Men of footnotes, not headlines. I find myself in the deep corridor
that would have been dark
if my right hand wasn’t shining like a torch.
The light falls on something written on the wall
and I see it
as the diver sees the name on the sunken hull shimmering toward him in the flowing depths:
ADAM ILEBORGH 1448. Who?
It was he who made the organ spread its clumpy wings and rise—
and it held itself airborne nearly a minute.
An experiment blessed with success!
Written on the wall: MAYONE, DAUTHENDEY, KAMINSKY. . . The light touches name upon name.
The walls are quite scrawled over.
They’re the names of the all-but-extinct artists
the men of footnotes, the unplayed, the half-forgotten, the immortal unknown.
For a moment it feels as if they’re all whispering their names at once—
whispering added to whispering till a tumbling breaker cascades along the corridor
without throwing anyone down.
Though the corridor is no longer a corridor.
Neither a graveyard nor a marketplace but something of both.
A kind of greenhouse, too.
Plenty of oxygen.
Dead men of the footnotes can breathe deeply, they remain in the ecological system.
But there is much they are spared.
They are spared swallowing the morality of power,
they are spared the black-and-white checkered game where the smell of corpses is the only thing that never dies.
They are rehabilitated.
And those who can no longer receive
have not stopped giving.
They rolled out a little of the radiant and melancholy tapestry
and let go again.
Some are anonymous, they are my friends
without my knowing them, they are like those stone people
carved on grave slabs in old churches.
Soft or harsh reliefs in walls we brush against, figures and names
sunk in the stone floors, on the way to extinction.
But those who really want to be struck from the list . . .
They don’t stop in the region of footnotes,
they step into the downward career that ends in oblivion and peace.
Total oblivion. It’s a kind of exam
taken in silence: to step over the border without anyone noticing. . . .