‘Über unsere Gedanken hinaus nach
den Objecten giebt es keine Brücke.’*
G. Ch. Lichtenberg

Love’s padlocks locked on die alte Brücke
built from warm red sandstone
I found, and walking out alone
again along a Philosopher’s Walk

found wall menders, stonecrop, toadflax
in leaf-viewing time, deep autumn,
clouds hung under hilltops opposite
and the misted distances.

*

No, not apart, but a part of things,
just like in any tourist town,
strangers snapped on parapets here
have the Neckar flowing under

bridges below me linking banks
as if thoughts and their objects —
e.g. the smell of turned red earth
now wall repairs are going on.

*

Then ‘this evening is our evening’,
so young love’s graffito read
where the postcard was invented:
exploded castle picturesque …

See maple leaf-shapes at their reddest,
the bitter orange tree’s long thorns,
wild garlic, birthwort, Hölderlin’s verses
and Eichendorff’s carved in memorial stones,

*

and Europe, Europe looking after me
in its confusion of dialects, tongues,
Erasmus money’s lingua franca,
though I couldn’t not remember

Kyoto’s Tetsugakunomichi —
a tinkling stream to emphasize stillness
beside holy mountain or woodland way
in another autumn, another November …

*

But without that devil of a temptation
to get above yourself again,
that’s how I would look down on them
and hear a stray cat’s faint miaow

about its own states of affairs
between parked cars, descents of stairs,
from where I send this to you now,
send it with my thoughts.

Heidelberg, 14 November 2013

* ‘There is no bridge that leads beyond our thoughts to the objects.’