Café des Westens

Kurfürstendamm

 

1.

                                  where we waited for that Bruckner
concert to begin, drinking beer, remembering
especially how the great Wilhelm
Furtwängler conducted the adagio when Father
did it in his study Führer
in his bunker muted cellos in Berlin even better than
Vienna even back when Rupert Brook sat
writing at our table about Grantchester, the Vicarage,
the clotted cream on ripe
berries, blood
a trifle if there’s just enough for tea
just enough tradition that’s behind it all when
Isherwood and Auden came out for
the boys working class the best
ass of course and free of bourgeois English scruples
about heavy brass and soaring violins
klezmer music too although by that time Jews
were you know Schoenberg Britten both
wrote songs for cabaret says humm
it for me Mr Bowles (Paul, that is, working here
with Copeland then) or Sally
named for him in fiction odd as that may sound
but sally forth

 

2.

to old Vienna. Did you know I wrote an honors thesis
at Ohio State on Isherwood?
Yes and met him once of twice. Flakey don’t you know
but helped me out a lot and introduced me
to his more important friends.
More important anyway than he was. Who
was greater, Furtwängler? Or do you think von Karajan?
A Brahms by the latter someone once
described — all the timpani ablaze — as witnessing
a person being kicked to death.  And then the Swedes
gave their prize to fuck me bite me Jelinek,
professor of piano.  Movie, too.  Her student beats
her up; she likes it, Erika,
and she sleeps with her own mum.
Hitler was a Catholic. My Notre Dame students
always choke on that.
Ich bin eine Berliner. Mr Gorbachev tear down
this wall.  A British diplomat in code to Whitehall once:
I see Joseph Goebbels at a restaurant every
week or so. What about I rub him out, Chicago?
Don’t be silly, mon vieux, we don’t do diplomacy like that.
1936 or 37.  Is it time for that concert?
Oscar Milosz — and I don’t mean Czeslaw; when
he won the prize I told them damn you’ve
got the wrong bloody Milosz — wrote La Berlin arrêtée
dans la nuit: en attendant les clefs, waiting
for the keys.  It’s a kind of hooded carriage, a Berlin,
huddled masses in the church
herded altogether boys out to where

 

3.

the chairs are all arranged around the tables
at Café des Westens and got off
the bus poor dumb tourists that we were. It was 1961.
Less than twenty years had passed we’d
visited an uncle
of our pal Hans Morton Todd III he was survivor
of a U-boat crew & few enough of those
his daughter there at dinner with her French lover
all stuffed with Sartre.
Was John Hawkes’s Spitzen-on-the-Dein a real place?
1949 that book and J.H. only 23
disciple I suppose of Al Guerard who wrote
the Introduction taught us Conrad, Stanford, 1963-65
New Directions books are published always for
and never by James Laughlin
sole alumnus of the Ezuversity at Castle Soninlaw, Italia.
Hawkes: Will you tell me what day it is
Weiss nicht
Do you know what year it is
Weis nicht
Do you know where you are
Weis nicht
We knew that it was Friday, 1961, Berlin,
our well-connected friend Hans Morton Todd III

 

4.

knew a little German Kindertotenlieder for example
little kids & babes firebombed with adults
their mums gone ash and bone and carbon atoms
you’d inhale when you breathed free
as far away as Granchester.  He did indeed the Churchill
darling Brooke write that thing right here
you’d hardly credit it the clotted cream on ripe
berries, blood
but that was still before the First War
a trifle if there’s just enough I said already
Horst Wessel Lied
Clio — not the muse of history, my cat —
walks across computer keys and history is purposeful
thought Stalinists and Nazis both
History is not but Clio is stepping down on $ and ! and %
just the way that Anton Bruckner’s cat stepped
down on white keys and black
to make it all chromatic just before
she leapt onto the strings themselves thunderous and
avant-garde degenerate entirely in her art.
What Sailor was it like in U-boats what Pierre this
song sings Jean Paul Sartre
we all knew next to nothing in those days

 

5.

and probably still do.  We didn’t know
that Lilly Hellman would be played by Jane Fonda
or that “Julia” was really Stephen Spender’s lover Muriel
whose Code Name Mary broke the cover of a tale
that wasn’t true or whether Auden’s midrash was sublime
or merely submarine, halakha or aggadah
forged papers were exchanged
right here and Mary took them to Vienna
just before the Anschluss when she did analysis with Freud
Spender wrote to Isherwood a woman’s body’s
more than I expected and of real interest more than
any well hung boy’s did Hegel say that
History is that which no one wanted History is cats
on keyboards on computer keys mice on
screens and boys hanging from a gibbet or a tree is
doppleganger doppelzungigkeit in Eastern sector 1961

the first wire going up and Stasi maybe at the next table
laughing at us as we translate for ourselves
the sign across the street: Bureau
of Unusual Events
Nostalgia peaking oddly now for old checkmate
old checkpoint old Charlie
dumping millions in defunct Ostmarks the theatre
of Bertold Brecht & concrete fact (cement)
our own George Smily waiting at a bridge for Karla
college girls picking at the loose chunks of wall
to bring home in their backpacks
JFK proclaimed: I am a doughnut –  a “Berliner”

 

6.

cunning as the passages in Mahler, Bruckner,
Brahms, the moments when the rival maestros would
outflank each other, speed it up or slow it down
in ways they’d not rehearsed
even to the point the concertmaster gets confused and
skips a phrase the brass and woodwinds
charging  some four bars ahead and young Isolde of the
cellos stands and shrieks, pulling off her fishnet stockings
tossing them and then her bra & panties to the
S.S. weepers in the first row
for after all it’s Herbie von, after all it’s Furtwängler
— the scarecrow and the robot —
while high in the stirrup of his left ear rides
the microfilm that Lord König’s agent pressed too hard
into the auditory canal breaching thus
tympanic membrane hammer & the anvil crashing in a
deaf man’s forge: Da stieg en Baum
all hearing’s tallest tree wound up in there but not for
him sings Granchester the acorn & the oak
and Lebensraum for naiad faun and goat-foot piper
on the mind’s table top
a manic Sea Lord mammoth in his mourning at the sacrifice
of young Apollo open cricket shirt & bare feet tickled
into motor cortex by the music
will expand the neural zone and modify the past
oral well before you know what’s written
whole cities die in firestorm and
the last horseman of the cavalry at Omderman
alive in the audience a gaze exchanged
the flash of a dying synapse crash of a falling roof

 

7.

with advent of magnetic tape the maestros were
denazified — this official, 1947 — but only one can see
the future in LPs and studio recording
back in 1939 he lost the thread entirely doing Meistersinger
for a gala and the tenor stammers to a halt
the fiddles one by one fall silent down comes the curtain
with the nervous floppings of my sophomore
student offering on classical FM to spin a new CD called
Die, Mister Singer!  Sophomores all in 1961
who thought we sat at that table when we sit at this
the format of the menu dropping from the screen like choices
for an appetizer English titles for a movie on The Wall
regions of the brain areas parietal and medial
that turn on and plunge us in the past happily enough
but startled when we drift from our task
a hand on a cup or stein or instrument or someone’s throat
the lobes temporal light up like cities in an MRI
default for Mr. Singer Hellman Isherwood Herr Bruckner
anybody when I think about it clotted cream
was not what he wanted at Café des Westens May 1912
but honey it was not there
but Granchester in 1961 I was nineteen
I’m sixty five
with no desire for adagio adagio on anybody’s birthday
at this table. That one. Above it hover bees