POETRY

MEASURE FOR MEASURE AND THE THIRD MAN –
TALES FROM THE SEWERS OF VIENNA

 

Says Mr. Popescu – about Anna,
or Isabella – ‘She ought to go careful
in Vienna. Everybody
ought to go careful in this city.’ ‘Even,’
adds Lucio, ‘the fantastical
duke of dark corners.’ Tyranny has scope
in the paradox between nature and art.

The movie is shown, three days a week, on a loop
at the Burg Kino on Opernring. In the play,
Vienna, under the Duke, is depraved –
brothels abound, citizens, unleashed,
give the finger to laws as well as morals
but, in the dénouement, the Duke confounds
the dissemblers and offers Isabella
marriage. We never know if she accepts.

Beneath the statue of Franz Josef,
Dr. Winkle, Baron Kurtz and a third man
exploit victims of dissembling: children
who die needlessly, always elsewhere, always
bemused with pain. In the late Emperor’s
sewers, Harry Lime lives! The truthful poets are
excluded from ideal republics or
dukedoms. ‘Hence,’ says the Duke, ‘shall we see if
power change purpose, what our seemers be…’
So, Holly Martins, a successful writer
of Westerns, outguns his high school friend.

In the cemetery’s main avenue
of pollarded trees – which shed their leaves, art,
of course, confounding nature – Holly waits,
the handle of his hold-all in his right hand,
as Anna walks towards him and the zither
sounds. She passes by, unseeing.