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Issue 10

Table of Contentsfor Issue 10

Puzzle pieces

Cover illustration: Puzzle pieces / photo art Leif Harmsen

As the tenth year, and tenth issue, of no man’s land approached, we found ourselves thinking that it would make a good stopping place. Not without mixed feelings – but on the whole it feels like a cheerful farewell. We began this journal at a time when publication opportunities for translations were few and far between, and English-speaking audiences had little idea of the richness and diversity of contemporary German-language literature. Over the past ten years, we have seen a renaissance of translation culture in the Anglophone world, a surge of interest in foreign literatures even in their most challenging forms – driven almost entirely by a burgeoning community of small presses, online journals, blogs, networks and dedicated individuals operating outside the bounds of mainstream, commercial publishing. In our home town of Berlin, the Anglophone literary and translation community is thriving, engaged in a lively dialogue with German colleagues.

We are proud to have been part of these developments – and with all the new opportunities for translators, we feel we can move on in good conscience. At the same time, though no man’s land will discontinue as a journal, we plan to maintain the no man’s land community through our Berlin Translation Lab and other activities.

no man’s land # 10 is an exceptionally rich issue, with many new voices alongside returning favorites, bringing our total roster of writers to nearly 150. For the first time, we feature a literary essay, Bodo Kirchhoff’s searing, clear-eyed confrontation with the trauma of sexual abuse. The issue’s fiction features storytelling on a grand scale: Nino Haratischwili’s “The Eighth Life” launches a German-Georgian family epic, while Ulrike Edschmid’s autobiographical “The Disappearance of Phillip S.” delves into the political terrorism of the 1970s; Gunter Geltinger’s “Moor” (narrated by the moor itself) and newcomer Josef Felix Ernst’s “The Cripple and the Silken Garrotte” are tours de force of dark, surreal imagination. Our poetry includes work in experimental formats, with Anja Utler’s “9th Leaf” and Uljana Wolf’s “subsisters”, Maja Haderlap’s exploration of the borderlands of language, and a taste of novelist Clemens Setz’s first poetry collection.

For the final issue, we decided to allow our editors to submit work of their own: poetry editor Catherine Hales has contributed translations of the young poet Konstantin Ames as well as no man’s land regular Hendrik Jackson, while Isabel Fargo Cole presents an excerpt from Ulla Lenze’s The Endless City, a novel of Berlin, Istanbul and Mumbai, and Katy Derbyshire “leafing through the world” with Annika Reich’s linguistic virtuosity.

Finally, we’ve given our translators the chance to reflect on the translation process. We’re delighted that so many of them have taken us up on the offer and offered insights into their own creative process and their passion for the work they translate. It is their inspiration and dedication that has kept no man’s land going – and will continue to sustain a flourishing culture of translation.

The no man’s land editors: Isabel Fargo Cole, Katy Derbyshire, Catherine Hales.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Issue 10


Five sonnets


Time to Stay, Time to Leave
Kattegat
Weißenfels
Klee
Dove in Venice



become flesh, an ensemble of characters
inventory
darjeeling could be a color
journey around the world, illustrated in one’s own hand



Bright Sea


On the train I heard her say …


borderlands
house of the old language



Robert Schumann
Riding School
Air



freeze frame
vacuum



Illumination, or?
Note unto Jonah
Globegame
Soilshadow
Witiko



the autumn sun is like the national gallery
twelve golden chimes
no more political poems
the violence of plants
christmas eve 2pm



Paradigm shift
This house
Labour of love



Bill Evans, My Man’s Gone Now
Men in the darkness
Why I am not a great lover
Exegesis
Postcards of cats with human professions
Procedure



9th Leaf: Rendering of accounts. As if from a weighty dream


subsisters: lauren’s youngest sister …


procession route
or wearable protectorate
the classrooms lured her like fluorescent plastic ponies



Operation Hinterland: Tales from the Silver Scrapheap


Sons of Samsa


I Grew Up in a Scrapyard


My Deepest Sympathy


Fuckin Sushi


The Disappearance of Philip S.


The Cripple and the Silken Garrotte


The Eighth Life


Moor


A Bearer of Suffering. Not a Victim.


The Life of a Top-Quality Mattress


The Endless City


The Invention of Life


Residual Warmth


Leafing through the World


Snail Mill


Hasenmeister


Colder Layers of Air

Five sonnets

Author: Konstantin Arnold
Translator: Catherine Hales

Evening of blue city dwellers in Berlin. Underground train

1 / 15

for Almut, Janka, Luise, Mara and Norbert

Windows Benn, untouched and unregarded.
The soft showers. Early blossom. Dying
like far-off happiness. Shadows and Great Flood
as though dumb in sealed caves, the bi-

nary. In duning, coming, going, slide
our walls, are as thin as Loerke’s hide,
blended, unravelled after blue tunes.
Through all the Spring comes the stranger, womaning,

hooked. A redness swarms up. Blood rises. House-walls
greyly swollen like strangled people gaze on
bland blooming, let in the moistness of others!

Who, if I wept, Wolfenstein, would it bother.
The stocking on the stretcher is there. But where it ends
people stand where eyes are narrowed, stonewalling.

 

2/15

People! Where eyes are narrowed, stonewalling,
a sentence takes a dump like beaver shit:
the I takes an early shower in political-hist-
orical terms, the rustic must go! If he called

fraud, hand the villagers an epic cure
and leave the townies whining and all a-quiver
and pull the sticky stuff off your eyelid
thus putting the books of the orphans of Chur

into good shape no cooking of books or weaving of box
tree for you. Commit yourself to nothing! www.and.we.co.uk
we’d think communicators had botched something there.

Sticking your finger in the socket these days
could be a decorative act. Skimming reactions I quickly praise
the monkey orchid. The grass is crassly frazzled.

 

3/15

The grass is crassly frazzled. Swan! Playboy!
Every sponge wipes swanning ahead of her across
the board even in Parliament the mindless chatter stops
even the editor cleanses beforehand her toyboy

the aforesaid playboy meanwhile playing Gameboy
board wipers m+f devouring falafel with everything
the parliamentarians (m) writing a ghazal in their minds
the parliamentarians (f) murmuring Senna Hoy!

The interval has completely corralled them all
even laying hens, according to legend
she has, none other than Mr. Rockstroh

the long interval, got rid of all the destitute people
he chews around on a giraffe like a flea
would do, were it grown greatly and tenderly lonely.

 

Pianofourte Sonnet

Who’s coralled greatly and tenderly? The rhyming couplet.
I much prefer the world lost to me full of giraffes: a lot
of embellishment, bee slime by the bucketload.
Thus spake Zeck in lubricious greed monkeys.

A Steigenberger, a hotel, even making a chain
Of them. The per se opposite of turning to good use: the sim-
ilarity of a lamed seed bucket to a limping skeleton.
For a stuttering sonnet: make weaponless sonnets!

Hidden in every Berlin Window: bestiaries
Sir! No, Sir! Munich is no beast! I demand fixed prices
For hamburgers and our favourite frankfurters

On this Zeil. Can you feel the desire for the best arias
For 1000 euros 1000 Belgians are freed from rivers
And streams in your mind’s banger-desert. Are all ice-creams E-flats?

 

Pipsqueak Sonnet

Freed from rivers and streams. Are all ice creams E-flats?
Well, that’s really nice. If you procure something for me
Does that mean I’m on the game? Chocolate ice cream yeah (Elise)
Is worth procuring: while oil … Not that

I’ve got anything against oil as such, it’s just that a lot
Of people are made orphans by the squabbling over blackpastored wetness
over oils. On that subject an announcement by the generals: put your foot on the gas!
Pastors change channels as quietly as mouse-snouts on the remote.

I’d dig around for dino-bones outside the small house in Buckow.
I’d fly like the wind and rhyme like a child in summer.
I’d get into the sack with all available sonnet muses.

I’d set to with the most terrible creatures in the rock wall at Duino:
Without cream or pincers; Battle of the Somme
(at the cold buffet). I’m afraid they only exist now in sonnet museums.

From Konstantin Ames, sTiL.e(ins) Art und Weltwaisen © rougbooks, 2012

Time to Stay, Time to Leave
Kattegat
Weißenfels
Klee
Dove in Venice

Author: Mirko Bonné
Translator: Paul-Henri Campbell

Time to Stay, Time to Leave

The desk does not fit in the suitcase,
so it’s emptied, for nothing wants to stay.
Does everything always need to be traveling? Outside, for
weeks on end the puppy’s been yelping
within its fenced in habitat, and through
the ceiling, as every evening, Rachmaninoff
resounds, the melody on the piano.
Light flashes over from the photo studio
on Broadway, and during dark breaks, outlines
can be seen on the roof while they make
their final, utterly final rounds, although
it’s chilly and windy and time to leave.
The leaves of the ginkgo trees brush up
against the window, where I always used to stand.

For Sabine Baumann

 

Kattegat

Within the maple masts,
whispering. The breeze settles down
upon the seagulls’ backs,
when late in the evening the last ferry
makes fast and waits.

At the harbor, the trees
are compelled to deliberate auPtumn.
The generator shack
is overgrown by wild lemon balm.
Beacon lights are on the early shift.

Still, boats are searching about,
human cutters, for only in the night
will truth be caught in their net.
Whatever the sea may mean, the fish
can live with it.

 

Weißenfels

In the dark, nocturnal park
geese with elbow sails
are practicing flapping their wings.

Hardenberg heaves and spews,
nervously, as he is
elated by gleeful anticipation.

Eat He Gravel
bellows the blue Tieck
I’ll stuff him with pebbles!

At the edge of the forest, the constellation
of the Charpentiers twinkles,
the starlight calash.

Novalis starts running.
Halt, all! Rock chips
are trickling out of my head.

 

Klee

Let it go,
that spider’s web.
It illuminates the sleepy path
for summer.

Joshua is trudging
around Jericho
with seven eyelashless
disciples of the Lord.

Decipherable
the sunflowers cooling down,
ancestral signs,
etched into border stones.

On this side I am beyond understanding.
And above the light
luridly rushing forth
that which is immovable and stiff.

Behold the flashes of lightning,
the fish.
They are sounding out the dominion
of vivid lines.

 

Dove in Venice

I believe you’re
a mask that flutters,
flutters, and flies: so calmly
frantic, buzzing forth, barely
above the people, the cameras
pushing through murmuring mirrors.
I believe, as a dove
in Venice I’d glide upon
the shoulder blades of women,
and I’d forever love
cookie handbags.

Wrong, if you believe
the only thing they want are cringles.
I believe people fail to recognize doves
in this light, in which even Brodsky
had failed to recognize the eye’s power:
it beholds the mask, it flutters along with it,
flutters lame-winged. I believe
Titian kicked Tintoretto out
as soon as he had eyes.
Trakl rode the steam vaporetto.
He hated it all and suffered.

I believe there’s
nothing to be added
to the rhymed dovecot, to leave
no traces but a few cigarette butts
from the evening party strewn across
the banks of compassion. Lasting
500 years, the haunted hour, and it’s
not time yet to go. There: tattered sails,
one might downright believe
a galleass was coming into the arsenal.
Wilde fluttering in the lagoon’s hall.

From Mirko Bonné, Traklpark. Gedichte © Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2012

become flesh, an ensemble of characters
inventory
darjeeling could be a color
journey around the world, illustrated in one’s own hand

Author: Carolin Callies
Translator: Bradley Schmidt

become flesh, an ensemble of characters

1st pers. sing.
I wanted to leave your shame be
& more than just the useless bones;
leave you the feebly scraped word

& more than the lint in
the swollen parts of the eyelid
scaffolding standing before you.

2nd pers. sing.
you’ve become a flat construction:
profound lacerations & not even a flesh wound.

3rd pers. sing.
a suspicious beery, bowlegged tongue,
just lying fallowed. just old assed:
this discharge, sucked into a lap, can rarely be sugar coated.
only thing that helps is to sequester his member.

1st pers. plur.
we gathered up the last of your skin particles
to pack them in the boxes with the crumbs
& then ourselves to join them
loud & driven by sorrow.

2nd pers. plur.
you’re united by the lack of a foot
& the opportunity to brag about it
& more than just hint at your contraption for it.

3rd pers. plur.
this loans needed for a blemished body
were numerous & the spare parts accidentally shredded:
tracks, containers & cables, for example.

all the things that would at least be washable.
laid out to dry along the river & and the tubes.

inventory

you have clots, necks, moles,
pegs, corks, red veined;
what were the folds, marble shells
collar: the last thing leans out of your hands.

what were the epidermis corruptions, fingertips,
day albums, giddy with lines
& there on the mouthpiece
nothing more than your hand-sewn lips.

darjeeling could be a color

washed faded & I lay you out, tea-skins.
your limbs are carried:
you carry them dry on modest frames,
on iron & salt.

frozen to form & I salt you, jittery,
wash myself with your towel:
it’s the feet that I wash,
your ankle deep feet.

journey around the world, illustrated in one’s own hand

the circumnavigation of the smallest of things:
hoisted up & continents on your fingers.
listen to that eloquent stuff: who still strikes sails these days

& how many trunks can you construct?
at your feet a mill & map material
& a mouth made of postage stamps.

From Carolin Callies, fünf sinne & nur ein besteckkasten, © Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2015

Bright Sea

Author: Daniela Danz
Translator: Adam Siegel

this is the beginning a break
upon the sea drunk
with the desire to span it
Europe in the evening and Asia after
the passage through the night in
thought: all of it false that was
effortless with none of that tearing
at the feet and at the head until here
a remnant without a beginning and there
all of it was false bright what you
whispered into my ear
even the word Colchis
was false without ever having eaten
of the freshly slaughtered sheep
which we have here
on our only gold-rimmed
plates (did we ever eat
from anything other than tableware?)
bright along the unlit sea floor
you pasture your ideas
about the Caucasus: Colchis Colchis
you whispered into the curve
of the ram’s horn
Colchis you said you see
it draws him in — all of it false bright
nothing drew in the ram it was
just my thighs
pressing his flanks
if you were to come out of
the sea out of death once
more then you might say
instead of Colchis: Caucasus
Mingrelia Svaneti Poti
you might say nothing more
about the ram and its fleece: look
how it shines golden
in the evening sun no: look
how they will sheer it
how his glory will be the cord that tightens
look: you’ll say bright
alive once more you say: so
not enough because greedy
is what the fleece makes you and the rugged
coastline the peaceful sleep of Europe
with their ships come the Greeks
across the sea under which
your sister sleeps bright
against dark ground a girl
in sneakers and hooded sweatshirt
a pocket knife in whose blade
no one has any faith
over which they must travel
the Greeks and high above flying
on the ram my brother
his flight as swift as my sleep
behind us small and crooked
fear lies in our bed
as children and later
the white buckled clasp
of my fingers tight around his waist
until I let go fell and sank
and all that is false was not as swift
as my death and my brother’s
look of shock: bright at the base
where you are with your ideas of Colchis
your body disintegrating utterly and undisturbed
for Asia has never tugged at your head
while my ideas so fruitlessly
scattered upon the sea
with Europe at the foot and Asia
at the head this is the end bright
I live on and you stay dead

From  Pontus. Gedichte © Wallenstein Verlag, 2009

On the train I heard her say …

Author: Ulrike Draesner
Translator: Tom Morrison

ON THE TRAIN I HEARD her say
she’d got a new favourite play
nathan the wise. thin blonde hair
a double chin, puppy fat. or maybe
something else that had taken wing
during her search for a home and was
lodged there temporarily, inside that ring, I
thought of lessing, how from his library he’d walked
to braunschweig most evenings
12 kilometres straight ahead the forest
was already there. skint? and he drank
drank till he could drink no more, gambled
till he lost, had lost the lot. stayed over
other nights walked 12 kilometres through
darkness and the standing of trees. cracking
twigs. glow-worms lugged silence into the
grass. enlightenment, dawning? those heavenly hounds
were running so fast. no whining to be heard. such
he told himself is the dawn in my own garden.
so I am entwined with myself like the braided forest.

From  berührte orte © Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2008

borderlands
house of the old language

Author: Maja Haderlap
Translator: Deirdre McMahon

borderlands

their borderlines link a string
of snares and breaches.
in the annals of division
the limes came up winner.
in the war the border’s ribbon
swung back and forth,
villages cut off from roads,
slid to the periphery.
their inhabitants sealed throats
with clumsy locks,
observed silent crime scenes,
which i enter on tiptoe.
i often went with wide eyes
along the armed path
into a neighbouring country,
to hear about past times
when a fence edged the meadows
and all the names were linked
by related echo, where once
there was a street, its traces
fading. everything is edge
oblivion and transition.

house of the old language

confused bees buzz around the hallways
of my abandoned language.
birds of passage spill their guts
in chambers stormed by abuse
as if they were home at last, back
to where they came from. language
bound me to the world, fascinated me
while it failed to satisfy me.
biting through it, i tasted its desolation.
combing through those years i left
little behind, even if it was everything.

behind those porous crumbling walls
epochmaking promises lay dumped
an odd lovely song
with its promise of milk and honey
its collapse long evident.
at last i forced my way out
followed by what I had left behind.
it has reached its destination,
while i circle without cease.

Translator’s Note:Encountering Maja Haderlap’s work was like opening a door into a world I knew well, yet one very different from my own experience. Initially I was drawn by her novel Engel des Vergessens into a rapidly disappearing rural culture, a minority community and a language under threat, a world where the landscape hides knowledge and wisdom as well as the divisions and bitterness of history. After getting her first German language volume of poetry langer transit I began to read and translate, at first as part of a university assignment and then for its own sake.

Maja Haderlap’s poetry is a poetry of borderlands, linguistic, cultural, historical and political. It draws the reader in, delights but challenges before revealing its range of possibilities. It is challenging in its use of German. Capital letters are completely absent. This is more unusual than in English. Substantives and some pronouns are generally capitalised in German. ‘ihr’ without capitals in borderlands invites interpretation of the poem either as an address to the borderlands or a more conventional speaking of them in the third person – ‘their’. Such lack of linguistic signposts creates ambiguity and invites the reader to engage in the search for meaning through close reading. While it is difficult to maintain the intensity of this challenge in English, keeping the text in lower case and using lexis and line structure helps to convey as much of the original as possible. Very precise punctuation does provide the reader with a handrail for understanding.

For Haderlap, who grew up speaking Slovene as part of a linguistic minority in Carinthia, southern Austria, choosing to write in German is, in itself, a political act. She has spoken of using German as a lens through which she can safely explore memories and experience.

She moulds the language to her needs, particularly in her pairing of words to create new compounds. In borderlands she uses ‘grenzband’ to describe the border, an unconventional pairing which evokes the image of the border as a ribbon which swings and varies according to political or social pressures. The speaker moves ‘beäugt’ through this landscape. This word offers a multiplicity of interpretations from a highly visually aware speaker to one who moves with ‘eyes-wide-open’ or ‘eyes-peeled’, conscious of danger in a threatening landscape. After a lot of thought I went with ‘wide eyes’ which invites examination but does not hammer any particular interpretation. The path on which the speaker walks is described as a ‘harnischpfad’ (armoured, armed or fortified path), again an unconventional pairing inviting a reader to reflect. Is the path armoured? Is it protecting the speaker or protecting itself from intruders? She moves ‘leichtfüßig’ or light-footed, perhaps to avoid awakening ghosts or memories. The image of the silent people with padlocked throats resonates with many borderland situations where silence seals off stories of suffering and horror. The ‘echo of names’ within the poem hints at connection, even conversation but also the change of names due to political or linguistic realities. The final image of oblivion or transition may be positive or negative in that the borders may become unimportant as understanding grows or its opposite, where borders, though impermanent are a force of destruction. Translating this necessitates a balancing act to try to maintain as many perspectives as possible.

Haderlap’s evocation of this desolate border area resonates with my own experience of travelling along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic prior to the Good Friday Agreement. Roads and paths along the border had frequently been cratered or barricaded, vanishing or becoming overgrown and deserted as a result of political unrest or savage acts. Around them nature flourished, obliterating traces of human activity.

In ‘house of the old language’ Haderlap explores the nature of language and the effect of changing languages. Elsewhere she has spoken of writing out of a lack of language the tension between her two languages and the way they allow her to experience the world. Haderlap has described her bilingualism as an enriching experience but has also said that speaking Slovene could be seen as politically suspect in some quarters. The image of her old language Slovene as an abandoned and derelict house is a very powerful one, beautiful yet desolate. This resonates with me as a Gaelic speaker, another language threatened from both within and outside its population, struggling to survive amid social, political, economic and cultural difficulties. Such minority languages are repositories of cultural history and wisdom but are accessible to an ever-decreasing number of people.

The lines ‘zugvögel entleeren ihre mägen in den/von der schmähung erstürmten kammern,’ were two lines which challenged me most in my attempt to understand and translate them. My own experience of entering a house where crows had met their traumatic end (with devastating effects!) by falling down the chimney suggested a translation as ‘spray shit’. However this does not convey the full meaning of this image in the poem. Haderlap’s birds are migratory; they carry experience of elsewhere within themselves. They empty their stomachs but is this from the crop to feed young or simply faeces? Do they “empty their stomachs”, ‘void their guts’ or ‘spill their guts’ which might suggest story or other enrichment?

Translating these and some other poems by Maja Haderlap has for me been a very enriching experience. Her lyricism, themes and preoccupations fascinate me as a reader and translator and I am delighted to introduce and share her work with other readers.

From Maja Haderlap, langer transit. Gedichte © Wallstein Verlag, 2014

Robert Schumann
Riding School
Air

Author: Gisela Hemau
Translator: Esther N. Elstun

Robert Schumann

The sky
orphaned in A Minor.

From the pieces
of yore
nothing remains but the sound of footsteps
that take him away from himself,
down the embankment
where the riverbed
is his bed,

and he watches
the water
dissolving him
into the aimless
physicality
of his limbs.

 

Riding School

A room carpeted with earth.
Horses walk up, down,
rented by the hour.
Each time the riders
sink into the stillness.

For years the room is preserved
behind the glass.
Everywhere movements left lying.
Even if we could,
we would not pick them up.

Our eyes are used up.
The one who measures time with a rein
says: the shadow of the horses
is for the dead,
and leads us inside.

Air

Strolling girls,
thin as flagpoles,
on a street
that since the war
no longer exists.
Their dresses,
craving bodies,
flutter away
through the wordless
time of their death.

“Air” and “Robert Schumann” from  Abschüssiges Gelände © Königshausen & Neumann 2000, 2nd ed.  “Riding School” from Gisela Hemau, Außer Rufweite, Königshausen & Neumann, 2003.

freeze frame
vacuum

Author: Hendrik Jackson
Translator: Catherine Hales

freeze frame

I

draught up our sleeves from the side wind, tiredness suppressing
a few half words, we moved into the colder frost-air by the rear frontage
of a distant building, a couple among the houses, at night
the tree (landing net) through which winds flowed off crackling –

slow spotlights silence disembodied steps, then movements
from a conventional plot (interim fade-ins). in her soft
white coat the ice princess flew overhead, ghosts passing through
the rows of seats, of houses (your hand lying lifeless in mine)

II

jingling of glassy icicles, the cold glass in front of the window display, a few
crystals (housing estate). for a moment there was a pure nothingness
the horizon turning wide (eyelids as though cut away) –
motionless layers of air, you were dreaming: this dull dull afternoon

a hairline crack – smiling, loudspeakers rattling in the ice tent
the steady humming of the transformer, as we swarmed out singly:
briefly disquiet, flying shadows over indifferent gratings
(old advertising posters) and away. darkness trickled through a hole in the sky

III

the door swung open: snow was falling (sleeping) in dense
flakes – and gusted up, then something half forgotten began
thoughts passing effortlessly – two people were standing unnoticed
as we did back then, attentive to an arm (fur)

at a turning, astounded, in a conversation about affection
my bicycle, frame and handlebar, cables and spokes
turning white, as though sprinkled with coconut (the heavy coats)
fine, doubting promises, your hair tied back

vacuum

I

these paths: starting at zero, magnificent. unbroken
blanket of new snow (silence) the light reflected like crazy
and footsteps footsteps. victory – decided, touch
unavoidable. not until the sun was really low did you

utter words again, showed reactions I hadn’t reckoned with, albedo
you said, your profile in the greyish yellow colouring of the light, hearing
straining into the icy landscape, whirling (air lanes) snow dust (glass spheres)
where the circle closed we stopped, emptiness enclosed us

II

fallstreaks, flame-coloured schlieren (nosebleeds, pressure on the eardrum)
in the sky. the reflection rising to a head, flickering
(flare) adjustment phenomena image disturbance, then –
lines of flight eradicated. each step in tow tensely awake

in the stream of the underground, tiled white the floor slight vibration
evil stench and stiff knee, of course: nude pictures, depressing stillness
seething mass (safely in trust) face (flat hissing) the way it turns
aside, side-on – contours, blurred. wires posts tunnels

III

may, ten in the morning. the day building up to a heat
that spreads out. writing about the redstart or about
the greenfinch, like frederick II, the ornithologist. his falcon,
it’s true, died (casual occurrences). from the cellar: humming of bees

immortal in weather continuing fine (under the wing of the older ones)
full of nearness – the day – was far away, calm on the bed, copied from
the salamander, with eyes (gummed closed). sun strained sun
extracted from honey. (blurred) land beneath me, threaded with dreams

From Dunkelströme © kookbooks 2006

Illumination, or?
Note unto Jonah
Globegame
Soilshadow
Witiko

Author: Hendrik Jackson
Translator: Nicholas Perrin

Illumination, or?

Frontsteps at night. (Afar Enlight) glancing upward: Ahasver Ahasver
– pure-blue the spheres (clair) – overcast
undertowed, what an inundation… Substance _ Vacuum: Schizo- Nexus? Who?

singing wires (Soil Sky) asunder pitched. Frequencies: Crack
what there upon the stone (Stammering) crystalline, quiet
Fright Stream-of-Images. bathed over ouses and in the backyard nightvolk

a sleeve grazes, grates (Colors Schemes) deft disturbance or simply as set in ice.
Droning (Bees) from under: a stalac
Black. groaning, tiresome dismissal. this weariness, sense-sapping

Memory folding unto (Interspace – Veiled) unapplicable, but: Loam _ Earth _ Darg
– the honeybee dies and Ahasver (Apparition) sets awave
the Field dark or yellow, only the slightest crosses over, evaporated, the Rest – hard

Note unto Jonah

the Word, that doesn’t arrive –
regardless, we’re not going into the Immanence
an obese obscure, not much
to explore Life itself unto itself
in the open Ocean of the Whale –
it washes, runs
over the eyes

you’re always waiting for a sign –
immortal stubborness
and all of Heaven hangs stuffed
with Doglights, so we trickled
the lie in Jonah’s Ear
go out to the World
into the windswept Emptiness

Globegame

the Wind picks up, in the drawing of breath itself misuse a Word (clearing
away figures
) – as mixed in the parched air audible an outbursts tearing.

arising disquiet, branches swaying, clouds rolling in. delicate ebbs
the stillness shaking, squandered on notions, Cold-Fallwind Cobwebs

Rubble Carlsbad – (what no longer watches) in the Globegame drift to
the outermost circle. first layer, then taking it in, become Giant.
lastly entropy, anathema. this: I want to sing you, you
this thou I sing, Muse. roots in late light (unblessing) cogent

Images: aborted branches, an aisle, soundless undulating Grass.
Weariness makes one’s bed in Earthflattening, Troughs– rise glassy
as Waves. a Butterfly, guiltless – flap flapped – still caught: its needs.
Rush of Noise that rises, itself dispersed, pressed through warm leaves

Soilshadow

currents of crystallization, flow with the day. frost _ inhale
again the dream collapses, overwhelmed from affections
inasmuch snow collects across dispursed, good days. as you
withdrew yourself going in out from the earth, heavenly greetings

sent off, a companion in the convoluted tunnel-system
of psychological stratum, the entire humus of
society, declining. but to hoist one’s own unaided? self activating
charge towards Light: always in manic exhumation. singing

Witiko

everything stands. suddenly, an imperceptible tremble releases the Structure of Balance.
a strange storm joins the horizon in approach, breaking through as hail

(take care this rumbling) measured steps (a measuring) where the wren sits.
Flag flying (halfhearted, as in my silence) (don’t listen)

the immaterial nudges us gently. Clang of arms – naked silver. Sun rising.
over the hill a ride. Saddle, foot. A ride over the hill