90
(A Sunday afternoon at the cinema)
I love the Sunday crowd here, overflowing
into itself, and if it just can find
a seat, enjoys in admiration
a bit of that American hopefulness.
It makes me feel my life is not pointless,
that I still love people and love life.
And the tears well up into my eyes,
and in my heart a song sings to me:
‘Say, don’t you remember an orange jersey,
and a beret of the same colour,
which made her look something like an orange?
Say, don’t you remember little Erna?’
She’s still alive is little Erna;
more alive in fact and cheerier than before.
I thought she was somewhere else, and here I saw her
not alone, and in company I didn’t care for.
‘I was,’ she told me later, ‘with my sister
and with her husband.’ I didn’t believe you.
You good, you dear, you little liar,
I never believed you. I pretended to.
We were – a bit – unhappy. And just when you
think it’s gone dead, the heart will beat again.
And it never beats as it does when
you sang its corpse a miserere. 91
Are these things not very sweet and true
I’ve said? Am I not perhaps a solitary?
A poet? And also at the same time something
else and better? What good’s that now to me?
If the Sunday crowd here that I see
were alien to me or were far removed,
I would be a cymbal gracelessly
clashing, a useless echo vanishing.