Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
How to Forget
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
Summary
In Leopoldstadt by the station the drunks
piss in the open air. The Polizei prowl.
I called this place clean when I got here.
It is, relatively speaking. But it can take time to see dirt.
Like a kid at a window asking
how centuries fold and unfold,
how this crow stands now, un-cautious
un-concerned by interruption
determined no matter
how close you get
she will not fly.
How today in a haunted town
the rain is patient
and windows promise
to split our faces
How today in a hunting ground
we tell our stories in the only
wayward inadequate way
anyone knows how
And which parts will you remember best?
In German remembering's reflexive
Ich erinnere mich
to remember something
you must first remember yourself:
so it is easier to forget:
ich vergesse, es vergesst, wir vergessen.
How we repeat ourselves so faithfully
acting the parts we think we made
and echoing those who've come before
how much we need new ghosts to follow
And in his essay on forgetting, Freud
changed the verb to forget – so each time
we forget, we must forget ourselves:
ich vergesse mich –
and his editors silently corrected the proofs
forgiving what they saw
as his forgettings.
A match strikes between
what we feel for those we know and
the bewilderment of strangers
When of all the crowds to listen to
it's the dead who know the most
I thump my boot down
on a puddle and drops gush up
It is astonishing to be
alive, we say, which means
it is astonishing to be here
among these future dead
I spill into the Prater
walk the Hauptallee
I come here often enough to know
each night at five the horses come
tugging their carriages
back from the city.
I suppose I must remember myself
in order to remember them
as each night they remember
their own slick bodies, cold hooves, their
slack-lipped exhale into winter
all just to know their way home.
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- Nowhere Nearer , pp. 29 - 32Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018