At the moment on Ascension Day
of the year ’forty-four when I was born,
the procession for the blessing of the fields
was just passing our house to the sounds
of the fire brigade band, on its way out
to the flowering May meadows. Mother
at first took this as a happy sign, unaware
that the cold planet Saturn ruled this hour’s
constellation and that above the mountains
already the storm was hanging which soon thereafter
dispersed the supplicants and killed
one of the four canopy bearers.
Apart from the grievous impression this
occurrence, unprecedented in the village’s history,
may have made upon me, and apart from
the raging fire which one night—shortly
before my first day at school it was—
consumed a sawmill not far from our house
and lit up the whole valley, I grew up,
despite the dreadful course
of events elsewhere, on the northern
edge of the Alps, so it seems
to me now, without any
idea of destruction. But the habit
of often falling down in the street and
often sitting with bandaged hands
by the open window between the potted
fuchsias, waiting for the
pain to subside and for hours
doing nothing but looking out,
early on induced me to imagine
a silent catastrophe that occurs
almost unperceived.
What I thought up at the time,
while gazing down into the herb garden
in which the nuns under their white
starched hoods moved so slowly
between the beds as though a moment ago
they had still been caterpillars, this
I have never got over.
The emblem for me of the
scarcely identifiable disaster
since that time has been a stunted
Tatar with a red headcloth
feather. In anthropology
this figure is often associated
with certain forms of self-mutilation
and described as that of the adept who
ascends a snow-covered mountain and long
tarries there, as they say, in tears.
In a sheltered corner
of his heart, so lately
I have read, he carries
a little horse made
of clay. Magical
crosswords he mumbles,
talks of scissor blades,
a thimble, a needle’s
eye, a stone in the memory,
a place of pilgrimage, and
of a small die, ice-coloured,
with a dash of Berlin blue.
A long series of tiny shocks,
from the first and the second pasts,
not translated into the spoken
language of the present, they
remain a broken corpus guarded
by Fungisi and the wolf’s shadow.
After that come the children grown
a little bigger who believe that
parts of their parents ride ahead
on the removal van’s horse
to make ready the living quarters,
while in the dark box
on the way to Gmunden
they eat their supper,
drink two pots of coffee,
spread butter on the bread
and say not a word about
either herring or radish. For months
Grandmother’s dying has now dragged on,
more and more water rising into her body
while in the village shop a poster
outlaws the yellowing
terror of Colorado beetles.
At the forest’s edge often a blackamoor
peered out of an American tank
and in the dark we saw
St. Elizabeth, lifting her skirts,
cautiously stepping over
red-hot ploughshares.
At school the beadle counted
his keys, Palm Sunday catkins
behind the crucifix chanted
their credo, and in the pencil case
the catchword of our dusty
future could be made out.
So one of us turned
into an innkeeper, the second
into a cook, the third into a waiter and
the fourth into nothing at all.
And from the hills we can see
the wispy shadows drifting
in Jehoshaphat’s Valley.
The magnetic needle, trembling,
points to the north, and I sense
a galvanic taste on my tongue,
a chemical miracle plated inside
with the finest horn silver.
The dreaded blackening
on certain parts
of the body confirms
the whole thing
most satisfactorily.