Four more poems by Ruben van Gogh

LISZT DOES UTRECHT

It’s Thursday – which must make this Utrecht.

How cold and windy it is here,

I’ll simply have to squeeze warmth myself

tomorrow from my piano. What a life,

to have to traipse from town to town like this

and everywhere see cultured ladies swooning.

I conjure up electric shocks, they say,

as if my playing were some sort of Leyden jar,

inside though I am empty, all I want’s to lie there

on my bed, with cigarettes, a bottle or two of wine:

champagne can blot out sorrows, so they say.

It’s Thursday – which must make this Utrecht.

TOWN HALL FAÇADE

From the front a closely-knit façade

by the water, but from the back

a baroque Spanish dance of gables. Smokers

exhale quick puffs where long ago the geese would

cackle, herded together week after week

to be sold, and building workers fairly

recently still hacked out chunks of brick;

have violated the whole thing according to some

who do not realise the love of it perhaps.

The sober-living Franciscans of olden times

said no and little knew in doing so

how centuries later time after time precisely yes

would be said, ever again and every which way

for couples pledging eternal fidelity –

should they for that now dismantle all those gables

for that single word of love perhaps?

Anyhow, the always newly married men

and women are completely unaware

of the ordinances placed by

the entrance doors, too preoccupied as they are

in the blissful counting within the bubble-blowing events

of family and relations,

who on their respective sides are

notifying them of the hope of preventing

a public liquidation sale and the shattering

of whatever possible dreams:

that of love probably the most perhaps.

RHIJNAUWEN

If I’d still had explosive shells

with me, I’d have gone by the town

just like that. But I was hungry

and in the tearoom I was passing there

was still some space, so I descended on it:

an encampment for pancakes.

Small paper parasols stuck up at sixes

and sevens from abandoned desserts,

like palisades of past pleasure.

In the distance war was still being

conducted: clusters of children

along the antitank ditch fought

for attention, pulled these

frenetically towards themselves.

Clouds of icing sugar flew up

when peace was finally concluded

in the one, always permitted ring

within the three forbidden rings

of Rhijnauwen: that of family

gathered round the table. Bottles of syrup passed

from hand to hand and everywhere around me

much fine clacking and smacking of lips began.

sparrows foraged in between the tables,

pecked at crumbs that fell by the dozen.

 

BILTSTRAAT 166

The future belongs to youth, but precisely

the past cuts so deep here. Right

through the hall, an act that can’t

be visualised. Young bloods, big-eyed

like heroes in Asian cartoon films

stand ready to be allowed to come up.

Taut and stiff, as once the animals

destined for instruction that were led in.

The audience had every opportunity

to leave, but stayed; riveted to the benches

by the tableaus once presented here.

Their white coats reduced to relics,

but regaining colour from the moment

other things began to happen

behind these ever more identical doors and walls.

Only the reviewer has got stuck

in time, strips the performance

to the bone and analyses the scenes

Finally passes judgment: full of life, certainly,

but with a strange coherence – as if

it has already lasted for a hundred years.