Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?
—Lord Byron
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
—Orson Welles
Mrs. Papendiek’s Diary (5)
Dimity, elderberry, shawl and muff,
husband, children, grandchildren—
undinting service, no questions asked.
Remember the time the coach let you out
at the wrong station and you fell
crossing the meadow—how
the mud stain on your puce silk riled you less
than the put-out glare in the eyes of your host?
Ah, Charlotte. Did any stranger
other than the Queen you served
ever call you by name? Would you
have so desired it? Some say your diaries—
recollected forty years after the fact
at the urging of your children,
who thought it a proper “amusement”
for passing time during an illness—
provide anecdotal insights into life
at the Hanoverian court. Anecdotal,
as in having no bearing on world events.
Inconsequential theater, minutia,
silly stuff all in a day’s work—but
your day, your life.
The African Prince
I fashioned a person to inhabit.
He was high maintenance
but so was I; we set each other ticking.
It was beautiful to watch as long
as you stayed out of the way.
I dropped in on the wife,
whored around the Continent for a while,
caught a cold hiding on a lady’s balcony
and went straight to the mineral baths of Karlovy Vary,
where I taught English to schoolboys
and wooed their mother in French. I hitched
a carriage-ride to the banks of the Kneiper,
where it was rumored Catherine the Great
was trolling for eels . . . ach, who cares
where I’ve been, where I came from,
where I went? All that matters in life
is joy—and joy (like me) is a traveling man.
I died on the way to Prague.
Ludwig van B.
I wanted fame. I wanted love.
I deserved bliss but bliss
scares easily.
I fled Bonn’s dreary terrain
for Vienna’s grave lilt:
There I learned to cherish
even the gaps, the static.
Fame became moot.
Love, a strategy.
Beauty was what I couldn’t seem
to hang on to. Beauty would
discharge her blandishments,
then retreat to observe the effect.
Now I know none of this is real,
none of this exists.
That next moment,
shimmering before you? Wink—
and it will either astonish you
or be gone.
And so it occurred in the year 1809
that gravedigger Jakob Demuth, paid handsomely,
handed over the prize to perpetrators
Michael Jungmann, Johann Nepomuk Peter,
and Joseph Carl Rosenbaum; that Rosenbaum,
former footman to the Prince and amateur phrenologist,
squirreled this, his most treasured possession, away
for years, even in face of the discovery,
the abduction and subsequent investigation
by the Prince’s guards, stuffing the mattress
just in time to declare his innocence
while his wife tossed in feigned fever on a lumpy bed;
and that the rogue Rosenbaum remained in possession
until his death; whereupon,
acting in accord to his testament
his widow (the erstwhile princess on the pea)
passed on this strange glory to Johann Nepomuk Peter,
who on his deathbed bequeathed it to
his clueless physician, Karl Haller,
who trusted Doctor Carl von Rokitansky,
curator of the Imperial Pathological Museum,
to know what to do. He did. He kept it.
Held on until 1895, when he himself
was dispatched to dust and the composer’s skull given
to the Viennese Society of Music Lovers,
devoted to keeping the music which had issued
from that head alive, and in whose museum
it reposed for sixty more years
before the reunion of body and soul found consecration
in Prince Esterházy’s Haydn Mausoleum
at the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt, in 1954.
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower
Will the real name please stand up?
Not the geographical marker (look for
a bridge, a tower; that is the place)
or the stamp of shame that is Bridgetown,
complete with slave compounds and a dramatic escape.
George! To please the King, every second son
was stuck with George somewhere in their monikers,
while Augustus lent a hint of classical bragging rights.
What’s in a name is what you put in it;
the concealment’s all in a day’s work.
Here, only the middle name, odd
as it is, seems real. Clumsy Polgreen,
sticking out, refusing to move.
Poland Forever? A large conifer?
A staff to lean on, the flowering rod of Moses?
We’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know
if the day that doesn’t exist
was the day he was born,
or the day he died,
or both.
A stick.
A string.
A bow.
The twang
as the arrow
leaves it.
The twang
praising
the imprint
it makes
on the air,
caressing
the breach
no one sees
shivering
struck
Will I cry for you, Polgreen? Will I drag out your end
though it is long past, though I drove slowly past
the place of your dying days and recorded
what I knew I’d find there—
families in townhouses, a sensible Vauxhall
parked askew in the carport behind the green grate?
Will I tell you, whispering to no one in particular
how even the street sign seemed greasy,
and that it was raining, natch, and whenever
I tried to focus on the thought of you
laid out in one of those miserable Victory cottages
(no turrets! no gilded palms! no jiggling regents!)
I had to do something, crack a joke or snap
another useless photo of the Bellenden Primary School,
but when we turned left to round the block
for the fifth time, it was the perfectly dismal
sight of a fast-food joint on the corner,
Sam’s Kebabs, which cheered me. Would you understand?
The red and yellow neon script, shouting
like a Janissary band, so tacky it was buoyant,
colorful because there was no good reason
to be afraid of shouting with the whole world
determined not to hear you,
though they tried to shut you up all the time.
Do I care enough, George Augustus Bridgetower,
to miss you? I don’t even know if I really like you.
I don’t know if your playing was truly gorgeous
or if it was just you, the sheer miracle of all
that darkness swaying close enough to touch,
palm tree and Sambo and glistening tiger
running circles into golden oil. Ah,
Master B, little great man, tell me:
How does a shadow shine?