There’s a spic-and-span café/venue
of stainless steel and polymers
where homesick Americans can go,
watch a little MTV, hear a Coke fizz:
an antiseptic respite from history
in the hard orange chairs
George Jetson favored.
The crooked sidestreets of the Jewish
ghetto put me in mind of doctor
and nurse appurtenances, deathbeds, Kafka
skeletal, coughing. A man wakes up
as a bug, worried about being late
for work. Kafka thought such stuff
was funny; today most people
don’t. I’m in the minority.
I’m with Kafka, but it is horrible to hear
the small fry burrow, undermining your
home; to build the Great Wall generation
after generation; to assemble toggle switches
for Honeywell (something to do with rock-boring
bombs for Afghanistan, maybe, this piecework
farmed out by the military-industrial complex).
Simple: lots of dog doodles on the sidewalks
(no scoop laws in Prague), and the whipped lard
confections the bakeries offer look much
the same. People eat them anyway.
Hardcranny Castle: a statue in dramatic
silhouette, a giant about to bring the cudgel down,
braining an innocent. Cruel? No. It’s sweet,
it’s Keatsian when history stops forever.