In which a man falls in love with his
reflection in
the mirror, and then with a child who
resembles him. Under the Nazis, this means
death.
Berlin burned until its bones
showed. Flame spared
Only this apartment: crouched downstairs,
The tiger Fire was hiding, cracking scraps;
Above, the socket of the top floor flat;
Around, the rubble tundra’s sculpted walls
(Bedheads, headstones, Stonehenge,
hedgerows) rose;
But here a loving couple still
remained
And patiently embraced the invading
flame.
“I am a Cabaret,” Berlin affirmed.
So Paolo in Palermo sold the farm
Mamma and he had shared since pa departed
Via a giant, quiet, quite unguarded
Threshing mill. (Inexorably drawn
Toward the appalling straw-surrounded maw
He’d begged his helper’s aid to take the
brake,
But Paolo only howled and ran away.)
But never mind – for providential Nature
Gave (like many a native matron) mater
In-born, home-grown, unmown mourning
robes.
So locks like soccer socks enclosed her
toes,
Her armpits carpetted and knuckles gloved;
A mat, that matt-black matted back; a
rug
Those shoulders broader than a Nordic soldier’s.
And how adoringly her boy explored her
Inner-arm chinchilla farm and traced
The tracery of lace that graced her face –
Until, holding a so-called safety razor,
Dashing from the bathroom, mother made a
Clotted dotted line across the farm
To tumble, pumping, into Paolo’s arms.
No wonder ever after women would
Wrinkle his winkle like a salted slug!
Paolo loved Berlin. In posh cafés,
Averted as a vase his lovely face
Graced a centre table all alone
To snub the other customers but pose
A morsel for them all. And how he’d
stiffen
When eyes like double barrels turned to hit
him!
Like naked Saint Sebastian unashamed
At rows of Roman bowmen taking aim,
So with a noble patience Paolo kept,
Among their hungry glances, still
erect...
…’till one day someone spoke. Staring
ahead,
All profile like a pawn until they went,
Offended and afraid our hero rose,
In kingly indignation gained the door
–
Then messed his exit dancing face to
face
With some disdainful waiter’s aproned waist.
For, oh! but he was small: a chessboard
knight,
A flower-featured creature heart-beat high,
Who hidden in a window watched alarmed
(Weeks later from a cheap-rate station
bar),
The tall sun lie down, darkness its
duvet,
And crowds that would devour embowered
beauty.
“Poor Paolo,” Paolo thought. Suddenly
then,
A lamp was lit. Its temporary tent
Recalled the farm, mama, his haloed brow
And evenings at the keyboard. Now he
saw
How Berlin herds that circled seeking
prey
Had vanished in an instant. In their
place
His own reflection watching him! Transfixed
At loveliness at bay, pale, with parted
lips
And fingers stilled around a lifted
glass
This image gazed compassionately back,
His beauty’s only equal! With fearful
hope,
Paulo, smiling, shyly joined the toast
Adoring as the Lord when, newly
wakened,
Adam like a mirror faced his maker.
In harmless happiness a decade passed
As jackboots trampled trash across the
maps.
From sweethearts meeting through that
bar-room window
Even as Hindenburg appointed Hitler,
The twosome rendezvoused around the city
While Germany reversed the Versailles
Treaty.
However, by the time of Kristallnacht,
His lover lived at ease in Paolo’s flat,
The bedroom wardrobe’s mirrored door his
home
Before the Hitler-Stalin peace accord.
Enraptured in their intimate relations
Both ignored the Polish annexation,
Used the beginnings of the Berlin
blitz
To spice their nights of unexampled
bliss,
And comfortably sunk to dull old lovers
Missed the sudden Hunnish thrust at Russia.
But mummy’s money couldn’t last. Weekly
Teacher Paolo, pale with rage, received a
Menopausal hausfrau’s powdered pout,
A clammy adolescent’s acnied scowl,
Twin pre-pubescent sisters sour with pee,
And last a lean Gestapo engineer
Who worked in “Deportations” – meaning
“Death”.
(And how this grey-faced ancient’s ageless
strength
Would overpower Paolo in his dreams
Of fraying railway sidings where the trains
Were pigeon-toed and panting, Poland bound,
Till tall on skater’s blades they slithered
out
With crowds of Paolo’s fellow felons,
decked
With Jewish lemon-yellow, red for
Reds,
Or else, like him, with pink, pink – which
means...
But Paolo never could recall his dreams.)
One week, while Paolo scowled with hopeless
hate
At this mechanic engineer who played
Relentless as condemned-cell clocks that
close
Scissoring fingers on their awful goal,
This latter licked his slit of livid lips
And rose and closed the scrolled piano lid
(So Nosferatu by his casket swayed,
Gorged on gore and dazed in day’s first
rays)
And sighed that with his son-in-law and
daughter
(One with Rommel, one in the bombing)
slaughtered,
Their mourning son, his convalescent ward,
Must now incessantly be kept absorbed.
“Thus,” the dilating pupil dared to add,
“The child requires from you a daily
class.”
At length the death’s head student leaves
And Paolo, heading for the bedroom, meets
His flat-mate, also angry. How they rage
To lose their sweet seclusion, rave and
wave –
Until, like lovers that a row arouses,
Their fingers find the lump that fronts
their trousers.
And always Allied bombers trawl for souls,
Their loads like ladders leading to the
Lord.
Yet Paolo strolls this city where the sun,
Impending like incendiary bombs,
Emulates the daylight raids he braves:
Burly Berliners, only, make him quake.
As fattened cattle butt a butcher’s
gate
With incoherent fear and snouty face,
Or wronged and tongueless zombies dumbly
yearn
To argue terms but largely gargle worms,
Each beefy burgher’s words come belching up
In grunted gutterals from bulging guts.
He is an artist; only artists live;
But open graves the pavements in Berlin!
From whited sepulchres a city wide,
Fled to his bedroom wardrobe Paolo finds
Refreshing, cool, reflecting pools to bathe
With him (his only friend) so frail, so
brave!
But then the door-bell. Agitato still
He turns the catch – at which there enters
in
Amazing brightness, with, within that
blaze,
Himself! Full length, with equal solemn
face,
Enveloped in the level evening light,
A shining child, precisely eye to eye,
Meets him completely like the wardrobe
glass.
Again like moving mirrors comes that flash
As Paolo shuts the door, and turns to see
The child smile shyly by the gleaming keys.
“So beautiful! So beautiful!” he called
At midnight at the mirror’s prison wall,
When (pressed impetuously breast to breast
To hear his sweetheart’s heart, and breathe
his breath,
Moaning to know the other also moans
When hands that reach to feel impede his
own,
Or – bending tenderly to tendered necks –
When kissing lips by kissing lips are
checked)
He witnessed mirror symmetry that proved
Their perfect empathy, their perfect love.
Cacophonous as crashing Cadillacs,
Raskolnikov’s trepanning axe attack,
Or England’s Empire’s senile flatulence,
The stamping Allied ordnance advanced.
It scattered plaster dandruff round his
head,
Made cutlery like crickets chafe its legs,
Brought whiffs of shit like fear from
fractured drains
While tearful tremors shook his flatmate’s
face.
Yet still the lovely youngster every day
(His beauty like a naughty playmate)
played.
And how reluctantly the notes flew free,
As shook buds surrender drunken bees –
The struck piano wires an opened cage
Where song-birds, long-immured, still
hesitate.
And Lord, how gorgeousness had not forgot
His smallest corner, love-lorn Paolo
thought,
Bewildered in unnumbered infant fingers,
Lost in labyrinthine ears, in tresses
tangled,
Seeing that peerless profile pulsing out
As ripples replicate an anchored boat,
Or merged with air that clouded outline
shimmer,
Blurred as the bevelled edge of bedroom
mirrors,
While mirrors face to face might show him
grown
To just such kindergarten crowds as now
Gathered to grandad’s welcoming embrace,
Thence with accelerating pace escaped,
To leave the teacher reaching for his stool
Before that pinnacle of pleasure cooled,
With thoughts like flashlit snapshots, all
Showing a fractious brat that played, or
paused,
Or kicked the instrument, or pouting whined
For ever-escalating chocolate bribes.
“So now what happens to our happy home?”
His flatmate asked. And Paolo’s post-grope
glow
Failed as he faced the other’s worried gaze
And dying smile. Perturbed, he turned away,
Over a shoulder showing frowning brows:
But seeing his sweetheart sneak a parting
scowl,
Wondered, as suspect husbands always
might,
What brought this on – and was it worth a
try.
And when in bed (instead of sweet unease
Playing a game they named “Whose Bit Is
This?”,
Indubitably sure the wardrobe door,
If once he chose to check, would stand
ajar),
Paolo, solo, scornfully disowned
Thoughts of that winsome infant’s flawless
form.
Nor did that scribble of delicious
limbs,
So slim, so small, at all call out to
him.
“More! More!” The orphan flexed his neck
Erect for chocolate like a cuckoo chick,
Then satiated played his favourite game,
Became again a Deportation train,
And stamping past the cramped flat’s
bric-a-brac
He rattled teacher’s cheap Venetian glass,
His leaning Pisan souvenirs, the shelves
Of withered lilies, lamps and candle-ends,
The curling calling card that praised
A curious Munich club he’d briefly played
(They’d all adored him so: but he was
bored!),
Then half on purpose kicked across the
floor
His only books – a six-part set that held
The “favourite poet” Paolo never read.
(D’Annunzio it was, that Fascist scribe
Who, all Sicilian schoolboys know, devised
The oral form of Onan’s lone abuse
And ordered both his lower ribs removed –
A symbol of the scribbler, and a mockery
Of Adam’s rib that merely made monogamy.)
Thence with a shriek of steam he crossed
the hall
Where shaded by a parching parlour palm
Unsteady pedestals held dusty busts
Of Paolo’s heroes frowning at the fuss.
(Again a head displayed d’Annunzio,
That nasty blackshirt bard whose toilet
bowl
Through ranked reflectors let the wretch
inspect …
But let some southern schoolboy tell the
rest.)
Then, helpless, Paolo saw the infant sprint
Around his filthy kitchen’s stinking sink
Where every pot he’d got was long since
stacked
And none was ever washed except the last,
Then back to thunder under and around
The humming tunnel of the baby grand,
Shaking the weighty silver frame thereon
(The only photo known of Paolo’s mum),
And lastly open (Paolo shouting, “No!”)
With operatic force the bedroom door.
But here he halts. He heaves. His quivering
lip
Like cappuccino foams. He’s being sick!
Swiftly Paolo points the voiding boy
Round to the sordid toilet where he toils
A kind of clotted cocoa up. But then –
Insanity! For as the spasm ends,
A solitary chocolate droplet spots
The youngster’s shirt. So Paolo pulls it
off.
His shivering fingers strengthen as they
feed:
Quickly the boy is bare. Now Paolo sees
The meagre room, narrow, its towels
sour,
The maps of damp, and how a fungus sprouts
Behind the toilet where his water falls,
Transfigured in an instant by a form
Palid as plaster statuettes that shine
Dimly in Sicilian hillside shrines;
Or Dresden shepherdesses somehow found
Cushioned on rubble, saved in that razed
town;
Or Viennese ice cream (his little dick
The Sempiternal Chef’s concluding quiff);
A Sistine Chapel ceiling cherub’s cheek;
Cathedrals in Venetian streets, their feet
In honey-coloured mud (around his shoes
His pretty outfit from the Hitler
Youth)
But mostly notes the infant’s gimlet gaze
Shining triumphant from that angel face.
It rained that night. Cross-legged on the
floor,
Shrunk to a skull and crossbones by the
cold,
Paolo’s mirrored lover scowled him down:
“I’ll tell,” he said. Then the emerging
moon
Bared its beggar’s bruises, spilling chill
Illumination like an open fridge
And lit a lunar duplicate – his face,
Cratered with dented features in its frame
Of ever-rarer hair and gecko throat.
“I’m almost forty,” Paolo thought. And
dozed.
And in a moment woke, seeing a train
Zipping Poland open to his burned
remains,
Then slept again. Then felt a banded snake,
Clamped to his pants, fatten to railway
track
Bleeding him east. His pants were grabbed
In some piano’s stallion fangs. And trapped
In train doors, so he was dragged and died,
His pants erect with broken bones. Barbed wire
Snaked from his score and circled him. He
choked
Oceans of broken glass – and at last woke
Convulsively. Again his lover said,
“I’ll tell.” But then the stern reflection
wept,
And Paolo, kissing slippy lips, vouchedsafe
–
Through his own tears – never again to
stray.
His flatmate met mama – when mother’s
picture
Splintered his image in the wardrobe
mirror.
Held hostage (while the prancing brat had
smashed
Paolo’s household ornaments and danced
Around the wrecked apartment shedding
clothes,
Yelling “I’ll tell, I’ll tell,” till Paolo
saw
His mirror like a river slip, raw wood
Surge to its surface like some coffin lid)
The heavy silver picture frame
released
Lover and mother, bursting into tears.
Paolo, crawling, saw reflected eyes
Wide as a diver’s dying under ice;
Discovered the parental portrait torn,
A sliver like a razor through her throat;
And turned toward the boy.
For
one so young
His pupil proved unconscionably strong,
But pacified at last agreed to go
In all good order through the wardrobe
door,
Where stubbornly he crumpled like a coat
Till teacher’s necktie kept him on his
toes.
Paolo slowly closed the wardrobe door,
Then, for parity, removed his clothes.
Paolo opened wide the wardrobe door,
And wrapped a matching necktie round his
throat,
And thought. He felt aesthetically
distressed
At the lad’s chest’s projecting spike of
glass.
He pushed his mother’s picture on the
point,
And climbed inside, the shard against his
heart.
Beside the youngster’s tie he tied his own
And softly shut the wardrobe on them
both.
Two blocks off, long as a grandfather
clock,
The lad’s dead grandad – solemn, spotless,
stopped,
Lay beside his car, which (splintered by
bombs,
Its fat Gestapo chauffeur knocked to chops)
Hard-pressed SS investigators guessed
Mingled the missing infant in its grisly
wreck.
/ENDS/
========