In Transition

 

Mauerblümchen - Wallflower 80 x 100 cm acryl/dispersionsfarbe/ink on canvas

IN TRANSITION

The cable installation dude looks as if he’s been doing push-ups

all of his life. He’s eying your wife steadily,

unabashedly. Given the context, scenario, the looming

event horizon you consider a response. Why not

strangle the fuckwit with one of Cynthia’s

push-up bras? For once a touch of punning poetic justice.

But aggression’s leaking away replaced by a softer,

gentler, more fluidly feminine substance. Headaches keep 

circling back, settling in like sodbusters in the north-east

sector of empty territory once known as your brain. Life loving

sociopaths, charlatans in sharkskin suits, used to lurk there,

replaced now by a midwife, two hairdressers,

a depressed clerk weeping in a broom closet. What’s this all about?

Your analyst has suggested you take up ballet, as if lifting

a fifteen year old girl over your head and sprinting rather

daintily through a bevy of dying swans just might clarify

certain “issues” in your life. Soloists lined up at the barre.

Staring into the mirror, nubile Denise asks you to sit on her 

upright feet, your manly weight needed to bend, reshape, deform.

“I’ll get back to you later,” you say, then lock yourself in a bathroom

stall in which you dig through your “dance” bag, like mom searching

frantically for her lipstick, a clean tissue, so long ago—you’ve taken to crying

in elevators. Must be the music, the sad songs. Those testosterone blues.

Hoping for Rain

Ich mag den Regen - I like the Rain 42 x 56 cm mixed media painting by Karin Goeppert

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE

Couldn’t care less about the Duke of Aragon’s

barbed scepter. But you do like the crumbling   

bits of old barns, or the stone cold cellar of an abbey,   

moldy bottles of a local vintage stored there  

for decades, undrinkable, the grapes in these parts   

turning sour well before middle-age sets in. At the agri-  

cultural festival there’s talk of manure and goose liver,

the famous scene in “Madame Bovary”

in which Madame B. is romanced 

by Rudolfo while outside a politician    

gives a speech that, with Bach-like precision,  

mirrors a lover’s empty words. I’m getting tired, maybe 

we should lie down for a while. Lunch was heavy

going and the wine strong. Children are running

races through the barley and rye. Say what you like,

some day they too will have to rest. People say

that a Greco or a Goya is stashed away in a back chamber

of the ducal palace, but no one has the energy to look for it. 

Julia Fischer plays various Bach pieces