Writes to Georg at War
8 Nocturne
11 Dream II
1 Spin
2 Grete Asks the Hard Question
3 Animus
4 Keening
5 Poppies
8 Umwelt
2 On the One-Year Anniversary of Your Death
7 Tethered
8 Paradise
9 Riot
10 Unfetter
12 The Poem about Birds I Can’t Write
Finding you everywhere nowhere I travel
in this spaciousness are you absent.
DEBORAH KEENAN
Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet born in 1887. He was addicted to drugs for much of his life and had an extremely close relationship with his younger sister, Grete, the extent of which nobody knows. Grete was a gifted pianist and also addicted to drugs. Georg trained as a pharmacist in Vienna and began to publish his poetry. Grete, meanwhile, lived in Vienna and Berlin, studying piano. Georg eventually enlisted in the army and completed several tours before serving as a pharmacist and medic during World War I. After a horrific incident in Gródek (in modern-day Ukraine) in 1914, wherein he attempted suicide, Georg was hospitalized in Poland and ultimately died following what might have been a purposeful cocaine overdose— perhaps because of the atrocities of war he witnessed. He left all of his money and belongings to Grete. Grete committed suicide at a party less than three years later.
I.
WHOEVER DRINKS FROM ME
Come, let us go away together into the wide world.
—THE BROTHERS GRIMM
Be not tiger nor wolf to rend me,
but brother as deer.
Brother as thirst.
Quarrel of forest, windfall of firs.
Water meant to wound
we repurpose.
Too dangerous to keep you
in the world.
Take to the woods, deer brother.
