John Koethe
Y2K (1933)
Y2K (1933)
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace . . .
-Ezra Pound
Some of us were tempted to oblige,
Until the aesthetics got so complicated:
Private, yes, but at the same time
Sculpted as from stone and freighted with the
Weight and shape of history, each one
Part of something bigger, something
No one could explain, or even describe.
A change was on the way, eliding outwards
From the chambers of self-doubt into a torchlit Platz
In waves of imagery and rhetoric
That motioned towards some none too distant future
Where a narrow cage awaited, and Cassandra
Practiced the extreme, the fraudulent emotions.
So the image of the age wound down to insects in a jar:
The light flows in, and you can see for miles,
But try to move and something lifeless intervenes.
The truth is on the outside, where the atmosphere is far too
Rarefied to breathe, while here inside the confines
Of our individual lives we ‘reign as kings, as
Kings of the inconsequential. And the soul inscribes its
Shape in the profusion of the sky, yet its reality is
Small, and bounded on all sides
By language writhing with the unrequited
Ache of what was free and fine and
Now surrounds us everywhere, a medium
Too general to inhabit or feel.
"Look," I tell myself, I tell my soul,
"Those sentiments were fine, but they’ve had their say,
And something stronger is in the air, and you can feel it."
So the fantasy of now sustains an arc of flight
That takes it from a vague, malignant vacuum
To this calm suburban street where on a winter morning
Snow falls as the postman makes his rounds
And something gathers in the corners, something innocent
And evil as a sighing in the sky, insistent
And inert, dragged backwards by a constant
Nagging at the base of the brain, an ill-defined
Unease that hides the horror in the heart, but always working
Towards the future, towards the Führer.
