Where did you hear me in this cold…

Where did I bring names and contra-names

into the story, into this account

out of poverty, my specter… My Word picked

sheep, pigs, whipped oxen in calf,

drank from the back of the cow…

in thousand-year-old books

my father’s plow scarred the stars back and forth…

Octobers mowed down the truth,

the wild wheat, the black cities,

to the very edges and into the darkness

in a gull’s cry, in a donkey’s bray…

I spoke for many, but to speak

I had to fly up

like one of these birds,

flailing through the earth,

converging with millennia,

boring through the firmament…

October, my old chum, my humble father,

prodigious alcohol

who scrawls “hell, hell, hell, hell”

on my intestinal walls

beer drinker for the poor,

frostbite carrier for the mediocrity…

Thomas Bernhard, “Ave Virgil,” translated by James Reidel

Happy Halloween!