Stuttgart

Helmut Heißenbüttel

A Stroll round Stuttgart

The characters of the trees are rising as if into ordered sentences on
     the meadows
and the city’s panorama spreads out beyond in a pastel continuo

A shower blows over slowly then rain drops mark
a pattern of splotches that thicken on asphalt paths in the park

From slopes in the afternoon an Easter-time scent starts streaming
     into the valley’s cup
while March’s sun traverses the valley a yellow glow from slope
     to slope

An architecture of flights of stone steps a city landscape
streets and years that with tram number two twenty-one o-nine
     I escaped

The view of Rotebühl Strasse seen from the Reinsburg Strasse side
and the Western blocks and the sharp and flat corners of Ostheim
     understanding them right

Photo of afternoon cobbles near Feuersee à contre-jour
area through which I being changed through the years am passing
     anew

Into the valley early contre-jour tramcars careen
suddenly something’s achieved never was the unretrievable foreseen

Lighting into the valley early Rotebühl Strasse a sudden shower’s
     shine
what has come is wide open fulfilled never quite

Photo regarding the Sinners’ Steps or the Silver Way and that view
up and down the main road toward Gablenberg, routes I used to
     follow sometimes still do

Climbing the Sinners’ when Ruth was oh about seven
morning summer’s light above Heslach ‘Poem about the Practice of
     Death’ The End

Once here the late spring and its rushed-through triumph
innumerable meetings of paths and from the leavings also: numb

Donizetti Strasse Feuerbach Valley the Doggenburg Berliner Platz the
     Kirchhalde roads
a sentence formed from street names to be filled with variable loads

The view up the woods Chopin Strasse in the evening’s dimming light the prospect of that which concretely unpacked we had as life

When we arrived in this city the children were small or not yet born
now they’re full grown and like me into the world see Goethe torn

Place that made the children grown up, means what to the Villa
     Berg—Botnang commuter
workplace, route to work, lunchtime walk, somewhere that spot from
     which I did then didn’t after all scoot

Did then didn’t bound by a mix of meetings duties temptations failings
     compromises things to do and pictures
pieced together as a series of memories to be sketched so far and no
     further

Undermined by concrete memories stock has been taken
a city fallen asleep on its feet and like me never really awakened

City seen in reverse and incomprehensible what was once still to
     come
above it the allotted span of my life ran on and neither lost nor
     gained in sum

Corners hideaways secluded spots public houses locals gaps
initials written invisibly into the street map

Splotches of plum-blossom white, cherry-blossom white, pear-
     blossom white, apple-blossom red
scattered on the slopes where at other times the violet of lilac or the
     scarlet of staghorn sumac spreads

Arbogast Comes, later on up and down let’s say Hausmann Strasse
     along the valley’s bowl
keeping an eye on what as if rapidly sketched on a Stuttgart map is
     our stroll