Gottfried Benn

I You don’t need always to be scrubbing the tiles, Hendrickje, my eye drinks itself, drinks itself to death— but other drink is in short supply— the little Buddha there, Chinese grove god in exchange for a ladleful of Hulstkamp, please! Never painted anything in frost-white or ice-skater blue or that Irish green in which the purple shimmers through— always my own monotone, my compulsion to shadows— not pleasant to pursue that path so clearly. Greatness—where? I pick up the slate-pencil and certain things appear on paper or canvas or whatever the heck else— result: Buddha bronze hocked for booze— but I draw the line at homage under ornamental plants, banquet of the painters’ guild— something for the boardroom! ...Creaking, little sheep squeaking, chromotypes Flemish, Rubensish— for the grandchildren (same idiots!) Ah—Hulstkamp, hits the spot, midpoint of colors, my shadow brown, stubble aura around heart and eye— II

One says: please no inner life, manners by all means, but nothing affective, that’s no compensation for the insufferable difficulties of outward-directed expression— those cerebralized city-Styxes when my little prince pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst, and it’s no different now the contraries are not easy to reconcile but when you survey the provinces the inner life has it by a neck.

Renege on the rock! Smash the oppressor cave! Sashay out onto the floor! Scorn the cornices— see, from the beard of drunk Silenus from the unique uproar of his blood the wine dribble into his genitals! Spit on the obsession with pillars: ancient rheumatic hands quake toward gray skies. Bring down the temple by the yearning of your knees twitching with dance. Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed your soft flowers through great wounds. Dove-hauled Venus girds her loins with roses— see the summer’s last puff of blue drift on seas of asters to distant pine-brown coasts; see this final hour of our mendacious southern happiness held aloft.

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died (it’s there in her museum in Meersburg), on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s, Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland, in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes rested on white pillows till they looked their last— all of it junk now, or no longer extant, unattributable, anonymous in its insentient and continual disintegration. We bear within us the seeds of all the gods, the gene of death and the gene of love— who separated them, the words and things, who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end, the few boards and the floods of tears, home for a few wretched hours. Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote, bed and tears too impalpable, no No, no Yes, birth and bodily pain and faith an undefinable surge, a lurch, a power stirring in its sleep moved bed and tears— sleep well!

The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes looked so nibbled. When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey. Finally in a bower under the diaphragm they found a nest of young rats. One little thing lay dead. The others were living off kidneys and liver drinking the cold blood and had had themselves a beautiful youth. And just as beautiful and quick was their death: the lot of them were thrown into the water. Ah, will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!

Asters—sweltering days old adjuration/curse, the gods hold the balance for an uncertain hour. Once more the golden flocks of heaven, the light, the trim— what is the ancient process hatching under its dying wings? Once more the yearned-for, the intoxication, the rose of you— summer leaned in the doorway watching the swallows— one more presentiment where certainty is not hard to come by: wing tips brush the face of the waters, swallows sip speed and night.