Expeditions with W.G. Sebald

You think you want congruence,
our imaginations closer
than the rings of Saturn,
yours just enclosed in mine. --Susan Ludvigson

I. Walking

Let's list as you loved to:
Jerusalemstraat, Nachtegaalstraat,
Pelikanstraat, Paradijsstraat,
Immerseelstraat--
street names accumulate and empty as the long begats
of the Bible, as the smudged faces in photographs,
whose uneager looks, whose knowing looks,
are husks of insects piled up as if
one name on top of another,
one corpse concealing another,
can be said.

Let's walk again
in Suffolk, as you did:
see those same compressed horizons of land,
the calm Deben, the laden,
low skies, pools of ashes
at Auschwitz.

Words are words.
Our shovels, our nails.

Can I tell your tale
of how, lost on a walk near Benacre Broad,
you came upon a brackish lake?
Always for me, that word leaps out like
a struggling fish -- brackish!
Meticulous writer, did you
bend over the water,
take some of the lake into your mouth?

Or can I tell you of my dream
in which, discovering
some power of the hands
I turned a bare woods to blossom
and then, at a whim,
sent each white
flower
snowflaking to the ground?

Are there not two possible gods
also walking the world:
one who raises His arms
and changes the very nature of things --
and another, hunchbacked with effort,
who bends to taste, eternally,
that which He already knows
is bitter?


II. Fishing

'Dying,'
said Ingmar Bergman,
'is a very wise arrangement.'

Perhaps. For years, fishing with my grandfather,
I made him take from my hook
the herring, skipjack, flathead, black bream,
so that, once, on an expedition with a friend,
neither of us knew how to make the kill.
I was sure you broke the neck
at the gills, but she, inspired,
took the knife and sawed off its head.

Such things stay,
as if, inexplicably, we trawled,
and caught all sorts of things in our nets.
I didn't think of it when, in the Louvre,
I came upon Fra Angelico's Le martyre
des saints Cosme et Damien
though perhaps I should have;
those saints on their knees, the violence
of their beheading, and their halos,
lingering even over the decapitated heads,
as light is inclined to,
on what we have severed.

'Perhaps it is no coincidence,'
you said, 'that to dream of fish
is said to mean death.'
And, how much we have mourned,
or how little,
day in, day in.

The men of Sicily fish for tunny
as they have for thousands of years.
Hauled, stunned and bleeding,
from the sea -- one of the fishermen
will always place his brown hands
over the tunny's great eyes,
in order to ease its panic.

Shevaun Cooley

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