Sylvia Mae Gorelick - Imagined Travelogue (for Tamas) lyrics

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