POSTCARD FROM ZURICH

Zurich is rubbing against the Zurichberg.
Zurich doesn’t like being tickled under its fur.
Zurich likes order, it’s hardworking, not necessarily welcoming
or particularly warmhearted, but direct, fair, more
or less so. And who doesn’t think about profit? Not everything that glitters
is gold. Zurich doesn’t glitter. It’s sober, doesn’t like
to guess, to solve riddles. Zurich likes facts, the Bahnhofstrasse,
the Fraumuenster, zum Storchen, guests even more, not always
poets, the house where Buechner died, and Lenin lived. The Kunsthaus.
In der I 37, the Uetliberg.
If an old man calls things by their names – that’s enough.
One word – an entire life.
And it is not easy to insist upon order in this orderly city which is
already a memory. A memory that surely
emerges suddenly, hides, leaps. Hard to restrain.
In memory, death is struck dumb. He doesn’t have the right to speak. But
Zurich has also changed. We
have changed more. Zurich is just Zurich in the end.
It isn’t exhausted. It doesn’t look back
with a sort of uncertainty. The lake doesn’t abandon it
even when it’s all wings on a sunny day.
I almost forgot: in Zurich we were all still here
together, we sat around one table for our evening meal
one by one, all of us.

POSTCARD FROM ZURICH