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Remembering Michelangelo's David

By these his hands the vineyards spring ripeness
and the beasts rise again in meadows spilled with blood
to move off, desiring death once more
till another time.

The women still observe him with impassive faces
and ungirdle themselves for the boy.
Old women in the delight of terror.
His eyes...

And dead young girls chafe against the cold;
wake, to match the marble and to breed
a race of beauty not for death.

How men regard him secret in their philistine awe
as he stands above in anxious
and terrible expectancy . . . is it. . . of kingdoms
and years of men.

He arrives always at the perfect marble word.
The entire stone slays our preposterous giant
so when it roars why should he care,
this boy who holds the covenant.

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I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom, one day I went with a friend on a walking tour. We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the man I would move with to a boarding house, then to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant, and from there one morning in January to the Registry to be married. Afterward we moved to a studio apartment and two years later to the school where boys returning from the war would remove their collars and sew them back on with red thread to demonstrate the end of their allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past. Everyone wanted to be launched into a place from which you could look back and ask whether the red was also meant to enact spilled blood. You could say so, but only if you want to insist that history's minutia is best read as allegory. The fact is, history didn't exist then. Each day was a twenty-four hour stand-still on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future. It's near where you're standing now. One day we were lying in the sun dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera came by and devoured us. …

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