Trakl's poetry he wrote over the last five years of his life is chiefly concerned with plotting parallel processes of decay in the natural and human world, and intoxication plays a significant part in aestheticizing his lyric speaker's confrontation with grim reality. Had a remarkably strong constitution and after leaving a tavern one winter's night stumbled into the snow and blacked out. He awoke alive in the morning.

—Margitt Lehbert, Introduction to The Poems of Georg Trakl

Snow

*

1912. Tavern night, and the serving girl's shoulders sag, her limbs tremble, pale roots. She refuses me more wine, pulls me to my feet. My animal-thick tongue slides from my mouth. You've had enough cups, sweetest one. Softly, she nudges me through the door and into the drifting furies, where sleep jumps out of the frostbitten trees. Branches thrust and click, sparking the dark with flint. White otter bones. Moon, a cold broken stone. I stumble deeper into the woods; my murderous feet thud against a child's blue body that has washed from the river of my poetry. A blue carp pickled in vinegar and frozen. My first publication—Ellis, the dead boy, the priest's drowned child. Sebastian, the tallow-lipped acolyte, how many rewrites? The owl god is approaching and rodents race for their burrows. The she-owl's wings are silent—talons ready to crush the skull and knead the head before eating. A ghostly future has already happened. Her silent wings layered in velvet swallowing the sound of her flying.

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Copyright © 2022 Stephanie Dickinson All rights reserved
from Blue Swan, Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries
The Bitter Oleander Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission