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

For some time
we crossed a low plateau.
Our eyes took in
the distant landscape,
elegant touring cars
flew past
and a motor-cyclist
with a gun
over his shoulder
appeared again and again
in our mirror.
Soon our road curved down
swiftly into a basin and
Marienbad lay suddenly before us,
a petrified magical city.
Black spruces thronged
to the edge of the outer buildings,
Siberian chervil and eight-foot
giant hogweed in the gardens.
Behind the drab, yellow façades:
Old German furniture,
hat boxes, the strains of a pianola,
an inkling of poison and bile.
It was like driving
into an old-time theatre.
We had a fire made up in the hotel
although it was still mid-summer.
Later, wrapped in heavy
Scottish dressing-gowns we gazed
through the open windows
and gloomy rain outside
into a dusky otherworld.
Is not the world here still,
you asked; do banks of green
no longer follow the river
through bush and lea? Does
not the harvest ripen? Do
holy shades
no longer hang
upon the cliffs? Is this
drawing-in
the gray stain of night?
Next day we sat in the café
beneath a painting of water-lilies. Or
perhaps they were even flamingos.
Do you remember the waiter?
His closely cropped white hair,
his turn-of-the-century
frock-coat and taffeta bow?
The way he kept touching
his left temple with his fingers?
Remember the Cuban cigarettes
he brought me? The fine blue
smoke rose straight as a candle.
A good sign, no doubt.
And indeed, outside it had turned
brighter. Reduced aristocrats
swished past in dust-cloaks
bound for the refectory.
The Rabbi of Belz, plastic
beaker in hand, walked to the well.
A bride and groom were posing
for a photograph on the promenade.
Harquebused suffering
hearts lay about
on the shorn lawns.
Returning to the hotel
we saw Dr K, half-obscured
by a red flag, sitting
at his balcony table,
busy with a portion
of smoked pork much
too big for him
The match game
was meant to decide everything.
The gleaming parquet floor
stretched before us. All round us
were mirrors, guests, motionless—
and in the middle you
in your feather boa. Hadn’t
we met once before?
In a taxus maze?
On a stage? The perspectival
prospect, pruned hedges,
little round trees and balustrades,
the palace in the background?
You were supposed to say, I
am wholly yours, nothing
but these words;
and you did say them,
while strangely not
coming an inch
closer.
During the journey home
fantasies of a fatal accident.
Unspectacular woodlands
and hills flanking our route
through the countryside.
The motor-cyclist
turns up again in our rear.
Not a soul on the streets
of Eger. I see only
one woman shoveling coal
through a cellar hatch.
A deserted house,
the icy cold here,
the corridors and chambers,
the flight from the alcove,
the blind window-pane,
the flash of a lance,
the barely audible cry of horror.
And at the end of the act
they carry the pierced
corpse across the stage
in a piece of crimson tapestry.

The traveler
has finally arrived
at the border post
A customs official
has untied his laces
removed his shoes
His luggage rests
abandoned on the
planed floorboards
His pigskin suitcase
gapes, his poor
soul has flown
His body, last
of his personal effects
awaits meticulous scrutiny
Dr. Tulp will soon be here
in his black hat, prosectorial
instruments in hand
Or is the body already
hollow and weightless,
floating, barely
guided by fingertips,
across to the land
one may only enter barefoot?

23 Februari 1995
between Schiphol
& Frankfurt at ten
thousand feet
in the air
I read a
report in the
paper about
the so-called
carnavalsmoorden
van Venlo all
about the strange
quarter of Genooy
where in the van
Postelstraat
right among
the respectable
condos stands
a row of
whorehouses
where white & colored
women sit
behind the
windows & where
a few guys from
the koffieshop
branche: Frankie
Hacibey & Suleyman
drive out
one evening to an
execution on the banks
of the Maas. There is
talk of a
bludgeon & a
bread knife of
a jar containing
thirty-five
thousand guilder
& of the married
couple Sjeng &
Freda van Rijn who
as the carnival
surged through
the town center
were lying at home
twee oude mensen
met doorgesneden
keel op de grund
a dark tale which
so they say has much
to do with hashish
dealing turkse
gemeenschap &
duitse clientèle
with greed & ven
geance violence
een zwarte Merce
des een rode BMW
& twee kogels van
dichtbij in het hoofd.

of the Universe,
Patriotic Tales and
Memorabilia,
A Germanic
Hall of Fame,
The Neudamm
Forester’s Primer,
Register of
Germany’s
Protected Species,
Social Hygiene
in Hamburg
and The Mushrooms
of our Region—
all informative
work assembled
by chance
in the display
of a junk shop
near a railway
underpass in
Oldenburg I
think or Osnabrück
or in some
other town
30. ix.95

according to the Julian
calendar, on 22 June
according to our own,
Anton Pavlovich and
Olga Leonardovna reach
the spa at Badenweiler.
The tariff is sixteen marks
for board and lodging
at the Villa Friederike
but the spelt porridge
and creamy cocoa
bring no improvement.
Suffering from emphysema
he spends all day
in a reclining chair
in the garden marveling
again and again at how
oddly quiet it is indoors.
Later in the month the weather
is unusually hot, not
a breath of wind, the woods
on the hills utterly still,
the distant river valley
in a milky haze.
On the 28th Olga travels
to Freiburg specially
to buy a light flannel
suit. At the Angelus hour
of the following day
he has his first attack, the
second the following night.
The dying man, already
buried deep in his pillows,
mutters that German
women have such
abominable taste in dress.
As dawn breaks
the doctor, placing
ice on his heart,
prescribes morphine
and a glass of champagne.
He was thinking of returning
home with Austrian
Lloyd via Marseille
and Odessa. Instead
they will have him transferred
in a green, refrigerated
freight car marked
FOR OYSTERS
in big letters. Thus has
he fallen among dead
mollusks, like them packed
in a box, dumbly rolling
across the continent.
When the corpse arrives
at Nikolayevsky Station
in Moscow a band
is playing a Janissary
piece in front of
General Keller’s
coffin, also newly
arrived from Manchuria,
and the poet’s relatives
and friends, a small
circle of mourners,
which from a distance
resembles a black
velvet caterpillar,
move off, as many
recalled, to the strains
of a slow march
in the wrong direction.

on a Sunday after —
noon in the month
of November I drove
south from Freiburg
across the foothills
of the Black Forest.
All the way down
to the Belfort Gap
low motionless clouds
above a landscape
deep in shadow,
the hatched patterning
of vineyards on the slopes.
Badenweiler looks
depopulated after
some virulent summer
epidemic. Silent
hemorrhaging in every
house, I guess, and
now not a living
soul about, even
the parking lot
near the facilities empty.
Only in the arboretum
under giant
sequoias do I meet
a solitary lady
smelling of patchouli
and carrying a white
Pomeranian in her arms.
As the evening
draws in the sun
sinks in the West
between the clouds
and the skyline of
the Vosges hills
the last of the
fading light flooding
the Rhine plain
which shimmers and quivers
like the salty shore
of a dried-out lake.