Читать книгу Albrecht Dürer and me - David Zieroth - Страница 12

on the occasion of visiting Auden’s grave

somehow I don’t expect sighing evergreens

or cruel April’s birds tuning up their notes

or the autobahn’s whine beyond the church’s

sweet-cream-pastry-coloured plaster walls

though I recognize the iron cross and plaque

labelling the deceased as poet and man of letters

and somehow the ivy’s dense entanglement

surprises me as do wilting winter pansies

on top of the small rectangle of the plot itself

(how can it hold such long, grand bones?)

and a two-pence copper coin lying atop moss

that says he is loved by someone from home

and those admirers from other lands (like me)

know better than to swipe this little token

even as I feel its melancholic foreignness

enter my thumb and vibrate with an eagerness

to claim the wrinkled poet as my own

yes, I know how men slide daily under earth

and what remains of them upside stays briefly

before it too leaves like wind or highway noise

while calamity clots nearby, one hamlet away

even as that woman in her red coat crosses

a green field, happy black terrier leaping up

to her hand, as a crow settles his wings on pale

winter stubble, and an old man in a crushed hat

posts a letter at a yellow box – and may a reply

come sooner than he expects from a grandson

he loves to praise as only a free man can praise

but likely it’s a bill, what must be paid

in a certain period before penalties apply

and debts accrue and demands mount

and a day passes in which he fails to relish

this heaven-side of grass, neglects the glory

in birdsong! – and in men whose songs rise

so smoothly from their natures we forget

how both ease and fine form came to pass

out of a morning’s work in the low house

with green decorative siding not far from

his grave, a domicile easy to pass by without

a murmur of wonder – though the German words

under his photo leave me squinting, envious

of those who know more than I, who knew him

as a neighbour, summer visitor to Kirchstetten

on a back road bordered by willows ready to bud

from soggy forest floor with leaves faint for now