By now, it is almost my father's arm,
a man's arm, that lifts the cigarettes to my mouth
numbed by smoke and raw onions and chocolate milk.
I need calm, something to tranquilize me
after the sudden storm between us that left me shaking,
and with sticky palms . . . It only happens here,
where I blurt in German, dissatisfied and
unproficient
amid the material exhilaration of abstract furniture,
a new car on the Autobahn, electric pylons walking
through the erasures in the Bayrischer
Wald . . .
Once before, I left some lines of Joseph Roth
bleeding on your desk: 'I had no father -- that is,
I never knew my father -- but Zipper
had one.
That made my friend seem quite privileged,
as though he had a parrot or a St Bernard.'
All at once, my nature as a child hits
me.
I was a moving particle, like the skidding lights
in a film-still. Provoking and of no account,
I kept up a constant rearguard action,
jibing,
commenting, sermonizing. 'Why did God give me a voice,'
I asked, 'if you always keep the radio on?'
It was a fugitive childhood. Aged four, I
was chased
round and round the table by my father, who fell
and broke his arm he was going to raise against me.
Michael
Hofmann,
Acrimony