THE GALLERY
I spent the night at a motel by E3.
In my room there was a smell I’d sensed before
among the Asiatic collections in a museum:
masks Tibetan Japanese against a bright wall.
But it isn’t masks now, it’s faces
pushing through oblivion’s white walls
to breathe, to ask for something.
I lie awake and watch as they struggle
and disappear and come back.
Some borrow features from each other, exchanging faces
deep inside of me
where oblivion and memory manage their trade-offs.
They push through oblivion’s second-coat
the white wall
they disappear and come back.
Here is a sorrow that doesn’t call itself one.
Welcome to the authentic galleries!
Welcome to the authentic galleys!
The authentic grates!
The karate kid who paralyzed a man
still dreams about quick profits.
This woman buys and buys things
to toss into the jaws of the emptiness
that slinks behind her.
Mr. X doesn’t dare leave his apartment.
A dark fence of ambiguous people
stands between him
and the steadily receding horizon.
She who once fled from Karelia
she who knew how to laugh . . .
now she appears
but mute, petrified, a statue from Sumer.
Like when I was ten years old and came home late.
In the stairwell the lamps had gone out
but the elevator I stood in was lit, and it climbed
like a diving bell through black depths
floor by floor while imaginary faces
pressed against the grates . . .
It isn’t imaginary faces now, but real ones.
I lie stretched out like a cross-street.
Many emerge from the white haze.
We touched each other once, really!
A long bright corridor that smells of phenol.
The wheelchair. The teenage girl
who learns to speak after the car crash.
He who tried to cry out under water
and the world’s cold mass rushed in
through his nose and mouth.
Voices in the microphone said: Speed is power
speed is power!
Play the game, the show must go on!
We move through our career stiffly, step by step
like in a Noh play
with masks, shrieking song: Me, it’s Me!
Whoever’s defeated
is represented by a rolled-up blanket.
An artist said: I used to be a planet
with my own dense atmosphere.
Incoming rays were refracted into rainbows.
Continuous thunderstorms raged within, within.
Now I’m burnt-out and dry and open.
I no longer have childlike energy.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
No rainbows.
I spent the night in the thin-skinned house.
Many want to come in there through the walls
but most don’t make it all the way:
they’re overcome by the white noise of oblivion.
Anonymous singing drowns in the walls.
Discreet knocking that doesn’t want to be heard
drawn-out sighs
my old replies crawling along homelessly.
Listen to society’s mechanical self-reproach
the voice of the large fan
like the artificial wind in mineshafts
six hundred meters down.
Our eyes stay wide-open under the bandages.
If I could at least get them to feel
that this trembling beneath us
means we’re on a bridge . . .
Often I must stand perfectly still.
I’m the knife-thrower’s partner at a circus!
Questions I’ve hurled from myself in a fury
come howling back
not hitting me but nailed to my contour
in a rough outline
that’s still there after I’ve left the scene.
Often I must keep quiet. Willingly!
Because “the last word” is said again and again.
Because good-day and good-bye . . .
Because that day is today . . .
Because in the end, the margins will rise
over their banks
and flood the text.
I spent the night at the sleepwalkers’ motel.
Many faces in here are desperate
others made smooth
by their pilgrimages through oblivion.
They breathe disappear fight their way back
they look past me
they all want to reach the icon of justice.
It happens though rarely
that one of us really sees the other:
a moment when a person shows himself
like in a photograph but more clearly
and in the background
something that’s larger than his shadow.
He stands full-length before a mountain.
It’s more a snail shell than a mountain.
It’s more a house than a snail shell.
It isn’t a house but has many rooms.
It’s indistinct but overwhelming.
He grows out from it, and it from him.
It’s his life, it’s his labyrinth.