MARKUS WERNER ~

 

R E A D   M E

Like reading Hrabal, and no one is Hrabal —

a treasure

GOTTFRIED BENN ~

S T I L L     L I F E




When everything lies there in fallen heaps

thoughts, moods, duets

— lies there despoiled

without tinfoil — and the scraped membrane

— all the layers washed away —

of the bloody conjunctiva stares into silence —

what's left?



The sixty-four-thousand-dollar-question! But who in his senses

asks it anymore —

Renaissance reminiscences,

Baroque overlay,

castle museums —

an end to drilling,

but still no groundwater,

the wells dark,

the styles exhausted —

time has acquired a stillness,

the hour breathes

over a wine jug,

it's late, the last blows have been traded,

a clinch and a hang on the ropes

before the bell — I give the world

to anyone who wants it, let them be happy:



the jester's not to turn serious

the drinker's not to wander into the Gobi Desert

even a lady with a lorgnette

entertains aspirations to happiness

well, good luck to her —



the lake rests at ease

rimmed with forget-me-nots,

adders laugh.


                                                             (1949-1955)
—————————————


Gottfried Benn
I M P R O M P T U S
Selected poems and some prose
translated by Michael Hofmann
Farrar 2015





NEVER HEARD OF GOTTFRIED BENN?

MALCOLM LOWRY ~

M A L C O L M     L O W R Y

Nocturne

This evening Venus sings alone

And homeward feathers stir like silk

Like the dress of a multitudinous ghost

The pinons tear through a sky like milk.

Seagulls all soon to be turned to stone

That seeking I lose beyond the trail

In the woods that I and my ignorance own

Where together we walk on our hands and knees

Together go walking beneath the pale

Of a beautiful evening loved the most

And yet this evening is my jail

And policemen glisten in the trees.

Happiness

Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water,

A wild sky full of stars at rising

And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise,

Gulls following a motorboat against the wind,

Trees with branches rooted in air —

Sitting in the sun at noon with furiously

Smoking shadow of the shack chimney —

Eagles drive downward in one,

Terns blow backward,

A new kind of tobacco at eleven,

And my love returning on the four o'clock bus

— My God, why have you given this to us?

No Company But Fear

How did all this begin and why am I here

at this arc of bar with its cracked brown paint,

papegaai, mezcal, hennessey, cerveza,

two slimed spittons, no company but fear:

fear of light, of the spring, of the complaint

of birds and buses flying to far places,

of girls skipping with the wind in their faces,

but no company, no company but fear,

fear of the blowing fountain: and all flowers

that know the sun are my enemies,

these, dead, hours?

____________________________


MALCOLM LOWRY
The Voyage That Never Ends
fictions  poems  fragments  letters
New York Review of Books, 2007 

 



 Malcolm Lowry's mysterious demise