With NR, committed to campus Benjamin Franklin, Charité Hospital, Berlin Steglitz.
Beauty first of all. Then every angel. But other things are also terrifying. |
Mind comes to mind. What yours is saying is that your heart has stopped beating. |
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Nor does it occur to you to wonder how this thought is even possible— |
terror has already rung the ambulance. The ambulance that knows your address. |
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The ears of angels? |
musics: a hurricane blows around one’s sinuses, another is shrieking its inane |
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| hosannas across the stratospheric ether, while a third hears only abstract ideas. |
Our cries must fall instead on human ears, as Rilke’s did, preserved, if at all, |
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| for such posterity as our medical records command. Is this any consolation? Hardly. |
But then our demand was hardly moderate. Our terror is a signal that we are not yet |
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| prepared to concede to time, although we still don’t know what to do with ourselves |
until we must. Time. It has to be passed. Somewhere . . . I’m at the public library, |
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| you’re at the clinic, and between these elective prison cells invisible messages |
are now travelling screen to screen. You castle, Queen’s side. I do so as well, |
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| foreseeing the move to follow. But this, I know, isn’t possible in life, only in small |
models of life, made by mind itself to flee its other fictions— terror, angels, time. |