Author: Dieter M. Gräf
Translator: Andrew Shields
GINGER-BLOSSOM SPACE
your latihan hands,
their fledgling tremors,
so softly promiscuous
to things,
their sliding through
the hands: redder
and redder car
Space for the
feet that visit
the hands.
ginger-blossom space,
your antelope
evaporation – –
SINAI ENDLESS 1 – 3
1 SECONDS OF SINAI. ENDLESS
tiresome halo, like the one
the flies form.
Orange
skeleton of a smoldering
fire;
glittering colors
of the seconds of Sinai,
of an
earthhopper, for example: long,
butterfly leap into its
orange, then becoming stony
again.
Camel-like boulders;
the desert mountains’ elephant
skin
2
the engulfing
rock,
into it
hands. The
rock feet;
face of the
rock
on a
just imprinted
breast
3 HIBISCUS, HALOGEN-
everything adorns itself, adorns.
Androgynous hibiscus opens,
reaching out all the way;
Bedouins, the white perpendicular.
Children palm
off poverty ribbons:
the solar wrist;
to burn oneself on the cliffs.
A bow toward Mecca, toward
the slaughtered, night.
Waning halogen moon;
single Venus,
the most beautiful of all.
BUTTERFLY (COMMENTARY)
ON THE MOTOR-BARGE
Water Time
falters but for
W. C. W.
after
this sphincter
spot a
getting-it-on, coloring
of intense burden,
tipped shining
into trip water.
butterflying time. Going
under a mild wake.
To over
take the beauty
of fish.
MUD-
evening rush of rain from leaves
of the tree next door
going to
the moon side: to the tidal
patches,
the giant saltmarsh
hares. Orange-red beak
of oystercatcher, its clear
signal sounds amid the murmur of black
headed gulls;
bird-field
crescendoes. Glasswort eyes that
overgraze the silty mudflats
& at night, it’s said, hedgehogs
ambush the bird eggs in
an orgiastic frenzy.
By day,
the reading room, seaside,
for swimming beside
the North Sea, whose temperature’s wrong — —
going along the paved island
lines till they tatter
in swash marks
From the dismantled railway posts,
the most hermetic language. In mudshoes
on wet sand’s wave decoration.
Green algae hair growing into
mudflat puddles; bird arrow’s path,
becoming, toward the water, a bird-of-air
Back to what’s more solid
into the “Radieschen”‘ to tip
Jever Gold.
Further, past
places like Norden,
Sande,
Leer — —
