Author: Karin Fellner
Translator: Zane Johnson

Above the Curie Temperature

With a lightning rod from your hair,
you go on ahead,
measure by measure over the field
beside your Parallel
through the elm forest. With
each of your steps the country
is laid bare before you, violet.

The coils on the horizon are
humming up to your mark.
Rings rustle the grasses in the
Tesla wind, the bundled charge
weighing steadily
on your shoulders. Maybe

the switchboard is there.
Maybe someone just inches
the regulator up. As
your line fades,
you pause at the turn
and go cross country.

 

God’s Picture Book

Only a blink from the fern forest to the stilt house to the labyrinth
within the church wall: the spiral system faded, or rather
put aside for later, nooses of hope and fear.
The monks are supporting beams in the emperor’s hall.
Their goosequills arrange water and sky.
They banish the abyss in minium, in thorny ink,
and the serpents squint and flee.
Carolingian miniscule flutters out of the leaves.
“We, too,” proclaimed the dove, “are only messengers
of our misunderstanding.”
An aeon passes over. Who has kept the prayer?
Midday demons, glutted, turn over the page
to seaquakes, stilt houses, fern.

 

Power drills sing

from the swelling of new blisters
in dim hands, and as
in the general twisting
and trembling, occasionally
a breach of the controls succeeds
Their rotations partner is
catacombic silence:
The coil thrusts to
a higher casing through
fetishes and bulging:
Let us create the sound base,
let us be the slipping-through!