Infinite Lieder
Your last hours overlooking the pear blossoms
snowing down on the suburban street
where I pumped you full of Schubert
instead of the Mozart you loved.
Your Winterreise started at nightfall,
the last syringe full of Jägermeister
to send you on your way.
Ha — you thought it was going to be
oxycontin again just like you thought
I’d send you out with The Magic Flute,
but there was only Schubert, Schubert,
and your jaundiced eyes bulging as if to say:
Yo — I’m dyin’ here. I’m dyin’ here.
Yer killin’ me. You couldn’t find
a little Mozart? Hey, I’m dyin’ here.
Drüben hinterm Dorfen steht ein Leiermann
und mit starren Fingern dreht er was er kann
I watched him build models as a kid: airplanes, cars
ships, a glow-in-the-dark Frankenstein that stood
vigilant by my bed. It colored my dreams
until I was eighteen when the tennis match
I could never win against that glowing fiend faded.
By then, you were off to Silicon Valley to design
programmable logic devices, to dream the dream
of the start-up and parachute out a self-made man,
but that parachute never opened and you were
still logging hours a month before the end.
Barfüß auf dem Eise wankt er hin und her
Und sein kleiner Teller bleibt ihm immer leer
At your memorial a co-worker told the story of
a meeting you were required to attend concerning
a hardware glitch. A waste of time, you said,
but you sat and listened to all sides bicker
over the diagnosis of the problem, then even
more vehemently over the fix. Finally, you got up
and announced that you’d already fixed
the problem and left the room in silence the way
a gunfighter would. Is that true grit the measure
of a man you’d want everyone to remember . . .
or just the persistence of the hurdy gurdy man?
Keiner mag ihn hören keiner aus sieht an
und die Hunden knurren um den alten Mann
What dark truth resides in the black box
that streams images, the face turned
toward its light? How do the fingers trace
the electronic mysteries on the screen?
No one knows the brains that put it all
together, that learn arcane languages and
run the final design specs into place
so that we can tender our information abuse
and clutter our lives with a few more megabytes.
There once was a brain that could name all
fifty states and lines from favorite movies.
It grew to include the function of the slide rule,
how to calculate resistance and impedance.
From there it learned the set-up of
the integrated circuit and hard drive bit transfer
rates, network speeds, and the sorting of
packets to a single IP. There I was feeding it
oxycontin at night to qualm the screams
that shook the car alarms awake in the street.
I was fuzzing the hard edge of pain where
he’d let me, but not enough because at the end
he’d pull away before the syringe was done.
He wanted to be clear so the last set of data
could be crunched, the age of the spectacle
delivering its one last great disappointment.
und er läßt es gehen alles wie es will
dreht und seine Leier steht ihm nimmer still
Tired of the battling and the chemo, you
let it all go, and driving you back from Stanford
after they had pronounced your fate, nothing
left to be done, I saw your only regret —
there was still so much to do for your employer,
so much more work. Always one more thing.
And the hospice nurse told me I had to give
you an enema. I waited two, three, four days
for something to pass, but I couldn’t do it.
The new measure of a man as hero is whether
he can give his dying brother an enema,
whether he can let Papageno reign over
the infinite lieder. Tell me, brother, will you
let me play my songs on your old computer
or is my head just supposed to download
more stuff? Is there anyone smart enough
out there to invent a vacuum cleaner for
the brain . . . maybe that is what alcohol is for.
Travel well, my brother, travel well —
may the Jägermeister lend you the light to forget.
wunderlicher Alter soll ich mit dir geh’n?
Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier drehn?
Bio:
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) and The String of Islands (Dink, 2015). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters’ Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.wordpress.com/) and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios [http://linebreakstudios.blogspot.com/]. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth} [http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickele/11129585563/] [http://www.sacmetroarts.org/documents/FullPoems.pdf] He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento and houses his father’s literary estate—one volume: Robert Gerstmann’s book of photos of Chile, 1932.