Читать книгу Albrecht Dürer and me - David Zieroth - Страница 15

commemorative rooms

Georg Trakl (February 3, 1887, Salzburg to November 3, 1914, Kraków)

not a word in English, yet I understand

yellowing paper holds up faded words

small books plain in design

black and white photographs

light from windows muted (a storm

is building, and later its mountain

violence breaks and drenches

my T-shirt: Salzburg, it says)

from in here I can almost see

the school he attended, still severe

and grand and yet submitting

in this city of churches, it is functional

first and only with time dignified

and perhaps saddened

that many were dead

in the short film a man’s voice

intones his poems so tenderly

I am reminded that language

this harsh can be loving – because

back home we’d read translations

but never softly: scenes of the Eastern Front

required at least a twisting

of the jaw so out would come

how he himself may have sounded

gurgling on his deathbed from

an overdose of cocaine, unclear

whether suicide or error

– but forever clear his small

self-portrait: a painted darkness

of reddish hair, green face

makes a mask so unlike

the blond young man in striped trousers

seen sitting, eager not for war

but for his life – and I see

how summer light comes in

and tries its best to tell me

not to believe this possessed glow

here on the wall set to trigger

my dismay but instead to step

back into the street, where

he’d walked, shadows from clouds

falling on him as they fall on me

with sudden heat and thunder –