Map Read Free Page A

now, shiny and new.
Blissfully barefoot on Europe’s beaches,
she unbraids her bright hair, right down to her knees.
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My advice: don’t cut it (her hairdresser says);
once you have, it’ll never grow back so thick.
Trust me.
It’s been proved
tausend- und tausendmal.

Vietnam
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“Woman, what’s your name?” “I don’t know.”
“How old are you? Where are you from?” “I don’t know.”
“Why did you dig that burrow?” “I don’t know.”
“How long have you been hiding?” “I don’t know.”
“Why did you bite my finger?” “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you know that we won’t hurt you?” “I don’t know.”
“Whose side are you on?” “I don’t know.”
“This is war, you’ve got to choose.” “I don’t know.”
“Does your village still exist?” “I don’t know.”
“Are those your children?” “Yes.”

Written in a Hotel
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Kyoto is fortunate,
fortunate and full of palaces,
winged roofs,
stairs like musical scales.
Aged but flirtatious,
stony but alive,
wooden,
but growing from sky to earth,
Kyoto is a city
whose beauty moves you to tears.
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I mean the real tears
of a certain gentleman,
a connoisseur, lover of antiquities,
who at a key moment,
from behind a green table,
exclaimed that after all
there are so many inferior cities
and burst out sobbing
in his seat.
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That’s how Kyoto, far lovelier
than Hiroshima, was saved.
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But this is ancient history.
I can’t dwell on it forever
or keep asking endlessly,
what’s next, what’s next.
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Day to day I trust in permanence,
in history’s prospects.
I can’t gnaw apples
in a constant state of terror.
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Now and then I hear about some Prometheus
wearing his fire helmet,
enjoying his grandkids.
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While writing these lines
I wonder
what in them will come to sound
ridiculous and when.
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Fear strikes me
only at times.
On the road.
In a strange city.
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With garden-variety brick walls,
a tower, old and ordinary,
stucco peeling under slapdash moldings,
cracker-box housing projects,
nothing,
a helpless little tree.
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What would he do here,
that tenderhearted gentleman,
the connoisseur, lover of antiquities.
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Plaster god, have mercy on him.
Heave a sigh, oh classic,
from the depths of your mass-produced bust.
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Only now and then,
in a city, one of many.
In a hotel room
overlooking the gutter
with a cat howling like a baby
under the stars.
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In a city with lots of people,
many more than you’ll find painted
on jugs, cups, saucers, and silk screens.
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In a city about which I know
this one thing:
it’s not Kyoto,
not Kyoto for sure.

A Film from the Sixties
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This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.
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He first took the shape of a small boy.
The boy would lean his head on his aunt’s knees.
Where is that boy. Where are those knees.
The little boy got big. Those were the days.
These mirrors are cruel and smooth as asphalt.
Yesterday he ran over a cat. Yes, not a bad idea.
The cat was saved from this age’s hell.
A girl in a car checked him out.
No, her knees weren’t what he’s looking for.
Anyway he just wants to lie in the sand and breathe.
He has nothing in common with the world.
He feels like a handle broken off a jug,
but the jug doesn’t know it’s broken and keeps going to the well.
It’s amazing. Someone’s still willing to work.
The house gets built. The doorknob has been carved.
The tree is grafted. The circus will go on.
The whole won’t go to pieces, although it’s made of them.
Thick and heavy as glue
sunt lacrimae rerum.
But all that’s only background, incidental.
Within him,