(Emil Mayer, Wiener Typen)

I don’t know what they’re called, the chains
                                                that seem to be part of the
         harness, but it takes no special powers to see
he won’t be getting up again.

The cart piled deep
                                                with gunnysacks of lading
         indeterminate, the cobbled
square, the tram rails, all the nascent/ob–

solescent urban tangle of technologies: but
                                                something here is
         dying that is not abstract.
He was not rich

who harnessed the horses in leather–and–
                                                chains and
         starved them down to gauntness, this is not
the bitter manifest

of one man’s hardened heart.
                                                See him now bending
         to disengage
the fallen one from the shaft. So that

the other, the one whose hooves are still
                                                beneath him, neck still
         bearing the weight of the traces through which
he is bound to the one on the

ground, stands quite neglected. It’s
                                                Vienna, 1910, the ignorant
         latter days of empire, though
the man with the camera

appears to have comprehended it all. Who loved
                                                above even
         the elbowing crowds at the vegetable stand
the hours with his brush

in the lamplight. First
                                                the visible image bleached
         away, the silvers ever
altered, then

the inking–up, by hand, which resurrects
                                                the horses, harness, one
         alarmed and one indifferent passer–by, the
city’s open

book of imperturbability.
                                                The sufferer? Still
         standing. Neither
passage through brief oblivion nor

the transfer print reversals have done anything
                                                to help him. It’s
         his job now, he secures the frame.