The Old, Angry Songs Poem by Aisle Walton

Die alten, bösen Lieder,
die Träume bös' und arg,
die laßt uns jetzt begraben,
holt einen großen Sarg.
- Heinrich Heine


I.
He wanted a coffin, he said -
large, with long, thick planks,
and twelve giants to carry it
down to the sea to throw it in,
because nowhere else was dark
or low enough a grave;
no other tomb where the black,
still waters of the deep
would crush the contents of the bier
so fully into forgetting -
and would not tell me,
not yet,
just what he planned to bury
in the vast container,
but simply said,
with a gleam that made me worry,
that it would be many things
and heavy,
so heavy that he could be sure
they'd sink too fast for hesitations
and would leave no trace,
nor any other way of being found,
or rising up again..



II.
I wanted a coffee, or so I said,
large, a long, thick latte,
and twelve baristas…
no, let's not be silly,
but in the end she would not meet me
amongst the tables by the stand
between the wide street and the church.
I probably had left it late in any case -
not just by now but by three years or so,
and not just time but also
I was too slow in myself to be
a ‘finished product' soon enough
I think, or at the very least
that served as grounds for
all appropriate punishment -
a bit like this poem really,
we can move on to another,
I know of one by Heine.



III.
..So there was no relief
when finally he turned to me,
confiding that he planned to
place within the cask
all of his ‘love and suffering'
because, in fact, it had become
too painful and too difficult to feel,
and that therefore it was preferable
to numb it all and
cut himself away.
Yet with this severance
I could not help but wonder
what it was that would remain
upon the shore of his existence;
taking each slow surf,
each in-breathed tide
to gradually efface this ghost
that was a man with
everything, or nothing, he had lost,
depending how you looked at it.


I, too, tried to bury mine with an ocean,
now glad that some escaped me,
trapping each thought
on a sofa at midnight -
and the coffin,
sinking slowly,
slowly down
into the coffee..