In sifting through my weekly backup log, I found some directories I haven’t plumbed in a while. I found a fragment of a poem, or perhaps a complete one, which I wrote sometime back while I was in Munich. I believe it was during that intense period of working all the time.
The street imagery is surely because I worked both as a tour guide on a bike and as a pizza delivery guy on a moped. I got to see a lot of the city.
There are times, walking through the streets of this city I’ll never know, that I notice the height of the doors. I can never decide whether they looked taller hundreds of years ago. It’s quite impossible to say.
They might look taller now because they are made of wood. Because of the goliath wrought-iron finishing which adorns them, knockers you’d need to use two hands on to clap just once.
The streets were cobblestone not long ago, but have in some spots been paved over with asphalt, making an ugly mess. The asphalt breaks away in huge patches, failing to justify its own existence.
The streets are the face of this city I’ll never know. A cobblestone face peers out at the feet and wheels all about it, coldly curious, worn but not broken.
The problem with making things that last is that civilized humans like to marvel at ruins.
If only we could see the ruins of the future.
If only we could bid the stone faces speak, and tell us what it feels like to be foundation.
I am neither wood nor stone.
I am the ruins of the future.
I’m fairly sure that when I wrote it I knew I was ripping off a Borknagar song. I can hope so, anyway.
All I know about prose poetry I learned from Solzhenitsyn, whose Wikipedia article informs me that he’s just passed away. How sad. I’d always assumed he was long dead. I would have written him, had I known he was still alive.
But they always say that.
I am the runes of the future.
I love your poetry dude, this whole poem totally ROCKS.
I want us to set it to music together…
By the way, though I only lived there for one year, I knew Frankfurt am Main. And I loved it. The city of Goethe, and Buber and the blind organist who memorized all of Bach’s works by touch and finger-memory, Walcha, that city will ever be part of my soul. Your poem plays with knowing/not knowing, which is related to time/eternity. You show you know the city in some ways many who live there all their lives would never know. And some would say München is far more beautiful than Frankfurt am Main. But I still love that fair city….
I think I was so obsessed with knowing it because one of my jobs was to know it. And working while zipping around through the city at night on a moped, with all the doors shut and all the people inside, warm gold light coming through the windows and cast across the slick bricks of the street, I felt like I might never be invited in. When I would come home from work, everyone in my building was generally asleep.
München absolutely has a place in my heart. But that doesn’t mean I know it. In fact, maybe that’s just why I love it so much.
I look at the double dichotomy you’ve brought up as a kind of Punnett square. Where present and knowing meet, there’s gladness. Where unknowing and eternity meet, there’s death.
That’s not to say, however, that there is no gladness in death. To quote Bly:
Yes. Hypothetically, anyway: yes.