Outlook Anniversary Issue: Porcelain And The Memory Of A Shattered City

Porcelain

Say after me: it doesn’t take much to make

a moonscape of a city. Or charcoal of the folk

who lived there. Imagine this: in the time it takes

to nip out of the opera for a pack of fags

the streets were death traps, bubbling with tar.

Just now, frost, hands frozen blue on handlebars,

then the sea of houses was raked by desert winds.

Stiff as pharaohs in their winter coats they burned.

Never was a summer hotter. The last alarm

hardly faded—and the ashes were still warm.

*

Luther standing there: the image that I can’t let go.

Surrounded by a wasteland, shoots of tender green,

under a disdainful sky, almost forgotten, memento

of the blaze: and in this urban desert, a window arch remains.

Do you recall? The lonely risalit, black with soot,

moaning soundlessly, like the o in torso . . . chorus . . . baroque.

A mote like this in your eye and you’re stuck

with it for life. And yet the greatest shock

was not the ruined church, his final thesis—

but that all around the sheep grazed on oblivious.

*

Memory: here’s the thing: it starts in certain regions

of the brain and then returns. And origin and home

are just grains of sand in the shifting dunes of neurons.

Blindly, we follow those early paths from childhood on

inscribed into the cortex. And by sense of place we mean:

that this is where it’s at, inside your head and not out there:

that’s to say what comes and goes in here is mémoire involontaire.

Sitting at the bar, it feels like your mind’s been

read when Dresden’s resurrected from the gutters,

a distant greeting across time and space—from Hypothalamus.

*

Crazy dream that will not let me be. I am there alone,

unnamed witness to the night of bombs, frozen, mute.

What if you were him, that angel in the skin of stone,

arms spread wide, figure on the cathedral roof?

Below, the city sinks in rubble: he remains unscathed,

hardened by the blaze, ashes cold upon his lips.

Locked inside him, helpless, no one hears you scream.

Are those people popping like chestnuts between

the gutted trams, their charred metal ribs?

Crazy dream: from this cranium nothing escapes.

(Porcelain is a 49-poem elegy in which Durs Grünbein weaves history, memory and reflection to mourn and interrogate the destruction of his hometown Dresden and the complex legacy of its devastation.)