Ghosts

Ghosts - 60 x 80 cm acryl on canvas

GHOSTS

                                                                                                                  

Sometimes I see one

or two of them, coming literally

out of nowhere but doing quite

ordinary things like, as is routine

here in Berlin, dancing around dog

shit on the sidewalk, a seriocomic

ballet of evasion, or pretending

to contemplate a shop window.

Then I’ll spot the giveaway: this one’s

missing the tension that once gave life

to Eva’s face, or the damp sheen of awareness

in her eyes; and that particular pseudo-apparition’s 

wearing shoes that Jonathan, whose sense of style was not

so much acute as World Historical, wouldn’t be caught

dead in. They usually arrive with a grip on

my heart and lungs, can’t catch my breath, feel like there’s

a balloon in there gradually expanding. A real ghost

doesn’t haunt the streets of Berlin, but lives in the mortal soul, is

an indelible moment such as when my grandmother reached

out to me through a fog of terminal morphine,

the door of her hospital room

open, I, seventeen-years old,

standing in the corridor as I turned away,

too sad and frightened to touch her,

too utterly abandoned to say good-bye.

Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Herbert von Karajan conducts The Wiener Philarmoniker

The Passing World

untitled (acrylic/ink) 42 x 56 cm by Karin Goeppert

OLD POET

                                For Jack Gilbert

Wrestling with austerities

in thorny, bare spaces. Smooth and

congenial as cactus, you cast yourself out.

All the crimes of a life—did you ever

injure a man, damage a woman?—you presented

quietly, in dry image, no obvious shame, rhetoric

not too richly seasoned, just a sprinkle 

of rosemary or sage on a lamb chop.

You talked to God but didn’t believe in Him.

You blamed the Devil for spreading pain

then thanked Him for Palladian moonlight,

for roasted goat meat on a mountainside   

in Greece. Romantic, Modernist, Individualist.

Experts said that you were the end of all these things:

what a luxury not being post whatever: being just

an inch before the after. Pleasure you damned faintly   

for not lasting long enough, for demanding renewal,      

and yet you delighted in appetite. And suffering

was as much to be enjoyed as the texture

of a woman’s skin, as the aroma of ripe tomatoes   

in Umbrian summer. Beaten on by the sun and by the wind, in    

exile even at home, feral hearted, you were wary of comfort,   

of growing mild in old age: you need not have worried about that. 

 

Remember Shakti

John McLaughlin/Zakir Hussain and guests

The White Stripes and the Thirty Year War

untitled 50 x 64 cm oil/ink/oilpastel

AS IF…

                                                         for Heinrich Heine                

As if we were on stage together     

with Jack White and a recently resur-

rected Jimmi Hendrix and were strumming

some strange tandem guitar-like thing  

as Jimmi and Jack struggled to keep up  

an assortment of groupies oiled and ready 

and sandwiches and cold beer awaiting us                                                                       

backstage the entire retinue impossibly high

as if the morning were like a girl on

one of those vast expensive sidewalks

in the Kurfürstendamm and mounted

atop a stack of pallets she’s munching

strawberries in voluptuous slow-mo

as if she were all alone in the world

as if we were all alone in the world as

if five of your best enemies were hanging  

from various fruit trees in the front yard

as if the aftermath of a battle fought  

in the Thirty Years War had taken up exactly  

half of your property as if your neighbors were   

scandalized by all this unexpected mayhem    

as if what they thought mattered anyway.

The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Greetings from Kaminibassi

Kaminibassi 18 x 24 cm Ölpastell - c/o Karin Goeppert

WHILE YOU WERE OUT

The trees were offering their support.

They signaled this by shaking out the light in their leaves.

I watched a jogger steam past; a multiply tattooed girl

in unlaced combat boots sweep the door step

of a tavern, smoking and muttering beautifully,

her mind a mess but obviously still functioning;

traffic thickening in a bottleneck. You are trying

to decipher my message, wondering if you should

just give up, maybe go out for a beer, perhaps talk to the

neighbor you’ve been avoiding for a year or longer

because he always looks as if he has bad news for you

but is asking himself whether it’s worth it,

whether you really need to know

that the land lord is contemplating a substantial rent increase,

that a three-generational family of Serbian gypsies 

is moving into the apartment upstairs next month,

or that your wife receives a male visitor every Tuesday morning

during “home office,” and that you just might be better off,

in the end, clueless if relatively content, an occasional reader

of what life was up to while you were out.

Schumann - Piano Concerto 1st movement 

performed by Dang Taih Son

Paavo Jarvi conducts l'Orchestre de Paris

Flow Chart

Flow Chart 60 x 80 cm - acryl on board

THE LUNATIC IS ON THE GRASS

Which is a good place for anyone

to be--it’s so hot--beneath the trees, dozing

in some dreamless void of foliage and dirt,

dealers pacing the shadows

and grinning full of hope.

A raw whiff of garlic something

or other from Bardolino’s open kitchen

window reeks of the good life,

a fishing village, say, in southern Italy

animal eyed people with white smiles

gesticulating all over the place.

The pink domes under which they seem to live.

Limestone, olives, a fiasco of counterfeit

Chianti and lots of time to drink it.

Go on tell us one more time how summer

can only mean Pink Floyd live in the Stadt-

park, Hamburg, you and I drinking beer

on our new balcony, eating take-out

chicken curry, getting off on all that

lunatic music for free. I think

the primroses were a dusty pink—you like to say—

the lilacs just about kaput. So was it summer,

or late spring? The sun flaming out behind the trees.

The music clear as a fount.

Pink Floyd - Time