Glaucous moonlight and you! Riefenstahl …
You writhe, Leni, unprim the bolting saddle.
Foxes in pursuit race down the cold snow field,
bark the nearness to a fullstop.
The shadows shy and sweep the trees
to leprous silver, as Leni clings her knees,
astride and bent, the runaway gasp of stone
on flesh, of ice orchestral in relentless wind.
In starbleak rain, wind rapes gray trees,
hilltop stripped to a disc of stars.
Imaginary expert on birdsong, sylphed and wolfish
in the narrows of a Kievan ditch, calls out once,
a soft panther-husk of pain.
Enthroned upon a mass of mud and moss,
a brindled cat spies blindly up the tilting sky.
The canister of home movies is stenciled
with a date a decade past, as memory whispers
only a thousand years to go.
Champagne and strawberries on a winter morning’s balcony,
the piercing Alpine light washed in gold and Panavision.
Mussolini plays the violin with his gloves still on,
accompanied by a 12-year old Rhinemaiden,
dwarfed by her accordion’s culture clash
of bruise-blue and strident silver.
She smiles, startled, when Schatzie the German
Shepherd wanders into the frame,
is polite and fearful of the bull-headed Italian and his
Abyssinian jokes.
The three of them (dictator, child, dog),
surrounded by Il Duce’s new best-friends,
their accents thick as schnapps,
crackling the consonants like a riding crop through crystal.
Champagne and strawberries and the crackpot
efficiency of nouveau riche equestrians.
Stand and deliver, white-lipped in the grinning
crowd, warm-blooded commissar-killing elite,
their notion of trust the gallows and blackjack.
Seduction of leather, untwisting the charnel heartstrings
from their Catholic-girl gloom and doom.
Within the glass palace the stone throwers
puzzle and debate, speak the occasional poisoned
verb, anise on tongue and soul,
coveting with sheepish glance the bittersweet,
heel-clicking women …….
He dreams of you, Leni,
of the sweat on your vacated saddle …..
Blindly down the tilting sky,
moonblown windblown clouds,
dew spilled upon untended plots.
A sham fog drifts and settles
like a wig upon the now-
bedandruffed volkisch trees.
The lights of an approaching car
score spectacular and brief,
before passing on through fog,
with a damp noise like a hiss,
or kiss, or silk on skin.
Silence and dark rear and fall,
the silence to stay, the dark
to shrink and bundle back before assertive
patient eyes.
Waking from a dream of girls decamping from an
ice-bound Reichstag, sex determined by a
sliver of skin, the blind dentist fumbles at
his workbench, unwitting of his daughter’s
yellow-starred departure.
How many blue bottles have plugged his moans
with guiltless dreams? Old, he wait to grow
older, shuttling between hallucinations and
what passes for work. Why does his daughter
cloak her contempt with silence? Why not a
douche of laughter, to tingle him like the birch
of boyish discipline?
Only quick reflexes can stop the work of the fiend,
the bureaucratic ogre who fills his files with
names, whose own name keeps changing, from
Magda to Joseph to Loki to Leni.
One might have pledged fidelity absolute as death
and still found duty’s twin in the heavy fruit-
fall sleep, the opioid gaze of godlike self-
irrumation. How many blue bottles, dark
ambassadors through whom the light wouldn’t
dare break, monolithic, silled, and empty,
untempted by the wringing of a stolen
daughter’s ruthless hands.
An exact compass (assertive, patient eyes)
would parallel the imperfection of whomever handled it
with trembled temporary hope.
In a groved loss, east’s as good as west,
the fences reeling back for unsuspected miles,
the asphalt loping off to vanish beneath
Bayreuth’s arenas.
Silence becomes you, Leni.
The city-dweller cringes in his comfortable shell,
know-it-all heart aflutter with the drumbeat of
impending flood.
Rest in peace, Leni.
Put out the lights and wait for rain,
to softly weep and piss against the door, to hiss
around the ignorant warmth of happiness and home.
Lost in the woods, baby almost loves the wolves.