Photographs of Kafka

Photos of Kafka
bend the heart a bit.
They make you want
to buy him coffee,
also pastry, and listen
to him tell a joke.

He's slight, his face
is bony, his coat's
too big. He isn't absurd:
The photos mean too much.

You want to say, Come
back, Mr. Kafka, and have
another try. If God knows,
then God knows you've
earned a second chance
with fresh lungs
and time to write.



hans ostrom 2020

Going Through Customs

The Current Customs

At the airport in Vancouver, B.C., the border's
inside the terminal, which is many miles and
kilometers from the border, so the border
in the airport's even more arbitrary, let us
say imaginary, than the "real" one. You

round a corner that's under reconstruction,
and at some point, the linoleum becomes
"U.S.A" not "Canada." You have to take off
your shoes, declare you're not a farm-animal,
surrender anything sharp or metal, expose
your collection of sad toiletries (including bad
aftershave that was on sale), and allow
the underwear in your luggage to be X-ray-ed
to see if it has pulmonary problems.

Finally you approach a glass-enclosed booth
and show your passport. The customs-agent
either sells you a movie-ticket, tells you your
passport belong to Franz Kafka and arrests
you, or lets you back into the nation where
you pay taxes--even though you already
passed a sign that said, "Welcome to the
United States of America." Our customs get

more labyrinthine every year, and does
anyone besides the Germans stamp
passports anymore with that authoritative
whack of ink? Anyway, having passed
the point of demarcation, you buy coffee
from an outpost of a multinational
corporation using a tossed salad of
two currencies. A recent immigrant serves

you. His daughter will become
an entrepreneur, a civil rights attorney,
or a diplomat in Canada, the U.S., or
a country-to-be-named-later. You
have passed through customs.

Phrase Books

The concept of a phrasebook is amusing, I believe. The idea is that you buy a book of phrases commonly used in a language and you use that book to make your way in a country whose language is not your own. Things quickly get complicated, however, even with the simplest of phrases. Your "Goodbye" might be someone else's "Go with God." You will probably mispronounce whatever phrase you're trying to use, thereby turning it into a) strange sounds or b) a joke or c) an insult.

Then there's this problem: You want to ask someone in the country something, so you look at your phrasebook, pick out the question, and say it. The person answers. You don't understand the answer, so what was the use of saying your phrase? Or you do understand the answer but don't know what to say next. You look at your phrasebook, but of course it offers no help. In conversation, it's the second, third, fourth (and so one) things that matter, not the serve. You serve your phrase, and a response comes screaming back over the net, and there's no way you can handle it.

Nonetheless, I'm a sucker for phrase books. I bought one before we went to Berlin this summer. I think I used it once out of a possible--oh, let's say 50--interactions, and even then I used it only as a kind of prep. I had studied German long ago, and I had lived in Germany for a year in 80-81, so I had that to fall back on, but "falling back on" was about all it was good for. Rather like an old worn-out bed. Pieces of a second language do float to the surface, however. And hearing the language makes you remember things; you get into the swing of language; you get by. And we mustn't overlook the fact that because of the British and American Empires, English has insinuated itself all over the place, so even ins spite of our best intentions, our desires to blend in, we are, by default, linguistic bullies. Meanwhile, the phrasebook stays up in the hotel room, on vacation. Think of all the free vacations phrase books have taken!

This poem is based on the premise that two travelers communicate using only their phrase books. I'd prefer that every other line of the dialogue were indented, but I can't get the blog-program to let me do that. Clearly, I need to buy a phrasebook in Blogese so I can talk to my blog.

The poem:


Two Travelers Meet By Chance Inside a Phrase-Book


“My name is Carmen,” she said.
“The Post Office is over there,” he replied.
“Thank you! It is one o’clock.”
“Goodbye! How are you?”
“Do you speak English?”
“The pleasure is all mine.”
“My factory is on fire.”
“Excuse me.”
“That dog is frothing at the mouth.”
“You’re welcome!”
“My passport lies under your thigh.”
“Where is the café?”
“Keep walking to the left.”
“Please put this on your head, my painful cousin.”


Ambrose Bierce wrote The Devil's Dictionary, with all sorts of funny definitions of words. I think he may have defined "coward," for example, as "One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.” (I just finished re-reading Gore Vidal's novel, Lincoln, in which Vidal has Lincoln signing [or not]execution orders for hundreds of soldiers who ran away from battles or who committed other potentially capital offenses. Lincoln has sympathy for those he calls "the leg men," the ones who run away, because he thinks that's how he might react in battle.) I think someone should write a phrasebook-counterpart to Bierce's Dictionary--something like the Franz Kafka Phrasebook for Foreign Travelers, a phrasebook that revels in the absurdity of phrase books.



Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom