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Avrile Hale-Bopp has been wondrous, an omen of auspiciousness, but it's leaving now Every few thousand years Comets lose mass on each perihelion passage so that the short-period ones are most often less dramatic than long-cycle ones like Hale-Bopp Last night with his wiry bush and pocked face, in the half light he looked like an Arcimboldo, whether fruit or vegetable, flower or grain, wasn't clear until he moved inside, downcast, bad skin and rank hair Arcimboldo's aesthetic equivalent now might be goofy, off-kilter fads like monster trucks, Batman movies, arbitrage, body piercing, arena football, BMWs Horselaughs like Arcimboldo's don't carry down well History is always distant And so is pompous and obliquely selective In the way that Mao's great famine, 1958-62, has long been the dog that still doesn't bark Two hermit thrushes, probably a breeding pair, feeding near the whiskey barrel rain gutter overflow One of them back the next day, early morning in the middle of the lawn. Shy birds Shoals of old snow still here in northern exposure shade After the first warm rain, a little brown myotis spent the day hanging asleep from the low eves above the gurgling fountain It returned for three days and then was gone Little brown myotes are mousy ruffled portobello mushroom brown The compelling world of bat silence and motion through quiet air, intrusion of human noise into their night flight zones is minimal They take no regular roost except when breeding, sleep near moving water after feeding much of the night, sleep next in another valley near other moving water In their migrations they can pass anywhere Great heights, low swoops Fire engine red Step into the boarding pod of the midnight Swissair Zürich flight and North America is instantly gone Cool hum friendly quiet savvy settle-back polite and groomed efficiency The Airbus is only two-thirds full, take a seat portside looking for Hale-Bopp, but it's already set, it followed the sun for the night Each early spring night moving closer to the sun that's soon lost to us out away behind In a short eight hours slant in off the Atlantic across France down to Kloten from ten thousand meters in afternoon sun That seems to have not a thing to do with the comet-drawing sunset out over North America to last night's dusk and darkness The same fleeting sun, that now warms careful, pointed, usually sane, methodical Swiss purposefulness The new autoroute cutoff through the Homberg complete through a high valley of beech forests, cherry orchards and side-hill pastures that until last year had only forest logging trails at its head with narrow farm roads farther down Another stately little Swiss Jura valley graded and paved now leading off to Basel on the Rhine Ancient, peculiar, complex, Jungian, Basel Familiar streets and roads, their driving-times and distances, shortcut alternatives depending on time of day, stoplight phases, speedtrap sites, sight-line cambers, tram intersects, border crossing points Stop to see kin, deal with their reluctant hospitality, leave for the French autoroute, la Chaussée, open, staring out on Europe's northern spine Ages of the Alemannic Rhine The huge Rhine, swollen, sinister river, with its canals, massive hydraulic control Channeled, concrete embanked, fixed in predictable Euro-purpose North Sea-bound Blast on before sunset down the Rheingraben to Strasbourg Cathedral Generic redstone Rhine munsters. Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Sélestat, Colmar, Basel, all alike France's East, on one of Europe's most fully countenanced flanks Ramp off the autoroute in Strasbourg's Petite France, come up from the Ill embankment to the Cathedral and turn on the rue des Hallebardes for the high redstone hotel Its level above level of loft windows on the long, steep, dramatic, dormered roof's tiled pitch One steep tile roof of many dozens of like roofs in the old center of Strasbourg, each roof dormered repeatedly, small windows on small low-roofed rooms many centuries old Each dormer room having held sleeper upon sleeper, dormer, dormir, from the Gothic through the plagues and wars and the dislocative incidents of the wars and chaos of an ancient European city Servants' rooms, childrens' rooms, rooms where refugees were hidden, indigents and mendicants sheltered Death and change, hidden in those upper dormer rooms, Jews from the SS, saboteurs and extremists from the police Dormer rooms with rough unfinished floors, briquette stoves in some, trunks, scanty furniture, pictures tacked to their lath and horsehair-plaster walls Bare rafters and undersides of the roof tiles, the leavings of hundreds of years of individual lives marginally relegated well upstairs, away, out of sight, up under the roof Of terracotta-red roof tiles gone sooted grayish hard from smoke and time and acid rain and sun Off in the morning to strike across the Rhine's gardened alluvium, headed for Swabian Tübingen in the ground-mist dawn Sandy purlieus before the border bridge, Gypsy mobile homes, big cars and travel trailers Like any Roma encampment, magnificent women, dark watchful mustached men standing around, cars leaving for the day's enterprise Germans appeared at encampments like this, probably at this very one, in the 1940s to round up these people's grandparents But the grandchildren survived, drive big cars now instead of hacking along behind donkey carts and caravans As the grandchildren of those German soldiers and police who crossed the Rhine from Kehl, Kork, Appenweier, Oberkirch, Freudenstadt, Nussbach, to ship the Roma arrested here eastward to the camps have thrived With the same family names as on a war monument, the 1870s, 1918, 1945, in Nussbach a few kilometers in The same family names that crossed the Bug in the spring eastern offensive from the Reich to do in Jews, Slavs, and the Roma, in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus The orchards surrounding Nussbach blossom in April now as then Thousands of hectares of apple and cherry trees bloom along the Nussbach road filling the air with blossoms and breeze blown fruit-blossom debris Petals, stamens, pistils, pollen dust Billowing lift of blown petal orchard drift covering the road, trees reaching back to hillsides, ordered espaliers, deep processional ranks, pruned, disappearing into a white-pink-applegreen sky-ground profusion of cherry pink and apple blossom white This the height of orchard bloom, maybe the finest single day of the year in all Swabia Superintended by the same family names and faces that within memory crossed the Rhine to do in Roma in France Same Swabish family names and faces in a supermarket in glittering spring-sun Oppenau on the way up into the Schwarzwald Oppenau's gloss painted woodwork and bargeboards, decorated stucco building walls, open water-stone flow, glistening with the town's gleaming, earnest pelf In wide-tired Mercedes towns like Oppenau and Audi towns like Oberkirch it seems impossible that there was winter starvation fifty years ago, and improbable that Nazis ever ran things here at all Across the Schwarzwald ridges, stop in Horb am Neckar for a Swabian madeleine Butterbrezel On the road to Tübingen Where turning on Wilhelmstrasse for the university it begins to rain, as often in Germany thing seem to begin to happen in the rain Each of Tübingen's five thousand theological students preaches a sermon in the Stiftskirche. The waiting list for a Sunday opening is years long Old friends wait to discuss angst, Greek food and suicide Walk to the summit of the Heuberg above the city, truncated in the Nazi years as the site for Hitler's national university Very early in the game all Tübingen professors designated Jewish were dismissed and their students militarized and Nazified In the way that nearby Freiburg was Heideggerized, Hannah Arendt aside Sein und Zeit. "Authentic human existance belongs only to those who react with angst to the inherent emptiness of life" Heidegger probably will soon appear as brutal and stark as, say, Calvin does now Drive away from Tübingen in more evening rain to climb to a thousand meters across the high Schwarzwald Steep, dark ravines with big April snow shoals among the tannenbaums, then downslope to Strasbourg there in Europe's great graben France westering from the Rhine Europe is geography Every year in Strasbourg for la Braderie the Rue Grandes Arcades is packed tight, closed to traffic with more than a million on the streets Once coming west out of Germany, stood in the sun on the roof of Printemps during la Braderie and to the west the Vosges glowed Below the setting sun's red She lives on her Belgian-built canal boat moored permanently on the Rhone-Rhine Canal close to her Strasbourg institute Carved mahogany cutglass-doored cupboards in the mahogany paneled main cabin She's built linear rooms in the holds with the pleasantly swell-curved sidewalls of the hull Skylights in the deck above Under huge plane trees there on the canal's embankment full of nesting rooks Hundreds of pairs, mass acrobatic aerial displays, tumbling, rolling, diving, bowing displays, droop posturing and open wings, raised, tails spread, forward bows The lore of water road canals, a thousand years of European waterways, routes and roads, and then a thousand years more behind to Roman times Waiting in the weeds beside the roads Plastic scraps blown tire shards cans paper strewn bottle glass ditched trails to cart tracks to roads to autoroutes, as tribes consolidate to duchies to nations through unrelenting wars Place to place at two hundred K's, flashing high beams out in the passing lanes, past the streams and trees, through the hills and ancient intersects that meant community Indigents straggling to the next wall or defended crossing as night closed down Plagues brigands hunger rabies, uniforms brandishing weapons cannon fire strafings the fear doubt and fatalism of two thousand years of intimidation for those who venture off home dialects The most wanderers could hope for would be to come upon some safe place scarcely outside their dawn horizon scan before the sun went red and swung back down With the possibility of something hot to eat, a song, stories told around a fire before shrouding sleep within their cowls Families and mendicants bedded down lean-to close against the elements The dust of all that history sealed beneath high-speed spanning roads Now such equivalences have to do with cheap gasoline in this short century of the Euro-consumer driving hard over their cruel trodden history's locales The Ottmarsheim octagonal church consecrated about 1050 by Leo IX lies near the Rhine before crossing back into Switzerland Leo IX was Bruno Count of Toul in the Moselle, who would have journeyed to Ottmarsheim via Nancy and then over the Voseges from Épinal Past Basel into the Swiss Mittelland down the road the other way, that night a lake in moonlight from a dormer in Sempach where the Swiss fought the Austrians in the summer of 1386 Reeds, ducks, herons, coots, storks and passerines with daylight, lacustrine Switzerland almost as it was Across the Gotthard to hike an old abandoned smuggler's pass Leave Val Colla in the Ticino over the border ridge spine, the disused trail gone in places carries down into Italy twelve hundred meters to Puria on the Lake of Lugano On the cliffs, a pair of golden eagles from above, large and grand, steady level-winged gliding fast away from their nest ledge crag Then in the highest gorge, come up on a feral brown billy goat large as a dwarf pony, eight-centimeter lyre horns That spooked only after he moved downwind to graze Then arrogantly turned up again from a high knob farther down, head chest profile beard toss against the sky Lower at about the thousand-meter level, an abandoned mill called San Rocco that must have originally been a Roman place Rest on the sunny pasture grass and watch a dipper, Cinclus cinclus, foraging the pristine stream That splashes down toward the Lake of Lugano and the Lombardian plain The rest of Europe behind the Alps, the Rhine, the North Sea Plain, the other way |
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