He came to Prague in a fragile boat,
His hair was beetle black.
His thin ribbed body was barely afloat
And stretched and pale as if on a rack.
As white as a bone in a dying throat
He stumbled along and clutched his coat,
With a siren's song he'd learnt by rote
And a fardel of stories and fables.
The road was narrow and dimly lit,
It skirted the foot of the palace.
He simply requested a permit to live
But was greeted with laughter and malice.
Granted a visa, he trained as ascribe
And hardly slept a wink.
Thin, unloved and barely alive
He lived and breathed in paper and ink.
He rattled around in a form of speech
Old German and dead bureaucratic;
And when he got home from the office at night
He padlocked himself in his attic.
One evening he met a young woman -
A Jewish Berliner, Felice,
She smiled and stroked his thin pale hands,
He sensed an unusual peace.
'If only you'd leave your attic bower,
This tiny circle of light,
With me you could blossom into a flower
And not be a creature of night.
'You stay couped up in this small gloomy space -
It like putting yourself in detention.
But I have to keep bottled up, Felice,
For constraint is the nurse of invention.'
He began to sweat and to pace the floor,
He threw away bundles of paper.
Would he enter the strange world of daylight and flesh,
Or burn up alone like a taper?
With equivocal purpose he made for the door
Yet he ached as if on a rack;
One of his feet seemed stuck to the floor,
And the night was insect black.
As he reached the threshold and snuffed out the candle
He felt a sharp pain in his lung;
His thin pale hand never reached the handle,
Like a song of love never sung.
He staggered around, collapsed on the bed,
It felt like a metamorphosis;
Out of his mouth it spilled dark red:
He had tuberculosis.
Love had been slain - a violent thief
Had struck him and stolen his breath.
Instead of the beautiful voice of Felice
His companion from now would be Death.
Yet he felt inside him a certain relief.
He as spared the momentous decision.
Was he himself the shadowy thief?
Had he made the fatal incision?
'Too much blood has been spilled,' he wrote,
'We'll never be joined as one.
There's a dry rattle deep in my throat,' he coughed,
'I must shield myself from the sun.'
Hand in hand he danced the dry roads
With a fluttering under his ribs.
His companion's limbs were beetle black,
Like a vein of ink or a hairline crack,
And they danced to asilver nib.
In occasional airs his siren song sings,
With its terrible lonely elation.
He flew from the world on folio wings -
His final transformation.
from Pipelines, 1998.