GR is, of course, not a poem. It's a 900-page novel. Fifty years old this year. But I was so bruised, amused, amazed by it that I wanted to feature it here. Because, beyond all the zany slapstick, eschatological paranoia and postmodern vastness, Pynchon is a gorgeous writer with a poet's eye for tiny details. This scene, some 500 pages in, describes the hero Slothrop stumbling out into a Berlin night. It's the summer of 1945 and the city is in ruins. But what ruins!
The rain lets up at midnight. Russian troops are singing in their billets. The salt ache of accordion music cries on in back of them. Drunks materialize, merry and pissing in the center grooves of cobbled alleys. Mud occupies some streets like flesh.
Shell craters brim with rainwater, gleaming in the lights of midwatch work crews clearing debris. Shattered Biedermeier chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar (eyes at the edges of the twisting trail watching for sign, for blazing), wine cork, splintered broom, bicycle with one wheel missing, discarded copies of Tägliche Rundschau, chalcedony doorknob dyed blue long ago with ferrous ferrocyanide, scattered piano keys (all white, an octave on B to be exact - or H, in the German nomenclature - the notes of the rejected Locrian mode), the black and amber eye from some stuffed animal... The strewn night. Dogs, spooked and shivering, run behind walls whose tops are broken like fever charts. Somewhere a gas leak warps for a minute into the death and after-rain smells. Ranks of blackened window-sockets run high up the sides of gutted apartment buildings. Chunks of concrete are held aloft by iron reinforcing rod that curls like black spaghetti, whole enormous heaps wiggling ominously overhead at your least passing brush by ... The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes and smile, coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies.