Gottfried Benn

A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab. Someone had jammed a lavender aster between his teeth. As I made the incision up from the chest with a long knife under the skin to cut out tongue and gums, I must have nudged it because it slipped into the brain lying adjacent. I packed it into the thoracic cavity with the excelsior when he was sewn up. Drink your fill in your vase! Rest easy, little aster!

I Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad, so many years as a man, compromise, in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle he was never anyone of Olympian allure. He walked slowly through the dreamscape of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable from early spring, with young willows and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed. Dreamy exposure to phenomena that to nature in its administration of various cycles—young and old alike— are inseparably part of a single order—: so he drank his gin and accepted a dish of sausage soup, free on Thursdays with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance of sorrow and pleasure. II

Feel it — but remember, millennia have felt it — the sea and the beasts and the mindless stars wrestle it down today as ever

Fill yourself up with the forsythias and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too with your blood and happiness and wretchedness, the dark ground that seems to come with you. Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome. And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows, then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you into June, when the roses blow.

“Jena before us in the lovely valley” thus my mother on a postcard from a walking holiday on the banks of the Saale, she was spending a week at the spa of Kosen; long forgotten now, the ancestor no more, her script a subject for graphology, years of becoming, years of illusion, only those words I’ll never forget. It wasn’t a great picture, no class, there was not enough blossom to justify lovely, poor paper, no pulp-free mass, also the hills weren’t green with vineyards, but she was from back-country hovels, so the valleys probably did strike her as lovely, she didn’t need laid paper or four-color print, she supposed others would see what she had seen. It was something said at a venture, an exaltation had prompted it, the landscape had moved her, so she asked the waiter for a postcard, and yet—

That quality of the great boxers to be able to stand there and take shots, gargle with firewater, encounter intoxication at sub- and supra-atomic levels, to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s lip like Empedocles, and descend, not say: I’ll be back, not think: fifty-fifty, to vacate molehills when dwarves want space to grow, to dine alone, indivisible, and able to renounce your victory— a hymn to that man.

A bunch of glads, certainly highly emblematic of creation, remote from frills of working blossom with hope of fruit: slow, durable, placid, generous, sure of kingly dreams. All else is natural world and intellect! Over there the mutton herds: strenuous ends of clover and daggy sheep— here friendly talents, pushing Anna to the center of attention, explaining her, finding a solution! The glads offer no solution: being—falling— you mustn’t count the days— fulfillment livid, tattered, or beautiful.

A day without tears is a rare occurrence culpable absent-mindedness practically an episode • when men still wore starched collars, and stuffed cotton wool between their toes hobbled about in pain, pedicure hadn’t been invented, but you would see faces that were worth a second look those were years when something whispered

Finis Poloniae— a phrase/figure of speech, that apart from its literal historical meaning stands in for the end of empires. Charged atmosphere, everything breathes damply, epicene air—if it could think anything it would think un-European things like monsoons and yellow seas. Greatness bears itself to death, says its last words to itself, a foreign-sounding swansong, generally misunderstood, sometimes tolerated— Finis Poloniae— perhaps on a rainy day, bummer, but in this instance a sound of happiness followed by solo horn, and then a hydrangea, most placid of flowers, capable of standing out in the rain into November, dropped softly into the grave.

Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet. Malayan yellow. Express train Berlin-Trelleborg and the Baltic resorts. Flesh that went naked. Tanned unto the mouth by the sea. Deeply ripened for Grecian joys. How far along the summer, in sickle-submissiveness! Penultimate day of the ninth month! Parched with stubble and the last corn-shocks. Unfurlings, blood, fatigue, deranged by dahlia-nearness. Man-brown jumps on woman-brown. A woman is something for a night. And if you enjoyed it, then the next one too! O! And then the return to one’s own care. The not-speaking! The urges! A woman is something with a smell. Ineffable! To die for! Mignonette. Shepherd, sea, and South. On every declivity a bliss. Woman-brown drapes itself on man-brown: Hold me! I’m falling! My neck is so weary. Oh, the sweet last fevered scent from the gardens.