Picaresque

The extraordinary work of the German landscape photographer Killian Schoenberger

The splashing and clattering of your father’s mill as you dreamt over a book; the long days on the road with the tow-haired cornet player and his talking cat; nights when you slept in hay and swam before dawn in the green mountain river;

There was a time when your feet never tired, when bread and apples appeared in your satchel each morning, and the small birds in the bushes knew your name;

Gay parties in the ruined Schloss, and assignations by the stone table at sunset; that time you foxed the robber with the knife, and stole the heart of the lady with the pearl-coloured shoulders;

Recall, too, the smell of the pines in the late sun, and how the trees leaned in above the sunken path. How the girl in green warned you not to look back, and yet you did (just once);

It was always the evenings that troubled you. The moment the ferns shivered, and the sky hung too long between two shades of dusk;

Snow that day in the winter market. You followed the stench of roasting chestnuts, Kartoffelpuffer, the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. There was a man with the nose of a pig selling rings of horn, and a girl whose tears turned to ice as they fell. You know you bought something, though you cannot say what;

You stayed at an inn where the fire would not die and the innkeeper’s daughter had silver eyes. She said you were welcome, but only until her crow came back from the Far Hills. Each night she sang a song in no language you recognised, and each morning your boots were dustier than the night before;

That all seems very far off now, my friend: it seems you gave the wrong answer at the toll, took the sinister choice at the crossroads, and now regret your words to the strange, harelipped beggar;

You left your gloves at the glassmaker’s cottage, your name with the old woman at the weir, and your shadow in the bierkeller beneath the broken abbey;

Now every house has a locked door, and the black winds know it is your heart they seek;

The woods are very thick, the way is very dark, and all the stars are lost;

The wolves strike up their ominous, unassuageable music.

More work by Kilian Shoenberger here.