The Drugs, The Words
Said it,
and the toad leapt
Said it,
and the toad leapt
onto the table,
blew the match out
and the lightning
struck under the table,
lifted the glass,
and the drop
spilled into the sea,
meaning tears,
none of them dried,
which means a sea,
something quite other,
though there’s only one,
suffering not being
the worst thing
to popes, to ideas,
to states, but rather
a torture for the sane.
The sick know
that a color, a breath of air,
a hard step, indeed a
whimper of grass in the world
turns the heart inside
the body, causing them to hope
for peace the more they sense
war, as the war goes on.
They love
the white uniforms
of the nurses.
They hope that
from the white
something good will come.
They are not
white at all.
Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria. In 1949, she received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Vienna with her dissertation titled “The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger”; her thesis adviser was Victor Kraft. Bachmann’s work primarily focuses on themes like personal boundaries, establishment of the truth, and philosophy of language, the latter in the tradition of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her doctoral dissertation expresses her growing disillusionment with Heidegerrian Existentialism, which was in part resolved through her growing interest in Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus significantly influenced her relationship to language.
Peter Filkins is a poet and translator and a Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. He has published four volumes of original poems and has translated the poetry and prose of Ingeborg Bachmann, novels by H. G. Adler and Alois Hotschnig, and a critical work by Bernd Stiegler. He is currently at work on a biography of H. G. Adler and a new book of poems. His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including The New Republic, Poetry, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, Partisan Review, Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review.
