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

The program enlists the turqueries
of a newly lapsed century
a potpourri with bells and cymbals
orchestrated obscenities
Masked players swell
the plot in a green theatre
their true faces overwritten
Rather than greater virtue
the happy ending proposes
more trivial vices
The hedges rustle with applause
and the bygone ladies
of the court return
below the lawns
Back to reading
cubist
novels

Grown sheepish
by morning I study
the grounds of my coffee
At midday I cut
a slice for myself
from the hollow pumpkin of summer
And not until dark do I risk again
the Cretan trick
of leaping between the horns

Great-grandfather
in his gay jacket
casting a horoscope
A perfect
heptagram omitting
the malefic houses
Those white areas
photoset and printed
in my historical atlas

As you know
the owl was only
a baker’s daughter
And Sheikh Subir
a professor expelled
from Persia

After numerous
proselytizing expeditions
to Paris
Geneva Smyrna and
Constantinople
he was burned at the stake
in Moscow

Surrounded by German
mothers and conscript
sons homeward on the
Bundesbahn: the leaning
tower by Landsberg
the murder at Hotel Hahn
the Buchloe cheese factory
the lunatics of Kauf beuren
the abbey school windows
the abyss of childhood
And in the dark
lifting her skirts
Saint Elizabeth
stepping daintily
over glowing ploughshares

Precisely undulated fields
little globular trees
sculpted and dark green
pedantically aligned
rows of maize
Thereabove to the west
God’s pleasure
pink candyfloss
from the recent funfair
Mumbling the enigma of their
crosswords pensioners sit
on the express, limbs benumbed
in the quicksilver of their angst
Already the shadows are smoking
in the valley of Jehoshaphat
Here comes the railwayman
his lamp bouncing on his bib

The poster in the village shop
recalls the yellowed terror
of the Colorado beetle
In the backroom behind her
the shopkeeper’s children sit glued
to the nation’s wooden eye
Windfalls lie leaden in the garden
and blue in the crayfish-stream
flow the suds from the washing machine
The Moor on the hill
peeps from an American tank
among the dying spruces
In the afternoon
my crazy grandfather
torches the fields
My last aspirin
dissolves gently
in a glass
As the pain subsides
I hear once more
the call of the distant posthorn

White fields
in winter sometimes
strewn with ash
The high shoulders of the hill
stunted conifers
juniper shrubs
rock tombs
one-eyed sheep
Overtaken by ruin
a Wilhelmine artisan mill
reflects the breadlessness
of the passing trains
Deposited between layers
lie the winged
vertebrates
of prehistory

Glacial in the early morning
the train station at Bamberg
a Reichspost stamp
overprinted for hyperinflation
Hindenburg’s gray-green millions
history’s null ouvert
penny panic
in the poor souls of commuters
Beyond the tracks
moored in the half light
the brickwork brewery
a German airship
At the gondola window
Saint Dionysius
a lonely passenger
with his head under his arm

Falling asleep
on the sofa
I hear from a distance
geese on the radio
whetting their beaks
to pass the verdict
The mildew grows
in the garden paralysis
spreads
a long succession
of minute shocks
I feel the blood
at the roots
of my teeth
As I awake
sudden cardiac
death waves
from the other side
of the abyss

A snip of the scissors
a thimble
a needle’s eye
A place of pilgrimage
a memory stone
a mountain moved
A club moss
and a cube of ice
tinted with a jot
of Berlin blue

Nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine years
Zarvan murmured
to get a son
And now his descendants
are flogging off
the houses of heaven
and the five coasts of the earth
With his sea-goat ready
for departure the mythologist
beholds once again
the shattered world egg

Build fire and read
the future in smoke
Carry out ash and
scatter over head
Be sure
not to look back
Attempt
the art of metamorphosis
Paint face
with cinnabar
As a sign
of grief

Nothing can be inferred
from the forecasts
Tree frogs
are ignoring their ladders
Changeable weather tests the patience
of the rheumatic soul
The slightest gust makes it flutter
first this way then that
Meanwhile Propertius
waits faithfully in his folding boat
One oar in the water
the other skimming the sand at the edge

His personal effects
are ready to leave
Entered
well in advance
the calligraphic endorsement
an analphabetic cipher
valid for a single journey
Pictures sent
en route greetings
from Bohemian Switzerland
and a group photo
in front of the High Tatras
Didn’t you
have your
photograph taken
in Franzensbad too

The cucumbers
lurk in their greenhouses
The customs official
borrows my evening paper
A wet hand
casts no shadow
Kaiser Willem
is still smoking his cigars
No sign
of the reclaimed land

like Kafka’s essay
on Goethe’s abominable
nature

Beethoven’s room
is tidy now
The pictures straightened
the curtains washed
and week for week the floors
polished anew
But the chair
for the grand
has been taken away
He still comes in at night sometimes
and composes something
standing up
The proviso is
it be audible only
with an ear-trumpet

Such desolation
in Harwich Harbor
when I am here
it always seems to me
as if we were
in the throes of a silent war
The hollow barges
all that bulky
worn-out iron
the oil-green water
and the ever stiller
county of Essex
round about
The poor travelers
with their woe-begone
faces oppressed
hapless folk
standing here waiting
on the Red Sea shore
Nobody tells them
where the ferries are heading for
tonight

A green zone
for field glasses
and camouflaged
ornithologists
Beyond it the bay
its sweep broader
than the furthest
horizon
The Home Guard
waited here
for the sea lion
to appear
When the monster didn’t
show the marram
was permitted to reoccupy
the fortified strip
But Uncle Toby
doesn’t entirely
trust the peace
Stuffing his pillow
with sand he wishes
the deluge would begin