A Conversation with Martin Heidegger
1
Brother Martin! Here? And you on my mind.
But you were drawn to poets. Rest by my hearth--
an oddity now in this red-gothic maze.
Looking into my blue flames we are soon gone,
our true selves staying in our work,
you say, as we easily fly back to Freiburg,
where by your pale fire, ten short years
after the uncovering, you sit still
"thinking back" on the glorious past
of Swabia--your corner of poverty--
and I burn to ask about whoozit--the rector
whose place you took--and those you deposed.
This all-things-bound-together-in-conflict,
you call true intimacy, and it holds us closer
to our own ground, as in undoing we do and in doing
we negate. I've no taste for your petite scandale;
we're discreet. Can I or my colleagues judge you?
Ambition, you say, means going around and around
chasing your own tale. That's true, but we need
to know, also, as you root us all in being-there,
how you could breathe the infectious air, wherein
you grasped necessity and manfully cast yourself
into a broken iron cross, your most decisive
posture, making history possible with your gloss.
When is subtlety sophistry; exposing pornography
the obscenity: the accuser the accused? Where
thought is calculative, you say, not meditative.
Excellent, Martin. I will remember.
Van K. Brock
A Conversation 2 | Ein Gespräch 1
Contents | Mudlark No. 4