A spire reaches up
in any city I have loved
we could've had it
I am not your shadow
am I?
air of a fallen evening
I am
through with
metaphors
I bet you will see
thousands of those
pale Hungarian pigeons
jerking their little
heads around
and spit into the
black water
that's how I imagine
the Danube—black
although it's blue in all
the pictures—with your
funny hat
protruding
and my giddy silhouette
I could descend into
the fish market
where I fall on
ice habitually
and smell like raw
salmon
in my Hawaiian
-Sicilian robe
and air is salty
there were all kinds
of mutants there
with terrible eyes
I wished
I was Soutine
so I could paint them
and for you I mumbled
homages
in Amsterdam
esp. in the abandoned
warehouses
a couple vistas of
medieval Hoorn
would have become you
—Peter Pan
a couple stormy ports
maybe you'll go to
a museum and
get kicked out
I'm still thinking
about evil—when
going mad is
necessary
to become a genius—wish
I was in Goethe's
company
when he found color
in the Rhine
I catalogue a race of tragedians
—nothing else to do
and stare at your scroll
well-lit—uneven—
monumental—like
it should be behind gla**
in the 42nd St.
library (they last had
that show
about L U N C H)
I'd love a system
of can*ls today
—the only kind
worth having
—f** the rest
as we agree
too often
camera lucida
/ contrary to
appearances
New York is not the
center of the
universe
it orbits everywhere
and haunts
now in your absence
I go back
to being UNTIMELY alone—
a constellation
here the moon
is sharp and cutting
through the sky
I am delighting
in your Brubeck
and that sudden
shift
from melody
to rhythm
Hölderlin is always on about
gets clear—a sonorous
caesura—
as seen by an
abyssal eye
and we might share in it
as conversation thickens over
distance
being modern
is an old
delusion
only to be
kept alive
at night
I've taken to wearing your
clothes—now I
look exactly like
you
funny how time doesn't move
when you're gone
—on the longest day of my life
I have thought
about eternity
where it is off to
somebody else's future
and smoked too much
—I have taken
innumerable
circular walks
there the road dips
down
and you hear
savage
barking
—a dwarf appears
(as from the grave)
and mutters syllogisms
O how a dreamless sleep
would cure us all
I hope you find
your painter
blithely idling
along the banks
I am so restless
under Napoleon's gaze
today I saw that thrift-store
is gone now
filled with baroque
clocks
—from when time became
a mark of cla**
Venice one feels
is made of secrets
I only found the most
immediate ones
the winged lion I
descend from
and the chain between two towers
cross a tree
my village falling
off its cliff where
Cima's virgin
smiles nearlyenigmatically
It's time for another
circular walk
did they ever decide
—those scientists
—if time is
a line or a circle?
or is it always
up to the
philosophers?
turns out they stopped
caring in the 19th
century
which ended
with Nietzsche
still the physician must
have circular vision
like the cosmos
—only simultaneous
—never straight
and the dice game
of life
is a crooked one
played out in Venice
or Amsterdam our namesake
who taught us our corrupt
economies
of lies—all kinds of
prostitution
we smile
from our side
of the ocean
the world is round
can you believe it?
we can still behave
as if
it were a curveless
desert
from the sky it just
looks like
a ripening volcano
in a drawing by Paul Klee
I miss those Eastern
Europe domes
the buildings here
are all too flat
—wreak of the Dutch
a sudden sadness tinges
everything—already
green—
a little greener
I am thinking about
the confusion that is history
—you must love every city
says Benjamin from
his sunlit corner
on the rue Vivienne
the old Bibliothèque Nationale
across the street
from that
ornate arcade
that all the shops
have left by now
I drink cold coffee
and briefly curse
myself for leaving
Engels' Dialectics of Nature
in Paris and wish
(again) the 19th century
were not a part
of history (of course
it lives inside me
and I wonder who
Caspari really was
no one enters or leaves
the house
but me
and the streets fill
momentarily with ghosts
when you decide to
measure everything
no life is left
and time is only
rhythm
nothing
more