Albrecht Dürer and me Read Free Page A

still
    he did survive, crept out of that stinking house
    an emaciated, gaunt adolescent, made
    his way back to Canada to live and eventually
    make me
    and I think now some spirit of Egon flew
    from Vienna, drawn to my weakened father
    who in his fatigue raised an arm above
    his burning forehead and deflected it, returning
    to himself as he was before he descended
    into days of half breathing, half living with death
    â€“ and yet part of the painter entered Father
    as an unseen arrow that pierced through
    matter and was itself released in his last
    offspring, so here I stand in this Viennese vault
    recognizing myself in these twisting limbs
    and later buying a black T-shirt with one of his
    signature figures of skewed appendages stencilled
    in shiny blue, I almost wish I hadn’t succumbed
    to such tourist delirium, but I needed an emblem
    to remember my long-gone juvenescent wild skin
    and jutting bones, my imprisoning self-pity
    to evoke him, to keep him close, talisman
    to protect me from my own age’s plagues
    coming from outside on the wind and those
    eventualities from within rising up in blood
    and phlegm, ushered along by semen and soul

I knock on Thomas Bernhard’s door . . .
    Thomas Bernhard (February 9, 1931, Herleen, Netherlands to February 12, 1989, Gmunden, Austria)
    once, twice, raise the iron ring
    and bring it down hard in case
    his ghost is sleeping, boom
    rolling over a table of books
    the farmhouse locked, unattended
    I can’t enter the place
    he called his writing prison
    only half affectionately – he hated
    his country if not this house
    its gangly flowers’ unfamiliar
    pungent scent around me
    as I peer in, leaning against
    stone and mortar wall, brown
    board, field of cut green hay
    nearby, the road-edge battle
    of weeds versus wheels
    that hollow knocking
    echoes some hollow in me
    and later I read: ‘I am one
    of those people who cannot bear
    to be anywhere and are happy only
    between places,’ and I think of those sought
    and left behind by brown boots
    the brochure depicts for walking
    (
gehen denken
: going thinking)
    across Alps I imagined
    but stalled now, stuck
    here only – and I leave then –
    on to Vienna, its blindness
    he railed against, its equestrian icons
    I slip past, determined to go
    light-footed among graves, cafés
    monuments, even to him
    Nestbeschmutzer
, my smile
    not quite that
    of an innocent
    book under my arm slipping
    narrow street rising up:
    horse droppings and
    iron rims on yesteryear carriages
    scraping on stone through an ageless crowd
    of foreign wanderers, most unaware
    Bernhard’s hammer hangs
    over the city, poised to fall
    with a hard clanging all must hear
    his joy deemed untranslatable
    though still sufficient, wondrously so
    for the seeker

sun-filled photo, Dubrovnik . . .
    where a woman laughs
    says she lost 50 kilos
    from the Serb shelling
    â€“ she refused to enter
    the fortress, willing instead
    to die in her bed
    and her husband recalls
    a grandmother cautioning
    about the placing of money
    the grandfather exclaiming
    â€˜Austria cannot lose!’
    â€“ sure as only the colonized
    are sure – and betting on an empire
    that ended, coin devalued
    (turtles in the garden also tell
    a story: when Pavo fails to feed them
    on time they begin to eat the small
    patch of grass they call home
    either voracious or desperate)
    nevertheless this terrace
is
peace:
    purple blooms, cactus transplant, high
    wall of stone and vine and sun-stunned
    mortar, rosemary greeting at my door
    to the street and its slant down
    past outdoor tables and tour buses –
    in Adriatic’s blue and breeze (both)
    where Odysseus speaks not of exile
    but of travel, his messengers
    minnows darting in clear sea
    old woman cleaning fish at the wall
    feet in lapping, evening water
    three cats await her gifts
    â€“ and wet, bronzed bodies step
    out of the cove into a night
    already cooling around me
    into a kind of home I