Maatstaf. Jaargang 35

[p. 84]

Jacob Lowland
Gedichten

Disease

It's a disease without a ready cure:
the craze to want to pass one's time in dabbling
at Poetry. In cycles like the flu

it strikes now here now there, today Peru,
tomorrow Zanzibar, and sets folks gabbling
of flaming passions and such things as rue.

There'd ought to be a law, just to be sure
things stay in hand. Still, let them go on babbling:
like Homer, Dante, Keats, they won't endure.

A dainty dish

You thought you'd go to England. So you went.
They wouldn't let you in. They said, ‘Your key
is broken. Or at least it's badly bent.’

You said, ‘Come on, now! That's no way to be
to country cousins come a-visiting.
I've brought three bags of gold to pay the rent.

I can fold bluebirds. And I dance and sing.’
‘Oh well,’ they said, ‘all right! I guess you'd be
a dainty dish to set before the king.’

[p. 85]

Shower

You try to take a shower. From the faucet
come tumbling blackbirds and a pink canary
warbling exotic tunes. The tones are dulcet,

the rhythms wild and woolly. Then a very
velvety bass starts singing ‘Ol' Man River’.
And Chinese-cookie fortunes. ‘Be most wary

of shower baths: they're evil for the liver.’
‘Use wooden nickels.’ ‘Sweat's in with the fall set.’
Then you collapse, your dry flesh all a-quiver.

To be from Betelguese

It's difficult to be from Betelguese
and live on Terra incognito. Think:
your skin's bright turquoise, and you're eight feet tall.

You call attention. But the worst of all:
your two-foot dong hangs dangling at your knees.
Boys, women take one look at it and shrink

back: ‘No! Not that!’ It's for the birds. And bees.
A screw on B.'s a week-long carnival.
And then they wonder why you took to drink.

[p. 86]

Streetcar. Amsterdam. Summer

You're riding in a streetcar. Amsterdam.
Hear German, Swedish, Russian, Czech, Swahili.
A smattering of Dutch. That means it's really

summer at last. You watch the rain. You think
when will the sun come out? And then a yam-
shaped object fills the sky and starts to drink

the rain up. For two minutes. Damn.
It's gone again. Come back! Be big! Cartwheelly!
Snow shuts off everything outside the tram.

Ardennes

All morning cycling through the twisting lanes
of the Ardennes. An inn. Right now I'd like
some bread-and-ham, a gueuze. I park my bike
and enter, as the chatelain explains

to an American the way to Mons.
The place is packed. All farmers drinking ale.
Just down the road there's been a barnyard sale.
They all look country cousins, brothers, sons.

(Or maybe lovers? Not much chance of that.)
I find a place way back. Where these two guys
sit looking round. Amusement lights their eyes.

I catch their names: Paul, Arthur. As they chat
they puff on long, strong pipes. I'm barely able
to make out jacking hands beneath the table.

[p. 87]

The art of surviving

The riffraff rage and batter at the gates.
They're armed with pitchforks, shovels, crowbars, knives.
What have they got to lose, except their lives.
One of their leaders, egged on by his mates,

climbs up the gate and over, opens up,
and lets them in the courtyard. See them pour
across the moat, and to the castle door.
They sight us then. I lift a loving cup

and toast them from our window. We're prepared.
We pellet them with creampuffs, gumdrops, grapes.
We sing them sugared songs by Aretino.

And Marco does his striptease, body bared
down to the nitty-gritty. Then the crêpes
are served. They sit and eat. They love the vino.

A page from Cinna's daybook

I spent the morning working on my Zmyrna.
Someday I'll get it done. This afternoon
Catullus came by with a new lampoon
on Caesar and O'Toole. He left to burn a

votive for Lesbia. His fuckboy Johnnie
was with him: what a pair of fools. But then
what fools we all are, thinking Letters can
save us in times like these. (Still they are funny,

those Julius jibes.) I've never met a man
so barbedly bitter or so much in love.
The winds are rising for the likes of him

and me. He knows it. And he stands there fan-
ning at the flames. But when the moment of
these New Men comes, they'll tear us limb from limb.

[p. 88]

Aantekeningen

‘Ardennes’

In an early sonnet, ‘O caberet verre’ (O Green Inn) Arthur Rimbaud described a walking trip through the Belgian Ardennes, including a stop at an inn where he enjoyed the ham that is the area's specialty. Much later, in a poem in his recently often-translated cycle Hombres, ‘Dans ce café’ (In This Café), Paul Verlaine depicted a country-inn scene like that described in the second part of this sonnet.

‘The Art of Surviving’

Derived from ‘Ars Moriendi,’ a short story that was the first published fiction by the long-leading Dutch novelist Simon Vestdijk, and was brought out in English translation (by James S. Holmes) in Delta (Amsterdam), Vol. 1. No 3 (Autumn 1958). Parallel to Vestdijk's ‘Ars Moriendi,’ I wanted to call this poem, which has a very similar plot, but with an opposite ending, ‘Ars Survivendi,’ but people tell me it's not good Latin.

‘A Page from Cinna's Daybook’

Cinna, like Catullus one of the New Poets of Rome who rejected traditional rural virtues and values in favor of street-wise urbanity, sharp wit, and Alexandrian elegance, wrote a nine-book epic (probably it was rather an epillion) called Zmyrna, which Catullus praised but which was lost quite early. The New Poets came to the fore more or less parallelling Caesar's rise to power; Cinna's life ended, too, with Caesar's, as we all know from Shakespeare. Commonly referred to as Cinna the Poet to distinguish him from Cinna the Politician, he was nevertheless confused with the other Cinna during the night of rioting after Caesar's assassination and, as he here predicts, literally torn limb from limb. O'Toole is Peter Whigham's name (in his Penguin translation of the complete Catullus) for Caesar's buddy Mamurra, whom Catullus in his lampoons called Mentula, or Prick. Catullus' ‘fuckboy,’ Juventius, is called Johnnie Young in Jim Holmes' renderings of the Juventius Poems.