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WERTHER ENDS IT ALL
So you, you pedant, you too
like things in writing?
GOETHE, Faust I.
He does not expect much of a funeral but has asked
that no one search his pockets. A woman in a white
nightdress steps down into a cellar lit with a forty-watt bulb,
settles carefully in a dusty armchair, curls her toes
on the stone floor, waits until there is nothing on her mind.
Under a black palmtree on the Grande Corniche
Werther sits in his roadster, both hands on the wheel,
the night hissing with insects and the dizzying sea.
Far below, there is dance music, paper lanterns,
men and women holding each other. Tonight
is as good as any night for putting a small pistol
to one's head. Alternatively, one might climb the cliff
and take one's father by the throat, shake him
until the stones of the law drop from his hooked hands.
But Werther wants no truck with politics,
which does not mix with poetry these days.
In the antipodes, armored cars open fire, children
fall. And rise, and fall. So what is the price of a woman
in white, white arms, white bosom rising and falling,
emoting among the racks of mossy sauternes?
The man at the wheel—red stockings, patent pumps, blond
pompadour, immaculate suit of lights—ain't worth a shit.
As the band moans on and midnight strikes, he will trigger
a ball of lead into his frontal lobe, and she will feel a rush
of blood and clench her thighs, and—in the twelve hours
it takes for him to die—the tide of government will fall
and rise and (children and soldiers being expendable,
as she—he thinks—is not) so little will have changed.
   
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