Betrink dich und nenn sie Paris
Each day I wake feeling I've already failed.
Tonight let's get wrecked and call it Venice.
A woman I loved lied that she was healed
and for a night until waking, we were. I was born
with a mortgage, now show me the house, the home,
slip me the dose that'll make me care less, I wake
each day felling I've already torn
what I meant to rethread. (Did anything seem
in Eden, or was it all its own is?)
There was that woman, so enlisted in life,
one of passion's true recruits, Love, I said
I am so bad at loving, and the usual biz
ensued — scenes, loss and its isotopic
slow-fade, never done. On the deathbed of the skeptic,
where he slept each night of his dying life,
he said, It was hard having so little skin-to-skin
with the world — but look on my works!
Venice
is sinking, and it might be the case
it was never the key at all. Said a small voice
in the cirrus of a dream. Love is its own abode.
Not sure what it meant, though I think I knew once.
There is some cold road that you must renounce.
About this Poem
"Inspired By a Line By Paul Celan" was originally printed in Steven Heighton's Governor-General Award-winning collection The Waking Comes Late (2016). Find more works by the author in KFPL's Collection.
