Albrecht Dürer and me. David Zieroth

be imagined today as our train passes

      through Linz, bearing me, grateful for

      considerate and sleeping companions, easy

      to say now we’re going somewhere safe

      travelling without earplugs

      spotted cows on pasture slopes

      moo where upper alpine snow

      leaks into June-fed creeks constrained

      in narrow rock walls, each unmoved

      by burgeoning white

      when evening arrives, all noises

      cease here in my pension

      except for one: someone’s

      far-off singing, perceptible

      only when other sounds

      subside, its pitch insisting

      my tired mind identify

      and end its e-e-e at once

      and failing to do so

      I resort to pillow-wrapping

      my head, to await any dream

      wherein I escape that timbre

      not unlike the one (I begin to think)

      we hear just before dying: such

      thoughts entangle the traveller

      unwisely travelling earplug-less

      and who is vexed to discover

      next morning the mosquito buzz

      arises from the radio at his bedside

      an opera-broadcasting station

      not turned completely off

      as if the previous person here

      had been malignly planning ahead

      to effect another’s discomfort

      and thus he suffers because he assumes

      he can never correct creation

      believing glumly the arrow

      of the irreparable always aims for him

      yet in the cool of the next dawn

      he’s enchanted to encounter birds

      new to him singing in Italian

      on the occasion of visiting Auden’s grave

      somehow I don’t expect sighing evergreens

      or cruel April’s birds tuning up their notes

      or the autobahn’s whine beyond the church’s

      sweet-cream-pastry-coloured plaster walls

      though I recognize the iron cross and plaque

      labelling the deceased as poet and man of letters

      and somehow the ivy’s dense entanglement

      surprises me as do wilting winter pansies

      on top of the small rectangle of the plot itself

      (how can it hold such long, grand bones?)

      and a two-pence copper coin lying atop moss

      that says he is loved by someone from home

      and those admirers from other lands (like me)

      know better than to swipe this little token

      even as I feel its melancholic foreignness

      enter my thumb and vibrate with an eagerness

      to claim the wrinkled poet as my own

      yes, I know how men slide daily under earth

      and what remains of them upside stays briefly

      before it too leaves like wind or highway noise

      while calamity clots nearby, one hamlet away

      even as that woman in her red coat crosses

      a green field, happy black terrier leaping up

      to her hand, as a crow settles his wings on pale

      winter stubble, and an old man in a crushed hat

      posts a letter at a yellow box – and may a reply

      come sooner than he expects from a grandson

      he loves to praise as only a free man can praise

      but likely it’s a bill, what must be paid

      in a certain period before penalties apply

      and debts accrue and demands mount

      and a day passes in which he fails to relish

      this heaven-side of grass, neglects the glory

      in birdsong! – and in men whose songs rise

      so smoothly from their natures we forget

      how both ease and fine form came to pass

      out of a morning’s work in the low house

      with green decorative siding not far from

      his grave, a domicile easy to pass by without

      a murmur of wonder – though the German words

      under his photo leave me squinting, envious

      of those who know more than I, who knew him

      as a neighbour, summer visitor to Kirchstetten

      on a back road bordered by willows ready to bud

      from soggy forest floor with leaves faint for now

      in Duino

      narrow roads off the autobahn

      offer tour buses no place to park

      should passengers want

      to see where Rilke slept

      Princess della Torre e Tasso’s gilded

      family portraits of past aristocrats

      staring down, uncomprehending

      I step onto a balcony overlooking

      the Gulf of Trieste, notice no angels

      though commercial oyster beds

      at the mouth of the Isonzo River

      provide a symmetry the poet

      may have admired from his cliff path

      I am thinking a trace of gravitas

      might remain on this stone

      balustrade he may have touched

      (or pounded) and where

      in three languages is written

      on its limestone lip the command

      not to lean over, which I heed

      Apollo beams down to warm

      my thoughts again, so once more

      I wonder how the poet saw from here

      ‘wind full of cosmic space’

      what remains for me white cliffs

      and blue sea, curve of the gulf

      and sunlight calling one wave

      to appear just as another dips and

      disappears without any ‘endlessly

      anxious hands’ framing

      what cannot so easily pass away

      Nicholas