Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Often in my wounded warrior years
I think back to Frankfurt, Germany
twenty years after the horror
though I then was
not mindful of the whistle
and bang of bombs,
the dry or the wet mess of rubble;
the streets were postcards reconstructing,
bratwurst sizzling
beer warm, not needing chill,
frauleins in calf-high boots,
mini-skirts, tight sweaters
that your eyes groped wildly, though judiciously.
The sun shone down
as in a travel magazine,
so rich that azure,
the greens dark, bright
in that damp Taunus District climate.
My legs were good.
I walked
one end of the city to the other
never fearing knife, gun, Gestapo, thug;
I walked
fantasizing
the look of the Holy Roman Empire,
of genuine Roman soldiers before that,
the armor clinking or clacking as they walked,
the precision of determined feet on stone, on ground.
I imagined campfires on dark nights,
logs, twigs burning, the crackle,
and the river silent in the shadows out there somewhere.
I strolled by the now and seemingly forever named
Main River,
the stippled white light of noon
floating,
and I
even by myself,
mostly by myself,
entered
the scene like Caspar David Friedrich,
a wanderer above a sea of fog,
but the fog was in the mind,
history, not the eye,
in the mind
and then the cold touch of a railing,
and next to me the frown and pull away
of that pretty girl that I would have liked to meet..
I heard stories of the war,
saw the aria of the old opera house,
the building a shell exploded
with a Beethoven burst.
The fog did not lift;
besides imagined Sturm und Drang.
there was only the crudity, the stupidity
of enlisted army life,
only the George Grosz faces
of people I knew,
drunks,
punks I knew,
kids like me,
when face to face
with a mirror,
and later
through years of sifted sunlight,
time established itself,
the haze of history arose
from its corpse.
I saw in perspective
a personal walk on a stage empty
awaiting the next act of the larger drama.
I was grateful that I lived in less
than Wagnerian times,
the entrances and exits
were losing their impressions
in the accumulating dust,
in the wearing away of wounds
in the sweeping away of the dust.
History is so much cloud;
The brief shapes evaporate
But the essence of storm
Always arises, bit by bit,
And grumbles out to another country,
Bites lightning quick,
Floods with impassioned blood
And roars the rhetoric of anger and grief.
In Frankfurt I roamed the wisps of the past
As if the conclusion of one war was final,
but it is the human heart that’s always ready for new battle,
arming itself with distrust, suspicion,
vainglorious ambition,
A generation falls dead,
So many puppets rot away,
All that courage, fear, blindness,
Visionary grief evaporated like water,
Puddles of blood hidden, absorbed by weeds,
The dancing flowers of peace so charming,
Disarming nations with the veneer of civilization.
How so much is reconstructed, built with hope,
But all the foundations are built on forgetting, or if
Memory is invoked, the kings, queens, sergeants,
Killers and the fallen are made of bronze or stone.
No blood, no veins, no laughs or tears
Come out of the unchanging mouths of statues,
Posterity that has that faux nobility,
Like scripture has that holier than thou reverence.
Nothing is grounded in the common world of bombs, armor.
The head is still wrapped in historic fog,
----Dan Cuddy
*******
The Gasthaus On Homburger Landstrasse
Johan or “John”
owned a profitable business
a gasthaus
serving Henninger Bier
cognac
all manner of whiskey
schnitzel, wurst, pommes frites
that the young depraved American army craved
A somewhat homey place,
the wood paneling,
the white and yellow opaque glass
of the lower window panes,
the comfortable tables,
not too closely spaced;
Locals visited it too,
not just soldiers
that wanted to get off-base
but had to stay nearby,
Edwards Kaserne just across the street
and Third Armor headquarters' gate,
this side half a block down.
John had a glass eye.
He in his late forties
a soldier in Hitler's army,
his frau,
attractive face,
a bit plump
but good living settles, spreads,
sits in contented conversation.
Renoir would approve.
Life moves on.
Certainly, John was not
a war criminal
but a skinny youth
in the bad times,
when harangue and euphoria
were the orders of the day.
John just wanted to get along;
it was his duty to serve,
defend the homeland,
had nothing to do with Jews.
he didn't particularly like Nazis.
He was a dark-haired German
lean, young,
given a uniform, a gun.
John was not an intellectual;
he fell into the general apoplexy,
nurtured no visible conscience
or protest,
just an ordinary man,
Ecco Homo,
the events swarming
before his eyes
within, without his mind,
he just wanted life,
not a soldier's death,
not a hero's monument,
and so,
twenty years after the war
he had a plump attractive wife
who gave him a peck of affection
in public and more in the marriage bed,
three floors above that gasthaus
where soldiers would come and go
talking of drinking and bordellos,
but the American soldiers
were kids
and the couple
like chaperones
kept a semblance of order,
had little trouble with loud voices,
off-key American singing.
A profitable business,
an ordinary life,
not a romantic’s dream
but preferable to the ride
of the Valkyries
one learns to tap forgetfulness
toast the present,
---Dan Cuddy
~ Zarina Abdulina
