Kirmizi_ada

A few bad things happened this week. Someone at the World Meteorological Organization thought it was cool to name a really awful typhoon after a friend of mine. Then I got locked out of my house and slept on a green plastic lawn chair in the back of a 24-hour gym. But now the locksmith is on his way home with my 50 Euros, and I’m back inside steaming broccoli. Someone upstairs is practicing “O Come All Ye Faithful” on the recorder.

But there was a good thing also. Or more precisely, a perfect thing. On a lark, I went to a poetry reading by a guy I had heard about on the radio, who was about to celebrate his 50th birthday after 23 years of living with HIV/AIDS. Wirz is a fantastic last name for a poet, because you have no choice but to back-roll the “r” with the abandon of a manual pencil-sharpener. And this oppositional-defiant “r” gives you cover to do equally intrusive things with the “z”. The name of Wirz' most recent collection is Storm Before the Silence [Sturm vor der Stille].

As far as German poetry goes (apart from its most acutely sentimental and sublimity-prone representatives like Rainer Maria Rilke), I have never been a die-hard fan. A few nice moments with Celan, George, and Brecht, but brief and never breathless. So anyway I squeezed into this little bookstore called Eisenherz [Iron Heart] and shed as many layers as possible. There was a kind of good-faith, guileless milling-about happening that indicates something literary is about to take place. And a table with champagne and cold, soft pretzels— which also meant something.

There were as many canes in the room as bomber jackets—most of which shared owners. Mario read from all of his books, which were stacked, dauntless, on the edge of the jittery lectern. Only reading a few selections from each, he interrupted himself with radiant digressions about how one "little book" after the other almost didn’t come into being. He talked about other poets--Detlev Meyer, Napoleon Seifert--who died while he wasn't dying. He talked about his little one-room walk-up in Neukölln, where he got his HIV diagnosis in 82, got deathly afraid of dying alone, didn’t, and then started writing again.

It was only when he knocked his glass of water clear off the lectern into a pile of porn magazines that I realized that this was a family reunion—of everyone who had survived queer pre-Unification Berlin. And everyone, except me, already loved this man dearly. Or at least hated him. The filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim was in the back row, silently shushing the poet, as the latter revealed the sanguine political passions of their epistolary tryst in the late 80s. From Mario’s gentle, magnanimous gloss of their relationship, I learned the expression “auf unterschiedlichen Sternen behaust” [“at home on different stars”). There was an intermission, for the pretzels and sekt, after which Mario called us back to order in his charmingly ultimative Tuntenmund.

This is actually not a big ramp-up to how great a poet this guy is. In fact, when I sit at home now reading his poems aloud to myself, I still don’t go lame with gratitude as I do during Stanley Kunitz’ “The Round” or Lucille Clifton’s poems about history. As I look through his books—one is called A Week has Seven Lives, another Embraces at the End of the Night—I’m hoping for a poem that will fit the brash generosity, the unstudied solicitations of his voice. Here is one poem I translated—not quite the one I’m looking for. But worth reading.


Traveler’s Hymn to his Suitcase

for Andreas Walther

A little down
From all the leaving
Though he knows no bitterness
Now, as then, he gazes at the alikeness
Of the likeness of the places
the luggage does not change
considerably either
So he remains
The discreet witness of all the reenactments
Only sometimes
Maybe
he recalls
Between some time and some where
the sleepless night
before the first journey

(1984)