Michael Hofmann

Nothing required an account of me And still I didn't give one. I might have been a virtual casualty, A late victim of the Millennium Bug. No spontaneity, no insubordination, Not even any spare capacity.

Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. — Andrew Marvell These are all thoughts — of course. At the edge of the ocean with nowhere to go, the nearest land three thousand miles away and under different management, the diving sun another thirty thousand times that, there is no reality, only these parlous notions, messages, statements, stylings on the edge of extinction. Little petillas. A kind of spontaneous zoo of   human recency and arrival and promontory variorum. Imprudent comb-over thoughts, rigid and proud eye-catching false thoughts, little jiggling thoughts, intricate braided-beard thoughts the product of much misplaced patience, product placement thoughts (which are rather elementary, and are almost a contradiction in terms), unlike myriad highly-evolved dog thoughts (no mutts here), pushing a baby in a three-wheeled stroller whilst running very hard in no shirt and six-pack thoughts, this a development on the now-obsolete egg and paddle (what it does to the infant to be impelled at such a rate into the future whilst facing backwards like an Aeroflot passenger is not recorded — not that forward is necessarily better), high-concept silky-swishing Afghan hound thoughts, intrusive bum thoughts, hapless and homeless panhandler thoughts (a smarte carte loaded with undesirables never far to seek), low-slung belly-dragging beagle thoughts little better than the serpent in the Bible, holding hands Adam and Eve thoughts, foot-shuffling Zimmer frame thoughts, “revolution in mobility” wheelchair and gravel thoughts, pushed by most likely an illegal attendant borderline thoughts, candy-striped T-shirt and shorts thoughts, cut-off thoughts, paired with sometimes nothing more than a bikini top, those three-quarter length thin and probably amphibious trousers, worn without socks, that men go in for, suggestive of adaptability and resourcefulness thoughts, standard over-loud mobile thoughts, (“our relationship is...    ”), lying immobile on the grass on your back mobile thoughts (these are different), tourist thoughts, an unexpected preponderance of  Russian thoughts (though with residential qualifications), borscht belt leopard skin thoughts dripping with gold and eccentric lamentations, dog and baby both thoughts (these last thought to be ideally-balanced), high-stepping poodle thoughts like a four-wheel drive with little intelligence in rough country, furiously texting in the glare with all thumbs to the pump thoughts, being at least half elsewhere, baseball cap thoughts rife with determination, slightly dated straw hat thoughts, reverse baseball cap also thoughts.

A working river, a working valley, The gray-green Rhône Lined with workings, heaps of dust, gravel, cement, And log jams waiting for transport, Like the island exporting itself to its neighbors one barge at a time. The river, the road, and the railway, A plait, a tangle, a place of through. The river not navigable, the boggy valley floor not walkable, The locals came down from the mountains a little way To site castles on moraine and regulate trade. Hannibal marched his elephants through here, dynamited rocks with vinegar. Poplars were planted en passant by Napoleon’s Grande Armée Two-hundred-some years ago. Goethe came to visit. The shade endures. Rilke was reminded of Spain. He lived among apricots at Muzot, Just the other side of the language barrier, And fixed to be buried with a view of France. No one knows who I am, were his dying words. Smells of hay and dung, the murmurs of subtle conversation Next door are tax-efficient sheep The underground chicken palace like CERN Or a discreet gun emplacement. The lights come on when we appear, and go off after we’re gone. Larchwood and rye bread, chocolate and slate, Dried beef and stone All one striated substance, The staff of life breaking explosively, crumblingly, If it breaks at all, A stash of daunting verticals, A washing machine delivered by helicopter Winched down into the Renaissance casbah. Time was a man had to carry his donkey across his shoulders up a cliff; Now everything is tunnel fodder. Electricity and water come piped through the mountains, The vineyards get a sousing under great rainbow arcs, Who wouldn’t want to die in a thirteenth-century tower With light sensors and cold running water Off the hills and a chill in the sunny air of the contemporary archaic.

Sankt Georg, what was it, questionable, doubtful, shady, twilit, a something area, something  Jan said, and he was born in Hamburg, and went to school here, so he would know. A little isthmus between the Alster with its freshwater sailors and the railway station, always a reliable drag on things anywhere in Europe (the transients, the drugs, the preset collisions between the foolish young and the unscrupulous old), though this one piped classical music — 
not anymore — to the forecourt, where taxi drivers got out and walked their Mercs around in neutral because they were hours without a fare and were saving diesel (which was all very well in summer), and the immediate, somehow always slightly grubby or compromised view of three theatres, two museums, and le Carré’s bunker hotel, but, hey, it was classy while it lasted, and you could get to Milan or Moscow if you had to. Then the Polizeibezirk of underage Puppenstrich about the time B. came here from the country, still often the only girl not on the game, among whores and winos and people “with an immigration background” looking grim and wearing subfusc and doing the messages, as we once said. Then gays — is there a pink euro, like a pink pound, and the Pink Pistols and gray wolves? — intrepid advance guard of gentrification. So up the rents, send in the heavies, firebomb the buildings, locals out, make improvements, and up the rents again, same everywhere. A natty pellucid pissoir in the Hanser Platz that it would take Paris to pull off, drunks round the monument (“reel around the fountain”), hardy trees and hardier women, little roosters, little rosters in the apartment block for cleaning the common parts, little brass squares set in the ground for individual fascist outrages, with the victims’ names, the massy church at the end of the street — St. George’s, the AIDS church, the rainbow flag, the incendiary community paper called the Dragon. Sudden sad flurries of flowers, the curt pairs of dates, a grown-out bleached person with one leg. The main drag changed utterly, meaning as usual stylistic diktat from elsewhere and the birth of an interchangeably frippish hideousness. Three hat shops, an empty tea bar (tax write-off? money laundry?) boasting sixteen varieties of macaroons, endless places to stop (if you even wanted to stop) on the narrow pavement between the heedless cars and the nosy passersby, expensive ready-cooked food shops with names like Mom’s, gone the hardware store that stocked everything and was staffed by people who advised you where to find it for even less, out of business, or moved away to less promising parts. The photo shops, the record store, bookshop. All gone. And behind that, the Steindamm, our belly and balls, twinned with Kabul, or Mombasa, or Abuja. Telephone shops if you wanted to call anywhere with a red, green, and black flag (launch pad of Ali Ağca and his crew of martyrs), casinos, thorny or hairy vegetables, fetish stores, Alphonso mangoes from Pakistan, video brothels, limitless mint and parsley and cilantro, hourly hotels, cracked olives and fresh cheese, old girls with three words of German, newly baked flatbread. The birds strike up between three and four (it’s the Northern light), while at lit intersections they never stop. Twilit, doubtful, shady, something. Questionable.

The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace —Ezra Pound Idiot Wind, Blowin' every time you move your teeth —Bob Dylan You were energized by your epoch. The difference between a harmless nut—John Doe, Jane Doe, plain Jane, practically any mediocrity—standing on a beach and the same harmless nut riding a wave of (now) cultural self-righteousness about to tube. A tsunami armed with thunderbolts. Empowered—yea, packing. You played everything to the sympathetic studio theater of your hearers, a chorus-cum-sounding-board. They were your doo-wop boys and girls, your clique and claque and Marshall stack. The church hall chairs scraped, the cheap black crepe backdrop rustled “cutting edge” at you. You paid attention to how they oohed and aahed for you, and then pantomime hissed, and balled their fists and bayed for blood: the half-lustful half-men betraying their half-gender when they weren’t speculating what you were like in bed, the frightened girls who’d never seen anything like you but thought it might be fun (after Goth) to be a Maenad, the Pharisaic mothers going home to their chilly fires, their dim, furtive, put-upon husbands and their neo-feral offspring with a “there but for the grace of God” on their bony lips.

It's all right Unless you're either lonely or under attack. That strange effortful Repositioning of yourself. Laundry, shopping, Hours, the telephone—unless misinformed— Only ever ringing for you, if it ever does. The night—yours to decide, Among drink, or books, or lying there. On your back, or curled up. An embarrassment of poverty.

The luncheon voucher years (the bus pass and digitized medical record always in the inside pocket come later, and the constant orientation to the nearest hospital). The years of “sir” (long past “mate,” much less “dearie”), of invisibility, of woozy pacifism, of the preemptive smile of the hard-of-hearing, of stiff joints and the small pains that will do me in. The ninth complement of fresh — stale — cells, the Late Middle Years (say, 1400 AD — on the geological calendar), the years of the incalculable spreading middle, the years of speculatively counting down from an unknown terminus, because the whole long stack — shale, vertebrae, pancakes, platelets, plates — won’t balance anymore, and doesn’t correspond anyway to the thing behind the eyes that says “I” and feels uncertain green and treble and wants its kilt as it climbs up to the lectern to blush and read “thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb.” The years of taking the stairs two at a time (though not at weekends) a bizarre debt to Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe, the years of a deliberate lightness of tread, perceived as a nod to Franz   Josef thinking with his knees and rubber-tired Viennese Fiaker. The years when the dead are starting to stack up. The years of incuriosity and novarum rerum in cupidissimus, the years of cheap acquisition and irresponsible postponement, or cheap postponement and irresponsible acquisition, of   listlessness, of   miniaturism, of irascibility, of   being soft on myself, of   being hard on myself, and neither knowing nor especially caring which. The years of   re-reading (at arm’s length). The fiercely objected-to professional years, the appalling indulgent years, the years of no challenge and comfort zone and safely within my borders. The years of   no impressions and little memory. The years of standing in elevators under the elevator lights in the elevator mirror, feeling and looking like leathered frizz, an old cheese-topped dish under an infrared hot plate. The years of one over the thirst and another one over the hunger, of   insomnia and sleeping in, of creases and pouches and heaviness and the hairdresser offering to trim my eyebrows. The years of the unbeautiful corpse in preparation. The years to choose:sild, or flamber ...?

In that aftertime I wasn't writing. I never wrote, I didn't know what the aftertime was for. I felt little, collected nothing. I talked to myself, but it was boring.

Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call it an ex

For Hai-Dang Phan I have no doubt where they will go. They walk the one life offered from the many chosen. — Robert Lowell They are all also, it should be remembered, West German artists, with the partial exception of Penck, and are all male. — John-Paul Stonard He was born in the countryside / the provinces / the blameless sticks in (false) Waltersdorf (recte) Dresden in what is now Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic (laughs) / Czechia, if it ever catches on what’s it to you. Stripped of his East German citizenship, he fled on foot with a handful of pop music cassettes in a pantechnicon mit Kind und Kegel