Free Albrecht Dürer and me by David Zieroth Page A

pleasure to paint that the artist
    could manage in an afternoon, highlights
    of folds easy compared to the eyes some
    call cold, others unarmed, the gift of art
    to reflect and reveal each viewer accurately

commemorative rooms
    Georg Trakl (February 3, 1887, Salzburg to November 3, 1914, Kraków)
    not a word in English, yet I understand
    yellowing paper holds up faded words
    small books plain in design
    black and white photographs
    light from windows muted (a storm
    is building, and later its mountain
    violence breaks and drenches
    my T-shirt: Salzburg, it says)
    from in here I can almost see
    the school he attended, still severe
    and grand and yet submitting
    in this city of churches, it is functional
    first and only with time dignified
    and perhaps saddened
    that many were dead
    in the short film a man’s voice
    intones his poems so tenderly
    I am reminded that language
    this harsh can be loving – because
    back home we’d read translations
    but never softly: scenes of the Eastern Front
    required at least a twisting
    of the jaw so out would come
    how he himself may have sounded
    gurgling on his deathbed from
    an overdose of cocaine, unclear
    whether suicide or error
    â€“ but forever clear his small
    self-portrait: a painted darkness
    of reddish hair, green face
    makes a mask so unlike
    the blond young man in striped trousers
    seen sitting, eager not for war
    but for his life – and I see
    how summer light comes in
    and tries its best to tell me
    not to believe this possessed glow
    here on the wall set to trigger
    my dismay but instead to step
    back into the street, where
    he’d walked, shadows from clouds
    falling on him as they fall on me
    with sudden heat and thunder –
    and did he hear in that rumble
    guns that ended more
    than an empire swept away
    with his twenty-seven years?
    what
I
hear has by now
    been returned to nature, and I know
    enough of this timelessness
    spreads ahead, so I continue still
    to look upward at stone walls
    grateful they had been there
    to hear a schoolboy singing

Goethe, Ringstrasse
    your green mantle of bronze
    rose up on a street new to me
    dazed me: this chance wander
    and encounter! in my half-
    hope to find an age not yet
    complete, I saw your girth
    x
times larger than in real life
    but what’s a statue for
    if not to magnify, focus, inflate?
    and felt unnerved, until I spotted
    the double row of buttons marching up
    how classically draped your coat
    how sturdy your boots, casual
    drooping of your hands, your air of
    certainty and even, yes, touch of
    chagrin at becoming this . . .
    immovable icon
    earlier I’d passed towering Handel
    (or was it Haydn?) I can hardly recall
    now you and I are familiar: my third
    (or is it fourth?) journey to remove
    broken green bottle bits from
    the base of your pedestal, its one
    word, your name, raised in caps
    I ignore traffic swelling behind us
    pulse and drone of Mercedes buses
    touring among snappy winds this place
    has faced since long before you became
    yourself, dispensing clarity as if
    it were the simplest of languages
    more and more you look all inward
    as I gaze up, a ritual in which
    I’ve had my umbrella blown out
    by wind driving rain, same angle
    I felt as a child, and I marvel
    standing here, that I am able still
    to find a hero in your travelling
    toward Italy, in a polymath’s
    colours, plants – old cosmos
    streamed through your mind, alchemized –
    arrogance dropped, dross you spun
    for us into wise gold, your face here
    forever stained from rain running
    to catch your down-turned lips
    and I wonder if all alloyed eyes
    stare into past worlds with such doubt

Galileo . . .
    lived on this street, so says
    a tall handsome woman
    whose apartment I’m renting
    one thousand years old
    with modern plumbing
    and beams so huge I think of
    Pacific coast giants
    I look across the narrow way
    of Costa dei Magnoli to where
    a church waits with fresh flowers
    under a fading madonna’s