Albrecht Dürer and me (3 page)

winding stone stairs, Florence Cathedral

I start on the 463 steps up

to reach the church dome

in the tight space of this vertical

tunnel and, in weak light, bent back

against the wall in a breadth intended

for one monk only

I pause with strangers

as other strangers pass earthward

their traffic so close our clothes reach out

as if to touch, even if

sweaty, and here I remember

while buying the ticket far below

that sign: ‘This height not for those

with heart disease'

on the walls, a recurring notice:

‘Do not write on the walls'

covered with names, not a desecration

more an understanding that

Guido and Alessandro are joining

the celebration this building is making

their rough signatures just two

of the many I pass

an international explosion of names

one pink man bending

and gasping, and we push past him

up onto the outer ledge

fresh air at an eerie height

I dare not look at those ants

on the streets, plus I feel again

that urge only satisfied by falling

so I follow the steps back in

past the stone curve untouched

for centuries, its power intact

on gangplanks, we enter the dome

greeted by giant frescoes of hell

devils' red mouths roughly painted

but so high above the worshippers' floor

they cohere, reminders that thousands

for hundreds of years

feared, turning quickly to find

faces, robes, clouds

of their sunlit saints

tour guide . . .

holds high a wand or staff

tufted with yellow ribbon

so followers can spy her flag

each group an ectoplasm

that forms and bubbles around

nuclear leader who directs all

to see what cannot be seen:

underlay of history burnt off

by sun and sea breeze, her

rapid-fire iteration of details

they can't find on their own

eyes blurred by overload

I watch always for the one

who strays away, pulled toward

sea or street ephemera as if

he can only connect

when silence surrounds him

not mob hubbub pierced by

shrill voice in charge

I want to walk beside this

wanderer, tell him to plunge

down narrow streets, go blank

in plazas, feel panic rising

to be so alone, without

a language and without a sign

except for dog-peed corners

church bells, gathering

crones and a few old men

familiars he grows fond of

when he sits on a quiet bench

as one who wears the momentary

mantle of local garb, his hands

though, still holding pamphlets

and does he remember then

the guide's arm, how it must ache

in the evening, and how her voice

croaks when she speaks to

her lover of her clever phrases

intended to inspire but flattened

made dull by day-after-day delivery

that erodes pride of place and

hollows out where breath comes from?

Albrecht Dürer and me

at the Albertina Museum

his entire life he thought

of death approaching

it was the century syphilis arrived

1500 meant the end of time

one self-portrait an imitation

of Christ

for me, it's his rabbit

each ear bent differently, every

whisker visible

its mood pensive

another sort of portrait

and his monogram –

ad
, 1502 (same year

his medieval father died) –

floats beneath the brown foot

as I float

back to rodents I snared

in a winter garden

frozen next day

and still the fur soft

(or back to fuzzy lucky

charms on key rings

among coins in pockets

of the slightly odd)

from him almost all

German art springs, begins

from me up pops this poem

when here I stand

(wanting to touch the painting

and feel the fur again)

one of many awed viewers

this young hare has seen

in five centuries

even as he draws into

the calm before trembling

to ponder his animal thought

and from my departing train

I see him once more

a tall buck alert in rows

of early corn, escaped, free of

any frame – though red dots

of waving wild poppies

defining the farmer's field

draw my eye to his readiness

for leaping

Self-Portrait Nude

I stand in front of a tortured portrait

completed in 1910 by Egon Schiele:

skin reddish and raw, a scraped skeletal self

tilting, electrified by jagged outline of light

eyes closed, hair livid red blue

elsewhere in this museum

hang works of his other distortions

in legs and torso, some kink of the inner

made visible, along with the more famous

Gustav Klimts though they

failed to hold me as did these hysterical shapes

which perhaps foreshadow the artist's death by

Spanish flu, 1918, thousands dying contorted

and now I recall my father also suffered that

influenza in Detroit where he went to work

in car factories, he and his brother for days

sick in their room, young men – and

did he know they might be dying, waiting

and praying, no doubt they were praying, and

though he believed in the strength of that power

he could not deny the virus, illness eating

in him so he coughed himself up – and 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

– 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

– 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

‘Austria cannot lose!'

– 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

– and wet, bronzed bodies step

out of the cove into a night

already cooling around me

into a kind of home I might

remember if I stay one day more

above the Danube

we climb in heat and humidity above the Danube

and a once-upon-a-time town's constricted streets

the way up paved with slanted stone soon

a path, elevation gain severe but

breezes increase, and below becomes

picturesque as we crawl upward to ruins:

this castle held Richard the Lionheart hostage

on his homeward-bound Third Crusade

when these cream-coloured stones shone new

and the tiny space for prisoners –

iron bars across an opening in rock, a cavity

reflecting, we hope, short height then of men –

gives a chill amid August's fiercest sun

we linger on what we perceive as parapets

where others loll as well, some eager

to commune with ghosts

and at this moment we look west and discover

on a distant headland what looks like another

schloss
, though not a ruin, which even at this remove

glows, its walls firm, cupolas secure, and called

we learn, the monastery of Göttweig

where Benedictines maintain themselves and

keep the sun shining as well as it does

such thoughts occur in a foreign land

where all is brightly new – and why travel if not

to grow into the unknown where we'll hit upon

what transforms us, as bread is changed

when eaten if prayers are offered beforehand

as age is held back from the listener by a story

on the way down I pick up a whitened piece

of wood or bone, hard to tell which, but certainly

weightless, and I do not believe such a thing's

a relic or a mystery or even a worthy souvenir

but for a moment I hold it, rub it close to me

thinking to link back through eras to marauders

who appeared on the river, and to villagers

who prepared wine and meat for their feast

and prayed among families after they left

that the devils would not return again before winter

in Hallstatt

red hair of the guide leads us down

into earth mined for twenty-seven centuries

though only we and our recent progenitors

are tourists, all earlier visitants came

for salt, their individual stories lost or

merged with legends from the Celt

cemetery exhumed nearby in this valley

shadowed by peaks beyond peaks and

steep walls where nothing clings but myth

had I once been one of those who wore

gold bracelets on his biceps, and if one

such prince should touch me now, will I

know, the shiver of eternal recognition

shocking me backwards out of these

protective overalls all visitors must wear

a gaggle of us turning into a platoon

in red outfits, same for me as for

the Japanese and South Africans

will I walk into these depths older than

possible to grasp, even with the dark

illuminated by the guide's torch and words

and not return to reasoning as a city-

walking, siren-cringing, magic-missing

modern but find beneath these mass clothes

bronze body armour, and in my hand the

amber-embellished hilt of an iron sword

that led me over more than mountains

later we eat fish from the crystal lake

and under the calm of local wine speak of

the last war here, of a mother who carried

to her grave hope her missing son might

yet return, and then I sleep, my femurs not

unlike those in the close-by charnel house

until its flanking church's pre-dawn bells

announce I must begin again the work

of unearthing who I might yet become