Peter Weltner

The Ruins of Kareol Castle

~ Sechs Gedichte ~

 

 

Brangäne

Long live death was his sick cry
of love against love. Donʼt we all die
quick enough? Don’t listen to his music,
the enchanted tune, the harmonic trick
he uses to lure you to infinity.

Isolde, what Tristan said was a lie.
Nightʼs night. It’s no metonomy
for rapture. Tristan is sick.
Long live death?

Whatever his appeal, resist, deny
him his death wish’s high.
Pretend, if you must, to mimic
an orgasm. Youʼre swell at magic.
This time for sure weʼll poison the guy.
Long live death!

Isolde

Night after night, Iʼll no longer be.
Storms will cease, the wild sea
be peaceful. Iʼll rest in his caress,
our end the beginning of dreamlessness,
sleeping as windows sleep, transparently.

Our voices are air, the wind our plea
to drift away, forever free,
without desire no faith to profess,
night after night.

May Tristan’s wound be my ecstasy.
Him, me, death, I say, we three.
Life can never be healed unless
love lets brave lovers bless
nothingness without fear or pity,
night after night.

 

Marke

This jester of death is my ugly old age.
Who cares about those two? My rage,
my jealousy, my hate, my sorrow–
I’m over them all. Perhaps Iʼm callow,
cowardly, too easily assuaged,

too cold for passion to savage
my heart once more, too tired to wage
a new war on her or him. Tomorrow,
this jester of death–

my hairy ears, nose, bum, this plague
of ugliness, my ribs a tightening cage
for heart and lungs, my gutʼs flow
clogged, my face a clown show–
will mock me, taunt me more, my sage,
this jester of death.

 

Kurwenal

His sword unsheathed the death I sought.
What matter the blade wasnʼt his? Too fraught
with risk, what I felt for him, my care
too great. Loyalty was the most Iʼd dare,
that faithfulness devotion had taught

me despite his infidelities. Bought
and paid for, some said of me, caught
between her white hands and the hair
his sword unsheathed.

My tongue tasted his blood. I sought
by dying to drink more. Was he distraught?
My death unnoticed, my spirit bare,
in the end, he denied me that rare
dear glance I caught the once we fought,
his sword unsheathed.

 

Tristan

Without eyes, I see, ascending to Platoʼs
heaven, released from the earth I rose
from. All is sublime allegory here,
imagination freely roaming without fear
of wrongly knowing what it knows,

no illusion, no guess, no suppose.
Oracles, churches, temples now close
as at Christʼs birth. Let paradise appear.
Without eyes, I see.

Slowly, light from nothing grows.
Blindingly white, the black sky glows.
Antinomies, paradoxes more clear
than earthly sight. Death is twice dear
to those who strip off time’s worn clothes.
Without eyes, I see.

 

The Sea to Melot

Meaningless, the unbounded country.
You wanted to drown. Came down to me,
searched where the sky and I are one,
claimed you, too, were poisoned by that potion.
But, now the deedʼs done, Melot. No mercy

for you, irascible man. Don’t you see?
Nothing is what you wanted to be.
A sword in the gut is like a pardon,
meaningless.

Cold as sea water, youʼre at last free
of lust, sorrow, anger, anxiety.
All of Kareol is dead. You, friends, kinsmen,
long laid into earth, that crowded coffin,
or sunk in me, elementally
meaningless.

 

 

 

Peter Weltner has published five books of fiction: Beachside Entries / Specific Ghosts (1989), Identity and Difference (1990), In a Time of Combat for the Angel (1991), The Risk of His Music (1997), and How the Body Prays (1999). His stories have appeared in several anthologies, among them O. Henry Prize Stories, 1993 and 1998. His books of poetry are Laguna Beach: After Shelter (Barnwood Poetry, 2009), From a Lost Faust Book (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and News from the World at My Birth: A History (Standing Stone Books, 2010), where these works are excerpted from. Weltner's From a Lost Gospel of Mark, number 22 in the 2River Chapbook Series, is available here. He lives in San Francisco's outerlands, close to the Pacific.

 

We could not be happier in counting Peter among our Stammgäste.