In Jakob’s house

In Jakob’s house

In Jakob’s house

1.
On one morning, Jakob, holding my hand
though I was holding yours, you took me
from my first apple and honey breakfast
among Rodchenko’s functional dreams,
through the heroin-haunted station
into your most recent city.

We wandered between galleries of life-size traps
for animals and people built of recycled materials,
down a long dinner table of sculpted silent men,
through open-legged streets of Japanese whore-children
pinned to the walls and out into the mediaeval square
where roasted almonds, gingerbread and spiced wine
played their flutes around your voice
leading me further than I had come.

Pierced by the winter sun’s bleak eyes we sat
bare-headed drinking coffee after coffee,
watching the exiled Roma women
perform their desperation for us.

Inside your unfolding story of the century’s failure
you ushered me past the monumental mechanical worker
striking the air over the heads of Frankfurt’s electronic princes,
through scaffold towers and across pavements drilled open
to receive new steel roots, into the darkness
of the tiny shop where chocolates are made
according to a treasured recipe, and chose
ten small perfections for your anxious beloved.

Jakob, how many worlds have you survived?
I know you only in swallow swoops inside a few journeys,
drinking briefly from the small bowls you leave
in places I might pause to sip.

You’ve read everything and you’re out walking to work
in your eighty-sixth year, in this century full of dying struggles
you step sure-footed into the next skyscraper shadow
convinced that human beings are still growing towards the sun.


Were you always this whole-hearted?
Did you stand on a silent threshold one year
looking at your bombed past and grow
thinner than unfed dogs in the frozen street?

You are the century that rescued Europe from itself,
the man who still carries Kristallnacht’s splinters in his pocket,
who’s read the bankers’ ransom notes to governments
and the eyes of women with drugged babies
invading suburban trains, Kandinsky’s colours
and Bill Viola’s roaring brain music,
and who draws his comrades of all countries
into the late November wind
to review their mistakes and plan their next campaign.

Leaving again for my southern home
I think about the first journey of a family
that did not have the strength to carry you
inside its memories, inside its hopes.
May I choose you now, Jakob, as my father’s father,
the one he never knew? Is it too late?

2.
In Jakob’s house I feel welcome.
And it is Sigi’s house and it is she who welcomes me
inside her diamond-cutter’s gaze,
letting Jakob’s story fill the air like incense,
her own smoke curling privately along the walls.
She’s chosen this, it suits her
to be left out of the light
that washes what she’s seen away from itself.

Sometimes she brings a quiet set of inverted commas
out of her smile to place around him.
Often she shakes her head as he talks.
Her life is full of the history
he hopes will lead to better things.

Through my guest room walls
their voices come during the night,
tumbling embrace of Schumann’s cadences,
braced spine of Brecht’s chords.

3.
Dear Jakob, where I come from there are men like you
but their memories are shorter. They read no poetry
because the distances are too great between hunger and a plan.
Wide-eyed with commitment, stopping nowhere long enough.

Where I live time is so new that those in power
wear gold-plated watches bigger than their hearts.
Your continent’s horrors were my childhood fables.
Mine come roaring at me in three dimensions of sunlit misery
louder than my language. Here love is never
the answer to anyone’s weeping

and I hunger so for that landscape of intimate struggles,
willingness to save one person at a time.
Easily seduced by darkness stories
offered like bitter chocolate in a bright room,
my longings twine around the wrought-iron ruins of lives
fire-bombed into a lacework of suffering,
wrapped in old furs and the loyalty of candlelit shelters,
full of a cabaret melancholy I swallow like red wine.
A history filled with matinee idols rushing to rescue me
from the utter loneliness of my dreams.

Who are you loyal to, Jakob,
who would you say no to, for whose sake?
You have a kindness inside your anger
that makes your violent century bearable
but you are a man like a man I know
and I must ask you this, forgive me Jakob,
who have you destroyed by not looking back?

It is your work to keep walking
sweet-voiced and urgent ahead of your children.
Your house is full of love and its walls are made only of thoughts,
and you will keep leaving to go to work and returning
to build new walls against the winds that follow you

and under the bare sky of the future
I will shelter in my heart
the small nest of history you built for me there.