Siren Voices
The sirens sang it: it was the old song of Europe and the philanderer, his moustaches brushed and waxed, a sly wink of galoshes on the pavement as he strolled along.
The sirens sang and held the world together. They sang of Babel in a tangle of veins, of Viennese neurotics, Puritans in Haarlem, and they sang of Goethe's mother.
They praised the classical style which makes good ruins, they praised French gardens and Lord Burlington's villa, they praised the stocks, the guillotine, the colour of blood in ditches, washed away by rain.
They praised the colonists who reaped and sowed rich whirlwinds, and they also sang out loud the virtues of the sad and graceless crowd whose every bone and button would corrode.
There was a verse on Simplicissimus, another on Candide. They sang the wrecks of ships and states, of innocence and sex, the continent's incurable messiness.
They sang the jaundiced houses and the sky trapped in a window, the clouds locked in a pool, sang Dostoevsky and the Holy Fool who's doomed to suffer and, at last, to die.
The sirens sang all this and strummed their harps with barely a tear. Their voices might have been the sea sprayed up, a light necklace of green, a brilliant chromatic play of sharps.
George Szirtes
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