Threshold City
Threshold expects, it hungers,
not only to be crossed but to be lived
by those who wake up dreaming.
—Lucien Zell
I.
Oh poem make me a poet, oh song make me a singer,
entering the borderlands in Europe’s dark heart,
crossroads magnify, exposed to all winds,
the murky mishmash and dense clusters
of streets and houses close in like lurking beasts.
Barbarians to the north craved to liquidate the Kabbalah,
monolithic forces to the east invaded the spring,
but inertia will have to wait, for poets arise
and ignite the ‘heavily populated solitude,’
to err is to live and to die is to finally find power.
What’s left then when both parents are gone?
When one thought oneself dead I start again,
the radiance of other dimensions intensifies
on the edge of the thought of absolute defenestration,
where God is a pickle and work is a prayer.
II.
In the gloomy tangle of impaled flesh
killing the dragon only kills ourselves,
saturnine moods still malinger
amid capitalist pitfalls and photographing hordes,
overwhelmed, once home to the surrealists.
But ‘inescapable’ might be the word for this verge,
as there’s nowhere beyond the golden city:
there is no sea and I see no mountains,
and the river seems unique to this labyrinth
as if it doesn’t flow anywhere else.
The alchemist king in the glow of madness
inhabited a world of doomed abnegation,
suffering from thanatophobia;
now vacant night trippers amass
to engage the capital through the prism of beer.
III.
The first visit with my university love
was enveloped by caped Don Giovanni
performed by marionettes in black light theatre,
Mozart and Beethoven lodged here too,
while Gregor and K. were trapped forever.
Cataleptic ghosts and gnawing migraines
plague my brain in the oppressive air,
I gaze up at the kaleidoscopic ceiling
of the central train station,
and realise I too may never leave.
But our minds are a plexus of past and future
gazing through God’s logos and windows;
in the circular citadel of exiles and outsiders,
such is the demonic nature of the poet,
destined to combat the zombification of the world.
IV.
Vagabonds of slowness know no borders,
with twilight comes beauty and vanquishing litost,
on a moonlit eve I ascend and saunter
with my friend the poet of vignettes and kites
between the petrified monastery and castle.
The night before baptising his son Ezra
and meeting the architect near Tábor,
we encounter fireflies and four frogs
and converse and dream of renewed time,
for we have seen reality in the city of mirrors.
The protagonist of this polis is the pilgrim:
poutník, chodec, tulák, kráčivec, kolemjdoucí, svědek
(pilgrim, pedestrian, vagabond, walker, passerby, witness),
‘What will you do now?’ Lucien Zell asks,
—Write, teach, struggle.
‘Is that all?’
—No. Write, teach, struggle, sing.
Feature Image: Lucien Zell.
