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

Sailing backwards
as a passenger with
banished time
A Louisianian
landscape populated
by invisible windmillers
Where the Egyptian
in his painted boat
sails between fields

In early November 1980
walking across
the Bridge of Peace I almost
went out of my mind

In Man it is
the Quadruped
in Woman the Amphibian
who has the upper Hand

Is Carl Löwe’s
heart
really
immured
in a column
in the Church of St. James
in Stettin?

Aristotle did not
apprehend at all
the word he found
in Archytas

Feelings my friend
wrote Schumann
are stars which guide us
only when the sky is clear
but reason is a
magnetic needle
driving our ship on
till it shatters on the rocks
It was when my palsied
finger stopped me playing
the piano that calamity
came upon me
If you knew every cranny
of my heart
you would yet be ignorant
of the pain my happy
memories bring
Carnaval time for the children
with friends dressed up
as Ormuzd and Ariman
fleecy clouds of gold
melting in the pure ether
For years now I’ve had
this same whistling
sound in my ears
and it troubles me greatly
Walking by the Rhine
I know I shall steer
for the North I have yearned for
though it be colder there
even than the ice on
geometry’s intersecting lines

Hell Valley Wind on My Nerves
In the cathedral square
of a town he left
many years ago
the emigrant sits
reading the secret history
of Judge Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber
Events of war within
a life cracks
across the Order of the World
spreading from Cassiopeia
a diffuse pain reaching into
the upturned leaves on the trees
The black holes
of ghosts flying about
in the sky above
conceal as I know
li più reconditi principii
della naturale filosofia
Come lacklustre times, you
in the midst of beauty
of obscenity my nights
will help you remember
a pale block of ice
slowly melting
The judge speaks
I am the stony guest
come from afar
and I think I am dead
Open these pages, he says,
and step smartly
into hell

Late last night
I was standing in the garden
when a space ship
sparkling with lights
passed incredibly
slowly
over our roof
What can you do
but watch the ocean giant
pull away beyond the trees
and head for another galaxy
In sixty-nine
on Pwllheli beach
in Wales I saw a small
glimmering object
sink gently humming
in the air as it floated
down from the top
of a mountain that was printed
entirely in Japanese colors
finally vanishing
over the vast sea
What on earth it was
or what that ship was
yesterday in the sky
I cannot imagine
perhaps it was the soul
of the Welsh prince
slain by his brother
by the lake of Idwal
over which no bird
has flown since

A belated excursion to
the stone collection
of our feelings
Little left here
worth showing
alas
Is there
from an anthropological perspective
a need for love
Or merely for
yearnings easy
to disappoint
Which stars
go down
as white dwarfs
What relation
does a heavy heart bear
to the art of comedy
Does the hunter
Orion have answers
to such questions
Or are they
too closely guarded
by the Dog Star

Like an early geographer
I paint a lion or two
or some other
wild animal
in my white
memory fields
Porcupine, chameleon
flounder and grouse
jackal and unicorn
xanthos and mouse
Outside with the real
birds screaming in the dark
they stand guard
figuring with their
tiny heads what is
still to come
before the sun
goes out
Crocodile, monkey
buffalo, hare
dromedary, leopard
mud turtle, bear
Is it enough
to be overcome
by feeling
at a few words
in our children’s
school primer
Are these the emblems
of our love

In his year of mourning
Grandfather moved
the piano to the attic
and never brought it
down again
With his brass telescope
he now explores
the arcs of the heavens instead
His logbook records
a comet with a tail
and the categorical proposition
that the moon is the earth’s work of art
From him I also know
of the holy man who sits
where night turns to day
roaring like a lion
And once he said do not forget
the north wind brings
light from the house of Aries
to the apple trees

I
Feeding carefully through the junctions
the early train slips
through the station precincts
a tatzelwurm en route for the city
Riveted gray of the iron bridges
and coming through mist
a peaceful canal
with a barque
from which the Hunter Gracchus
has already stepped ashore
Views to the rear
of inferior housing
wooden sheds tin roofs
dog kennels gutted
cars and tiny
home-made crystal palaces
hung with tomato plants
last year’s hopes
The power station in the outskirts
lying on its back
a sick elephant
still just breathing
through its trunk
The little gold-toothed priest
facing me buries himself
in the news of the day
the ink of the godless
staining the little pink fingers
of a furry day-blind animal
Who scrawled the warning
Hands off Caroline
across the fire-wall
in Ipswich who knows the names
of our brothers the ducks
under the willow on the island
in Chelmsford Park pond
Who knows the noises
made by the animals
in Romford at night
and who will teach
the King’s starling
to whistle a new song
Pulling into the north-easterly
quarters of the metropolis
Gilderson’s Funeral Service
Merton’s Rubbish Disposal
the A1 Wastepaper Company
Stratford the forest of Arden
and the first colonists
on the platform at Maryland
heavenly Jerusalem
skyline of the City
brick-wall catacombs
Liverpool Street Station

II
The city sinks behind me
as I head home in the evening
reading Samuel Pepys’s diary
of the Great Fire of London
People taking to boats
many pigeons killed
panic on the river
looting near Lincoln’s Inn
Bishop Baybrooke’s corpse exposed
fragments blown to Windsor Park
The tatzelwurm passes through the country
nightly shadows hedges and fields
and in the darkness gently
glowing the elephant now
so utterly different

Spent two hours at the end of December
on the Garden State Highway
In the ancient Ford’s trunk
nothing but my heart grown
heavier year by year
A protracted catastrophe:
the constant river of traffic
the endless business of overtaking
vicious eye-contact
with total strangers
in the adjacent lane
Driven by yearning
for its prehistoric brothers
a Jumbo climbs out of Newark
airport over marshes and lagoons
a giant smoking
mountain of rubbish
and the countless lights
of the refineries
Mile after mile of stunted trees
telegraph poles fields of blueberries
a Siberian countryside
colonized then run to seed
with moribund supermarkets
abandoned poultry farms
haunted by millions and millions
of breakfast eggs
harboring the undeciphered sighs
of an entire nation
Near the retirement town of Lakehurst
a safari park soundless
under its coat of frost
cemeteries as spacious
as the world war killing fields
funeral parlors dubious
antique shops and a bus station
for last trips
to Atlantic City
In the twilight of the settlement itself
ten square miles of faintly
luminous bungalows
lawns dwarf-conifers
Christmas decorations
Santa Rudolph the Reindeer
and in front of one of the houses
my uncle feeding the songbirds
Drinking schnapps
he later tells me
of the conquest of New York
Drinking schnapps I consider
the ramifications of our calamity
and the meaning of the picture
that shows him, my uncle
as a tinsmith’s assistant in ’23
on the new copper roof
of the Augsburg synagogue
those were the days
Next day we drive out to the coast
Seaside Park Avenue at noon
the boardwalks deserted
boarded up diners
Alpine-style summerhouses
with circulating draughts
yachts rattling in the cold
the sub-urban migration of dunes
With the brown house-high waves
in the background my uncle
leaning forward into the wind
snapped me again
with his Polaroid
Do we really die
only once