The clue comes straight to the point, in the first sentence.
With the year, the poem refers to the author and at the same time to something that must have happened immediately after his birth in 1945.
However, this year is also a special one, a heavyweight, a sign of a year.
The Swiss poet was also born into the post-war period.
And the "scars" caused by apparently life-saving "two cuts" are also warning signs.
The autobiographical framework is always set.
First in an anecdotal tone.
Similar to James Stewart's famous genre of sentences with the introductory phrase "I used to have a boyfriend .
.
."
The association is not that far-fetched.
In the classic Western The Big Bluff, everyone the sheriff talks about after this introduction is dead. The film follows anecdotes about people who picked up a gun and died as a result.
In the poem now the glass of the mirror in front of which the scars stand out “again”.
And behind them the shadows of the parents.
Behind this mirror, which, like every mirror, can also be considered an access to the afterlife (impressively demonstrated in another film, "Orphée" by Jean Cocteau, in which the story of the poet Orpheus is set in Paris in the fifties, in smoky cafés full of poets and thinker and with an underworld goddess in elegant black - some of which is quoted in the film "Matrix", where the mirror marks the dividing line between lies and truth).
A memorial for the present
In the present poem, the "coffin glass" follows, behind which not only the deceased parents can be seen, behind which the face of the brother can only be remembered.
The sentence structure has left the laconism of the beginning, the mood is different.
Now comes the break: in the thirteenth line, in this verse with the particle after it and the pronoun after it (apparently): “Brothers too.
time my".
From here on out, it's not about random images.
From here on, the lofty, admonishing end (of the poem) is factored in.
The memento mori of the "two dents on the neck" makes the speaker of the poem one who sees himself between the living and the dead, between the generations too.
His position is exposed, his life is due to a special circumstance, the risk of a risky medical intervention.
The poem also takes a risk, proving to be a calculated escalation.
The words at the respective end of the line play out their weight step by step: fell - lost - cuts - saw - clearly - mine - my - form - at night - martial - human - naked - us.
Poems don't always speak of the whole person.
Especially with Klaus Merz they rarely do this.
They spare us readers and listeners the big picture, break a bit out of the biography, illuminate a marginal note, give a hint, direct our gaze until we perceive what corresponds or does not correspond with our own experience.
Above all, Klaus Merz is a master of such precise attention to detail, including the absurd.
Perhaps the present poem is the exception in his work.
The "bookmark", which in its slender length roughly imitates the shape of such a book, contains the (one) whole human being.
He appears in the mirror.
He turns himself in.
He reveals what touched him and touches him.
None of that above.
There is reason to believe that this is an encounter with the author himself.
Assuming that this encounter at the same time shows pars pro toto the condition of a (the) person when his life journey begins in 1945, no less.
The fact that I'm even touched by the little concrete talk about the children while reading - is it because I have children myself?
That the book, which opens “behind closed lids”, is reminiscent of Rilke – does it have to do with your own journeys to graves?
And finally, that in the line drawing of a uniform there is a creature, a naked person - is that a picture for me, have I seen it before?
Apart from one's own memory of the "grey norm", yes, such drawings certainly, albeit not under "soft blue dabs" by Dix or Käthe Kollwitz or in a museum in Sarajevo.
The bookmark becomes a memorial.
It is not known which book it is in.
Of course, it's about the present.