Albrecht Dürer and me (5 page)

departure and return

1. departure

you do not want to leave, to step out the door

after saying goodbye to those who remain

inside, already returning to their lives, cleaning

away what you have left behind and thinking

soon their daily routine will re-establish

in the arc forward into the day after you

pulled your suitcase over their threshold in

a clatter of wheels ushering you to the cab

and on to the airport where you fall into that

being-blank world, herds hauling themselves

home or away, exiting excited or exhausted

and having left behind loved ones, you

accept the return to the silence of your rooms

their hush, no one exclaiming over a doodad

found in a shop, held, tossed and finally bought

with money of a different colour from the kind

now in your wallet, and no one to step inside

the circle of your arms, someone who easily

holds you back from drifting into a trance

whose edges are sharper than the sound of

your key turning in the door, your nose

taking in days not spent here and where

you need to return, first by opening

windows and then by unzipping luggage

and letting their ghosts escape to haunt you

momentarily until you shower and sleep

dream raggedly, incomprehensibly the same

as you dreamt in far places where you went

to become someone other than yourself, a

surprisingly easy enough adventure you might

someday repeat once home has become again

the place you love enough to leave behind

its comforts growing around you until you

fling them back into dusty corners and

light out to where your eye gets fed on

a stone bridge, view of a lake, streets full

of strangers walking past, not seeing you –

the one you might attempt in that new air

2. return: young woman from Sarajevo

seatmate on the flight home has

rumpled hair back of her head, as do

all of us who travel on the long-sleep haul

our bodies struggling gracelessly with so much

stimulation, and we talk very little, too aware

of need for conserving energy in ourselves

but I glimpse her passport with its harsh American

eagle and note the way she smiles when I open

Crankshaw's
The Fall of the House of Habsburg

and so I learn her husband is Bosnian and

will be travelling later from his homeland to join her

in Sioux Falls (a city I struggle to fix to a state)

and I think briefly of speaking of my surprise

at seeing fresh flowers on the coffin of Emperor

Franz Joseph (uncle to ‘suspicious, misanthropic'

doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand) in Vienna's

underground
Kapuzinergruft
,
but restrain my questions

and when we stand later in the aisle after landing

both eager to breathe new air, I say her husband

will be asleep by now, past midnight his time

while we flew on through endless light

she wishes me good luck and touches the back of

my hand where it rests on top of a seat, a sincere

gesture but also one hinting I might need help

crossing nearly half the globe today, or perhaps

she's returning a kindness for mentioning her spouse

whom she left at dawn, knowing then his time zone

was not just Sarajevo's with its honours

of horrors and beauty but also that realm

everyone occasionally, reluctantly leaves

3. return: arriving from Munich

in Chicago I am told the truth:

I have missed my connecting flight

thereafter, chaos: waves of travellers

their carts and suitcases merging, bewildered

by fat, black woman's tone of command

– for what had they done wrong but land

in
ord
, stunned by physical onslaught

of chasing the sun, and the monitor tells all

to each of us whether bound for Omaha, Orlando

or Kansas City or not, shining blue and white

in tiny type, a wall no one goes to, fearing to cross

the line troglodytic men make as they flip

monster suitcases onto conveyor belts

their beer bellies in no way diminishing

their strength, taking my personal misfortune

as a given, not worth talking about

and baby held ahead of me begins to cry

her mother in head scarf, her father unremarkable

except that he's leading them into

a new life, in Dallas, that name in history

they cannot really claim as theirs though today

we have all seen guns at passport control

that make us long for homelands temporarily

unattainable, or already left behind

4. return: oval window

a portal like no other

looks down into forest-top

clouds puffy or matte grey

constant sword-length

cutting across, wobbling

so it's wise to fall away

from thrum of the actual, dome

blue-black above, the sickening tilt

and see instead remembered swifts squeaking

wheeling over parapets of castle stone

where brave men died in previous years

meeting firepower at dawn or from damp

man speaking Polish

sneezes, brings me back to

not earth but its high-flying

flight attendant's steely smile

Dutch woman chiding

my lack of savvy: to travel

without a pen

for customs form

ballpoint she disdains to take back

when I exit – such a stance

after all my successful

ignoring of thirty thousand feet

weight of luggage and imaginings

so earth passes below more serenely

than ever felt when dropped in on

5. return: over snow

flying home from far away

jets seem to stall

I'm thankful to find

at last

my country below

features we otherwise call

white, grey and black

not one sign of humankind

there lies snow upon snow, soft

from this height

or a peak protrudes

white slashes its face

what might live there

long swept away: home

somehow, space without provenance

its relief lets me relinquish

cities with fables

and five more airborne hours

traversing tundra and taiga

before gaining my bed

that still point found on no map

but mine, its welcome

now absurdly foreign, alien

as once was last night's European bolster

weeds grew while I was away

I expected what?

an unchanged patch

of pure stasis, stems

unaltered, exactly as

the morning I glanced back

from the cab, my face sunny

not this yellow of greeters

trumpeting on my lawn

crowding the walk where birds

splatter white words

around the grey face

of the garden stone

that has not altered, cool

under my hand, a spot more

lichen-wrinkle persisting

– that this filigree lives

so little, unlike the rise

and fall we are made of

we hardly care, so pleased

we alone measure how slow

rock crumbles, as we touch it

we rub against time and find

we triumph: listen

to our watery laughter

when sun lights up skin

we have animal pleasure

knowing and loving

even ragweeds with their vigour

and niche so like our own

in urgencies coming and going

a moment of missing bells

on a construction site, a crowbar falls on a pail

at such an angle that metal on metal rings out

to the plaza where I sit near mumbling fountains

half in shadow, half in sun, in view of distant water

and I twist my head to catch the sound again

as if a bell
has
rung, and in that instant I walk again

in Wien amidst the pealing, air-filling, calling chimes

resounding out from corner churches, sending their

iron-made messages of attention and intent

through pedestrians hurrying to destinations of

torte trysts, formal assignations or sitting alone

with tiny porcelain cups in hand, which tremble

in sympathetic vibration, and so the big and

little are joined as the hourly resonance

floats over the city, causes its denizens to

gaze upward at spires and to imagine themselves

ascending, asking how it feels to have ascension

inside them, a tintinnabulation growing, climbing out

of one's chest since first burst of the clapper striking

told how a small tick has been carved out of time

Notes

The first quotation in ‘In Duino' is taken from the first of Rilke's elegies in
The Essential Rilke
, selected and translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. The second quotation is also from Rilke's first elegy and is taken from
Selected Poems, Rilke
, translated by J.B. Leishman.

The quotation in ‘I knock on Thomas Bernhard's door' is from
Wittgenstein's Nephew
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock.

‘Vindobona' was the name of the Roman settlement where Vienna now stands, and where Marcus Aurelius died at the age of fifty-eight on March 17, 180 of an infectious disease. His last words were ‘Weep not for me, think rather of the pestilence and the deaths of so many others.'

Acknowledgements

Some poems, some in earlier versions, appeared in
Event, The Malahat Review, The Windsor Review
and in the anthologies
Poet to Poet
(Guernica, 2012) and
Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013
(Tightrope Books, 2013).

Special thanks to those who read various versions: Robert Adams, gillian harding-russell, Lorna McCallum, Meg Stainsby, Richard Therrien and Russell Thornton.

Special thanks also to Silas White and to Kurt Klima.

Photo by Margery Patrick

About the Author

David Zieroth has published several books of poetry including
The Fly in Autumn
, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and
How I Joined Humanity at Last
, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He taught at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC, before retiring and founding The Alfred Gustav Press. Born in Neepawa, Manitoba, he lives in North Vancouver, BC.