His new apartment was in a converted
eighteenth century farmhouse stranded
in a nineteenth century coastal town that,
as is the way of things by the accident
of geography, had become a prosperous port
and then declined. The back way in was along
a sloping path through an unkempt garden
then down narrow steep slate steps – slippery
that day with leaf mould. In the twilight,
two Waitrose bags-for-life in each hand,
he slipped, falling neatly on his backpack.
However, dignity, he felt, impelled him
to rise before some neighbour found him
so he lifted himself up by twisting
his left leg as one might a tourniquet.
He lay on the sofa, one bag of frozen
broad beans on his ankle, another
on his calf, sipping a large Zufanek gin
with ice and lemon, studying his print
of Chirico’s ‘The Uncertainty
of the Poet’, understanding as always
the express train on the horizon,
the headless, armless, legless, twisting
female torso but puzzled as usual
by the bunches of ripening bananas.
The row of arches prompted him to think
of the Charles Bridge over the Vltava
in Prague; of Kafka’s married sister’s house
(where Franz wrote) in Golden Street near the Castle;
of the writer’s birthplace on the Ghetto’s edge
near the automated clock – and only then,
only then did he remember Kafka’s
Gregor Samsa: waking as some sort of
monstrous verminous insect; realising
he was late for work; lying there observing
his many legs moving like a multitude
of dysfunctional, spindly, brown bananas.
By David Selzer