In whatever evening the naïve tourist happens
to be, escaping from our economic horrors,
a master’s hand awakes the spinet of the meadows.
They’re playing cards in the depths of the pond; posed
in the mirror are cuties and queens; there are female
saints, veils, threads of harmony, legendary scales
of colour iridescent in the setting sun.
He shudders as hunt and horde rush by. A gun
sounds. Hullaballoo. Drama drips on the stage of grass.
Watch the ceiling people bang their heads against the glass!
To his captive vision, Germany scaffolds upwards
to the moon; Tatar deserts catch fire; blizzard
revolutions sweep Celestial China; detailed
by stairs and armchairs cut into the rock, a little world, pale
and flat — Africa the Occident — will come to pass.
Afterwards, the ballet of familiar seas and nights, worthless
chemistry and empty arias. The same small-town
bourgeois magic wherever the mail boat sets you down.
Even the most elementary physicist feels
it’s impossible to endure this egotistical zeal,
the mist of physical regret, which even to observe
is more than any sane tellurian deserves.
No! The moment of the boiler room, of rising seas,
of subterranean stirrings, of the planet seized
by conflagration, and the consequent exterminations,
certainties so blithely skimmed by Biblical interpretation,
by the Norms … we need serious people to see through it.
Though that’s hardly the stuff of legend, I admit.