Poem by the Dutch poet Alfred Schaffer

Impasse

Seeking diversion in trifles is what keeps you going.

Practising scales. Loving someone endlessly. But,

what a letdown man is, infatuated, a slave of his organiser

and should he not fancy something, he breaks off the connection.

You smell how I decay, although I am not there, you’re lying, so I

imagine, staring enraptured at a monitor, at the first evidence

of life on Mars, there something innocent moves, something

that has a chance of success and without shifting your gaze

you grasp my hand – which is not there, hurrying to scribble

all this down, somewhere where I embark on pilgrimages

to buildings in high locations, completed long before Christ.

My hawser has snapped, I cannot heave myself on land.

When the city’s buzz soon dies away, I should see more with

these night-glasses. To make quite certain. But there’s nothing more.