Leipzig

I visited Leipzig for the first time earlier this month. My daughter and I stayed at a latchkey hotel just outside downtown, across from an abandoned building. It’s a clean, small city, sometimes called “Hypezig” because it’s supposedly the new Berlin, full of hipsters and used record shops. I bought a few used CDs myself, and so did Luisa. In an antique shop I also bought a handful of old photos for about 1.90 euros a pop. I love the texture and coloring of them. On the back of the one on the left it says "Oma Martha mit Martin." The one on the right doesn't say anything, but I love the look of the pensive young man, his military suit, and his yellowing frame.

The highlight was seeing the Thomaskirche, where Bach’s remains are buried. Bach’s music is gorgeous purity and longing, and I am a huge fan. I found out the boys’ choir would be singing a Bach cantata at 3 pm on Saturday, and I left Luisa to her wanderings to attend. I got there around 2.30 and found two long lines. Tickets were 2 euros. The place was packed and the best bet was the nave, where the acoustics weren't great, but there were plenty of seats. I sat beside a nice gentleman right next to Bach’s grave. The man told me how the remains found their way there after WWII and how we owe it to a mason and a knowledgable civil servant from the Russian culture ministry that Bach's bones were salvaged at all.

It's a simple grave - you can touch it, or lay flowers there if you want. All you have to do is arrive. 

My martini shook in my hand

Fed up with sleeping teenagers, I visited the cemetery Sunday with my cemetery kit: three books, two pens and paper. I read some of all the books - The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, a book of Benjamin Peret poems, and Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte.

The Peret poems wearied me with their crazy energy. Billy the Kid, which I’ve read many times, was good, but chilled me - also because the day was cold - and made me tired. I closed my eyes, I felt cold. I’d chosen a bench in the sun but there was no sun. My eyelids drooped; more than anything I longed to lie down, but it seemed disgraceful. Still, I had nothing anyone could steal while I slept, and it was unlikely anyone would accost me, there were so few people there. As an experiment, I put my legs up on the bench. I couldn’t go through with it. 

The last thing I wanted to do was go home and start innerly burning about my lazy do-nothing-all-day teenagers. So I moved on to Kaputt, with its slightly sleazy, sympathetic narrator:

“I had just returned to Italy a few days before after having lain in a Helsinki hospital where I had undergone a serious operation that had exhausted my strength. I still walked with a cane and was pale and emaciated. (...) My martini shook in my hand I was still so weak.”

Sunday arrives

I slept like shit, but so it goes. At least it is Sunday, and my blackberry is kaputt. I am the featured poet in the new issue of Avatar Review, meaning I’ve got a boatload of poems over there, and even videos. I wish I could make a video I didn’t have to be in, but I am not that learned yet. 

A couple days ago I had another poem, a fragment, up at Utter, a new online magazine. It looks good, so give them a try if you’ve got wares to peddle. My fragment is named ‘Grace,’ appropriate for Sunday.  

Also inside me it is Sunday, the last day of the week or the first, depending on whose calendar you look at. Vague and blurred blue. I went back to the cemetery to read but first spent 15 minutes peeling moss off someone’s grave: Gustav Horwarth, 1905-1986. Didn’t fall in either war. Nice little plot he had, and his rent paid.

We 2 kings

May & June are peppered with Catholic holidays, and today was one. Bang Thursday and no work. I decided to take a walk and couldn’t think of a good park so I went down the road to the cemetery. It’s the best possible park, huge and fabulous with trees. Sometimes a person goes by; most of the time not. I chose a bench among the many insects and birdsong and sat reading for over an hour: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which says in section 404 -

To wrap the world around our fingers, like a thread or ribbon which a woman twiddles while daydreaming at the window...
Everything comes down to our trying to feel tedium in such a way that it doesn’t hurt.
It would be interesting to be two kings at the same time: not the one soul of them both, but two distinct, kingly beings. 

To be honest, though, I was on a relatively open path, and worse, I was looking at the back of headstones, and I hate that. It’s like sitting in a restaurant with your back toward the door. If you’ve ever seen a mafia movie you know that is a mistake. So I set out for a more sheltered bench and switched to Little Dorrit, in which Mr Clennam asks, 

“The name of Mr Tite Barnacle has been mentioned to me as representing some highly influential interest among (Dorrit’s) creditors. Am I correctly informed?”
It being one of the principles of the Circumlocution Office never, on any account whatever, to give a straightforward answer, Mr Barnacle said, “Possibly.” 

This was the funniest passage so far, not least because of that name. And so, though I am not truly able to be two kings at once, reading two good books on one afternoon in pleasant weather did give me the feeling I could be two distinct, kingly beings, both, at the same time.

there's so much sunday

I've got three poems in the new issue of Avatar Review:

On Waking I Think Of Winter
Aunt Bobbie's Almanac
There's So Much Sunday

Avatar, which existed well before the popular film that I've never seen, is an annual, an unusual thing for an online zine. But it is very FULL, so that you could break it up and spend the whole year reading it.

Which I suggest.

I also got word yesterday that Opium online took my poem In Frankfurt Cemetery, one of my favorites. Because I love the Frankfurt Cemetery. It also did a cameo in my poem Despair, sort of, being the eternal resting place of Mr. Schopenhauer.