Winfried Sebald: Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

Days when
At the crack of dawn
The early bird
Squats in my kitchen.
It shows me the worm
Which sooner than later
Will lead me up the garden path.
I’ve already bought
My pig in a poke
It’s all Tom or dick
Kids or caboodle
In the home and castle.
My day is truly
Wrecked.

There he stood
In the early morn
And wanted in.
It’s warm
In front of the fire.
Lug a-cock
The man waited
For some response
To his knock.
Came a bawl from within:
Jesus Mary
A pain in the neck
In the early morn.
Where no kitchen
There no cook.
We don’t need no
King.
The man has heard
As much before.
He has heard enough.
Right then: all or nothing.

The valley resounds
With the sound of the stars
With the vast stillness
Over snow and forest.
The cows are in their byre.
God is in his heaven.
Child Jesus in Flanders.
Believe and be saved.
The Three Wise Men
Are walking the earth.

Quick as a wink, a star
Falls from heaven
Like nothing
That grows on trees.
Now make a wish
But don’t tell a soul
Or it won’t come true
Ready or not
Here I come!

I know there exists
A shuttered world mute
And without image but for example
The starlings have forgotten their old life
No longer flying back to the south
Staying in Bleston all winter
In the snowless lightless month
Of December swarming during the day
From soot-covered trees, thousands of them
In the sky over All Saints Park
Screaming at night in the heart
In the brain of the city huddled together
Sleepless on the sills of Lewis’s Big Warehouse
Between Victorian patterns
And roses life was a matter
Of death and cast its shadows
Now that death is all of life
I wish to inquire
Into the whereabouts of the dead
Animals none of which I have ever seen

In eternity perhaps
All we experience
Becomes bitter Bleston
Founded by Cn. Agricola
Between seventy and eighty A.D.
Appears in the ensuing
Era to have been
A bleak and forsaken place
Bleston knows an hour
Between summer and winter
Which never passes and that
Is my plan for a time
Without beginning or end
Bleston Mamucium Place of
Breast-like hills
The weather changes
It is late in our year
Dis Manibus Mamucium
Hoc faciendum curavi

An unfamiliar lament
And the astonishment that
Sadness exists — one’s own
Never the other of those who suffer
Of those whose right it really is
Life is uncomplaining in view of the history
Of torture à travers les âges Bleston
Uncomplaining is this mythology without gods
The mere shadow of a feast-day phantom
Of a defunct feast-day Bleston
From time to time the howls
Of animals in the zoological
Department reach my ears
While I hold in my hands
The burnt husks of burnt chestnuts
The silence of revelation
Sharon’s Full Gospel — the sick are
Miraculously healed before our eyes
The ships lie offshore
Waiting in the fog

He couldn’t help it Kebad Kenya
If the years of all humanity lay
Strewn about him in their thousands debris
Erratic and glacial white in the moonlight
Reclining in silence on the river of time
Hipasos of Metapontum by the Gulf of Tarentum
Made bronze disks of varying thickness ring out
Five hundred years before Christ
Et pulsae referent ad sidera valles—
It was Pythagoras however of whom it was said
He possessed the secret of listening to the stars
The valleys of Bleston do not echo
And with them is no more returning
Word without answer fil d’Ariane until your blood
Hunts you down with opgekilte schottns
Alma quies optata veni nam sic sine vita
Vivere quam suave est sic sine morte mori
Only in the wasteland does Rapunzel find bliss
With the blind man Bleston my ashes
In the wind of your dreams

But the certitude nonetheless
That a human heart
Can be crushed — Eli Eli
The choice between Talmud and Torah
Is hard and there is no relying
On Bleston’s libraries
Where for years now I have sought
With my hands and eyes the misplaced
Books which so they say Mr. Dewey’s
International classification system
With all its numbers still cannot record
A World Bibliography of Bibliographies
On ne doit plus dormir says Pascal
A revision of all books at the core
Of the volcano has been long overdue
In this cave within a cave
No glance back to the future survives
Reading star-signs in winter one must
Cut from pollard willows on snowless fields
Flutes of death for Bleston

Sunday was fed
Up to the teeth
With church bells
Summer hats
Gardening
Birds were squabbling
Over Lord knows what
Among the withered
Chestnut blossom
The presbyter went
To his May devotions
And it took
A long time
To get dark
Before it did
The birds made
A din
In the trees

The French windows
Are open still
As if in the theatre
People wait
On the colors of the carpet
In the cadence of dusk
Irony it is said
Is a form of humility
Glass in hand
They come and go
Stop still and expect
The metamorphosis of hawthorn
In the garden outside
Time measures
Nothing but itself
In the courtyard of a monastery in Holland
My name escaped me
Early in life according to Scott
Swift had acquired the habit
Of celebrating his birthday
In dejection
One leaves behind one’s portrait
Without intent

His eyes
Home in
On the real
There is
Skulduggery
Afoot
A raven alights
At God’s ear
Tidings he brings
Of the battlefield
Father has gone to war
The monk from Melk
Sleeps in his quiet grave
The snow
Falls on his house
If no one asks him
He knows
But if someone asks him
He knows not
When the Weisers
Will meet
Something not a soul
Has ever seen

Fieldwards goes the day
Mildew grows in the garden
Measles cover the man
Like a thousand butterflies
Fieldwards goes the day
Long long ago
Studded with stars was the sky
A thousand butterflies
Come from the fields is a day
A coachman stands at the bone-house
Holding in his hands
The thousand butterflies

Weary of always
the same trees and
a country far from crossed
the legionnaire rests
in fancy’s meagre holding
Revolving around him by turns
his life and a bloom of tobacco
smoked by the wayside
The hammered out sections
show him whenever he moves
which of his organs
alas are sick
Cheerful after all
humbly sat on his shield
he bids us good day
the one-eyed
king of the blind