Feltrinelli gives an ashtray as a wedding present Poem by Dieter M Gräf

'and failure, yes, that does it in this life'
T. Kling, Leopardi: L'Infinito / Das Unendliche

this hugely orange, table-filling ashtray,
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli's wedding present
for Renate and Walter Höllerer, as if everyone wanted
to put themselves out in it, to be ashes in design:
here are the dead, even before shots are fired.
On one of the lovely armchairs lies
the carelessly tossed holster; hanging on it is
the gigantic pistol. Now, in Havana, in
a little apartment of seventy or eighty square
meters, it belongs to Fidel Castro. Babbles
like a book, so that it's never finished, and
Inge, now la Feltrinelli, photographs him
in pajamas he surely still loves wearing today.
Giangiacomo wore two skins and looked funny
when he finally managed to get rid of her.
Ran across fields then, teeth degenerating,
made dried legumes useful by showing
how they increase their volume
in water, so they push up a little
metal plate and trigger an ignition
mechanism; mix potassium chlorate tablets from
the pharmacy with powdered sugar or liquid
paraffin and sawdust, with added slivers
of laundry soap. The publisher had turned fauve,
cadmium yellow, dark green, signal red. Gradually
dug himself out, could still be recognized
by his nicotine-colored fingers, the cash injections,
but it's cruel to claim it belonged to him,
the plot of land where he wanted to blow up
an electric pylon but blew himself up instead.
It's not easy to get to the bottom, and
not senseless, but nobody looks good doing it.
He reached for cartridges, chromed and shiny,
the curve of intensely shining color. I
asked him to give me one of them (Morucci) .
The ashtray can still be found, forty
years later, in Charlottenburg in Berlin, on
Heerstraße, on the floor now, like a
dog dish that never saw its dog. Stamps
stored here, express stickers, such
beautiful things, soon needed no more.

Translated by Andrew Shields