You won’t believe this – a postcard from Paris –

Paris des Rêves,

the Paris of dreams.

What, you say you think it’s London,

and the cat on the window sill

staring forever like an ancient Egyptian

is not Parisian? This can’t be. There are no

such cats in London. And no

such pair of lovers lying on the grass – what an embrace!

Hyde Park, you say?

And the fire eater?  

It seems like his heart is burning. In London?

And the one blowing soap bubbles

like shiny little lies in sunlight –

where did he come from? And this river, so gray

that a passerby on the other side seems not to exist at all?

And those people sleeping on the edge of the dock

who knows if they’ll sail off soon – where to –

are they Londoners or Parisians, uh?

The Thames? Not the Seine? And anyway how can it be

that you answer while I’m writing a postcard

and say just the opposite,?

You mean to say I’m not there at all, that we two are here

next to each other, still close,

weaving a dream?

A raised arm may be lowered

a salute – withdrawn.

A mouth filled with shrieks is also capable of speaking.

Wild shouts may turn into laughter.

It isn’t absolutely necessary to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes.

Yet Vienna is beautiful, a spotlessly clean city

with a rich past. Many musicians

lived there, actors, a lot of authors.

A city with much to be proud of.

On the Heldenplatz the sparrows chatter,

the traffic hums.

A hangman doesn’t have to be ashamed because he was

a hangman. And the Danube

is not really blue.

In a certain sense goodness is boring, Kafka wrote,

 without consolations. Be seeing you.

You can live with one arm, one leg, one lung

one kidney, no legs, no arms, one eye, no eyes.

I live with one heart.

I didn’t want to say it. I don’t know why I did.

Now they’ll come with thin, sharpened fingers

to poke, probe, decree: a total lie –

I know, I know. I

eat, sleep, work, listen to music.

“From the pure thoughts that arose before blessed-be-his-name

he created angels. And from thoughts of disaster

he created demons.”

What nonsense. What terrible nonsense.

When flying over gray cumulous clouds, in dim, late light, one imagines

how easy it would be to go, a light step swallowed unheard no effort,

to lie down and never rise again, an airy body, floating, almost bodiless –

a soft landscape of death, the depths of death, the death-sun sinking, the hills

             of the underworld

are made of down – images, images. I’m not a cat. I haven’t got nine lives.

For what, what’s this all for?

I don’t know. The truth is –

what terrible nonsense.