Jack's journey


He lived at a time of great
misery, of dirt
A time of darkness
and diffuse enlightenment, and that
God he praises
is not at all for you

And yet it is your God
he sings
when he succeeds to stretch
beyond the boundaries we
mark out in nature, in a history
transcending barren
survival
It was his music that succeeded: all
the forms
that came to him, all
his light

But this Enlightenment that also we
inherited
was shaky, new
and almost blind,
diffuse patches
of Prelude and Fugue
in F minor
Uprotected
building inwardly, so frail
and incomprehensible as a five years plan
As unshakeable

And you go back. Honorary citizen
in that city where you
once were born, welcomed
by the people who extinguished
your family
"So what then is a people", you ask,
as citizen of the Nation
of The Thoughtful,
but a thought is also oblivion
An abstraction is
a home, protection
against History's
dark machinery

You come from two peoples, and the one
wanted
to extinguish the other. You travel
in the
splinters of that history
Of the people of the word, of discussion
and of suffrance, the people
of your heart
Yet your other, murderous
crazy people, the people of music
and destruction
fostered him
The cantatas
that fundamentally touch
you

because mind is drama, and biology
is not. Not shaky, knowing
Mind is part of dream, and only
mind knows
that the wind brings rain and that music
carries the innermost knowledge
of one self

Underneath it all
the dark red shivering A minor, almost
unnoticeable
a motion of the same kind
as when waves sometimes lift
an entire lake
towards land

There is the tone, the leaping world
like when you lie down to fall asleep, before
you fall asleep
The tone so deep. Like the darkness
right before Yule
                                   To Jack Steinberger





Rain


It is white
outside
So white

and you are gone
It rains
The sky is sinking, no
more shadows
O, this spring
without a shadow
only rain
green rain

So white it is
so dense
To share green shadows

           *

You sat with me for a while, I
thought
you would come all the way
You said that only meetings exist
only now
But it is not true, there is so
much more that exists
Maybe it is only now
that you leave

with this shadow
like an old memory
of a sunny day, the young
woman's laughter
so expectant
She came from the north
with the breath, this darkness
from another place
The happiness
in your childhood

           *

Once you stood
in the brown house
In the middle of the room
you stood, receiving the day,
receiving doubt and distance
brown quakes
along the walls
Once you stood
in the brown house
and it rained outside, like
today

I see you now
we walked together once
along the water, like a
mirror
And we talked, you said
that you had
time
You said that you wanted
to be reborn, and shaved your head
and got born
again
You said you longed for beauty, for
the shoe sole that taps against
the ground
in the steep slope
I saw you once
And you came running out
of the forest

           *

The apple tree is in blossom
and sows pink leaves
in the humid wind,

maybe you can measure green-ness. Your
eyes are much too small, and together
we mourn the young boy
That night
he was deserted
like of iron

Someone is bleeding
Someone is dreaming
Someone is dreaming all this night, bleeding
and mourning
all the night

But I have no more pictures
to give you
I have only pictures
to give you