Colonies of Paradise

Anxiety, of being the machine at the end, a rotting plant, the cerebral mensch getting up in the morning, bending over backwards, just to be in the mirror, like a little sun, hair, face, an ego-I, that persuades itself to be a life, for a fraction of a second. 

In Colonies of Paradise, translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang, Matthias Göritz’s speaker is a “cerebral mensch” edging himself into the mirror of life, “searching for the means / out of all the mundane,” gathering in “everything, whatever glistens in light—since I’m a collector.” What he collects are forms of existential anxiety deliciously warped by an incongruous flippancy—“lightheaded, / lingo, vertigo”—that may be a modern cosmopolite’s only recourse in an era when joie de vivre reads as disingenuous. While he pays obeisance to philosophical meaninglessness (“I can’t make any sense. I want out”), his “elongated brain” drives through the day, gathering “impressions.” God may be merely a “mouth-trap” that “snaps over me,” but “Don’t worry,” the speaker explains, “it’s what’s called the sky.” Still, he wonders, “Don’t even / minor songs soar aloft?” betraying his reason for creating poetry, the flight of overwhelming emotions. Göritz may revel in the passivity of believing “Almost on its own / the poem / ran into me,” but elsewhere he declaims, “How seeable was the barely sayable!” concealing his astonishment at being able to articulate, however fretfully, what he observes. 

In restless traversals of Paris, Chicago, Moscow, and his native Germany, Göritz’s edgy, on-edge poems turn out to be a quest—“visionary,” fallible—for some semblance of the “actual,” as in “My Iceberg”:

My mass
is Heisenberg,
who speaks of the relative, observing I.
I am at home in that era, in this skin,
a visitor, visionary, there, where place solves for point of view, 
no one pledging before and after
where all truth is a known conspiracy, no me and no you
and no one infallible word to stand in for the
actual