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!
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