I shall have to pee out the window, says the translation
in the 1902 pocket phrasebook Alastair’s
grandfather gave him. Also, Call the hostler!
and Here are my boots, meaning polish them
but nothing that helps decipher life in this fortress
four hundred years ago, all cobble and cannon,
all ice storms and armor and horses. How, for example,
did they haul water for livestock and people?
Out of what reservoir make time for
carving twelve marble apostles and a Christ
that are tucked in a chapel chipped from the rock
of the scarp that commands the Salzach?
No idiom to tell us how secure
this Festung was before war took the air.
Down in the candybox town we dawdle
at Tomaselli’s over cups of hot chocolate.
I pretend I have come back here for the sake
of my forebears, come back out of exile
to reinvent how it was for them,
seeking among the faces that pass
those as old as I, those few with missing
limbs, or sightless, who endured the Anschluss,
seeking among the dirndls and lederhosen
the unknowable middleaged ones who risked the ovens
and came through stained with a deep understanding.
Bitte, bitte schön. Ropes of rain
fall on a sea of purposeful umbrellas
in calm green homogeneous Austria.
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