers
These deformed slippers have the shape
Of two crouching lovers
At the moment they crawled toward each other
Through two underground openings in terrain frozen solid
Trying to keep straight
With the spasmodically tensed muscles of a still erect spine
Or they have the shape of two traps
Set for mice
In the corner of a particularly arid crypt
Or even
The shape of two earthy words
Reeking
Like gloves after exhumation
For the absolute gravedigger’s hands
Are like his feet
And their ten calluses
Are ten eyes
Slightly deformed
By bruises
Made by a spade
On the hands
By its blade
The spade the great tooth of time
In the mouth of the gravedigger
Who sleeps
With tongue resting against his soft palate
The soft palate of the absolute gravedigger
Covered in a film
Of saliva
And dust
Houses
A cemetery in miniature
Transformed into a potpourri
This potpourri
Has the tongue of a hairdresser dead of consumption
The breath of sweet woodruff
And the taste of a pretzel
Dominating the whole potpourri
That permeates the nostrils of the absolute gravedigger
The gigantic man shrugs his shoulder
As if shaking off a coffin
Down
To a foot
Afflicted with a corn
The eye of an arthropod
That breaks to the surface
From the little toe
Peeking through a split in his cracked boot
The absolute gravedigger’s attire
Is made from the luxurious remnants of dead men’s garments
Patched with the leaves
Of a felled
Tree
And stained
With the saccharificated matter
Of entrails
A putrid eschar
Hardly discernible from the lichen
Of sunken lanes
Reserved
For jumping frogs
Convulsing
Like the heart muscle of the absolute gravedigger
While he performs
The most essential gravedigger’s work
For the absolute gravedigger to be what he is
And not just a man
Who digs
Shovels dirt
And fills holes
To be the metaphysical mixer of the offal
Of the absolute cesspool
A gondola glides across
Made from the same substance of clouds
He must
Constantly replenish
His affirmative nature
With his own opposite
That appears especially concrete
And completely visible
In the form
Of harvests flooded with blue vitriol
Circumscribed by a window
And intended for a mule
Who feels
If one can rightfully call this a feeling
A cricket in its ear
This cricket apart from itself
Is a sickle’s short swishing strokes
The tuning fork of a summer’s three-lined F-sharp
The creaky purring of a door
The bass of a pump
While the absolute gravedigger’s ear
Is the dead case for the sounds of all instruments
An empty shell
A case
That holds the remains of a sticky balm
Like melted rosin
With a mummified earwig
Murdering
A ladybug
Lying on its back
In the pincers of the huge mite
The absolute gravedigger’s nose
Is a magnificent synthesis of his being
Contingent
On one side upon life
And on the other upon death
In their absolute unity
And this nose
Looking like the huge fin of an ocean cyclone
A swallow flew out of
Is part ventilator protected by Art Nouveau nostrils
Perpetrating a kiss
Between a stinking foot
And sweet woodruff
And part decomposing slug
That plates itself in silver
With a mucous-like rather translucent
Sticky substance
Forming a fiber
Resembling Indian summer
When a child with a nougat-smeared mouth
Mistaking the absolute gravedigger for his uncle
Tried to wake him
By pressing a heartfelt kiss on his lips
And quickly ran out the tavern’s door
To emit a prelude sounding like the high pitch of a tuner
Now the child’s lips began
To swell enormously
Like a mouth stung by a bee
Which inevitably led to the child’s
Suffocation
Alone with the tethered mule
Amidst the harvest
Between the left nostril of life
And the right nostril of death
Of the gigantic nose
Covered in hives
And curdy islands the size of grits
Yet the moment
The swallow left this nose
To peck the entrails of small field mice
And when it flew
Out of reach of the cockeyed absolute gravedigger
Seemingly asleep
Just like his nose is seemingly dead
And the mule is seemingly alive
This nose
That is not a roof
Even though right under the upper lip it partly covers
A swallow’s nest hangs
Covered in beard
Was instantly able to sharply inhale the miasmas of summer
And induced such a rapid transformation of the processes of death
in the absolute gravedigger’s being
Into vital processes
That the absolute gravedigger lifted up
His right thigh stuck to the chair
At this moment resembling
Misplaced bagpipes
In the movements
It began to make
And in the sounds
It emitted
And this man stuffed with graveyards
Indolent half the day
During harvest time
When except for the dying
And the mule
Tied up next to the tavern by a traveling cutler
Everyone mimics death with scythe in hand
&nbs
p; Filled his nose
Loafing in the light breeze of late afternoon dusk
With the stench of death
Which at first only changed the seat of his chair
Into an autopsy slab
But which quickly began to creep like a wild bush
Over the glass of beer
Broken down into ammonia
Until one of its particularly quickly sprouting branches
Penetrated the crack in the ceiling the color of smoked meat
As this stench of death
Advanced evenly with blanket dusk
And as in such conditions smoked meat
Quickly succumbs to the process of decay
Beginning to crawl
Through the crack in the ceiling
The great white maggot of night
The great white maggot of a summer night
The great white maggot of a July summer night
Rendered the absolute gravedigger invisible
The Fetishist
On a cobbler’s stool
In a workshop
That looks like a greased
Boudoir
With damson flower wallpaper
And kitchen fixtures
With one bed
For three
Opposite a lockless door
That closes with a latch
Guarded
By an animal
In whom shoehorn
Is strangely wed
To crab
A Cartesian diver
Sits
And rocks
Alone as can be
Bowing
To a large leg
Under a skirt
That contains
A world resembling a cabbage rose
This world
Composed of pink and white creases
Constantly changing
In the reflective play of light
Whose source
Is a water bucket
And the head of a pipe
Hanging
From the Cartesian diver’s teeth
Is the stage arranged like a fan
Of an improvised flea circus
Whose only spectator
Is the Cartesian diver
A small
Blushing
Cobbler
With an enormous bald spot
That reflects
The secret of this entire boudoir
Between the Cartesian diver’s fingers
Between those delicate fingers
Covered in talc
Tremble
The toes
Of absent-minded femininity
The toes
Shrouded in a silk mourning stocking
Sensitive as nipples
The Absolute Gravedigger Page 2
