Oblique Walter Benjamin

Oblique Walter Benjamin

Myopia forced him to bend to the smear of street

Just in case someone he well knew but could not see felt

he was ignoring them. He seemed to see obliquely,

yet he could at a glance absorb the bustling lifescape.

In precise portraits of himself he does not appear,

Not at the corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner;

But everything on the street was a hint to him:

Stars, faces, animals, landscapes, dishes for Seder.

Every evening he walked through the wide gate arch

Down the long drive to visit his girlfriend in her house;

From the time she moved the opening of the gate arch

Lay before him like an ear that had lost its hearing.

All the things he took in were knowable in their names;

He glimpsed tales in the rattling down of roll-up shutters;

He thought all things without chance live in translation,

Meaningful however garbled the interpretation.

He found that an out-of-date stamp on an envelope

Can say much more than the pages still folded inside;

A stamped postcard was like a page by an old master

With two different drawings on recto and verso. 

He watched while he waited to interpret,

Cultivating solitude as a pot grows cactus,

Longing to be anywhere but the place where he was,

His whole demeanour asking to pass by unnoticed.

He saw riches in the glass-covered shopping arcades,

In the graffiti of the Paris of Baudelaire,

Where the exhumed detritus of ruined time spoke to him;

He sought to bring then into constellation with now.

He was a pearl diver into the depths of the past,

A lone retriever of meaning from the obsolete;

Reflecting on ruin, he did not rule out redemption;

What civilisation produced was worth analysis.

He had faith in our ability to explain art

Where form and content encounter critical judgment;

He felt obliged to illuminate an open space

For ethical inquiry into the point of things.

He sought to recover a tongue of equals for whom

truth is the answer to the challenge of inquiry,

including the truth that spellbinds the lifeful art work;

His life was a dialectical poem of longing.