charles VI, called the insane, puts himself to bed | next door the barbarians | north

charles VI, called the insane, puts himself to bed

“…that they are all glass, and therefore will not suffer no man to come near them…”
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

once, in the garden,

a goldfinch flew against me,

fell dead to the ground. no one saw

how with my foot i pushed

the little pulp into the rhododendron.

i however knew.

no ballgames or dogs

come near me. instead blankets, many,

and iron rings, sewn

into my clothing. never temper tantrums.

i clink only a little. and i wished,

before long journeys in the carriage,

to be allowed to sink myself into one of those chests

full of butter, to arrive safe and sound

with the tableware, the porcelain.

fragile, they say, too volatile

and easy to see through, but how could it be otherwise?

thoughts sift through me like an hourglass.

in the mornings i am turned the other way

and everything starts anew.

on the day which will come

when i fall from the highest gable of the hôtel saint-pol

down to my people—shattering

for every bare heel of france, a trace

of blood and sorrow

tossed to the hindmost quarters of my country…

one breath, isabelle,

from your lips. already i fog over.

next door the barbarians

in the beginning a battered camping van,

no more, that gleamed at night through the boondocks

like radium. the hangdog faces,

figures always flanked by fat-

tened terriers with old-men-looks.

we grew sage, pruned our roses.

then tents, huts, the thunderstorm-rumble

of corrugated tin roofs: both yews

cut down, and also the proud walnut,

on some evenings a tormented grumble,

a yelping, yelling, and the smoke of tires

that steeply rose into their sky. but

scarcely had it become routine

to gather up their half-knuckles and gnawed

spareribs from the lawn, from the rhubarb,

when the sacrifice of decorated oxen began.

and more and more often they stood in small

cliques and gazed into our yard.

early in the morning what sounds like macaques

or gutteral

chants; then yet again the coma-

tose silence, portentous. we think:

may the fences hold and the old wall

not crumble. and forgive us when you come.

north

for Asbjørn Stenmark

to wait for the mail ship at a fjord

that reaches down into the land, down into valhalla,

beneath the mountains, where the reindeer stood

and froze four shot glasses in snow; where all

the world is only time, and the day the stolid

tallow candle in some cave, some giant hole

or a day never ends. because the boat

lets everything awaken as soon as the jetty

is kissed by it. not just the salted cod

of the newspaper, but also like a great city

that overthrows the red hut, it seems to tote

the gin and colored lamps, the jazz melody.

to wait for the mail ship, as early as the milk-

y haze when it loosens its ropes, to put out to sea.

and once more nothing but these icicles’

organ-pipes, the crackling algae under the shoe,

the darkness. so quiet—you can hear the elks

lick the salt from off the frozen stairway.

Image by Thomas Colligan.